A Chinese-American veteran has called for Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to apologize to China first for his country's atrocity during the Second World War.

In an open letter to Abe, Chinese-born John Yee says he was 17 years old when the Japanese Imperial Army butchered hundreds of thousands of his fellow Chinese in Nanjing.

Yee says what the Imperial Army did to the Chinese people back then was nothing less than the Nazi genocide against Jews.

Yee was born in southwestern China's Yunnan province in 1921. He served as a translator in the First American Volunteer Group of the Chinese Air Force, commonly known as the Flying Tigers, during the war. Yee moved to the US in 1942 and has been living there since.