NAHA -- A man drowned on Friday while trying to swim from an island in Okinawa to an uninhabited island, police said.

At about 5:30 p.m., a worker at a diving school discovered a man off a beach on Tokashiki Island who had sunk to the sea bottom. The man was taken to a clinic on the island where he was pronounced dead.

The man has been identified as Keiji Yoshida, 23, a resident of Fukuyama, Hiroshima Prefecture, local police said. Yoshida drowned while attempting to swim across the sea with a friend to an uninhabited island about 600 meters from Tokashiki.

Okinawa Gov. Hirokazu Nakaima submitted a petition to the education minister on Wednesday demanding the ministry withdraw its order to modify school textbooks to delete descriptions that the Japanese army forced civilians to commit mass suicide during World War II.

Gov. Nakaima met Minister Kisaburo Tokai at the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Tokyo's Chiyoda-ku on Wednesday morning. It was the first time that the education minister had met with an Okinawa Prefectural Government official regarding the textbook screening issue.

During a press conference after the meeting, Gov. Nakaima said, "I would like to highly appreciate the government's attempt to understand the delicate part of Okinawa Prefecture, where the wounds of World War II are yet to be healed," adding that he hoped the central government would move toward resolving the issue.

The move came after some 110,000 people joined a protest in Okinawa last Saturday against the ministry's order to modify the textbooks.

Toshinobu Nakazato, speaker of the Okinawa Prefectural Assembly, accompanied Gov. Nakaima during Wednesday's meeting with the education minister, where he read out a resolution adopted during the Sept. 29 mass protest.

"It is a fact that the mass suicides could not have happened without the involvement of the Japanese army, and the ministry's order to modify textbook descriptions denies and distorts witnesses' accounts. As residents of the nation's only prefecture that suffered ground battles, we can never tolerate the modification," Nakazato said in reading out the resolution.

TOKYO (AP) -- More than 110,000 people protested in Okinawa against the central government's order to modify school textbooks which say the country's army forced civilians to commit mass suicide at the end of World War II.

Publishers of history textbooks were ordered in December to modify sections that said the Japanese army -- faced with an impending U.S. invasion in 1945 -- handed out grenades to residents on Okinawa and ordered them to kill themselves rather than surrender to the Americans.

The amendment order came amid moves by Tokyo to soften brutal accounts of Japanese wartime conduct, but triggered immediate condemnation from residents and academics.

"We cannot bury the fact that the Japanese military was involved in the mass suicide, taking into account of the general background and testimonies that hand grenades were delivered," Okinawa Gov. Hirokazu Nakaima told a crowd gathered at a park in Ginowan City.

About 110,000 people -- residents and politicians -- attended the rally, and a total of 5,000 others took part in two other meetings on the nearby islands of Miyako and Ishigaki -- both part of Okinawa Prefecture -- Saturday, said Yoshino Uetsu, one of the organizers.

Saturday's rally was the largest in Okinawa since the island was returned to Japan by the United States in 1972, Kyodo News agency said. In 1995, 85,000 people took part in a rally following the 1995 rape of a schoolgirl there by three American servicemen, according to the agency.

New textbooks for use in Japanese schools must be screened and approved by a government-appointed panel, which can order corrections of perceived historical inaccuracies.

The publishers of seven textbooks, slated for use in high schools next year, had been asked to make relevant changes and submit them for approval.

An official of the Education Ministry said Saturday that the ministry has no immediate plans concerning the amendment. She spoke on condition of anonymity, citing policy.

Accounts of forced group suicides on Okinawa are backed by historical research, as well as testimonies from victims' relatives. Historians also say civilians were induced by government propaganda to believe U.S. soldiers would commit horrible atrocities and therefore killed themselves and their families to avoid capture.

About 500 people committed suicide, according to civic group and media reports.

In recent years, some academics have questioned whether the suicides were forced -- part of a general push by Japanese conservatives to soften criticism of Tokyo's wartime conduct.

The bloody battle in Okinawa raged from late March through June 1945, leaving more than 200,000 civilians and soldiers dead, and speeding the collapse of Japan's defenses. The U.S. occupied Okinawa from the end of World War II until 1972.

OKINAWA, Okinawa -- The son of a U.S. Air Force captain stationed at Kadena Air Base has been arrested for bashing and raping a young Japanese woman, police said.

Kevin Parks, 21, an unemployed dependant living on Kadena, was arrested for rape resulting in injury.

Police said the American admits to the allegations.

Police said Parks was in a bar in the city of Okinawa early on the morning of Oct. 1 when he smashed a 22-year-old waitress in the face with a beer bottle so she couldn't resist him as he raped her.

Witness reports led Okinawa Prefectural Police to Kadena and they asked the American to come in for questioning on Tuesday. He admitted to the allegations and was arrested, police said. He had apparently originally been planning to return to the United States on Wednesday.

NAHA -- A woman died and two other people fell into critical condition in a blaze that burned down a sex shop here Sunday night, police said.

At about 7:35 p.m. on Sunday, a fire broke out at a sex shop on the third floor of a building in the Tsuji district of Naha, and burned down the entire floor, local police said.

Three men and six women who were in the shop at the time were rushed to a hospital. Of them, a woman in her 20s, who is believed to be an employee, was pronounced dead, while another man and woman, thought to be its manager and an employee, remain unconscious.

The shop is situated in a busy entertainment district about one kilometer northwest of the Okinawa Prefectural Government headquarters.