Okinawans Protest Japan’s Plan to Revise Bitter Chapter of World War II
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
Published: October 7, 2007
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.
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.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/wo...ld&oref=slogin