Japan hotel to remove books denying Nanjing Massacre

APA Group remove books from a hotel hosting athletes at the 2017 Sapporo Asian Winter Games.

APA Group remove books from a hotel hosting athletes at the 2017 Sapporo Asian Winter Games.

Published Feb 1, 2017

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 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. 

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