A Japanese hotel chain at the centre of a furore over books its president wrote denying the Nanjing Massacre is prepared to consider removing them from at least some hotels if it receives a formal written request to do so.
Tokyo-based hotel and property developer APA Group came under fire last week for books by its president Toshio Motoya, which contain his revisionist views and are placed in every room of the company’s 400-plus APA Hotels.
Motoya, using the pen name Seiji Fuji, wrote that stories of the Nanjing Massacre were “impossible”.
“These acts were all said to be committed by the Japanese army, but this is not true,” he wrote.
China says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in Nanjing from December 1937-January 1938. A post-war Allied tribunal put the death toll at about half that. To the fury of China, some conservative Japanese politicians and academics deny the massacre took place, or they put the death toll much lower.