Professor Saburo Ienaga is an author of Japanese history textbooks and thus has frequently faced the Japanese government and their policies of textbook certification. Ienaga alternately explains the history behind textbook censoring and examines the effects of the censoring on the Japanese public, effectively walking a foreign reader through his thesis that teaching children that war is glorious is inaccurate and potentially dangerous. He offers his own encounters with the Ministry of Education as proof of the extreme changes authors must make in textbooks to get them approved for distribution. Ienaga looks not only at what the government ignores, but increasingly what they require be added: namely, biographies of Japanese war heroes that further promote nationalism and militarism. While Ienaga says he is not worried that militarism will reach its pre-World War II levels, he warns against the growing veneration for the emperor and the increase in authoritarianism. Ienaga’s essay offers a first-hand account of the censorship discussed in the New York Times and Japan Times articles discussed in previous posts.Ienaga, Saburo. "The Glorification of War in Japanese Education." International Security 18.3 (1994): 113-133.
Unfortunately this article is only available with a subscription to JSTOR; however, it is very valuable and worth reading if you can track it down.
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