BEIJING, Feb. 20 (UPI) -- A Japanese official says he doubts there was a massacre in Nanjing in 1937 but China objected to the claim and said evidence of a massacre is irrefutable.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said China does not accept Nagoya Mayor Takashi Kawamura's denial of the massacre, China Daily reported.
The Mainichi Daily News, carrying a Kyodo News agency report, Monday quoted Kawamura, 63, as telling visiting Liu Zhiwei, a Communist Party official from Nanjing, that he doubted the massacre occurred.
The mayor's comment was in reference to the incident during the 1937 Sino-Japanese war.
The mayor, whose father was in Nanjing when the war ended in 1945, was quoted as telling the Chinese official he believed that only "conventional acts of combat" took place in the former Chinese capital, not mass murder and rape of civilians.
"Why were people in Nanjing kind to Japanese soldiers only eight years after the incident?" Kawamura was quoted as saying while referring to his father's experience.
"I could go to Nanjing and attend a debate on the history of the city, if necessary," he said.
China says more than 300,000 people died in the incident but the Mainichi Daily report said Japanese academics have pointed to various estimates from 20,000 to 200,000.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said there is irrefutable evidence about the Nanjing massacre and that China hoped Japan "takes history as a mirror," China Daily reported.
The China Daily quoted Feng Zhaokui, a researcher at the Institute of Japanese Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, that there was "no evidence" to support Kawamura's statement.
