About 110,000 people held a rally in Okinawa on Saturday to demand that the education ministry retract an instruction pressuring publishers of history textbooks to remove references to the military's involvement in forcing civilians to commit mass suicide during the 1945 Battle of Okinawa.
The rally was the largest in Okinawa since the island was returned to Japan by the United States in 1972, organizers said.
The gathering in Ginowan, just northeast of the capital of Naha, was organized by a committee made up of members from all the blocs in the Okinawa Prefectural Assembly, including Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda's Liberal Democratic Party and local governments, teachers' unions and citizens' groups.