After more than 110,000 Okinawans joined a dramatic protest rally on the weekend, the Japanese government may review its controversial history textbook writing policy, which has seen the deletion of the military's role in wartime atrocities on the island.

''Our people's voice did certainly reach the government, and now we are awaiting their response,'' said Okinawa governor Hirokazu Nakaima, after talking to the government officials in Tokyo on Wednesday.

Saturday's rally was organised by Okinawans upset at the Education Ministry instructions in March requiring high school history textbook publishers to remove references to the Japanese military forcing civilians to commit mass suicide during the 1945 Battle of Okinawa.

An island falling 1,500 km southwest of Tokyo, Okinawa represented the lone Japanese soil on which the United States military landed during World War II. Fierce fighting for control of the island resulted in the deaths of 200,000 civilians on Okinawa and the neighbouring islands.

Older Okinawans remember how a desperate Japanese military forced the islanders to commit suicide or kill each other, as the US military landed and people fled to hideouts. The survivors have recounted episodes to their children and grandchildren for decades.

Yoshikatsu Yoshikawa, 68, is one of them. The former school teacher in Tokashiki Island vividly remembers the sounds of grenades being exploded by fellow islanders. He was with his family and 20 relatives, sitting together in a circle when his elder brothers pulled the pin on grenades handed to them by military officials, killing his father among others. More than 300 people killed themselves in this fashion on Tokashiki alone.

Whitewash military's role

''No one can deny what we experienced,'' he told IPS . "Those disasters would not have happened without the orders, guidance, enforcement, instructions etc of the military." Okinawans say that the Imperial army that arrived from mainland Japan did not protect local civilians but victimised and killed them.

According to Isamu Tokuyama, another war survivor, anyone can see through the government's efforts to delete or whitewash the military's role in wartime acts from history textbooks.

Last year, it watered down the military's maintaining of brothels in the sexual slavery of Asian women, or the so-called comfort women. But following angry reactions from South Korea, former prime minister Shinzo Abe was forced retract and go back to a 1993 declaration admitting official involvement.

And this year, instructions were given to textbook publishers to delete references to the number of victims of the infamous 1937 Rape of Nanjing 300,000 according to Chinese estimates - on the plea that history textbooks should cover "various other theories''.

"These actions are all intended to deny the past war crimes of the Japanese military and to lead Japan to war," Tokuyama told IPS in an interview. "We cannot allow such trends." Many people outside Okinawa also joined the protest chorus.

A group of 422 historians and educators unveiled an appeal, last week, asking the government to withdraw the instructions. They claimed that the textbook screening body completely ignored academic research on the Battle of Okinawa, accumulated by scholars and specialists over a long time.

"Why do they make such textbook screening?" asked the appeal. There is pressure to delete the Rape of Nanjing, the 'comfort women' and the military's involvement in the mass murders in Okinawa, it said. The idea, according to the appeal, is to beautify the war and the Japanese wartime military for their ultimate goal of driving the people to cooperate. The appeal has been

winning endorsement since it was made public.

But the Okinawa outrage shook the entire nation, apparent from the number of protesters who turned out for the rally and filled a huge beach park in Ginowan city in the central part of the island. They included young parents with babies, children and teenagers as well as war veterans and town and village representatives.

One 17-year-old high school girl said she hoped her younger peers would learn history as she did. "I would like them to know the truth, not lies," she said.

The rally sent ripples though government, this week. Chief cabinet secretary Nobutaka Machimura said he has instructed the education minister to give thought to revising the rewritten passages. "Some of us, or concerned parties, may have ideas and wisdom to revise (the passages in the textbooks).''

Minister for education, science and technology Kisaburo Tokai also said the ministry would consider asking the Textbook Authorisation Research Council to reexamine the issue. The council is the ministry's advisory body responsible for screening textbooks. Nominally independent from the government, it advised in summer the removal of references to the military orders, which developed into a ministry instruction.

Can request corrections

In theory, the council is supposed to be politically neutral and objective and free from political influence. Also, once the ministry's instructions are issued, the rewritten phrases cannot be revised.

Technically, however, the publishers can 'request' corrections to their textbooks. They have begun working on a passage with references to the military forcing civilians to commit mass suicide in next year's textbooks.

But apprehensions remain. ''The rally was successful, but few Okinawa people were comfortable with it,'' Prof Masaki Tomochi of the mathematical behavioural sciences department at Okinawa International University told IPS. They are anxious that the reference to the military involvement may not be restored in the textbooks and that Okinawans may have to resort to more protest rallies in the future, he says.

"As textbooks are an important component in the education of history and, if the government should print lies in the textbooks, I think we should distance ourselves from them,'' he says. Okinawa was once the independent kingdom of Ryukyu before the mainland Japan won control. Many Okinawans, therefore, secretly hope for independence from Tokyo, although this is economically unfeasible today.

Some members of the ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) have opposed corrections that may be made by the council. One of them reportedly said: "If we set a precedent by allowing revision of passages in screened textbooks brought about by political intervention, it might open the way for further revisions at the behest of China or South Korea."

On Thursday, leading members of the 'Japanese Society Textbook Reform', a small but influential group, spoke at a press conference to make their ultra-conservative appeal. Rejecting the liberal point of view, they opposed any further revision of the history textbooks over the Okinawa issue.