The ongoing debate over Japan's version of historical events in its school textbooks focuses on the 1945 Battle of Okinawa in which the military were believed to have coerced civilians into mass suicides faced with certain defeat.
The government controversially decided two years ago to delete or rewrite references to the mass suicides in its national curriculum history textbooks resulting in a string of protests across Japan.
However, although education officials agreed to reinstate the passages, the new textbooks will not contain the requested word "forced" in the context of the Imperial Army's role in the suicides, according to new reports.
Instead, the wording has been delicately rephrased to state less directly that people were "driven to suicides amid the Japanese military's involvement".
Defending the decision, a senior official at the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, told one newspaper: "It must be proved that descriptions in textbooks impose troubles to study when we approve revisions. There is no problem in the description that the military was involved." However, the wording is unlikely to satisfy civilian campaigners and historians who have long urged the government to accurately depict the version of events widely accepted according to historical research.
Accusations of rewriting its wartime past have become an increasingly sensitive issue in Japan, where tensions with neighbours such as China and South Korea have regularly flared up amid claims it is whitewashing its militaristic past.
It was during the final months of the Second World War that more than 200,000 lives were lost during the Battle of Okinawa, marking the only occasion of ground fighting in Japan on the remote southern islands.
According to eyewitness accounts and historical research, Japanese troops handed out grenades to residents and ordered them to kill themselves rather than surrender to the US.
Unanimously criticising the government's initial decision in 2007 to remove the references to this fact in school textbooks, Okinawa's local assembly said: "It is an undeniable fact that mass suicides could not have occurred without the involvement of the Japanese military," the assembly said.