A Japanese hotel chain under fire
for books its president wrote denying the Nanjing Massacre in
wartime China will remove them from a hotel hosting athletes at
the 2017 Sapporo Asian Winter Games, organisers said on
Wednesday.
The Tokyo-based hotel and real estate developer APA Group is
at the centre of a furore over books by president Toshio Motoya,
which contain his revisionist views on history and are placed in
every room of the company's 400-plus APA Hotels.
Motoya, using the pen name Seiji Fuji, wrote of the Nanjing
Massacre that "these acts were all said to be committed by the
Japanese army, but this is not true." He also denied stories of
Korean women forced to work as prostitutes in wartime military
brothels, the so-called "comfort women."
China says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in Nanjing
from December 1937 to 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.
An official for the 2017 Sapporo Asian Winter Games, which
will run from Feb 19 to 26, said that when the APA hotel in
Sapporo was chosen to host athletes last year it had verbally
agreed to remove the contentious material from the rooms.
"Our goal is to make an environment where all the athletes
can perform at their best," added the official, who declined to
be named. Organisers are also working to find alternative
lodging for Chinese athletes.
APA said in a statement posted on their website late on
Tuesday that it had received a written request from the Games
organisers with "advice" about amenities in the rooms.
"Based on this, during the period of the games, we will
remove materials from the rooms and hold them safely at the
hotel," it added.
APA was not immediately available for further comment.
China's tourism authorities have urged tour operators to
sever ties with the hotel chain after an escalating row over the
denial, and there have been boycott calls on social media
against both the hotel and travel to Japan.
Motoya told Reuters in an email last month that Chinese made
up only 5 percent of guests at his hotels in Japan and he was
not worried about the impact of any potential boycott.