Massacre victim wins case against Japanese pair who claimed she lied
A Nanjing court yesterday ordered two Japanese authors to pay 800,000 yuan each to a survivor of the 1937 Nanking Massacre for claiming that she fabricated her account of the atrocity.
The Xuanwu District Court also told the authors' Japanese publishing house yesterday to recall and destroy all copies of two books at the centre of the claims and the parties to issue a public apology in both countries. But the order is unlikely to be enforced because China and Japan do not have an agreement on civil court judgments.
Xia Shuqin , 77, filed the defamation suit against Shudo Higashinakano and Toshio Matsumura six years ago after the authors claimed in two co-authored books - Thorough Review of the Nanking Massacre and Big Questions about the Nanking Massacre - that historical data about the massacre was false and witnesses including Ms Xia and another survivor, Li Xiuying , faked their stories, Xinhua reported.
Ms Xia maintains that on December 12, 1937, a group of Japanese soldiers entered her home in what is now known as Nanjing and killed seven of her family members. She and her four-year-old sister were seriously wounded.
According to Xinhua, the authors said: '[The survivors] fabricated stories ... what they said was just what they imagined ... they were taught it by the government.'
At a meeting in Nanjing yesterday organised by the China Society for Human Rights Studies and the All China Lawyers' Association, Ms Xia said she was angered by the suggestion that she had made up her account.
