Publisher Shueisha Inc. said Thursday it will delete or modify parts of a comic depicting the Nanjing Massacre that were carried by its weekly "manga" edition, when it is published in book form, after assembly members complained that the slaughter never happened.

"The lack of prudence in selecting and verifying the materials for the comic has caused misunderstanding among readers," the publisher and the comic's author, Hiroshi Motomiya, said in a statement printed in the latest edition of Weekly Young Jump.

The 21 pages featuring "inappropriate scenes" will be deleted or modified.

This decision comes after a group of 37 local assembly members complained that passages from "Kuni ga Moeru" ("The Country is Burning") printed in the magazine's Sept. 16 and 22 editions "distorted history" by describing Japanese soldiers massacring civilians in the Nanjing Massacre of 1937.

The politicians claim no such massacre took place.

"Kuni ga Moeru," a cartoon serial carried in the weekly magazine since November 2002, is a fictional account of the life of a bureaucrat in the turbulent early part of the Showa Era (1926-1989).

Shueisha, which has suspended "Kuni ga Moeru" since October, said no date has been fixed for its resumption.

The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal concluded more than 140,000 people were killed in the massacre. Chinese historians put the death toll at 300,000 in Nanjing alone. Japanese accounts vary from several thousand to 200,000.