Global Note: Rising Sun Revisions

Japan’s past keeps evolving, especially when it comes to World War II. Historians have long believed that the Japanese army forced civilians to commit suicide at the end of the battle of Okinawa, which was about to fall to the U.S. That’s the story Japanese student textbooks told too, until the government announced on March 30 that it had ordered publishers to delete those passages. Instead one textbook now reads that Okinawans were “driven to mass suicide,” without mentioning the army’s role. The change is the latest controversial tweak by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who also recently denied that women were forced into sexual slavery during the war.