China Calls for Boycotting Japanese Hotel

China’s tourism administration has urged tour operators to sever ties with the APA hotel chain after an escalating row over the hotelier’s denial of the 1937 Nanking Massacre.

The call for boycott comes after the Tokyo-based hotel group refused to withdraw books from its guest rooms that deny the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, an episode of mass murder that historians agree was committed over a six-week period by the Imperial Japanese Army that resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of people in the Chinese city of Nanjing.

Zhang Lizhong, spokesman of China National Tourism Administration, said on Tuesday this is a blatant provocation to Chinese tourists and has violated the industry's professional ethics, according to China-based news website Ecns.cn. 

“We demand that all operators with international tours and online platforms completely stop all cooperation with this hotel,” Zhang said in a statement on the body’s website.

The official Xinhua news agency added its voice on Tuesday, calling the incident “only the tip of the iceberg of Japan’s ultra-right wing’s efforts to revise the nation’s war history”.

According to Japan Times, China says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in the city. A postwar Allied tribunal put the death toll at about half that. To the fury of China, some conservative Japanese politicians and academics deny the massacre took place, or they put the death toll much lower.