It's going to be interesting to see what kind of "proof" this guy tries to come up with to try and prove his theory.
i've got a book i picked up from Yasukuni last year that porports to 'prove' that the Nanjing massacre never happened. i don't read any Japanese, but i
do do semiotics, and i can read photographs perfectly clearly: and the collection of photos are all attempting to 'prove' that pictures of the massacre were faked. some massacre photos have similar looking earth-formations circled - the implication being that the same photo has been used to make many montages. another sequence of photos compares one 'alleged' massacre photo with an (allegedly) similar photo of smiling Japanese soldiers helping happy Chinese peasants - the implication here clearly being that an ordinary photo of nice Japanese troops has been butchered by malicious enemies (ie, Americans) into a massacre montage.
it's all bullshit of course - hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians were butchered by a Japanese army (in)famous for 'clearing' all potential opposition; but one of the reasons why the bullshit survives is that the
legitimate greivances of Japan up to and during the war (ie, the (illegal) blockade of Japanese shipping organised by FDR in the 30's, and the sanctions applied to Japan, again on FDR's urging, by the League of Nations (on completely spurious grounds)) are also ignored: in that atmosphere it's quite easy for ppl to say 'well, this is denied and that is denied, and the first is true, so why wouldn't the second be true as well?/ (and yes, i'm aware of the logical fallacy in that statement).
and finally: all countries deny their war crimes. here in London, there's a statue of Bomber Harris, the war criminal responsible for the fire bombing of Dresden, in Whitehall, just outside Downing St; my fellow Australians completely ignore the fact that the Australian Army used white phosporous as an anti-personnel device in the Vietnam War (a war crime: it's expressly forbidden by the Geneva Conventions) even as they 'celebrate' the fact that the Australian Army was 'more effective' in Vietnam than the US. And we won't mention what the coalition of the willing are doing in Iraq...
the takeaway is that all wars are criminal. some might be necessary, but they're all criminal. i'm a firm believer that whoever takes a country to war, for whatever reason, should be put on trial (preferable in The Hague) afterwards. Those that were leading wars of resistance will get off, of course - but
all leaders should know that this fate awaits them. it's the fact that some wars are seen as legit, even tho they're not, and some are seem as criminal, even tho their legit (with the distinctions being made by the winners, of course) that leads to the sort of denial that the Japanese are in about Nanjing, and the whole 'China Incident'.