JAPAN:A Japanese group plans to make a documentary denying Japanese soldiers massacred civilians and prisoners of war in Nanjing in 1937, the film's director said yesterday, a move likely to damage delicate ties with China.
The film, tentatively entitled The Truth About Nanjing, is being backed by nationalist figures including Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara, the group said.
An Allied war crimes tribunal after the second World War heard estimates that about 142,000 civilians and prisoners of war had been killed when the Japanese captured the city, then known as Nanking and the capital of Nationalist China.
China puts the death toll at 300,000 men, women and children.
"We want to do our very best to bear witness to historical facts," director Satoru Mizushima said in a telephone interview.
He said he had begun gathering material for the film, funded by public contributions and by his production company.
Shudo Higashinakano, a university professor sued last year in a Chinese court over a book saying that massacre testimony was faked, would be heavily involved in the film, Mizushima said.
Nanking, a US film in which actors read accounts by westerners who witnessed the aftermath of the city's fall in 1937, is showing at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah this week.
"To put it bluntly, it is full of lies and fabrications," Mizushima said.
"It will be easy for us to point out the faked photographs and made-up facts - in fact it is a good reference point for us," he added.
Last August China announced plans to make a movie about the Nanjing Massacre, based on Iris Chang's best-selling book, and filming was due to start this month, media reports have said.
These are among seven films scheduled to be made about Nanjing this year, the 70th anniversary of its capture, the Japanese group said in a statement on its website.
"There is a danger that this kind of anti-Japanese propaganda film, based on a wrong understanding of history, could persuade the world that the fabricated Nanjing Massacre is true," it said.
Post-war ties between China and Japan have been overshadowed by what Beijing says has been Tokyo's refusal to admit to the atrocities committed by imperial Japanese soldiers in the country between 1931 and 1945.
Each new Japanese school history textbook is minutely examined for perceived "whitewashing".
Relations reached their coldest in decades in 2005, due in large part to then prime minister Junichiro Koizumi's annual visits to a Tokyo shrine where convicted war criminals are honoured along with Japan's millions of war dead.
Many critics say it symbolises Japan's past military aggression.
Koizumi's successor, Shinzo Abe, has moved quickly to try to repair ties, which have since been on the mend.
Chinese and Japanese historians also began a series of meetings last month aimed at narrowing the gulf between the two nations in perceptions of history.