Akira Suzuki, prize-winning author of the controversial book "Nanjing: How the World Was Fed Facts and Fakes," reasserted at a press conference Thursday that the Nanjing Massacre death toll of 300,000 cited by the Chinese government lacks credibility from a historical standpoint.
But whatever the actual number may be, Suzuki believes that the massacre was a massacre and that Japan's war atrocities in the Chinese city must never be dismissed or reduced.
Suzuki asserts that the number of Chinese citizens and soldiers the Chinese government claims were slaughtered by Japanese troops at the time Nanjing surrendered to Japan in 1937 cannot be substantiated and is merely the same number that prosecutors stated in their indictments during the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, in which Japanese military leaders were tried for war crimes by the Allied Powers.