China to boycott Japan hotel chain
Print Edition
CHINA’S tourism administration has urged tour operators to sever ties with a Japanese hotel chain after an escalating row over the hotelier’s denial of the 1937 massacre by Japanese troops in the Chinese city of Nanjing.
A furore erupted this month over books by Toshio Motoya, president of Tokyo-based hotel and real estate developer APA Group, that air his revisionist views and are placed in every room of the firm’s more than 400 hotels.
Motoya, using the pen name Seiji Fuji, wrote that stories about the Nanjing massacre were “impossible.” “These acts were all said to be committed by the Japanese army, but this is not true,” he said.
The China National Tourism Administration is firmly opposed to APA Group’s provocation of Chinese tourists, spokesman Zhang Lizhong said yesterday.
“We demand that all operators with international tours and online platforms completely stop all cooperation with this hotel,” Zhang said. “We call on Chinese groups and the many tourists that visit Japan to resist APA’s wrong approach and avoid spending money at this hotel.”
Official support for a boycott of the Japanese chain escalates calls that have circulated online and in some of China’s media.
Xinhua news agency added its voice yesterday, calling the incident “only the tip of the iceberg of Japan’s ultra-right wing’s efforts to revise the nation’s war history.”
Japan’s wartime occupation of Nanjing, and the resulting massacre, is a highly contentious issue between the uneasy neighbors.
Up to 300,000 people died in the city in a six-week orgy of killing, rape and destruction by the Japanese military.
The revelation of the book’s existence caused outrage on China’s social media.
Last week, a Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman lambasted Motoya and said that the book underlined the refusal of some in Japan to “squarely face history.”
Japan’s Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Koichi Hagiuda downplayed the incident yesterday, saying that China and Japan should work together on common issues facing the international community, rather than focusing too much on the “unhappy past.”
Japan attracted about 6.3 million tourists from China last year, the largest such bloc of visitors, up nearly 28 percent from 2015. Their spending helped buoy the sluggish Japanese economy, in areas from hotels to cosmetics.
Motoya previously told reporters that Chinese tourists only made up 5 percent of the hotel chain’s customers in Japan and that he did not expect the row to affect the hotel.
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