Acrop of new movie releases to mark the 70th anniversary of the Nanking Massacre is again set to dredge up controversy surrounding one of the 20th century's most notorious and disputed events.
One perspective can be gained from Satoru Mizushima, president of Japanese right-wing webcaster Channel Sakura. After what he calls 'exhaustive research' on the seizure of what was then China's capital by Japanese troops in 1937 - estimated to have cost anywhere from 20,000 to 300,000 lives - Mizushima offers a very precise figure for the number of illegal deaths: zero.
'The evidence for a massacre is faked,' he says. 'It is Chinese communist propaganda.'
He brandishes a book containing what he says are dozens of doctored photos. One shows a beheaded Chinese corpse with a cigarette stuck in its mouth. 'Japanese people don't mistreat corpses like that,' he says, stabbing the page for emphasis. 'It is not in our culture.'
The world will soon have a chance to assess these claims when Mizushima's movie, The Truth of Nanjing, hits the cinemas. The documentary is supported by more than a dozen lawmakers, including Nariaki Nakayama, a former education minister, and a panel of academics led by history professor Shudo Higashinakano, who provides much of its thin intellectual gruel. Courts in China and Japan ruled recently that Professor Higashinakano libelled survivors of the massacre, Xia Shuqin and Li Xiuying, in two books that documented their experiences of atrocities as fantasies.
Arguments over what occurred in what is today called Nanjing began almost as soon as imperial soldiers marched into the city on December 13, 1937, and have only grown in ferocity since. They are played out for the digital generation on YouTube, where hundreds of clips, including Who Witnessed Nanking Massacre and China Could Not Prove Nanking Massacre Had Happened, are posted, along with the foulest of racist comments.