China has released previously confidential Japanese World War II era documents, including some about comfort women forced to serve in wartime military brothels, state media reported.
The publication comes during a tense period in Japan-China relations. Last week, Japan’s Mitsui OSK Lines paid about US$29 million for the release of a ship seized by China over a dispute that dates back to the 1930s war between the two countries.
The 89 documents released from archives in northern Jilin Province include letters written by Japanese soldiers, newspaper articles and military files unearthed in the early 1950s, Chinese media said. Why they had not been released until now was not clear.
Nationalist politicians in Japan have been urging Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to water down a 1993 apology to comfort women, saying there is no evidence of large-scale coercion by Japanese authorities or the military.
Abe said last month that Tokyo would not revise that apology.
The Jilin documents include Japanese records on the exploitation of “comfort women” by troops as well as details of the Nanjing Massacre that began in December 1937.
China and Japan disagree on the number of people killed in the massacre. Some nationalist Japanese politicians have argued that the reports about the massacre have been exaggerated for propaganda purposes. Many of Japan’s wartime records were destroyed.
The release of the documents coincided with the publication on Saturday of more than 110,000 previously confidential Japanese government and military documents from times of war by China’s Thread Binding Books Publishing House.
History is a live issue between Japan and China. In a speech in Berlin last month, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) said that the atrocities in Nanjing were “still fresh in our memory.” His comments prompted an angry response from the Japanese government.
In December last year, Abe provoked China’s ire when he visited Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, where both war dead and war criminals are honored. Last week, more than 150 Japanese lawmakers and a member of Abe’s Cabinet paid their respects at Yasukuni.
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