Japanese Protest New Deletions From Textbooks
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TOKYO — Mitsuko Yoneda was 17 years old when 13 members of her family gathered in a forest in drizzling rain. It was March 1945 and the U.S. Army was invading Okinawa. Told by Japan’s military government that death was more honorable than capture, the Yonedas had come to die.
Her 19-year-old brother, a member of the civilian youth defense corps, pulled the pin on an army-issued hand grenade, killing himself and four other relatives. They were among more than 735 people who committed suicide in Okinawa during the American assault.
Four local assemblies are now protesting an order by Prime Minister Abe’s Education Ministry to remove from school textbooks all references to military involvement in the deaths. They have passed a resolution demanding the central government reverse its decision, and several other communities are considering the measure.
“Mr. Abe seems eager to delete the memory of Japan’s defeat and the military’s direct involvement in mass suicides,” the author of ” Unknown U.S. Soldiers in Okinawa” and executive director of Okinawa’s largest daily newspaper, Tomokazu Takamine, said. “He wants to create a new fiction.”
The controversy follows another earlier this year, when Mr. Abe, 52, disputed the military’s involvement in forcing women to work in brothels for soldiers during the war.
