Japan MPs Urge China To Remove Anti-Japan Exhibits

Conservative Japanese lawmakers launched a campaign on Wednesday to urge China to remove photographs and exhibits.

Conservative Japanese lawmakers launched a campaign on Wednesday to urge China to remove photographs and exhibits from museums that they say distort the truth about Tokyo's actions before and during Warld War Two.

The campaign coincides with the 70th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre in which Beijing says Japanese soldiers slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Chinese men, women and children in Nanjing, then China's capital.

A group of 42 Japanese lawmakers, mainly from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, vowed to press China to stop showing "fake or wrongful" photographs, films and exhibits that reflect badly on Japan.

"There are more than 100 anti-Japan museums across China, and anti-Japan campaigns have been going on day after day," said Takeo Hiranuma, a conservative independent lawmaker who heads the group. Former Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura and former Defence Minister Tokuichiro Tamazawa are also in the group.

"We must not allow fake exhibits to open cracks in Sino-Japanese relations," Hiranuma said.

Sino-Japanese ties have been strained by what Beijing calls Tokyo's refusal to acknowledge atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers in the country between 1931 and 1945.

"There are cases of photographs being exhibited with captions that say comfort women were abducted by Japanese troops, but in fact they were women being protected by Japanese soldiers and taken back to their village," said LDP lawmaker Tomomi Inada. "We want to have such fake photographs removed."

The Japanese government issued an apology in 1993 acknowledging official involvement in setting up and managing military brothels with "comfort women", mostly Asian, to provide sex for Japanese soldiers.

China says invading Japanese troops slaughtered 300,000 men, women and children in Nanjing, then known as Nanking, in 1937.

An Allied tribunal after World War Two put the death toll at about 142,000, and some ultra-conservative Japanese historians deny there was even a massacre.

A Japanese group backed by nationalist figures said earlier this year it planned to make a documentary film, "The Truth about Nanjing", denying that Japanese soldiers massacred civilians and prisoners of war. China condemned the proposed film.

Sino-Japanese relations have been icy for much of the past half-decade, largely because of former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine for Japan's war dead. Beijing sees the shrine as a symbol of Japan's past militarism because some convicted war criminals are honoured there.

Koizumi's successor, Shinzo Abe, has been trying to mend fences, visiting Beijing last October for a leaders' summit less than two weeks after taking office.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao followed up with an "ice-melting" visit to Japan in April, marking the first visit by a Chinese premier to Japan since 2000.

Hiranuma said his group would not urge Abe to visit Yasukuni.

"Our aim is to have wrongful exhibits which involve our country's honour removed, and therefore it has nothing to do with Yasukuni Shrine," he said.

Abe made an offering to Yasukuni in April, but he stopped short of visiting the memorial out of apparent consideration for relations with China.