The authors and publisher of a controversial junior high school history textbook being screened by the government are ready to comply with all of the revision requests made by an education ministry panel, sources close to the group said Monday.

Members of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform and publisher Fuso Publishing Inc. have already revised 137 entries in the draft in accordance with requests by the panel of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, the sources said.

The textbook recently provoked a storm of condemnation from South Korea and China, which said the text distorts history and justifies Japan's wartime aggression against Asian countries.

With the major modifications, the textbook is expected to be officially given the green light for publication later this month, the sources said.

When the group filed the draft of the textbook for approval last spring, one of the controversial entries stated that Japan's annexation of the Korean Peninsula in 1910 stabilized East Asia and had the support of Western powers.

The original draft also stated the move was necessary to defend the interests of Manchuria and the stability of Japan, and had been done in a legitimate manner that conformed to the principles of international relations at the time.

Following calls for amendments to the draft, the authors deleted the portion on the legitimacy of Japan's annexation of Korea, and inserted a passage saying that Japan used armed force to overcome resistance within Korea in order to colonize it, the sources said.

The draft of the textbook said "a number of doubts have been raised" over the 1937 Nanking Massacre by the Imperial Japanese Army, claiming that how much damage was inflicted on the Chinese remains open to debate.

It went on to say that although there may have been some killings because the two countries were at war, the incident was "not anything like the Holocaust." This reference to the Holocaust was deleted after the panel told the authors that it could cause misunderstanding, the sources said.

The authors had also deleted, among other items, the part of the text that referred to the Pacific War, which lasted from December 1941 to August 1945, as "not a simple matter of good and evil," they said.

The group of nationalist academics, formed in 1997, is led by Kanji Nishio, professor at the state-run University of Electro-Communications. It has criticized Japanese history textbooks currently in use as being biased and marked by self-flagellation and has demanded the elimination of descriptions of wartime "comfort women."