The U.S. has long backed Japan’s constitutional change so that it can play a larger role in their security alliance. But such moves, coupled with increasing attempts by Japan’s conservative leaders to revise wartime history, are beginning to unsettle its neighbors.

On the eve of the 62nd anniversary of WWII’s Battle of Okinawa Sunday, Okinawa’s assembly demanded that the central government retract its instruction to textbook publishers to downplay the military’s role in ordering mass civilian suicides.

The assembly issued the call in a statement after 36 out of the 41 municipal assemblies adopted uniform resolutions; and civic groups collected 100,000 signatures opposing Tokyo’s move.

In the statement, the assembly said, “It is an undeniable fact that mass suicides could not have occurred without the involvement of the Japanese military. We strongly call on the government to retract the instruction and to immediately restore the description in the textbooks so the truth of the Battle of Okinawa will be handed down correctly and a tragic war will never happen again.”

Okinawa was the only part of Japan where ground fighting took place in the closing days of WWII. More than 200,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians, as well as American invaders, were killed there.

Many survivors say Japanese officers, on the brink of defeat, told their soldiers to kill themselves and their loved ones. But some military-related people deny that mass suicides and murder-suicides were ordered.

In March, Japan’s Education Ministry advised publishers of the textbooks to rephrase descriptions that the embattled Imperial Japanese Army had forced civilians to kill themselves to uphold their honor. Japanese propaganda also induced civilians to believe U.S. soldiers would commit horrible atrocities, leading many to kill themselves and their loved ones to escape capture.

In recent years, some academics have questioned whether the suicides were forced — part of a general push by Japanese conservatives to soften criticism of Tokyo’s wartime conduct.

Also last week, a group of about 100 lawmakers from Japan’s ruling LDP say that after a month-long review, they have determined the number of Chinese people killed by Japanese troops during the infamous Rape of Nanking has been grossly inflated.

Nariaki Nakayama, head of the group created to study wartime issues and education, said last Tuesday that documents from the Japanese government archives indicated 20,000 people were killed in the 1937 attack — about a tenth of the more commonly cited figure of 150,000 to 200,000.

Historians worldwide generally agree that the Japanese Army killed at least 150,000 civilians and raped thousands of women and girls during its occupation of China’s former capital in 1937 and 1938.

Under Abe, Japan won’t become a “normal” country like Germany.

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