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A group of Japanese is reportedly taking legal action against their local government over a history textbook that they say whitewashes Japan's wartime aggression.

 

Japan's Education Ministry approved last April the new edition of The New History Textbook, written by right-wing scholars, which prompted outrage in China and South Korea where bitter memories persist of Japan's wartime aggression.

 

The lawsuit was filed by eight residents of Suginami, a residential district in west Tokyo that attracted media attention last year when it became one of the few school districts to adopt the junior high school textbook.

 

"As a resident, I cannot keep silent over the choice of an unwanted textbook for growing children," Eriko Maruhama, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, told a news conference.

 

In addition to a recall of the textbook from 23 junior high schools in Suginami from this April, the plaintiffs are demanding a symbolic 8,000 yen (US$68) in damages.

 

A similar lawsuit was filed last December by about 1,000 plaintiffs, including Chinese and South Koreans, against the governor of Ehime in western Japan for adopting the textbook for use at four government-run schools from April.

 

Plaintiffs in the latest suit say the defendant, the Suginami local government, adopted the textbook despite poor reviews from schoolteachers.

 

The Suginami school board said that it made an appropriate decision by adopting the book.

 

"The decision to use the textbook was based on laws and ordinances," the board said in a statement.

 

The textbook plays down the 1937 Nanjing Massacre and ignores the sexual enslavement of women for Japanese soldiers.

 

The book's authors and supporters have argued that the text's approach corrected a "masochistic" view of history that they said had deprived Japanese of pride and patriotism.

 

Fewer than 0.5 percent of 583 school districts decided to adopt the text, the daily Mainichi Shimbun reported last August.

 

(China Daily February 10, 2006)