(AFP) Japan came under fire again on the 56th anniversary of its surrender in World War II as ethnic Chinese community today demanded a public apology for wartime atrocities.

Mourners at a war memorial in Kuala Lumpur also protested Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visit to a war shrine and the approval of a school history book said to gloss over the nation's wartime record.

MCA Youth chairman and deputy Youth and Sports minister Ong Tee Keat urged the Japanese government to "show they are committed to maintaining peace in the region by disassociating itself from its militarist past".

More than 100 mourners and two representatives from Japan's embassy heard Ong accuse Japan of killing some 400,000 innocent people during its occupation of Malaya and Singapore.

Wu Wee Chow ( photo ), 80, who was only 20 years old at the time of the Japanese invasion in 1941, told AFP after the ceremony that his own brother went missing after joining an anti-Japanese movement in Singapore.

"Japanese atrocities have caused the blood of the innocent to be shed. We protest this move to distort history and to cover-up the true picture of the Japanese occupation," he said.

Signature campaign

Wu's association was among some 40 Chinese organisations behind a signature campaign launched on Sunday to protest the Japanese history textbook.

In a joint statement today, the organisations also expressed anger over Koizumi's Monday visit to the shrine to Japan's war dead, where the names of convicted war criminals are also enshrined.

"The Japanese government should apologise to the governments of the countries that they had invaded and make a pledge that the prime minister will not visit the Yakuzuni Shrine anymore," the statement said.

Japan must also apologise for approving the history textbook which "misleads the younger generation by spreading lies," it added.

The book's approval in April by Tokyo as suitable for use in schools drew angry reactions in several Asian countries invaded by Japan, souring relations with China and South Korea in particular.

However, a lobby group today said that 98 percent of local Japanese school districts had rejected the textbook for use in their classrooms.

"Our survey shows 98 percent of education boards in the 542 public school districts are not going to adopt the textbook," said Ayako Okino, a member of the Children and Textbooks Japan Network 21 civic group.

Liberators, not invaders

The textbook, penned by the avowedly nationalist Society for History Textbook Reform, plays down events such as the 1937 Nanjing massacre in China and the use of hundreds of thousands of Asian women as sex slaves by Japanese troops.

It also steers clear of the word "invasion" in reference to Japan's military occupation of other Asian countries in the first half of the 20th century.

Instead, it claims the "advance southwards of the Japanese Imperial Army also gave the impetus to Asian countries to achieve independence earlier" from their European colonial masters.