In the closing period of the Second World War there was a hard-fought battle between troops of the Imperial Japanese Army and the U.S. forces in Okinawa for three months, killing nearly 200 000 islanders or one quarter of its population.

The Okinawa battle remembered not only by the Japanese but by the world people with sorrow was an inevitable product of the Japanese militarists' policy of war in the past.

In 1944 Japan had neither reserve forces to go over to offensive nor means to protect the Japan proper from air raids of U.S. forces.

The war situation already turned unfavorable to Japan.

Had Hideki Tojo and other military bosses properly judged the situation and conceded Japan's defeat, the war would have ended earlier and the Okinawa battle and tragedy of A-bombs dropping would not have taken place.

However, Japan which had become extremely fascistized due to militarism, mercilessly suppressed those who called for the end of the war and the Cabinet was reshuffled with war maniacs to take extreme measures.

Consequently, nearly two million Japanese lost their lives in the last year of the Pacific war, though 3.1 million Japanese were killed from the Sino-Japanese war to the Pacific War.

A particular mention should be made of the fact during the Okinawa battle, soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army forced innocent inhabitants to commit "suicide" by the order of their superiors. Not content with this genocide, the soldiers massacred them.

It admits of no argument that Japanese militarists were much more cruel and brutal towards other countries and nations than towards their own people.

The people of Asia and other parts of the world should hate the past militarism of Japan and guard against its revival for generations as it pursued the policy of war and genocide, bringing so unspeakable misfortune and pain to the people of Japan and other Asian countries.

The ultra-right wing reactionary forces in Japan are getting ever more undisguised in their moves to distort the history of aggression and veer it into the Right and turn it into a military giant so that it may appear a warring state.

If such moves are allowed to go unchecked, humankind will suffer more terrible disasters than what it did seven decades ago.

A man aged 77 who took part in the event said that he became stronger in his assertion 70 years since the end of the war that a war should be averted as it causes people to suffer from diseases and starvation not only during it but in its subsequent period.

His words amount to a curse against Japanese militarism in the past and condemnation of the present Japanese reactionaries' moves to turn Japan into the Right and militarize it.

The Japanese and other Asian people should not forget the unbearable misfortune and pain brought by Japanese militarism in the past but check and foil the daily intensified moves of the Japanese reactionaries to turn Japan into the Right and militarize it.