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China and Japan, whose festering relationship has seen their rival military aircraft buzz each other over the East China Sea, have found yet another forum in which to duel: Unesco’s Memory of the World Register.

The Unesco program preserves the documentation of important historical events from various parts of the world. It was started in 1992 and contains items of whimsy — the 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz” is one American entry — and terror, such as the records of the Khmer Rouge’s Tuol Sleng prison in Cambodia.

This week China announced that it had submitted an application to include files related to atrocities committed by Japanese forces during their country’s brutal wartime occupation of China, including forced prostitution and the 1937-38 Nanjing massacre.



While applications to the register have produced disputes — the United States protested the inclusion last year of writings by the Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara — they are generally quiet affairs. But China’s submission has led to a high-level debate between the two Asian neighbors.

Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said the application had been filed with “a sense of responsibility toward history” and a goal of “treasuring peace, upholding the dignity of mankind and preventing the reappearance of those tragic and dark days.”

Yoshihide Suga, Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, said that Japan had filed a formal complaint with the Chinese Embassy in Tokyo. “After the Imperial Japanese Army went into Nanjing, there must have been some atrocities by the Japanese Army,” he told reporters on Wednesday. “But to what extent it was done, there are different opinions, and it is very difficult to determine the truth. However, China took unilateral action. That’s why we launched a complaint.”

Ms. Hua said China’s application had included documents from Japan’s military in northeastern China, the police in Shanghai and the Japanese-backed wartime puppet regime in China that detailed the system of “comfort women,” a euphemism used to describe the forced prostitution of women from China, Korea and several Southeast Asian countries under Japanese control. The files also included information on the mass killings of civilians by Japanese troops who entered the Chinese capital of Nanjing in December 1937.

China says that about 300,000 people were killed in the weeks-long rampage, which is also called the Rape of Nanking. That figure comes from the postwar Tokyo war crimes trials, and some scholars argue that the toll has been overstated.

While Japan has protested the submission of documents related to the Nanjing massacre and forced prostitution, it has considered other aspects of its wartime record for Unesco recognition. This spring the southern Japanese city of Minamikyushu in Kagoshima Prefecture proposed submitting the last letters of kamikaze pilots who embarked on suicide missions to destroy Allied navy ships. And the city of Maizuru in Kyoto Prefecture proposed including documentation related to Japanese prisoners of war held by the Soviet Union.

Japan’s National Commission for Unesco rejected the kamikaze letters, but will include the P.O.W. documents along with records from the Toji Temple in Kyoto in its next submission for the Memory of the World Register, Jiji Press reported on Thursday. The kamikaze letters could be submitted at a later date, the news agency said.