International News

TOKYO, Oct 14, (APP/AFP) – Japan is holding back more than $40 million in UNESCO funding, foreign minister Fumio Kishida said Friday, following a protest against listing documents related to the Nanjing massacre. Kishida confirmed Japan has suspended this year’s contribution totalling 4.4 billion yen ($42 million), but denied any direct link to an incident that still hangs over frosty diplomatic relations between Tokyo and Beijing. Last year, Japan — one of UNESCO’s biggest funders — warned that it may pull funding for the UN cultural and scientific body after it agreed to Bejing’s request to mark documents recording the mass murder and rape committed by Japanese troops after the fall of the Chinese city of Nanjing 1937. The documents were inscribed in the UN body’s Memory of the World register. The massacre, often referred to as the “Rape of Nanjing”, is an exceptionally sensitive issue in the often-tense relations between Japan and China, with Beijing charging that Tokyo has failed to atone for the atrocity.