NEW YORK — I was thinking once again about the intractability of Japan's part in the Pacific phase of World War II when the news came: Okinawans had staged a huge rally to protest the Japanese government's downplaying in textbooks the military's role in "group suicides" among civilians during the Battle of Okinawa.
According to some reports, a single examiner at the Japanese education ministry, with dubious outside connections, made the change. To explain it, he pointed to a recent complaint brought against writer Kenzaburo Oe's 1970 assertions.
The examiner, if he was thinking at all, took an action as improbable as the war itself. Yes, Japan was pushed up against the wall by America's compromise-be-damned approach to international complications. But the Japanese leaders who started the war did so in the perfect knowledge that the odds were overwhelmingly against them.