Japan's LDP party defeated in regional election

Published: Monday 26 January 2009 10:40 UTC
Last updated: Monday 26 January 2009 12:56 UTC

Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso has suffered a stinging defeat in a regional election. An opposition candidate was elected governor in the northern prefecture of Yamagata. For years, Yamagata was a stronghold of the prime minister's conservative LDP party.

Recent opinion polls suggest only 20 percent of the electorate still supports Mr Aso. There is widespread criticism of the prime minister's economic policies, and there are rumours that his party may replace him soon.

Reportedly, there is a growing chance that the LDP, which has been in power for all but 10 months since 1955, may not return to government after the parliamentary elections scheduled to be held later this year.

Demonstration in Japan against "rewriting of history"

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Hilversum, Sunday 30 September 2007 02:25 UTC

Over 100,000 people have demonstrated on the island of Okinawa in Japan against a government order to cut certain passages in a history textbook used in secondary schools. Publishers were ordered to delete references to the Japanese army forcing the inhabitants of Okinawa to commit suicide at the end of the Second World War when US troops attempted to occupy the island.

Around 200,000 people were killed in the Battle of Okinawa, including 10,000 civilians. Entire families committed suicide rather than surrender to the Americans. Some eyewitness accounts claim they were forced to kill themselves on the orders of Japanese soldiers, but nationalist historians claim they did so out of patriotism.

The demonstrators are angry that the nationalist version of events has been made compulsory in the school textbooks. They say that the brutality against the wartime generation should be a lesson for the future.