世界是平的？ 培養國際觀一直是個熱門話題，但是，國際觀是學英文、講英文、出國遊學觀光？在現在台灣媒體的國際視野狹隘、國際新聞貧乏之下，國人可能有什麼樣的國際觀呢？本站致力於將國際上發生的重要時事、國際媒體上重要的分析文章，節譯給國人分享，讓大家可以在短時間內掌握一些重要的國際情勢，培養國際觀，先從關心別人開始！秀才不出門，真的能知天下事。

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Japanese court defends author, says military was involved in mass suicides in Okinawa
By Norimitsu Onishi

Friday, March 28, 2008
TOKYO: A court rejected on Friday a defamation lawsuit against Kenzaburo Oe, the 1994 Nobel Prize laureate for literature, agreeing with his assertion that the Japanese military was deeply involved in the mass suicides of civilians in Okinawa at the end of World War II.

In a closely watched ruling, the Osaka District Court rejected a $200,000 damage suit filed by a 91-year-old war veteran and another veteran’s surviving relatives who said there was no evidence of the military’s involvement. The plaintiffs had also sought to block further printing of Oe’s 1970 book of essays, "Okinawa Notes," in which he wrote of how Japanese soldiers forced Okinawans to kill themselves instead of surrendering to advancing American troops.

"The military was deeply involved in the mass suicides," Judge Toshimasa Fukami said in his ruling. Fukami cited testimonies of survivors that soldiers handed out grenades to civilians to commit suicide and the fact that mass suicides occurred only in villages where troops were stationed.

The suit, filed in 2005, was seized upon by rightist scholars and politicians to try to delete references to the military’s coercion of civilians in the mass suicides from the country’s high school history textbooks. Last April, during the administration of the nationalist former prime minister Shinzo Abe, the Ministry of Education announced that textbooks would be rid of references to the military’s role.

Some 110,000 people rallied in protest last September, in the biggest demonstration in the prefecture since the early 1970s. The protest, as well as Abe’s resignation and his replacement by Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, a moderate, led the Ministry of Education to reinstate most of the references in December.

The about-face was an embarrassment for the Japanese government, which has always asserted that its school textbooks were free of political bias, despite accusations by China and South Korea