NANJING authorities said Tuesday that they’ve suspended official exchanges with the Japanese city of Nagoya after Nagoya’s mayor said he doubted the well-documented massacre of Chinese civilians by Japanese troops in 1937.

    The Nanjing Massacre occurred in December 1937, when Japanese troops occupied the eastern China city of Nanjing. More than 300,000 Chinese were believed murdered and thousands of women raped.

    According to Japan’s Kyodo news agency, Nagoya Mayor Takashi Kawamura told Liu Zhiwei, a high-level Chinese official visiting from Nanjing, on Monday that he believes only “conventional acts of combat” took place.

    During talks between the two – whose cities were twinned in 1978 – Kawamura, whose father was in Nanjing in 1945 at the end of the Japanese occupation of China, reportedly denied that mass murders and rapes happened.

    The Nanjing government said the remarks distorted historical facts and “seriously hurt the feelings of the Nanjing people.”

    (SD-Xinhua)