World
Japan’s Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida informed on Friday that the country has withheld its funding, worth 3.85 billion yen, to the United Nations heritage body U.N.E.S.C.O. for this year. Many believe that the action comes as a reprisal move after the world body included records about the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in its “Memory of the World” program last year.
Japan has previously questioned the veracity of the Nanjing Massacre documents, which claim that Japanese troops slaughtered 300,000 people in 1937 in China’s then capital of Nanjing, reports Reuters.
While a postwar Allied tribunal estimated the number of killings to be 142,000, a section of conservative Japanese politicians rejects the claims that any massacre took place at all. Japan’s move to withhold U.N.E.S.C.O. funding comes as several civic organizations have rallied to get some “2,700 comfort women-related documents” included in the heritage list, writes Japan Today.
Many women, mostly from Korea and China, were forcibly held in Japanese military brothels before and during World War II and were referred to as “comfort women.” If a U.N.E.S.C.O. member state does not pay its dues to the body for two years, it loses its rights to vote in the U.N. body’s general conference.
