Documents related to the Nanjing Massacre are being submitted for inclusion on a UNESCO list by authorities in the Chinese city, after uproar over a Japanese bid to include suicide pilots' farewell letters.

The Shanghai-based Oriental Morning Post said it was the third time Nanjing had submitted the documents for inclusion in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's Memory of the World Register, which also includes such items as the diary of Anne Frank and Britain's Magna Carta.

The cache includes documents related to the atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers in the eastern Chinese city, where Tokyo's imperial forces went on a six-week spree of rape, slaughter and destruction from December 1937.

About 300,000 Chinese people were killed in the massacre.

The papers also include files on the use of "comfort women" forced into sex slavery by Japanese troops, the newspaper said.

Relations between Beijing and Tokyo are heavily colored by their shared history, and tensions have escalated amid a row over the disputed Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea.

A senior manager at Japanese national broadcaster NHK, Naoki Hyakuta, drew fire earlier this month when he denied that the Nanjing Massacre had ever taken place.

Another NHK official said last month that the practice of forcibly drafting women into military brothels during World War II was "common in any country at war."

The Japanese city of Minami-Kyushu drew widespread condemnation last week when it made a bid for the inclusion of letters written by World War II kamikaze pilots on the UNESCO register.

The Chiran Peace Museum — named after the Japanese town from which kamikaze planes would depart on their flights of no return — is seeking the documents' inclusion "to forever hand down the letters to generations to come as a treasure of human life."

Both Beijing and Seoul swiftly blasted the move.

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