China has applied to UNESCO to have documents of Japanese invasion and the ensuing crimes of rapes, plunders and massacres included in the Memory of the World program for documentary heritage.

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A 14-member UNESCO panel has been meeting in the United Arab Emirates since Sunday to examine over 80 nominations for the register aiming to reserve important historical documents for posterity.

China has submitted two documents to be included in the register. One relates to the use of "comfort women" by Japanese Imperial soldiers before and during World War II. The other relates to the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, where around 300,000 Chinese civilians were killed during Japanese occupation in the 1930s.

China insists that the history of the past and the country's triumph over Japanese aggression should be preserved to inform and deter future generations from war. Beijing started preparing for the submission of the materials since 2009. However, official submissions of the Nanjing Massacre documents began in March.

Japan, which has also submitted two documents to the UNESCO International Advisory, has lodged a protest against China's submissions. Tokyo questioned the authenticity of Beijing's submissions and unsuccessfully asked the China to withdraw the nominations.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, Japan's government spokesman, said last week that China's nominations were regrettable. He added that when Shino-Japanese relations were in the healing process, Beijing is using UNESCO to score political points.

"When Japan and China are making efforts to improve relations, China is trying to use UNESCO for a political purpose and it is quite regrettable,"Suga said.

He stressed that China's nominations "unnecessarily emphasize a negative legacy from a certain period in the past involving Japan and China."

But Beijing has a different view. Guo Bigiang of the Second Historical Archives of China thinks the nominations "could remind us of remembering history and cherishing peace."

Zhu Chengshan, curator of the Memorial for victims of the Nanjing Massacre, said the nominations were part of China's collective memory and thus must be preserved.

China submitted first hand materials to UNESCO in three categories, including photographs, papers and film footages.

Japan's submissions include archives from a Buddhist temple as well as post-World War II imprisonment and repatriation records. Around 55,000 out of the 600,000 Japanese soldiers imprisoned in Siberian and Mongolian labor camps died in severe living conditions from forced labor and malnutrition.

Reports indicate that South Korea is currently examining whether to nominate documents relating to Korean laborers and comfort women imprisoned by Japanese Imperial soldiers.

UNESCO officials are expected to announce the nominations which made the register later this week. Other documents that have been preserved in the Memory of the World registration program, which started in 1992, includes Britain's Magna Carta, an annotated copy of Karl Marx's Das Kapital and the diary of Anne Frank.

TagsComfort Women, Nanjing Massacre, Memory of the World program, UNESCO, Japan World War II Crimes China