The history textbook revisions go on in Japan

Critics slam latest change to accounts of the Battle of Okinawa in 1945


TOKYO - MS SUMIE Oshiro was 25 when she and her friends tried to kill themselves to avoid capture by US soldiers at the start of the Battle of Okinawa in 1945.

'We were told that if women were taken prisoner, we would be raped and that we should not allow ourselves to be captured,' she said on last month's anniversary of the March 26, 1945 invasion of the Japanese islet of Zamami.

'Four of us tried to commit suicide with one hand grenade, but it did not go off,' Ms Oshiro was quoted by Ryukyu Shimpo, a local Okinawa newspaper, as saying at a gathering of now elderly survivors.

The fighting on Zamami, south of the main Okinawan island, was the prelude to three months of carnage that took some 200,000 lives, about half of them Okinawan men, women and children.

Many civilians, often entire families, committed suicide rather than surrender to Americans, by some accounts on the orders of fanatical Japanese soldiers.

However, Japanese rightists have re-asserted that such civilian suicides were voluntary acts of patriotism.

Late last month, the Education Ministry ordered publishers of high school textbooks to modify references to Japanese soldiers ordering civilians to kill themselves.

The textbook revisions echo other efforts by conservatives to revise descriptions of Japan's wartime actions, such as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's denial that the military or the government hauled women away to serve as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers in Asia before and during WWII.

'In every case, Abe's administration is saying there was no military involvement,' Mr Shoukichi Kina, an opposition lawmaker from Okinawa, told the media.

'They are distorting history and it is unforgivable.'

'The army ordered them to commit suicide,' said Mr Yoshikazu Miyazato, 58, who plans to publish testimony from survivors on Zamami, where he says suicides accounted for 180 of the 404 civilians - about half of the islet's population - who died.

One reason cited for the textbook revisions was a lawsuit by a former Japanese army officer and relatives of another claiming that the two men were falsely described in works by publisher Iwanami Shoten as having ordered civilian suicides in Okinawa.

That prompted the publisher and Nobel Prize-winning author Kenzaburo Oe to send a letter of protest to the Education Ministry, criticising it for taking into account only the views of the plaintiffs in the court case.

The Battle of Okinawa looms large in the collective memory of inhabitants of Okinawa - a separate kingdom until its monarch was exiled to Tokyo in 1879.

The battle, in which up to one-third of the island's inhabitants died, has been described as a futile sacrifice ordered by Japan's military leaders to delay a US invasion of the Japanese mainland.

Mr Masahide Ota, a former governor of Okinawa who was one of the local students mobilised to defend the island, says soldiers gave civilians two hand grenades - 'one to throw at the enemy and one to use on themselves'.

Mr Ota, a historian as well as a Member of Parliament, fears the lessons of Japan's wartime past are in danger of being lost.

'Education has the responsibility to convey history accurately to our children so that our country does not repeat the tragedy of the Pacific war,' he said in a statement.

'Textbooks are one method of fulfilling that mission. I think that is being forgotten.'

REUTERS

---

SUICIDE OR RAPE

'We were told that if women were taken prisoner, we would be raped and that we should not allow ourselves to be captured.'
MS SUMIE OSHIRO, who tried to kill herself to avoid being caught by US soldiers at the start of the Battle of Okinawa in 1945