Fury as Chinese paper publishes Japan map with mushroom clouds over Hiroshima, Nagasaki
Advert depicting mushroom clouds over cities bombed in second world war dismissed as 'ignorant' by Japanese foreign minister
A Chinese newspaper published a map of Japan with mushroom clouds rising above Hiroshima and Nagasaki, provoking outrage today from Tokyo’s foreign minister, who is from the first of the cities to be obliterated.
Tensions between Beijing and Tokyo are high due to a series of issues ranging from a territorial dispute over islands in the East China Sea to recent moves by Tokyo to reinterpret its pacifist constitution.
The Chongqing Youth Daily, a newspaper linked to the Communist Youth League in the southwestern megacity, last week carried the map in a full-page advertisement under the title “Japan wants a war again”, according to a posting on its official account on Weibo.
Japan’s full-scale invasion of China in 1937 left 20 million Chinese dead, according to Beijing’s estimates. It ended with Tokyo’s second world war defeat in 1945 following the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It was not clear who placed the advertisement, which can no longer be found on the newspaper’s official website.
But the stunt infuriated Tokyo, with Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida calling it “very, very ignorant”.