Lawmakers from Okinawa, site of one of World War II's bloodiest battles, blasted a government decision to tone down school textbook accounts of soldiers ordering civilians to commit suicide.
Yesterday's resolution urging the government to scrap the textbook revision comes a day before the anniversary of the end of the 1945 Battle of Okinawa, a "Typhoon of Steel" that left some 200,000 dead -- soldiers, civilians, Japanese and Americans.
Many Okinawan civilians, often entire families, committed suicide rather than surrender to Americans, on the orders of fanatical Japanese soldiers by some eyewitness accounts .
Some conservative Japanese historians have called into question the eyewitness accounts, arguing the suicides were voluntary.
In March, publishers of high school textbooks were ordered by the Education Ministry to modify the descriptions of the suicides. The move outraged many Okinawans.
"It is an undeniable fact that mass suicides could not have occurred without the involvement of the Japanese military," the Okinawa assembly said in a statement that was presented in person to the ministry in Tokyo yesterday.
"We strongly call on the government to retract its instruction and immediately restore the description in the textbooks so the truth of the Battle of Okinawa will be correctly conveyed and such a tragic war will never happen again," the statement said.
The statement followed similar ones by local assemblies throughout the island and a campaign by civic groups to collect signatures opposing the move.
"The great majority of people were furious at the instruction," an Okinawa assembly official said by telephone.
The textbook revisions mirror other efforts by conservatives to revise descriptions of Japan's wartime actions, including Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's denial that the military or government hauled women away to serve as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers before and during World War II.
Earlier this week, a group of Japanese ruling party lawmakers denounced the 1937 Nanking Massacre as a fabrication, contesting claims that hundreds of thousands were killed by Japanese soldiers in the Chinese city in 1937.
Meanwhile, a US search team on Iwo Jima is zeroing in on a cave where a Marine combat photo-grapher who filmed the flag-raising 62 years ago is believed to have been killed, officials said yesterday.
The seven-member search team is looking for the remains Sergeant William Genaust, who was killed in action after filming the flag-raising atop Iwo Jima's Mount Suribachi, and other US troops killed in the battle -- one of the fiercest and most symbolic of the war.
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