An auxiliary textbook used at a middle school in Yokohama, Japan, affirms the massacre of Korean people at the hands of Japanese soldiers and police officers during the Kanto Earthquake in 1923.

The 2012 edition of the auxiliary textbook, which was distributed by the Yokohama city government, says that Japanese soldiers, police officers and vigilantes persecuted and killed Korean and Chinese people.

Japan’s right-wing newspaper Sankei Shimbun criticized the statement in the auxiliary textbook as arbitrary, adding that the situation illustrates the problems with auxiliary textbooks which are not reviewed and approved by Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

The Japanese government has denied the massacre of Korean people by Japan during the 1923 earthquake despite studies by Korean, Chinese and some Japanese scholars proving the truth of the historical incident.