Japan’s Education Ministry edits textbook passages on the Battle of Okinawa (Video)

Japan’s Education Ministry has decided to change the way official textbooks mention civilian suicides in the Battle of Okinawa:

In the screening of history and geography textbooks, the ministry sought changes to 791 points, while for science textbooks it requested 1,681 changes, the largest number for any of the subjects.

On the Battle of Okinawa, which claimed the lives of one-fourth of Okinawa’s civilian population, one of the textbooks says that “the Japanese army gave hand grenades to residents, making them commit mass suicide and kill each other.”

More than 200,000 Japanese and Americans died in the bloody battle in the closing days of World War II’s Pacific theater.

After the screeners took issue with the statement, saying it could result in misunderstandings, the textbook was revised to say, “Mass suicides and killings took place among the residents using hand grenades given them by the Japanese army.”

Other textbooks also played down descriptions, deleting the words “by the Japanese army.”

The education ministry says that a definitive description should be avoided because academics differ over the army’s role in the mass suicides and that no direct instructions from army commanders at that time have been verified.

To the Education ministry it seems the question comes down to whether written documents exist confirming that the Japanese military ordered civilians to commit suicide, or whether the reported incidents of forced suicide were isolated and independent actions by Japanese soldiers. The aging civilian survivors of the battle, some of whom say they witnessed Japanese soldiers telling civilians to commit suicide, appear to be losing the struggle to keep their story in the pages of national textbooks.