To one furious Japanese politician it is “a matter of national pride and honour”. Another urged an “information war against the rest of the world”. Other MPs in Tokyo described an “atmosphere of crisis” between Japan and China.

It is not the usual kind of dispute over underwater oil-fields or military spending, but a battle over a series of forthcoming films about an atrocity a lifetime ago.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the notorious Rape of Nanking, when troops of the Japanese Imperial Army embarked on a rampage of looting, rape and murder in the former Chinese capital. Film-makers from Hollywood to Hong Kong are producing at least six different films on the subject.

All accept the view of most Western and many Japanese historians that in three weeks in 1937 the Imperial forces killed tens of thousands of civilians in the city of Nanking.

But now Japanese nationalists are uniting to insist on the opposite — that the massacre was a vicious lie cooked up by Chinese communists to smear a proud and noble army. A revisionist documentary plans to prove Nanking to be a hoax. And 18 young members of the Japanese parliament have formed a “Group to Study the Truth of the Nanking Incident”. “We have to pass on true history to young people,” Eiichiro Washio, of the Democratic Party of Japan, said. “We must fight this information war against the rest of the world.”

Japan began its invasion of eastern China in the summer of 1937, and on December 13 it seized the city of Nanking from the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-Shek.

The conventional version of what happened next is set out in the The Encyclopaedia of Japan by the Japanese publisher Kodansha.

“The Japanese Army began a wholesale murder of Chinese men on the pretext that they were Chinese soldiers trying to escape in civilian clothes,” it states. “As discipline broke down among the Japanese troops, they began to kill civilians indiscriminately.”

Prosecutors at the postwar trial of the Japanese commanding officer estimated that more than 100,000 noncombatants, prisoners of war as well as civilians, died in the region over six weeks. Chinese estimates range as high as 300,000 dead civilians.

The accounts of third-country citizens living in Nanking leave little doubt that atrocities did occur on a vast scale. “The slaughter of civilians is appalling,” wrote an American doctor, Robert Wilson. “I could go on for pages telling of cases of rape and brutality almost beyond belief.

“Two bayoneted corpses are the only survivors of seven street cleaners who were sitting in their headquarters when Japanese soldiers came in without warning or reason and killed five of their number”.

It is on the accounts of these foreigners that several of the films are based, among them the “Schindler of Nanking”, a Nazi businessman named John Rabe, who created an international safety zone in the city, where many Chinese found sanctuary.

However, Satoru Mizushima, founder of a conservative TV channel, is attempting to raise 300 million yen (£1.3 million) to make The Truth about Nanking, a documentary that denies that anything very bad happened at all. It will debunk the gory photographs that claim to show victims and will suggest that John Rabe was a Chinese stooge.

“To clarify the truth of the history is to recover our national honour,” the MP Yohei Matsumoto says. “We need this so that Japanese can feel proud of themselves in years to come.”

State of denial

- Between seven and ten million died in the 1932-33 Holodomor (hunger and plague) in Ukraine. Most accept that the famine was a result of Stalin’s policies, but Russia denies the claims

- From 1941 to 1945, inspired by the Nazi race laws, the Fascist Croatian Government persecuted Jews, Roma and the large Serb minority. Between 300,000 and 500,000 died, mainly Serbs. Many in Croatia, including the late Franjo Tudjman, the former President, questioned the numbers

- The scale of the Srebrenica massacre, in which 8,000 Bosnian Muslims are believed to have died at the hands of Bosnian Serb troops, has been disputed by some Serbs, as well as the US journalist Diana Johnstone, who wrote the book Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, Nato and Western Delusions

Sources: United Nations, Times archives, Institute for Historical Review

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