Japanese official calls toll 'a big lie'

TOKYO -- A senior member of Japan's conservative ruling party drew fire Sunday after he said estimates by some historians that Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in the so-called Rape of Nanking were "a big lie."

The comments by Takami Eto, leader of the third-largest faction in Prime Minister Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party, were criticized by China as an attempt to distort history.

"To say 300,000 people were killed in the Rape of Nanking is a pure fabrication, a big lie," Eto said in a speech Saturday, as reported in the Asahi newspaper and other national dailies.

Historians generally agree the Japanese army killed at least 150,000 civilians during its 1937-38 occupation of Nanking, now called Nanjing. Some put the number as high as 300,000.

But some Japanese nationalist scholars and conservative lawmakers say the figures are inflated; some call the entire massacre a hoax.

It wasn't clear from the reports Sunday whether Eto referred to the entire massacre or to the estimates of 300,000 people being killed. His aides could not be reached for comment.

China's Foreign Ministry criticized the Japanese politician for trying to whitewash history.

The Nanjing Massacre was "an atrocity committed by Japanese militarism during the war of aggression in China," a fact backed up by "ironclad evidence," said ministry spokesman Kong Quan in a statement on its Internet site.

Eto, a 78-year-old three-time Cabinet minister, has talked himself into trouble before when commenting on Japan's history. He angered Koreans in 1997 by comparing Japan's annexation of Korea in 1910 to a "merger between two towns."

He reportedly touched on that theme during his speech Saturday in the city of Fukui, saying Japan's occupation of Korea between 1910 and 1945 should be not be considered colonialism because both sides signed a treaty formalizing annexation.

A South Korean Foreign Ministry official said Sunday he was disappointed.

"Our government want to make it clear that such remarks will not help South Korea-Japan relations," the official said on condition of anonymity.

Conservative politicians periodically rile Japan's Asian neighbors by defending the country's record of aggression during the decades leading up to World War II. In 1994, then-Justice Minister Shigeto Nagano had to resign after calling the Rape of Nanking a "fabrication."

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