Commemorative event marking 80th anniversary of opening of Tokyo Trial held in Nanjing, China

NANJING, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 1st May, 2026) A commemorative event in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, marking the 80th anniversary of the opening of the Tokyo Trial was held in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province of China.

Themed Truths of the Past, Voices of the Present, the event was organized by the CICG Center for Americas and the Publicity Department of the CPC Nanjing Municipal Committee.

He Peng, Vice President of the CICG Center for Americas, hosted the commemorations.

For 80 years, the facts of the Tokyo Trial have never been shaken by revisionist noise.

Court transcripts, witness accounts and archives stand as irrefutable evidence and a shared international memory,” Gao Anming, Editor in Chief of China International Communications Group (CICG), said at the event took place on April 29.

Xu Ning, Deputy Director of the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Jiangsu Provincial Committee, said Nanjing has held exhibitions abroad, hosted peace forums, and produced artistic works like operas, documentaries and films on the Nanjing Massacre to reach global audiences.

According to Zhou Feng, the memorial hall’s Curator, the memorial hall has assembled a team of inheritors of the historical memory of the incident and developed an international volunteer service team.

The descendants of witnesses of the Tokyo Trial shared their memories at the event. Eighty years ago, Chinese prosecutor Xiang Zhejun stood before the Tokyo Trial and fought to define Japan’s aggression. Recalling Xiang’s accounts of the trial, his son Xiang Longwan shared difficulties facing the prosecutors in collecting evidences.

Any denial of the Nanjing Massacre betrays the victims.

History cannot be altered; truth will never be absent,” Zhang Qing, great-granddaughter of Xu Chuanyin, a Chinese witness at the Tokyo Trial, said.

As Chris Magee, grandson of John Magee, an American witness at the Tokyo Trial, said in a video message, he has passed on the legacy of his family through visual storytelling, as his grandfather remained in Nanjing after the invasion and documented and kept evidence of the atrocities.

“It is not enough to establish the truth and to punish the crimes; we must also continually resist the twin poisons of the modern world: denial and oblivion,” Kléber Arhoul, Curator of the Caen Memorial Museum in France.

“The Tokyo Trial and the tragedy of Nanjing are not only about the past. They are about the kind of international order we seek to build now and in the future,” Evandro Menezes de Carvalho, a professor of international law at Fluminense Federal University in Brazil, said.

During the event, organizers presented two books compiled by the memorial hall.

Tokyo Trial serves as historical documentation, providing undeniable proof that the Nanjing Massacre did occur and that some of the major Japanese war criminals were held accountable, Eric Foster, nephew of Edgar Snow, a U.S. journalist who authored the 1937 book Red Star Over China, said.

During the event, Zou Dehuai, a collector of archives including the diary of David Nelson Sutton, a U.S. assistant prosecutor at the Tokyo Trial, donated the archives to the memorial hall.

The memorial hall, the SJTU Research Institute of War Trial and World Peace, and the SJTU Press signed an agreement on jointly developing the Nanjing Massacre Documentation Center database.

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