“This is all part of the revisionists’ plan to downplay and minimise what Japan inflicted on the rest of Asia during the so-called liberation struggle from European colonial powers,” said Jeff Kingston, director of Asian Studies at Temple University’s Tokyo branch.

“When they say the Nanking ‘incident’, it’s a euphemistic way of referring to the tens of thousands of Chinese civilians who were rounded up by the Japanese military and simply slaughtered,” he said. “The revisionists want to sanitise that.”