TOKYO—One of Japan’s largest hotel chains has sparked condemnation from China for a book placed in its rooms that questions Tokyo’s wartime guilt.

APA Group, which operates 155 hotels in Japan, said it won’t remove a book by APA Chief Executive Toshio Motoya that describes as “fake” the 1937 killing of civilians in Nanjing by the Japanese military, widely known as the Nanjing Massacre.

APA...