Dr. Yutaka Arai, in a letter to the editor of the London Financial Times (2-26-05):

Sir, I was horrified to read Yuko Tojo, granddaughter of the wartime Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo, denying the existence of the Rape of Nanjing of 1937 ("Let sleeping gods lie", Lunch with the FT, FT magazine, February 19).

True, there is a continuing controversy about the number of deaths and the status of those soldiers who were alleged to have discarded uniforms in the besieged town. It is likely that, as some leftwing historians in Japan and the west claim, the number of victims of this massacre is not as high as 300,000, which is the official figure provided by the Chinese government, but is rather between 20,000 and 50,000.

However, the issue of the number of victims is a mere semantic matter that must not cast any doubt over the nature of atrocities. Further, even the conservative figure of 20,000 is about three times as high as the number of victims killed at Srebrenica in Bosnia in July 1995 in what was the worst case of genocide in Europe since the second world war.

What matters most, however, is that there is a clearly established fact that the Japanese Imperial Army committed brutal massacres against the Chinese civilian population, including women and children (and against Chinese soldiers who became hors de combat and defenceless) in Nanjing and elsewhere.

The manner of systematic and widespread brutality, including the rape of thousands of women, clearly constituted crimes against humanity.

To leap from the semantic question of the number of victims to denying the crimes is unacceptable. Such a move would undermine the edifice of democracy in postwar Japan.

The fact that revisionist views such as Ms Tojo's are "rehabilitated" in some sections of the rightwing Japanese press causes me much of concern. But I am still cautiously optimistic that the Japanese public, who have enjoyed a democratic and peaceful constitutional system for the past 60 years, will not turn to ultra-nationalism and militarism along the lines of ghastly empire-building in the 1930s and 1940s. However, the emerging "banalisation" in relation to such established facts as the sexual enslavement of thousands of "comfort women" and the Nanjing massacre, coupled with the virulent nature of the attacks by the rightwing press against China and the left-leaning Japanese press, makes me deeply concerned and indignant.

I still hold freedom of expression as the most precious asset of democracy, but I am beginning to wonder whether or not the Japanese Criminal Code should be amended to allow criminal prosecution of those who deny historically established war crimes, along the lines adopted by Germany, France and other European countries.

I was born about 25 years after the second world war but I believe it is my duty to educate students and the public about the horror that our army committed during that war.