http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/04\/01\/world\/asia\/01japan.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin<\/a><\/p>\nTOKYO, March 31 \u2014 In another sign that Japan is pressing ahead in revising its history of World War II, new high school textbooks will no longer acknowledge that the Imperial Army was responsible for a major atrocity in Okinawa, the government announced late Friday.<\/p>\n
The Ministry of Education ordered publishers to delete passages stating that the Imperial Army ordered civilians to commit mass suicide during the Battle of Okinawa, as the island was about to fall to American troops in the final months of the war.<\/p>\n
The decision was announced as part of the ministry\u2019s annual screening of textbooks used in all public schools. The ministry also ordered changes to other delicate issues to dovetail with government assertions, though the screening is supposed to be free of political interference.<\/p>\n
\u201cI believe the screening system has been followed appropriately,\u201d said Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has long campaigned to soften the treatment in textbooks of Japan\u2019s wartime conduct.<\/p>\n
The decision on the Battle of Okinawa, which came as a surprise because the ministry had never objected to the description in the past, followed recent denials by Mr. Abe that the military had coerced women into sexual slavery during the war.<\/p>\n
The results of the annual textbook screening are closely watched in China, South Korea and other Asian countries. So the fresh denial of the military\u2019s responsibility in the Battle of Okinawa and in sexual slavery \u2014 long accepted as historical facts \u2014 is likely to deepen suspicions in Asia that Tokyo is trying to whitewash its militarist past even as it tries to raise the profile of its current forces.<\/p>\n
Shortly after assuming office last fall, Mr. Abe transformed the Defense Agency into a full ministry. He has said that his most important goal is to revise the American-imposed, pacifist Constitution that forbids Japan from having a full-fledged military with offensive abilities.<\/p>\n
Some 200,000 Americans and Japanese died during the Battle of Okinawa, one of the most brutal clashes of the war. It was the only battle on Japanese soil involving civilians, but Okinawa was not just any part of Japan.<\/p>\n
It was only in the late 19th century that Japan officially annexed Okinawa, a kingdom that, to this day, has retained some of its own culture. During World War II, when many Okinawans still spoke a different dialect, Japanese troops treated the locals brutally. In its history of the war, the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum presents Okinawa as being caught in the fighting between America and Japan \u2014 a starkly different view from the Yasukuni Shrine war museum, which presents Japan as a liberator of Asia from Western powers.<\/p>\n
During the 1945 battle, during which one quarter of the civilian population was killed, the Japanese Army showed indifference to Okinawa\u2019s defense and safety. Japanese soldiers used civilians as shields against the Americans, and persuaded locals that victorious American soldiers would go on a rampage of killing and raping. With the impending victory of American troops, civilians committed mass suicide, urged on by fanatical Japanese soldiers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were some people who were forced to commit suicide by the Japanese Army,\u201d one old textbook explained. But in the revision ordered by the ministry, it now reads, \u201cThere were some people who were driven to mass suicide.\u201d<\/p>\n
Other changes are similar \u2014 the change to a passive verb, the disappearance of a subject \u2014 and combine to erase the responsibility of the Japanese military. In explaining its policy change, the ministry said that it \u201cis not clear that the Japanese Army coerced or ordered the mass suicides.\u201d<\/p>\n
As with Mr. Abe\u2019s denial regarding sexual slavery, the ministry\u2019s new position appeared to discount overwhelming evidence of coercion, particularly the testimony of victims and survivors themselves.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are many Okinawans who have testified that the Japanese Army directed them to commit suicide,\u201d Ryukyu Shimpo, one of the two major Okinawan newspapers, said in an angry editorial. \u201cThere are also people who have testified that they were handed grenades by Japanese soldiers\u201d to blow themselves up.<\/p>\n
The editorial described the change as a politically influenced decision that \u201cwent along with the government view.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Abe, after helping to found the Group of Young Parliamentarians Concerned About Japan\u2019s Future and History Education in 1997, long led a campaign to reject what nationalists call a masochistic view of history that has robbed postwar Japanese of their pride.<\/p>\n
Yasuhiro Nakasone, a former prime minister who is a staunch ally of Mr. Abe, recently denied what he wrote in 1978. In a memoir about his Imperial Navy experiences in Indonesia, titled \u201cCommander of 3,000 Men at Age 23,\u201d he wrote that some of his men \u201cstarted attacking local women or became addicted to gambling.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor them, I went to great pains, and had a comfort station built,\u201d Mr. Nakasone wrote, using the euphemism for a military brothel.<\/p>\n
But in a meeting with foreign journalists a week ago, Mr. Nakasone, now 88, issued a flat denial. He said he had actually set up a \u201crecreation center,\u201d where his men played Japanese board games like go and shogi.<\/p>\n
In a meeting on Saturday with Foreign Minister Taro Aso of Japan, South Korea\u2019s foreign minister, Song Min-soon, criticized Mr. Abe\u2019s recent comments on sexual slaves.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe problems over perceptions of history are making it difficult to move South Korean-Japanese relations forward,\u201d Mr. Song said.<\/p>\n
Mr. Aso said Japan stuck by a 1993 statement acknowledging responsibility for past sexual slavery, but said nothing about Mr. Abe\u2019s denial that the military had coerced women, many of them Korean, into sexual slavery.<\/p>\n
ENDS\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s business as usual as Japan Inc. takes on the world’s political arenas with spin doctoring over “Comfort Women” etc., to feint with the left hand while fiddling with the right. Distract with snow jobs while whitewashing the historical record. Only this time I think we’ve got enough people on the ground over here who know what our government is doing for a change. David McNeill releases an excellent article for the Irish Times, while Norimitsu Onishi, on an incredible roll these days, continues unearthing for the New York Times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,20,4,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-history","category-japanese-government","category-japanese-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}