Japanese court defends author, says military was involved in mass suicides in Okinawa
TOKYO: A court rejected on Friday a defamation lawsuit against Kenzaburo Oe, the 1994 Nobel Prize laureate for literature, agreeing with his assertion that the Japanese military was deeply involved in the mass suicides of civilians in Okinawa at the end of World War II.
In a closely watched ruling, the Osaka District Court rejected a $200,000 damage suit filed by a 91-year-old war veteran and another veteran's surviving relatives who said there was no evidence of the military's involvement. The plaintiffs had also sought to block further printing of Oe's 1970 book of essays, "Okinawa Notes," in which he wrote of how Japanese soldiers forced Okinawans to kill themselves instead of surrendering to advancing American troops.
"The military was deeply involved in the mass suicides," Judge Toshimasa Fukami said in his ruling. Fukami cited testimonies of survivors that soldiers handed out grenades to civilians to commit suicide and the fact that mass suicides occurred only in villages where troops were stationed.
The suit, filed in 2005, was seized upon by rightist scholars and politicians to try to delete references to the military's coercion of civilians in the mass suicides from the country's high school history textbooks. Last April, during the administration of the nationalist former prime minister Shinzo Abe, the Ministry of Education announced that textbooks would be rid of references to the military's role.
Some 110,000 people rallied in protest last September, in the biggest demonstration in the prefecture since the early 1970s. The protest, as well as Abe's resignation and his replacement by Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, a moderate, led the Ministry of Education to reinstate most of the references in December.
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The about-face was an embarrassment for the Japanese government, which has always asserted that its school textbooks were free of political bias, despite accusations by China and South Korea.