Kamikaze letters at centre of world heritage status bid
A city in Japan says the documents show the horrors of war, but the proposal to the UN has already been criticised in China, South Korea
A Japanese city wants its wartime archive of hundreds of letters and documents left by kamikaze pilots to be included in a United Nations list of important documents from world history, a move likely to further strain already tense relations between China and Japan.
Minamikyushu, a city where the pilots were trained and based before they carried out suicide missions on allied warships in the second world war, has submitted the proposal to the Unesco Memory of the World programme, Japanese broadcaster NHK reported. City officials hope the archive will join other documents worthy of preservation and international recognition such as the diaries of Holocaust victim Anne Frank.
Few relatives of the pilots are still alive and the airmen's writings would remind people of the horrors of war as the 70th anniversary of the end of the conflict approaches, NHK quoted the city's mayor, Kanpei Shimoide, as saying.
The plan has already sparked anger among some in South Korea and China.
South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se said Seoul opposed the application and the suicide notes went against the basic ethics of what constituted world heritage, South Korea's Arirang TV reported.
The China News Service wrote on its official blog that if such an application was possible, Japan would soon look for a listing for the controversial Yasukuni shrine to the nation's war dead, which also honours convicted war criminals.