HIROKO TABUCHI, Tokyo
Japan's government ordered changes to seven school textbooks that said the army forced civilians to commit mass suicide at the end of the Second World War.

The new history books, approved yesterday by the Education Ministry, were ordered to modify sections that said the Japanese army - faced with an impending US invasion in 1945 - handed out grenades to residents of Okinawa island and ordered them to kill themselves rather than surrender to the Americans.

Publishers have been asked to make the changes and submit them for approval by a government-appointed panel.

Accounts of forced suicides on Okinawa are backed up by historical research, as well as testimonies from victims' relatives. Historians also say civilians were induced by government propaganda to believe US soldiers would commit horrible atrocities, thereby killing themselves and their families to avoid capture.

However, in recent years, some academics have questioned whether the suicides were forced - part of a general push by Japanese conservatives to soften criticism of Japan's wartime behaviour.

The battle in Okinawa raged from late March until June 1945, killing more than 200,000 civilians and soldiers.

Survivors criticised the revisions. "If the Japanese soldiers hadn't come, people wouldn't have killed themselves," said Fumiko Miyamura, who said she witnessed a group suicide on Okinawa.

"Are they trying to make us forget about the war? This story must remain."

In another sign Tokyo is moving to soften brutal accounts of its wartime conduct, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe denied earlier this month that Japan's military forced up to 200,000 women, mainly Korean or Chinese, to work as wartime sex slaves.

A fund set up by Japan in 1995 to help such women expires today. It has paid 285 women in the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan compensation, helped set up nursing homes for former Indonesian sex slaves and offered medical assistance to some 80 Dutch sex slaves.

Tokyo's education board, meanwhile, has punished 35 teachers for not standing up to honour the national anthem - considered by some as a symbol of Japan's militarist past - during graduation ceremonies.

Three teachers will be suspended for up to six months, 12 others received pay cuts and another 20 were issued warnings.-AP