LDP lawmaker under fire for war memorial remark in Okinawa

A hawkish member of Japan's ruling party on Wednesday came under fire for his statement that descriptions at a war memorial rewrote the history of the Himeyuri student corps, many of whom lost their lives in Okinawa, one of the fiercest battlegrounds of World War II. "He rubbed the people of Okinawa the wrong way," Hajime Zaha, a senior executive of the LDP's local chapter in Okinawa, said of Nishida. The Komeito party, the junior coalition partner of the LDP, has taken the view that Nishida should retract the comments and apologize.