GINOWAN, Japan, Sept. 30 — Already 78 years old and in failing health, the Rev. Shigeaki Kinjo no longer wanted to talk about that fateful day 62 years ago toward the end of World War II when he beat to death his mother, younger brother and sister.
The Rev. Shigeaki Kinjo said Japanese soldiers filled him with such fears of American troops that he killed his mother and two siblings.
Last month, thousands of protesters in Ginowan, Okinawa, demanded that Japan drop plans to remove references in textbooks to the coerced mass suicides on their island in 1945.
Brainwashed by Japanese Imperial Army soldiers into believing that victorious American troops would rape all the local women and run over the men with their tanks, Mr. Kinjo and others in his village here in Okinawa thought that suicide was their only choice. A week before American troops landed and initiated the Battle of Okinawa in March 1945, Japanese soldiers stationed in his village gave the men two hand grenades each, with instructions to hurl one at the Americans and then to kill themselves with the other.
Most of the grenades failed to explode. After watching a former district chief break off a tree branch and use it to kill his wife and children, Mr. Kinjo and his older brother followed suit.
“My older brother and I struck to death the mother who had given birth to us,” Mr. Kinjo said in an interview at the Naha Central Church, where he is the senior minister. “I was wailing of course. We also struck to death our younger brother and sister.”
Mr. Kinjo agreed to tell his story again because the Japanese government is now denying, in new high school textbooks, that Okinawans had been coerced by Imperial troops into committing mass suicide.
The proposed changes to the school textbooks — the deletion of a subject, the change to the passive voice — amounted to just a couple of words among hundreds of pages. But the seemingly minor grammatical alterations have led to swelling anger in the Okinawa islands in Japan, cresting recently in the biggest protest here in at least 35 years and stunning the Japanese government.
For the past quarter of a century, Japan’s high school textbooks had included the accepted historical fact that that Okinawans had been coerced into mass suicides by Imperial Army soldiers.
But six months ago, the Education Ministry said that next year’s government-endorsed textbooks would eliminate all references to Japan’s soldiers. According to the revised passages, the Okinawans simply committed mass suicide or felt compelled to do so. But by whom?
“If Japanese soldiers had not been there, the mass suicides would have never occurred,” said Mr. Kinjo, who said he decided not to kill himself after he saw that Japanese soldiers were not committing suicide.
The ministry said that it “is not clear that the Japanese Army coerced or ordered the mass suicides” but cited no fresh evidence to explain its change in policy. What was clear, though, was the timing of the announcement, which came a few months after the Japanese government passed a new law emphasizing “patriotism” in public schools.
In fact, for at least the past decade, nationalist scholars and politicians, like former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, had fought to cleanse textbooks of passages on crimes committed by Japanese soldiers. If the deletion of passages on wartime sex slaves or massacres angered Asian nations in recent years, this was the first time that the government’s whitewashing of the past had caused this kind of anger in Japan.
The uproar presents a serious challenge for the new government of Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, who needs Okinawa’s consent to carry out the reconfiguration of United States military bases here. A moderate, Mr. Fukuda has signaled that he is seeking a compromise on the new textbooks, which are scheduled to go the publishers in November and be introduced into classrooms with the start of the new school year next April.
But Mr. Fukuda is in a difficult position. Abruptly overturning the revisions would anger his party’s powerful right wing; it would also belie the government’s longstanding assertion that the school textbooks are free of political interference.
Okinawa, which suffered the only battle on Japanese soil involving civilians during World War II, was an independent kingdom with its own culture and language until it was officially annexed by Japan in the late 19th century. During the war, Japanese soldiers distrusted Okinawans and feared that they would act as spies for the Americans.
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