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Titolo: Japan revises wartime history in textbooks

Japan revises wartime history in textbooks
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/01/news/japan.php?page=2
TOKYO: 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 has announced.
The Ministry of Education has 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 U.S.
troops in the final months of the war.
The decision was announced as part of the ministry's 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.
"I believe the screening system has been followed appropriately," said
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has long campaigned to soften the treatment
in textbooks of Japan's wartime conduct.
The decision on the Battle of Okinawa, which came as a surprise because
the ministry had not objected to the description in the past, followed
recent denials by Abe that the military had coerced women into sexual
slavery during the war.
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The results of the annual textbook screening are closely watched in China,
South Korea and other Asian countries. The fresh denial of the military's
responsibility in the Battle of Okinawa and in sexual slavery - long
accepted as historical fact - 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.
Shortly after assuming office last autumn, Abe transformed the Defense
Agency into a full ministry. He has said that his most important goal is
to revise the U.S.-imposed, pacifist constitution, which forbids Japan
from having a full-fledged military with offensive capabilities.
About 200,000 Americans and Japanese died during the Battle of Okinawa,
one of the most brutal clashes during the war. It was the only battle on
Japanese soil involving civilians, but Okinawa was not just any part of
Japan.
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 the United States and Japan - a
starkly different view from the Yasukuni Shrine war museum, which presents
Japan as a liberator of Asia from Western powers.
During the 1945 battle, during which one-quarter of the civilian
population was killed, the Japanese Army showed indifference to Okinawa's
defense and safety. Japanese soldiers used civilians as shields against
the Americans, and convinced locals that victorious U.S. soldiers would go
on a rampage of killing and raping. With the impending victory of U.S.
troops, civilians committed mass suicide, urged on by fanatical Japanese
soldiers.
"There were some people who were forced to commit suicide by the Japanese
Army," one old textbook explained. But in the revision ordered by the
ministry, it now reads, "There were some people who were driven to mass
suicide."
Other changes are similar - the change to a passive verb, the
disappearance of a subject - and combine to erase the responsibility of
the Japanese military. In explaining its policy change, the ministry said
that it "is not clear that the Japanese Army coerced or ordered the mass
suicides."
As with Abe's denial regarding sexual slavery, the ministry's new position
appeared to discount overwhelming evidence of coercion, particularly the
testimony of victims and survivors themselves.
"There are many Okinawans who have testified that the Japanese Army
directed them to commit suicide," Ryukyu Shimpo, one of the two major
Okinawan newspapers, said in an angry editorial. "There are also people
who have testified that they were handed grenades by Japanese soldiers" to
blow themselves up.
The editorial described the change as a politically influenced decision
that "went along with the government view."
Abe, after co-founding the Group of Young Parliamentarians Concerned About
Japan's Future and History Education in 1997, led a campaign to reject
what nationalists call a masochistic view of history that has robbed
postwar Japanese of pride.
Yasuhiro Nakasone, a former prime minister who is Abe's staunch ally,
recently denied what he wrote in 1978. In a memoir about his Imperial Navy
experiences in Indonesia, titled "Commander of Three Thousand Men at Age
Twenty-Three," he wrote that some of his men "started attacking local
women or became addicted to gambling."
"For them, I went to great pains, and had a comfort station built,"
Nakasone wrote, using the euphemism for a military brothel.
But in a meeting with foreign journalists a week ago, Nakasone, now 88,
issued a flat denial. He said he had actually set up a "recreation
center," where his men played Japanese board games like go and shogi.
In a meeting Saturday with Foreign Minister Taro Aso of Japan, South
Korea's foreign minister, Song Min Soon, criticized Abe's recent comments
on sexual slaves.
"The problems over perceptions of history are making it difficult to move
South Korean-Japanese relations forward," Song said.
Aso said Japan stuck by a 1993 statement acknowledging responsibility for
past sexual slavery, but said nothing about Abe's denial that the military
had coerced women, many of them Korean, into sexual slavery.
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 Japan revises wartime history in textbooks
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