Japan has threatened to withdraw its funding for Unesco after the UN body included disputed Chinese documents about the Nanjing massacre in its Memory of the World list, despite protests from Tokyo.

The row is one of several disagreements over wartime history that have soured ties between Japan and China, which are also locked in a dispute over ownership of the Senkaku islands.

Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga, said the decision to register the documents reflected a biased Chinese view of history. “There is a big discrepancy of views between Japan and China, and the decision reflecting a unilateral view turns the issue into a political problem,” he told reporters.

“We are considering all measures, including suspension of our funding contributions” to Unesco, he said.

Suga added: “The decision-making process lacked transparency. We were not even allowed access to the contents of the Chinese documents.”

Japan contributed 3.72bn yen (£20m) to Unesco last year, about 10% of Unesco’s budget. It was the first UN body Japan joined, in 1951, as it sought to contribute to the international community after its wartime defeat and occupation.



Unesco’s director-general, Irina Bokova, approved the Nanjing inscription in Abu Dhabi last Friday, after receiving recommendations from a 14-member panel of archivists and librarians.

Japan’s foreign ministry said it was “extremely regrettable that a global organisation that should be neutral and fair entered the documents in the Memory of the World register, despite the repeated pleas made by the Japanese government”.

Unesco, however, rejected a Chinese request that photos and other documents relating to Japan’s use of wartime sex slaves be included on the list.

The Nanjing documents relate to Japan’s bloody invasion of the south-eastern Chinese city in late 1937, during which troops murdered and raped tens of thousands of people. Chinese historians claim that Japanese imperial army troops killed more than 300,000 soldiers and civilians in a six-week rampage, but Japanese historians insist the number was between the tens of thousands and 200,000.

Japan’s official position is that “the killing of a large number of noncombatants, looting and other acts occurred”, but that “it is difficult to determine” the number of victims.

Officials in Tokyo called Unesco’s neutrality into question and accused Beijing of using the international cultural arena to promote its political agenda.

The documents submitted by China include court records from the international military tribunal for the far east, which found several Japanese leaders guilty of war crimes, as well as photographs claiming to show the slaughter of people in Nanjing and film footage taken by an American missionary.

Japan, however, has questioned the authenticity of the documents, adding that its offers to cooperate with Chinese experts to establish their veracity had been rejected by Beijing.

Japan’s foreign ministry said the nomination “raises questions about the action of the international organisation that ought to be neutral and fair”, adding that “it is evident that there is a problem about the veracity” of the archives.

Hua Chunying, a Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman, dismissed Japanese protests, describing the Nanjing massacre as a “severe crime” and “a historical fact acknowledged by international society”.

Hua said in a statement: “The facts are not to be denied. History is not to be falsified. What the Japanese side has said and done once again revealed its reluctance to face history squarely, which is wrong.”

Newspapers in Japan were united in their condemnation of Unesco’s decision. “We cannot accept China’s stance of using a system for protecting cultural assets for political purposes in a campaign against Japan, and trying to fix its self-righteous historical perception in the international community,” the conservative Yomiuri Shimbun said in an editorial.

The liberal Asahi Shimbun noted that some Chinese historians questioned Beijing’s claim that the death toll ran to more than 300,000. “There are few clues that could substantiate that death toll, which many historians in China doubt,” the newspaper said. “But there is no air of freedom that allows them to discuss the matter openly.”

Unesco accepted two Japanese nominations: memoirs and drawings by former Japanese soldiers who were held in Siberian labour camps, and thousands of documents stretching back to the eighth century that belong to a Buddhist temple.

Since its launch in the 1990s, the Memory of the World programme has registered dozens of submissions, including the diaries of Anne Frank and an annotated copy of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.