A Current Controversy

One of the most current topics involving World War II education is the Japanese textbook controversy. This "controversy" is an ongoing struggle between the Japanese Ministry of Education and groups such as the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform over how Japanese actions should be depicted in history education. The Ministry of Education does not write the textbooks, but they do require that schools select their textbooks from a pre-approved list, and herein lies the problem. The Japanese government has been accused of withholding approval of textbooks until certain brutalities are omitted (among them inhumane acts against the Koreans and Chinese, and the forced suicide of Okinawan citizens) in an attempt to inspire nationalism in Japanese youth. These removed passages are often replaced with biographies of Japanese war heroes to further paint Japan in a positive, fault-free light. I've posted a few news articles about the Japanese textbook controversy in the sidebar, and I will continue to update these links.

One of the textbooks that caused much of the controversy was the New History Textbook. (An English translation can be found here, courtesy of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform.) The debate began because this textbook, first published in 2000, was not approved until many changes and deletions were made regarding much of Japan's more shameful past. However, what struck me most about the New History Textbook was an introduction entitled "What It Means To Study History," a portion of which is excerpted below:

"...The history you are about to study is the history of Japan. In other words, you will be familiarizing yourselves with the stories of your ancestors — your blood relatives. Your closest ancestors are your parents, who were preceded by your four grandparents. As you go back further in time, the number of ancestors increases with each generation. Then you realize that the humans who populated the Japanese Archipelago are ancestors you share with the other students in your classroom. In every era, Japanese history was made by ancestors common to all of us....We must be grateful to our ancestors for their unceasing efforts, which made Japan a wealthy and safe nation (the safest in the world, in fact).

The most important aspects of studying history are to become knowledgeable about the problems our ancestors faced throughout history, and to imagine what you might have done in their place. Then you will see that historical facts are not simply disconnected events to be memorized. You will awaken to people’s hopes and inspirations, and the connection between one event and others. The more you delve into history, the more likely you are to make unexpected discoveries and to develop the ability to see events from different perspectives. When you study history, you are holding a conversation with people of the past — a conversation that looks to the future" (4).

Two things struck me about this passage. First, I found that these words try to invoke an intensely personal connection to history that I have not yet experienced in my education. This language of gratitude and pride is indicative of appeals to patriotism that I expected from a Japanese textbook.

And yet, the second bolded sentence surprised me. To refer to history as a conversation with yesterday that holds relevance for tomorrow--that is much more in line with contemporary American, if not global, perspectives. In fact this entire blog is an attempt to discover the best way to use lessons from the past to positively affect the future! Even if Japanese history education methods and motives are residue from World-War-II-era nationalism, perhaps their ultimate goals are more progressive.

Until next time...

--K

An Update

Admittedly it has been a long time since I wrote my first post on this blog, but I have been hard at work looking at both primary sources and analyses of how various national governments supervise the teaching of World War II and their own country's involvement. My working thesis is that the amount of objectivity to these shameful histories is inversely proportional to the amount of nationalism in a nation at the time, but of course I have many more avenues of research I hope to pursue before I come to any solid conclusions. In the next few days, I hope to update this blog with the details of my research up to this point, as well as interesting tangents and the directions I hope to carry my exploration of this topic in the future.

Comments are appreciated at any time.

--K