On March 28, 2008, the Osaka District Court dismissed a lawsuit against Nobel Prize-winning author Oe Kenzaburo and his publisher for publishing accounts of the Japanese military ordering “group suicides” of civilians during the Battle of Okinawa. The plaintiffs, a former garrison commander and the brother of a late former commander, had claimed the descriptions in Oe's Okinawa Notes (Okinawa Noto, Iwanami Shoten, 1970) and in the late Ienaga Saburo's The Pacific War (Taiheiyo Senso, Iwanami Shoten, 1968; translation, Pantheon, 1978) were defamatory.