Nanjing Refuses To Heal Sister City Dispute

Nagoya Mayor Takashi Kawamura

The Chinese city of Nanjing has decided to keep its sister-city relationship with Nagoya terminated.  Nagoya’s mayor in April 2012 expressed doubts that the Japanese Army’s 1937 Nanjing Massacre actually took place.  One month later the city council of Nanjing voted unanimously to end the sister city relationship.

The falling out began when Nagoya’s mayor, Takashi Kawamura, told a visiting delegation of Chinese Communist Party officials from Nanjing in April 2012, "I doubt that Japanese troops had massacred Chinese civilians. Most historians say that at a minimum, tens of thousands of civilians were slaughtered in Nanjing, but I find absolutely no evidence to support these claims."

The falling out underscored how differing views of history remain a problem in Japan’s ties with the nations that it once conquered. While such denials are common by Japanese conservatives like Mr. Kawamura, they are rarely raised in such a public manner, or directly to Chinese officials. But there is also a widely shared perception in Japan that China’s government plays up the massacre for its own propaganda purposes. 

The mayor continued when pressed by the Chinese delegation, "History is written by the victors and China in a sense is a victor because it hid under the cloak of US and the Allies after the war.  Nanjing was pushed as a war crime yet the atomic bombings were not.  My point proven."

Still, the Japanese government scrambled to head off a full-blown diplomatic quarrel. The top government spokesman restated Japan’s official position that the massacre did, in fact, take place. 

“This is a problem that should be appropriately resolved between the cities of Nagoya and Nanjing,” said the spokesman, Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura. 

The sister city relationship was encouraged to be healed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ahead of the December 14 election to give Abe another 4 years mandate for his reform policies.  The healing between Nagoya and Nanjing would have been seen as a major diplomatic score for the ruling LDP.

Nanjing city council members refused to even bring the measure to a vote Wednesday citing officially, "Unless the mayor of Nagoya comes to this chamber personally and apologizes with the Prime Minister of Japan then there is nothing to discuss."

Bill Bryant