Tuesday, October 9, 2007The China Post news staff
Ten days ago, more than 116,000 Okinawan people protested in Ginowan, near Naha, against the Tokyo government's plan to revise history textbooks to say that thousands of Okinawans had committed suicide in the Japanese samurai tradition upon learning of the imminent American invasion at the end of World War II.
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 American servicemen. Okinawa today remains home to most of the American troops stationed in Japan.
The archipelago, traditionally called the Ryukyus, which suffered the only battle on Japanese soil involving civilians during the war, was an independent kingdom with its own culture and language until it was officially annexed by Japan in the late 19th century. During WWII, Japanese soldiers distrusted Okinawans and feared that they would act as spies for U.S. invaders.
After the Americans landed, Japanese soldiers expelled Okinawans from shelters and used them as human shields. Those who committed suicide were believed to be only in villages with Japanese soldiers; mass suicides did not take place where there were no soldiers. Okinawa's assembly and all its 41 local governments have passed resolutions demanding the textbook revisions be overturned. 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.
For at least the past decade, nationalist scholars and politicians, like former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, had fought to cleanse textbooks of passages on crimes committed by Japanese soldiers. The deletion of passages on wartime sex slaves or massacres has angered Asian nations in recent years; this is the first time that the government's whitewashing of the past has caused this kind of anger in Japan.
For the past quarter of a century, Japan's high school textbooks had included the historical fact that Okinawans had been coerced into mass suicides by Imperial Army soldiers.
But six months ago, the Education Ministry said that next year's textbooks would eliminate all references to Japan's soldiers. According to the revised passages, the Okinawans simply committed mass suicide by themselves.
This revision occurs at a particular juncture in Japan: the Defense Agency's status has just been elevated to a ministry, and a plan is afoot to drop pacifism from its Constitution.
Okinawa's uproar presents a serious challenge for the new government of Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, who needs Okinawa's consent to carry out the reconfiguration of United States military bases there.
Fukuda has pledged to seek a compromise on the new textbooks, which will be ready for publishers in November and introduced into classrooms with the start of the new school year next April.
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