China slams idea to put Japanese kamikaze letters on UNESCO list

Beijing sharply criticized the idea of submitting Japanese kamikaze pilots' suicide notes to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register, calling it a whitewashing of Japan's wartime atrocities.

The application "acted against UNESCO's objective to safeguard world peace, and will be strongly condemned and firmly opposed by the international community", Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters on Monday at a regular news conference.

Her comments were in response to a question about the proposal of the Chiran Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots, in Minamikyushu, Kagoshima prefecture. The museum mailed the Memory of the World Register application to UNESCO's headquarters on Feb 4, asking the agency to include more than 300 such World War II documents in the register.

The documents include suicide notes written by World War II kamikaze pilots, who deliberately crashed their planes into Allied warships. Minamikyushu was the base of the kamikaze unit, where the attacks were launched from October 1944 until the end of the war.

Kamikaze pilots launched nearly 4,000 suicide attacks, sinking at least 47 Allied vessels and damaging about 300 more.

"The application is ridiculous," said Su Zhiliang, a professor of history at Shanghai Normal University.

In a conference that ended on Sunday in Shanghai, Su and 40 other researchers, including 12 from the Republic of Korea and three from Japan, agreed to work together on an application to register "comfort women" documents in the Memory of the World program.

The initiative came from the resolution of the two-day conference, jointly sponsored by Shanghai Normal University and Seoul-based Sung Kyun Kwan University.

Su, who has more than 20 years' experience in studying the history of "comfort women", said experts will be collecting materials before making their proposal to the commission.

"Comfort women" was a euphemism for women in occupied countries who were forced to work as sex slaves for the Japanese military during World War II.

Historians estimate that the Japanese military forced about 200,000 women into sexual slavery. Fewer than 20 are still alive on the Chinese mainland, Su said.

"We have collected more than a million words in written documents and oral records, as well as tens of thousands of pictures," Su said. "We're making this application out of thorough consideration and preparation."

Several documents were unveiled during the conference, including a map that shows the location of what was then a "comfort station", or Japanese military brothel, in Shanghai's Pudong district.

Su said a second meeting in the fall will review the progress of preparation work. The researchers aim to file the application in 2015, the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II.

"And we will introduce more countries and regions in the application in the future," he added.

The experts have agreed to strengthen records exchanges and build a website on the issue.

Of the current 193 documented heritage items now listed in the Memory of the World Register from 87 countries and regions, 43 are from the Asia-Pacific region.

Xinhua contributed to this story.

weitian@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 02/11/2014 page12)