One of Japan’s biggest hotel chains has sparked fury in China after placing a book in guest rooms claiming that the 1937 massacre of Chinese troops and civilians by Japanese soldiers in Nanjing was a “fabrication”.

Chinese media and government officials lambasted the Tokyo-based APA hotel group for distributing and selling the book, in which its chief executive, Toshio Motoya, disputes Chinese claims that the Japanese imperial army killed 300,000 people after it invaded the eastern city in December 1937.

Writing under his pen name, Seiji Fuji, Motoya described Chinese accounts of the death toll as “absurd” because, he said, the city’s population was only 200,000 at the time.

He added that there were “absolutely no records such as diaries, letters, or photographs by people from a third country … who witnessed the massive killing, except for two people who were employed by the Kuomintang public relations department”.

Hua Chunying, a Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman, said the book “again shows that some forces within Japan refuse to squarely face history and even attempt to deny and distort history”.

The Communist-party-controlled Global Times pointed out that during Japan’s peak tourist season, about 40% of APA’s rooms are occupied by overseas guests, half of whom are from China and South Korea.

The newspaper quoted Chinese social media users who said they would boycott the hotel chain. “I found the book in the drawer (after I read the post this morning), and I cannot stay in a place like this any more. APA has crossed the line,” said one user, who is visiting Japan.

Another wrote: “I will never choose this hotel after learning about this … I cannot let my money go to a person like the APA CEO nor to his political cause.”

The Global Times said Huangwang group, a Chinese-funded travel agency in Japan, would stop reserving rooms at APA hotels unless Motoya apologised and withdrew the book.

Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga, did not comment directly on the book but said the two countries, whose ties have been soured by rival disputes over Japan’s conduct in parts of the Chinese mainland before and during the second world war, should focus on the future.

“We need to tackle shared global challenges with a forward-looking view, rather than paying excessive attention to our unfortunate history,” Suga told reporters.

Japan and China continue to disagree over the extent of the Nanjing massacre.

While some mainstream historians believe the death toll was lower than that claimed by Beijing, few believe that no massacre took place.

The APA group, which operates more than 400 hotels in Japan and entered the US market in 2015, said it had received “floods of opinions” about the book, but had no intention of withdrawing it from guest rooms.

“Although we acknowledge that historic interpretation and education vary among nations, please clearly understand that the book is not aimed to criticise any specific state or nation, but for the purpose of letting readers learn the fact-based, true interpretation of modern history,” it said in a statement on its website.

Last October, Japan withheld more than £34m in Unesco funding after the UN cultural and scientific body registered disputed Chinese documents related to the massacre in its Memory of the World list.

Japan made the payments in December after Unesco said it would review the screening process for registering documents.

