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Another 23 Japanese schools to use nationalist textbook

A district of Tokyo adopted a nationalist history textbook for its 23 schools, the third school board to opt for the book that has outraged China and South Korea. The education board of Suginami, one of 23 wards in the Japanese capital, voted to use the controversial book from April 2006 at its junior high schools which have a total of about 6,300 students, a municipal official said.

The textbook makes no mention of the women sexually enslaved by Japanese troops during their invasions of Asia and refers to the Nanjing massacre as an "incident" in which "many" Chinese died.

China says 300,000 people perished in the 1937 massacre of the occupied city. Allied trials of Japanese war criminals documented 140,000 deaths.

The textbook is an update of a previous edition that was approved in 2001 and used by only 0.1 percent of Japan's junior high schools, all of them for mentally challenged students.

Read entire article at AFP