Question: Do Japanese citizens feel Japanese soldiers are responsible for the crimes committed at Nanking?
About the article "Nanking Massacre", section "Japan".

Candidate passages:
During the war, the Japanese Government kept tight control over the news media.
As a result, the Japanese public was not aware of the Nanking Massacre or other war crimes committed by the Japanese military.
The Japanese military was, rather, portrayed as a heroic entity.
Japanese officials lied about civilian death figures at the time of the Nanking Massacre, and some Japanese ultranationalists are still active in attempting to deny that the killings ever occurred.
One brief lapse in the Japanese Government's control over negative depictions of the war was the fleeting public distribution of Tatsuzo Ishikawa's wartime novel, Living Soldier (Ikiteiru heitai), which depicted the grim and dehumanizing effects of the war.
Ishikawa and his publisher tried to satisfy government censors by a deliberate decision to self-censor lines about soldiers 'foragfor fresh meat' and 'search[ing for women like dogs chasing a rabbit,' while still preserving the overall tone and import of the novel.
The novel was published in 1938 but was pulled from circulation within days; Ishikawa was sentenced to a four-month prison term for disturbing 'peace and order.
'Controversy and confusion over the Nanking massacre occurred even soon after, in 1943 George Orwell wrote in "Looking Back on the Spanish War": "Recently I noticed that the very people who swallowed any and every horror story about the Japanese in Nanking in 1937 refused to believe exactly the same stories about Hong Kong in 1942.
There was even a tendency to feel that the Nanking atrocities had become, as it were, retrospectively untrue because the British Government now drew attention to them...
There is not the slightest doubt, for instance, about the behaviour of the Japanese in China...
The raping and butchering in Chinese cities, the tortures in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly Jewish professors flung into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees along the Spanish roads — they all happened, and they did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them when it is five years too late.
"It was not until the Tokyo Trial (tried by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East) and the Nanjing Trial that the truth of the Nanking Massacre was first revealed to Japanese civilians.
The atrocities revealed during the trials shocked Japanese society at the time. 
Many historians recognize that widespread atrocities were committed by the Imperial Japanese Army in and around Nanking (now Nanjing), China, after the capital's fall to Japanese troops on 13 December 1937.
This event and associated atrocities breeds considerable anger in many Chinese today.
The Japanese textbook in question only briefly mentions the atrocities committed and refers to Nanking Massacre as follows: many Chinese soldiers and civilians were killed or wounded by Japanese troops (the Nanking Incident).
Documentary evidence has raised doubts about the actual number of victims claimed by the incident.
The debate continues even today" (p. 49).
[http://www.tsukurukai.com/05_rekisi_text/rekishi_English/English.pdf] While the use of the word "incident" is standard Japanese historiographical terminology for focal events, such as Tiananmen "Incident" （天安門事件） rather than massacre, it is objected to by Chinese as a deliberate playing down of the events in question.
Other textbooks, which are used in an overwhelming majority of Japanese schools, are more direct. 
The Nanking Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking, was an episode of mass murder and mass rape committed by Japanese troops against Nanking (current official spelling: Nanjing) during the Second Sino-Japanese War.
The massacre occurred during a six-week period starting December 13, 1937, the day that the Japanese captured Nanking, which was then the Chinese capital.
(See Republic of China).
During this period, tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and disarmed combatants were murdered by soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army.
Widespread rape and looting also occurred.
Several of the key perpetrators of the atrocities, at the time labelled as war crimes, were later tried and found guilty at the International Military Tribunal of the Far East and the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal, and were executed.
Another key perpetrator, Prince Asaka, a member of the Imperial Family, escaped prosecution by having earlier been granted immunity by the Allies.
An accurate estimation of the death toll in the massacre has not been achieved because most of the Japanese military records on the killings were deliberately destroyed or kept secret shortly after the surrender of Japan in 1945.
The International Military Tribunal of the Far East estimated in 1948 over 200,000 Chinese killed in the incident.
China's official estimate is more than 300,000 dead based on the evaluation of the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal in 1947.
The death toll has been actively contested among scholars since the 1980s, with typical estimates ranging from 40,000 to over 300,000.
The event remains a contentious political issue, as various aspects of it have been disputed by some historical revisionists and Japanese nationalists, who have claimed that the massacre has been either exaggerated or wholly fabricated for propaganda purposes.
As a result of the nationalist efforts to deny or rationalize the war crimes, the controversy surrounding the massacre remains a stumbling block in Sino-Japanese relations, as well as Japanese relations with other Asia-Pacific nations such as South Korea and the Philippines.
Although the Japanese government has admitted to the acts of killing of a large number of non-combatants, looting, and other violence committed by the Imperial Japanese Army after the fall of Nanking, and Japanese veterans who served in Nanking at that time have confirmed that a massacre took place, a small but vocal minority within both the Japanese government and society have argued that the death toll was military in nature and that no such crimes ever occurred.
Denial of the massacre (and a divergent array of revisionist accounts of the killings) has become a staple of Japanese nationalism.
In Japan, public opinion of the massacres varies, and few deny the occurrence of the massacre outright.
Nonetheless, recurring attempts by negationists to promote a revisionist history of the incident have created controversy that periodically reverberates in the international media, particularly in China, South Korea, and other East Asian nations. 
Shortly after the surrender of Japan, the primary officers in charge of the Japanese troops at Nanking were put on trial.
General Matsui was indicted before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East for "deliberately and recklessly" ignoring his legal duty "to take adequate steps to secure the observance and prevent breaches" of the Hague Convention.
Hisao Tani, the lieutenant general of the 6th Division of the Japanese army in Nanking, was tried by the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal.
Other Japanese military leaders in charge at the time of the Nanking Massacre were not tried.
Prince Kan'in, chief of staff of the Imperial Japanese Army during the massacre, had died before the end of the war in May 1945.
Prince Asaka was granted immunity because of his status as a member of the imperial family.
Isamu Chō, the aide of Prince Asaka, and whom some historians believe issued the "kill all captives" memo, had committed suicide during the defense of Okinawa. 
  22 November 1937 – The International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone is organized by a group of foreigners to shelter Chinese refugees.
12 December 1937 – Chinese soldiers are ordered to withdraw from Nanking  13 December 1937 – Japanese troops capture Nanking  14 December 1937 – The International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone lodges the first protest letter against Japanese atrocities with the Japanese Embassy.
19 February 1938 – The last of the 69 protest letters against Japanese atrocities is sent by the Safety Zone Committee to the Japanese Embassy and announces the renaming of the committee as the Nanking International Relief Committee.