CRI听力:Wartime Documents Record Japan's Atrocities in China

Documents revealing the crimes of Japanese soldiers during their invasion of China during the World War Two have recently been made public.

The documents have been released by Jilin Provincial Archives.

Zhang Yujie is the director of the administrative office under the archives.

He says that these documents were discarded by the Japanese army during its hasty retreat from Changchun, the capital of Jilin, after Japan's surrender on Aug. 15, 1945.

Among them are some letters written by Japanese soldiers.

Zhang explains these letters expose the crimes conducted by Japanese soldiers during their aggression against China.

"He said he cried before throwing a kid into a fire, but then he told himself the kid from the country he is invading would grow up if he left him alive, so he threw the kid into fire finally. He said it was hard to express how he felt after doing that. He said they killed 150 people that time."

The documents detail eight different atrocities conducted by Japanese troops in China.

Some of them show how Japanese invaders grabbed land from and other resources from Chinese peasants, and others show the cruel oppression used to coerce locals into serving the invaders.

They also record evidence about the Nanjing Massacre, human testing of chemical and biological weapons conducted by the notorious Unit 731, the use of Chinese women as sex slaves, and the maltreatment of U.S. and British prisoners of war.

Jiang Lifeng is a research fellow of the Institute of Japanese Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

"Monthly reports of the invaders at that time, how they managed such reports, relevant data, and letters of these Japanese soldiers, all these recorded their crimes. And these documents are shocking to me."

The expert says that these files are a response to the denial of Japan's wartime atrocities, made by Japan's right-wing politicians.

For CRI, this is Ding Lulu.