"Japan and China should focus on the outlook for bilateral cooperation, rather than dwell on painful events from the past," Abe said, adding that he regrets China’s decision to submit historical documents on the Nanjing Massacre to a UNESCO register.
Last week, UN education and culture agency UNESCO added a set of Chinese documents on the so-called Rape of Nanjing to its Memory of the World register, a year after the documents were submitted.
Files, ranging from films and photos to texts, bear witness to a month-long killing and rape spree by Japanese troops in the occupied eastern Chinese city in 1937. China says around 300,000 people were butchered and thousands of women were sexually abused during the Japanese invasion in the 1930s.
China and Japan have been unable to settle their disputes over the damage that Beijing says Japanese soldiers did to its population prior and during WWII, including the issue of Chinese "comfort women," who were forced into Japan’s army brothels during the war.
