The Reverend Shigeaki Kinjo, 78 years old and in failing health, no longer wanted to talk about that fateful day 62 years ago toward the end of World War II when he beat to death his mother, younger brother and sister.
Brainwashed by Japanese Imperial Army soldiers into believing that victorious US troops would rape all the local women and run over the men with their tanks, Kinjo and others in his village here in Okinawa thought that death was their only choice. A week before US troops landed and initiated the Battle of Okinawa in March 1945, Japanese soldiers stationed in his village gave the men two hand grenades each, with instructions to hurl one at the Americans and then to kill themselves with the other.
Most of the grenades failed to explode. After watching a former district chief break off a tree branch and use it to kill his wife and children, Kinjo and his older brother followed suit.
"My older brother and I struck to death the mother who had given birth to us," Kinjo said in an interview at the Naha Central Church, where he is the senior minister. "I was wailing, of course. We also struck to death our younger brother and sister."
Kinjo agreed to tell his story again because the Japanese government is now denying, in new high school textbooks, that Okinawans had been coerced by imperial troops into committing mass suicide.
The proposed changes -- the deletion of a subject, the change to the passive voice -- amounted to just a couple of words among hundreds of pages. But the seemingly minor grammatical alterations have led to swelling anger in the Okinawa islands in Japan, cresting recently in the biggest protest here in at least 35 years and stunning the Japanese government.
For the past quarter-century, Japan's high school textbooks had included the accepted historical fact that that Okinawans had been coerced into mass suicides by Imperial Army soldiers.
But six months ago, the Education Ministry said that next year's government-endorsed textbooks would eliminate all references to Japan's soldiers. According to the revised passages, the Okinawans simply committed mass suicide or felt compelled to do so. But by whom?
"If Japanese soldiers had not been there, the mass suicides would never have occurred," said Kinjo, who said he decided not to kill himself after he saw that Japanese soldiers were not committing suicide.
The ministry said that it "is not clear that the Japanese army coerced or ordered the mass suicides," but cited no fresh evidence to explain its change in policy.
The announcement came a few months after the Japanese government passed a new law emphasizing "patriotism" in public schools.
In fact, for at least the past decade, nationalist scholars and politicians, including former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, had fought to cleanse textbooks of passages on crimes committed by Japanese soldiers. If the deletion of passages on wartime sex slaves or massacres angered Asian nations in recent years, this was the first time that the government's whitewashing of the past had caused this kind of anger in Japan.
The uproar presents a serious challenge for the new government of Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, who needs Okinawa's consent to carry out the reconfiguration of US military bases here. A moderate, Fukuda has signaled that he is seeking a compromise on the new textbooks, which are scheduled to go to the publishers next month and be introduced into classrooms with the start of the new school year in April.
But Fukuda is in a difficult position. Abruptly overturning the revisions would anger his party's powerful right wing; it would also belie the government's long-standing assertion that school textbooks are free of political interference.
Okinawa, which suffered the only battle on Japanese soil involving civilians during World War II, was an independent kingdom with its own culture and language until it was officially annexed by Japan in the late 19th century. During the war, Japanese soldiers distrusted Okinawans and feared that they would act as spies for the US.
After the US forces landed, Japanese soldiers expelled Okinawans from shelters and used them as human shields. Thousands are believed to have committed suicide in villages occupied by Japanese soldiers; mass suicides did not take place where there were no soldiers.
Nobuyoshi Takashima, a professor of social sciences at the University of the Ryukyus, said discrimination against Okinawa survived today. Just as Okinawa was sacrificed to prevent a US invasion of Japan's main islands during the war, Okinawa today remains home to most of the US troops based in Japan.
Tokyo's initial reaction to the textbooks deepened Okinawa's fury, Takashima said. Local TV stations showed how senior Okinawan politicians visiting Tokyo to protest the revisions could not get an appointment with the minister of education or even a vice minister. Instead, they were met by midlevel education officials.
One of the visitors to Tokyo was Toshinobu Nakazato, chairman of Okinawa's assembly. Angered by the revisions, Nakazato broke a 62-year silence and talked about his own experiences.
Inside a shelter where his family had sought refuge, Japanese soldiers handed his family members two poisoned rice balls and told them to give them to Nakazato's younger sister and a cousin, he said. Instead, his family fled into the mountains, where his younger brother died.
"I'm already 70," he said in an interview, "and the memories of those over 80 are already fading. So perhaps this time was the last opportunity for us to resist."
Okinawa's assembly and all of its local governments passed resolutions demanding that the textbook revisions be overturned. Officials began planning a protest. Octogenarians on islets where some of the largest mass suicides took place spoke out for the first time. Teachers began devoting extra hours to the mass suicides.
At the Nanbu Commercial High School, Yoshinao Uezu, 36, a social studies teacher, explained to his students the political context of the revisions, saying he was trying to "connect the dots."
"This revision occurred at a particular juncture in our country," he said. "The Defense Agency's status was elevated to a ministry, and there is talk of revising our pacifist Constitution."
After a recent class, one student, Michie Tamaki, 18, said, "I'm ashamed of my own country for trying to hide these facts."
Unlike older Okinawans, Ayumi Sueyoshi, 18, said she had never felt discrimination directed at Okinawa, but added, "Because this happened, I do feel it now."
A day later, on Sept. 29, more than 110,000 people rallied in Ginowan against the textbook revisions. It was the biggest protest in Okinawa since it reverted to Japanese control in 1972, eclipsing a 1995 rally in which 85,000 protested the rape of a 12-year-old girl by three US servicemen.
As participants listened to the stories of the war survivors, many were visibly moved.
"I can't bear it," said Tsuyu Nakamura, 65, who kept wiping tears away, especially after two high school students asked, "Are they telling us that our grandpas and grandmas are lying?"
Nobuhiko Yonahara, 65, and his wife, Misako, 65, both lost relatives in the Battle of Okinawa.
"My father told me about the mass suicides -- how they were given hand grenades," Nobuhiko Yonahara said. "Distorting history is not good. You run the risk of committing the same mistakes."
"I don't think this is a problem just for Okinawa. That facts are being twisted at the government's convenience is a problem for all of Japan," Misako Yonahara said.
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