TOKYO, Sept 29: About 110,000 people staged a rally in Okinawa on Saturday against the government’s move to instruct publishers to delete references to Japanese troops forcing islanders to commit suicide during World War II.

The rally was the largest in the southern Japanese island since it was returned to Japan by the United States in 1972, Kyodo News said.

The rally was held in Ginowan, northeast of Naha, drawing local residents, government officials, teachers and labour unions as well as local politicians from both the ruling and opposition camps.

The protestors adopted a resolution urging the education ministry to retract its controversial instruction to history textbook publishers to delete the references, organisers said.

Representatives of the demonstrators plan to visit Tokyo next week to deliver the resolution to Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, who took office on Tuesday, the organisers said.

“The ministry’s attitude is extremely regrettable,” Okinawa Governor Hirokazu Nakaima told the rally, according to Kyodo. “As a representative of the people of Okinawa, I strongly protest to the ministry.” Okinawa islanders were angered by the ministry’s instruction in March to publishers that they rewrite the phrases suggesting Japan’s Imperial Army forced civilians to kill themselves in the closing stages of World War II.

The 83-day Battle of Okinawa, 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 resistance by home troops 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.

One of the draft textbooks read: “There were people who were forced by Japanese troops to commit group suicides.” But after a regular screening the ministry demanded a change to: “There were people who were driven into group suicides.” The episode is seen as another case of a controversial revision to how Japan sees its militarist past.—AFP