‘Honor History’

Emotional protests were held throughout Asia on Sunday against a conference in Japan calling a wartime massacre of Chinese civilians by Japanese troops “The Biggest Lie of the 20th Century.” The Chinese Foreign Ministry had urged Japan to stop the event. At the conference, some 300 people packed an auditorium to hear former soldiers and a historian deny the so-called Rape of Nanking, where some historians say the Japanese military killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians. Some historians say Japanese imperial soldiers killed as many as 300,000 people during Tokyo’s 1937-38 occupation of the Chinese city, now called Nanjing. A postwar tribunal in Tokyo said more than 140,000 were killed. In Nanjing, survivors, some of them in tears, gathered to denounce the meeting.