Textbook Controversy

There has been a growing controversy over Japanese textbooks, especially those that deal with the history of World War II and the time just before the war actually started. The conservative movement in Japan has been pushing for textbooks which downplay or ignore certain activities of the Imperial Army before and during the war, such as their involvement in the Nanking Massacre, Unit 731 and the use of "comfort women" for the soldiers.

Indeed, some Japanese believe that such things never actually ever happened, and that even if they did it's not necessary or proper to include the events in the school textbooks.

"In January 1996, a group of university professors formed the Society for the Creation of a New History. Their mission was to create a middle-school textbook designed to restore balance to a ‘masochistic version of history' whose effect, they claimed, had been to inculcate in schoolchildren feelings of horror and shame about Japan's past. In their view, the self-vilification that informed the official version of Japan's motives and conduct during World War II, in particular, promulgated in middle-school textbooks since 1947, was in large measure responsible for the uncertainty and disheartenment besetting Japanese society." Japan Unbound: A Volatile Nation's Quest for Pride and Purpose, 2004"

The group submitted to the Education Ministry, a book for use in eighth-grade social studies. The basic approach of some of the information was diametrically opposed to that in the majority of textbooks. Examples include:

(In relation to the earlier part of WWII) In the first hundred days of engagement, Japan achieved a major victory over American, Dutch, and British forces. This was a victory made possible by the cooperation of the local populations who had been oppressed for several hundred years by the Caucasians who had colonized them. Japan's victories in the first campaigns inspired many people in Southeast Asia and India with courage and the dream of independence."

In other words, the countries of Southeast Asia supported the Japanese military conquests since it was freeing them from colonial powers.

In relation to the Rape of Nanking, as it is know, various middle school textbooks had been presenting a somewhat realistic version of the events, with a 1985 version even noting the deaths of 70,000 to 80,000 citizens including women and children, and that the number could have climbed as high as 200,000 when counting men who were soldiers (or perceived to be soldiers).

The New History view was rather different. The book says "At the Tokyo War Trials, it was officially concluded that the Japanese army had killed a large number of Chinese civilians during the occupation of Nanking. However, questions have been asked about the reliability of sources pertaining to actual events at the time, and there is a wide range of differing views."

In other words, the book takes the position that the event might actually never have taken place at all, much as some people in the U.S. believe that the Holocaust never actually happened.

The book also does not mention at all the issue of "comfort women," women who were taken from China, Thailand and Korea and forced to serve as prostitutes for the Japanese Army.

The Education Ministry approved the textbook in 2001, but the way the system is set up approval doesn't mean adoption; what book is actually used is up to 543 central textbook boards. The adoption of the book produced an outcry in the public, with the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, the National Broadcasting Company (NHK), feminist organizations, teacher's unions and other labor unions speaking out against the book, and conservative and right-wing members of the Liberal Democratic Party and numerous business leaders pushing for its adoption.

The result was somewhat less than a victory by the conservatives. Of the 543 boards only 3 adopted the New History textbook, which meant ten of 10,000 middle schools would actually end up using it.

The book was later put out as a regular bookstore-type book and became a best-seller. Possibly as a response to political pressure, real or perceived, textbooks since 1997 have softened their own accounts of the war in revised editions of their books, in some removing all mention of Unit 731, changing "comfort women" to "comfort facilities", and deleting the number of people killed during the Nanking massacre. So although the conservatives lost the actual battle over adoption of their textbook, they won in a way by apparently scaring the other publishers into glossing-over Japanese atrocities during the war.

Before condemning them, though, it would be interesting to know, by comparison, how many American middle-school history books include the fact that smallpox-infected blankets were given to Native Americans to help kill as many of them as possible, or the fact that Christopher Columbus' own men massacred people in Haiti and even hung a young Princess of one of the sections of the island as part of their never-ending search for gold and power, and just how much space is given to the various forms of discrimination against blacks, especially prior to the Civil Rights Act. (for example, even in World War II, a fight that the free nations of the world had to win, there was rampant discrimination against blacks with black pilots being put into their own group, the Tuskegee Airmen, and "black blood" kept separate from "white blood.".)

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