WORLD : ’37 Chinese Massacre Admitted

An Imperial Japanese army major left behind an affidavit saying the army dumped the bodies of 150,000 Chinese into the Yangtze River during the 1937 “Rape of Nanking,” the newspaper Mainichi Shimbun reported today.

Maj. Hisao Ohta’s 44-page confession is further evidence of the existence and the extent of the massacre, which some Japanese right-wing historians and politicians say never occurred.

According to Ohta’s confession, written while he awaited trial in 1954 in Fushun, his army unit dumped the bodies of 19,000 Chinese into the water at the Nanking river front over three days starting on Dec. 15, 1937.

A neighboring unit “processed” 81,000 victims at the same time, and elsewhere in Nanking, units took care of another 50,000, Ohta’s confession, preserved in China’s Nanking Massacre Memorial Hall, says.