About 98 percent of local school districts in Japan have decided to reject a controversial history textbook accused of glossing over the nation's wartime atrocities, a civic group said Wednesday.

"Our survey shows 98 percent of education boards in the 542 public school districts are not going to adopt the textbook," said Ayako Okino, a member of the Children and Textbooks Japan Network 21 civic group.

Wednesday is the deadline for local education boards to decide which books to use from next April. No official tally will be available on Wednesday.

"It might be too much to say we declare victory (over the textbook) but this is a result stemming from campaigning by civic movements," she said, adding her group had held some 1,000 lecture meetings against the text.

"We must not use such a book for teaching children who carry the future on their shoulders," she said.

The Network collected information on local districts' policies through its members across the nation and schoolteachers, Okino said.

The membership of the network, established in 1998, has swollen to nearly 4,200 as about 150 people joined it every month since the textbook issue flared up earlier this year, she said.

The textbook was penned by the avowedly nationalist Society for History Textbook Reform which is made up of historians who assert Japan has become too masochistic in assessing its past.

The central government authorised the book in April for use in junior high schools and has rejected calls from Asian neighbours, notably China and South Korea, to revise its distortions.

The textbook plays down events such as the 1937 Nanjing massacre in China and the use of hundreds of thousands of Asian women as sex slaves by Japanese troops.

It also steers clear of the word "invasion" in reference to Japan's military occupation of other Asian countries in the first half of the 20th century.

Instead, it claims the "advance southwards of the Japanese Imperial Army also gave the impetus to Asian countries to achieve independence earlier" from their European colonial masters