Japanese government defends NHK director who denied Rape of Nanking

A senior manager of Japan Broadcasting Corporation who denied that any massacre took place in Nanjing during the 1930s did nothing wrong, Japan's government said yesterday, fanning a storm over revisionist views aired by Japanese officials.

Naoki Hyakuta, board member of broadcaster NHK, dismissed as "propaganda" the accounts of the 1937-8 orgy of murder and rape by Japanese troops as they rampaged through China.

His comments, made during a stump speech for a right-wing candidate in Sunday's election for Tokyo governor, come after the newly appointed head of NHK sparked anger with comments about Japan's wartime system of sex slavery and said the station's output should reflect government policy.

Last month, NHK's new chairman, Katsuto Momii, said that "comfort women", who were coerced into brothels to serve Japanese soldiers during the second world war, "could be found in any nation that was at war".

He subsequently apologised for the statement, blaming his inexperience at press conferences, but refused to retract his assertion that the broadcaster's editorial output should cleave to the government's line.

The comments fuel fears that NHK, one of the world's biggest broadcasters, is falling meekly into line with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's aggressively nationalist agenda.

"Countries in the world ignored the propaganda produced [by then-Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek] ... that Japan's troops carried out a massacre in Nanjing. Why? There was no such thing," Hyakuta said during a speech on Sunday, according to the newspaper.