TOKYO, Aug. 31 (Xinhuanet) -- The educational board of Japan's central Shiga Prefecture said Wednesday that it will adopt a junior high school history textbook which whitewashes Japan's aggressive war against its Asian neighbors.

    The textbook, edited mainly by the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform and published by Fusosha Publishing Inc., will be used at one of the three prefectural government-run junior high schools from the next school year beginning in April.

    It "will contribute to enhancing students' interests in grand sense of our nation's history and characteristics of each era. Thestudents will be enabled to broaden their views," Keiko Takahashi,head of the educational board, was quoted by the Kyodo News as saying when announcing the adoption of the textbook.

    Currently,the notorious textbook has been adopted only in EhimePrefecture, Otawara, Tochigi Prefecture and Tokyo's Suginami Ward. Most of Japanese junior high schools have refused to use it.

    According to the major Japanese daily Mainichi Shimbun, of all 11,035 state and private junior high schools across Japan, only 48 adopted the Fusosha textbook, merely 0.4 percent of the total and far less than the publisher's target of 10 percent.

    China and South Korea, along with the peace-loving groups in Japan, have strongly protested against the Fusosha history textbook as it whitewashes Japan's militarist past and Japanese army's atrocities on Asian people.

    Regarding the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in China, the book says, "Japanese forces caused a large number of Chinese military and civilian personnel to die." But it challenged the validity of the casualties number of the massacre.

    As a well-known fact, the hands of Japanese aggressors were stained with the blood of the Asian people, with the Nanjing Massacre being one of the most atrocious crimes they commited during which they savagely killed more than 300,000 Chinese civilians and unarmed soldiers after occupying the then Chinese capital. Enditem