Japan & China Releases 3-year Study on History

choi

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Japan, China still at odds over Nanjing; Joint history study skirts death toll. Kyodo News, Jan. 31, 2010.
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20100201a1.html

Quote:

"[T]he postwar history section of the report — including studies on the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown — was not disclosed at the request of Chinese panel members, who feared a public backlash against the sensitive content.

"On the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, an exchange of gunfire between Japanese and Chinese troops near Beijing that led to the war, the Chinese papers indicate a softening of Beijing's stance, saying 'there is a possibility that it may have occurred accidentally.'  The Japanese papers say the first shooting occurred accidentally, while adding an annotation that such a view is 'dominant' among Japanese researchers

Note:
(1) Shinichi KITAOKA 北岡 伸一
BU Ping 步平
Sumio HATANO 波多野 澄雄

(2) It seems that Japanese scholars do not use the term "Rape of Nanking" or "massacre." Japanese say
(a) that China's figure of 300,000 deaths is based on the ruling of the 1947 Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal;
(b) that "various estimates up to 200,000, such as 40,000 and 20,000" exist in Japanese studies;
(c) that there has been no accepted figure because of differences in "the verification of data" in terms of the definition of "massacre," the area and period in which the incident took place, burial records, and other sources; and
(d) that  "mass killings" of prisoners of war, some civilians, stragglers and other people did occur, along with rapes, looting and arson.

I notice this report does not say by whom.

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