A diary kept by a Chinese witness during the World War II Nanjing Massacre is expected to be published this year, the Beijing Morning Post reported yesterday.
The diary of Cheng Ruifang, a medical worker in the Nanjing International Security Zone, the temporary asylum for wartime refugees, was the first Chinese diary found, the newspaper said.
Other diaries have been found and published, such as the diary of German John Rabe and the wartime diary of Japanese veteran Azuma Shiro.
Cheng's dairy, records the events in Nanjing, then the capital of China and now the capital of Jiangsu Province, between December 8, 1937 and March 1, 1938. It was found three years ago in Nanjing and has since been kept in the Second Historical Archives of China, according to the Beijing Morning Post.
After japan's unconditional surrender in 1945, Cheng appeared on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East to give testimony on the wartime atrocities of the Japanese troops.
The city of Nanjing fell to the Japanese army on December 13, 1937, and the massacre, also known as "the rape of Nanking," lasted for about six weeks. During the period, Japanese soldiers killed 300,000 unarmed Chinese soldiers and civilians.
The paper published an excerpt of Cheng's diary from December 18, 1937: "The Japanese soldiers were terribly beastly and stopped at nothing. They killed people and raped women at will."
Today, some Japanese continue to deny the massacre ever took place.