FACTBOX-China, Japan disputes over wartime history http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=worldNews&storyid=2006-12-27T123252Z_01_T132580_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsArt-L1-RelatedNews-2
Wed Dec 27, 2006
(Reuters) - Japanese and Chinese academics this week began a joint study on their long and sometimes war-torn history, part of efforts to improve ties strained by disputes stemming mostly from Japan's 1931-45 military aggression in China.
Following are some Sino-Japanese disputes over the wartime past:
NANJING MASSACRE
* China says Japanese soldiers slaughtered 300,000 Chinese men, women, and children in Nanjing, then China's capital, in 1937 in what was sometimes referred as the Rape of Nanjing, formerly known as Nanking.
* According to estimates made at Allied war crimes trials after World War Two, Japanese forces killed about 42,000 civilians in Nanjing and more than 100,000 civilians and prisoners of war in the vicinity of the city.
* Some right-wing Japanese historians and politicians deny a massacre took place, while others dispute the numbers killed.
CHEMICAL WEAPONS AND EXPERIMENTS
* China says there are 2 million bomb shells and 30,000 abandoned chemical weapons in Heilongjiang and Jilin provinces, but Japan puts the number in the hundreds of thousands. Japan had promised to rid China of the weapons by 2007, but later sought an extension, saying the deadline was impossible to meet.
* China says Japan had conducted wartime experiments on humans in Heilongjiang province to develop germ weapons such as bubonic plague, typhoid, anthrax and cholera and at least 3,000 people, including Chinese civilians, Russians, Mongolians and Koreans, were killed in the process.
* In 2002, the Tokyo District Court acknowledged the tests were conducted in China, something the Japanese government never officially acknowledged, but rejected demands for compensation, saying the issue had been settled in post-war treaties.
COMFORT WOMEN
* Groups of "comfort women" forced to work as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers have been prominent among those seeking apology and compensation from Japan for its wartime atrocities.
* Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has accepted as valid a 1993 Japanese government statement admitting the Imperial Japanese Army forced thousands of mostly Asian women, many of them Korean, to provide sex for soldiers. But lawsuits by the women in Japanese courts seeking compensation have been rejected. * In 1995, Japan set up a private "Asia Peace and Friendship Fund for Women" to make cash payments to survivors, but the fund stoked controversy as it was based mostly on private donations.
TEXTBOOK ROW
* Japan's education ministry approved in 2001 and 2005 junior high school history textbooks that critics say whitewash Japan's militaristic past, outraging both China and South Korea.
* The Japanese government has said the textbooks do not represent the government's official view of history and only a few local school boards have adopted the books for use.
* Japan has also complained that Chinese history textbooks do not accurately reflect Tokyo's contributions to world peace and development in the post-World War Two period.
YASUKUNI SHRINE
* Former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine between 2001-2006 outraged Beijing and Seoul, which see the Shinto shrine as a symbol of Japan's past militarism.
Japanese wartime leaders convicted as war criminals by an Allied tribunal are honored at Yasukuni alongside millions of war dead, and a war museum at the shrine is often criticized for presenting a one-sided view of World War Two.
Japanese media have said the museum will "soften" its references to China, following a decision to alter text stating the United States deliberately forced Japan into the war.
Koizumi, one of several Japanese leaders to have apologized for pain and suffering caused by Tokyo's wartime aggression, said he went to the shrine to pray for peace and honor the war dead.
Source: Reuters
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