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TOKYO : Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe denounced Japan's government on Wednesday for ordering textbook publishers to delete references to troops forcing islanders to kill themselves in the Battle of Okinawa.
"It is truly regrettable," the 72-year-old Japanese novelist, whose book on the sub-tropical island sparked controversy for descriptions of mass suicides, told a news conference.
In the latest controversial revision to how Japan sees World War II, the education ministry said last week it had ordered changes in school textbooks for the first time over the mass suicide issue.
"There were people who were forced by Japanese troops to commit group suicides," was a sentence in a high school textbook prepared by Shimizu Shoin Co. The ministry changed the wording to: "There were people who were driven into group suicides."
The 83-day battle, the bloodiest in the Pacific war, left 190,000 Japanese dead, half of them Okinawan civilians. The US death toll reached 12,520 due to die-hard Japanese resistance on the southern Japanese island chain.
While many civilians perished in the all-out US bombardment, local accounts say Japanese troops forced residents of Okinawa - an independent kingdom until the 19th century - to commit suicide rather than surrender to US forces.
Oe, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1994 and is known for his pacifist views, wrote in his 1970 book of essays "Okinawa Notes" that Japanese troops ordered Okinawan islanders to kill themselves.
A former soldier and the family of another have filed a libel suit against Oe and the publisher of his book on mass suicides. The education ministry listed the suit as a reason to alter textbooks.
"It is crude that the ministry has unilaterally taken up assertions on the side of the plaintiffs and forced revisions of descriptions in the textbooks," Oe said.
In recent years, nationalist academics have insisted that Okinawa's suicide pacts were voluntary and not due to orders by troops from mainland Japan.
The ministry said there was enough disagreement that "it is not appropriate to determine that there were military orders." - AFP/de
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