TOKYO (AP):

More than 110,000 people on Japan's southern island of Okinawa demonstrated yesterday against the central government's order to modify school textbooks which say the country's army forced civilians to commit mass suicide at the end of World War II.

Publishers of history textbooks were ordered in December to modify sections that said the Japanese army - faced with an impending United States invasion in 1945 - handed out grenades to residents on Okinawa and ordered them to kill themselves rather than surrender to the Americans.

Condemnation

The amendment order came amid moves by Tokyo to soften brutal accounts of Japanese wartime conduct, but triggered immediate condemnation from residents and academics.

"We cannot bury the fact that the Japanese military was involved in the mass suicide, taking into account the general background and testimonies that hand grenades were delivered," Okinawa Governor Hirokazu Nakaima told a crowd gathered at a park in Ginowan City.

About 110,000 people - residents and politicians - attended the rally, and a total of 5,000 others took part in two other demonstrations on the island yesterday, said Yoshino Uetsu, one of the organisers.

Yesterday's rally was the largest in Okinawa since the island was returned to Japan by the United States in 1972, Kyodo News agency said. In 1995, 85,000 demonstrators took to the streets in Okinawa following the 1995 rape of a schoolgirl there by three American servicemen, according to the agency.

New textbooks for use in Japanese schools must be screened and approved by a government-appointed panel, which can order corrections of perceived historical inaccuracies. The publishers of seven textbooks, slated for use in high schools next year, had been asked to make relevant changes and submit them for approval.