In-depth: Japan’s Textbook Screening and History Textbook Controversies

Divided Memories: History Textbooks and the Wars in

Asia
Daniel Sneider [Profile]

Society Politics

Some common assumptions about history textbooks used in Japan turn out to be ill-founded. Far from inculcating patriotism, as many
overseas observers assume, Japanese high school textbooks tend to dryly present a chronology of historical facts, with little interpretive
narrative added. This is the finding of the Divided Memories and Reconciliation project by the author and his colleague Professor Gi-Wook
Shin, involving an in-depth comparison of history textbooks used in China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and the United States.

Japanese history textbooks and their treatment of the wartime era has become an almost constant subject of international
dispute in the last three decades. For critics, both inside and outside Japan, the content of those textbooks is evidence of a
failure to take responsibility for the outbreak of the Asia-Pacific War or to acknowledge the suffering the Japanese military
imposed on conquered Asian nations and the crimes committed in combat with the Allies. The decision of the Japanese
education authorities to approve certain textbooks for use, or to reshape the content and language of the books, is
presented as evidence of a nationalist tilt in Japan. Most importantly, Japanese textbooks were seen to fail to properly
educate new generations of Japanese about their past.

Those views are not without some substance. Japanese history textbooks do not provide students with a detailed
accounting of Japanese colonial rule, particularly in Korea. They have avoided or downplayed some of the more
controversial aspects of the wartime period, such as the coercive recruitment of women for sexual services by the Japanese
Imperial Army, the so-called comfort women. And at times, under pressure from conservative revisionists and their political
supporters, the textbook screening process of the Ministry of Education has attempted to soften language describing
Japan’s aggression.

The Divided Memories and Reconciliation project of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center (APARC) at
Stanford University, however, belies the essence of this widely held view of the particularly egregious nature of Japanese
history textbooks. The project, directed by Professor Gi-Wook Shin and myself, was a multiyear study to better understand
how historical memory about the wartime period is being shaped. It began with history textbooks and moved on to look at
the role of popular culture—in particular film—and of elite opinion in shaping the view of the wartime past. Significantly, the
Stanford project adopted a comparative approach, looking at Japan in comparison with other major Pacific war participants,
principally China, South Korea, and, not least, the United States.

Methodological Approach for the Project

The study of history textbooks deliberately avoids the trap of focusing on the most controversial, and least used, textbooks.
The project compared the treatment of the wartime and immediate postwar periods (1931–51) in Asia in the most widely
circulated high school national history or world history textbooks recently or currently in use in China, Taiwan, South Korea,
Japan, and the United States, along with textbooks used for college-preparatory classes (with the aim of focusing on the
formation of elite opinion). Translations of those textbooks were prepared and the research team presented comparative
excerpts of the treatment of eight key historical issues, such as the Marco Polo Bridge incident and the atomic bombing of
Japan. This allowed scholars, experts, the media and others, for the first time, to actually compare how historical memory is
shaped in those school systems. It broadened the context for understanding the role of textbooks beyond those used only in
Japan.(*1)

The textbooks were selected based on two criteria. First, the project sought to identify the most widely used national and
world history textbooks in senior high schools. Where it existed, that selection relied on data provided by the national
government agencies (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) on textbook usage. In the case of the People’s Republic of China,
until recently only one textbook publisher was authorized. In the case of the United States, where no national data exists,
the project selected textbooks based on publishers’ data and on California usage, with the advice of the Stanford program
on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), which creates and distributes supplementary teaching materials to
high schools across the country. In the case of Japan, the project selected the textbooks that are overwhelmingly used in
Japanese high schools, published by Yamakawa Shuppansha. The decision was consciously made not to compare the
textbooks published by the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform that, while they receive lots of attention outside of
Japan, are used in a tiny fraction—well less than 1%—of Japanese school districts.

Second, the project also selected, where available, textbooks that were provided for college-preparatory level courses,
equivalent in the United States to textbooks for Advanced Placement–level courses. The intent in this second case was to
capture the educational material more likely to have been used by elites in all the school systems. In the US case, two
American history and two World history textbooks were selected—one set is used in general education classes while the
second set (World Civilizations: The Global Experience and The American Pageant: A History of the Republic) are the most
commonly adopted textbooks for AP courses. In the Japanese case, the history textbook published by Tokyo Shoseki is
considered equivalent to AP-level usage in the United States, as is the South Korean history textbook published by
Keumsung publishers.

In the course of the project, the researchers became aware of significant revisions of the textbooks of China and Taiwan,
which were being introduced in both systems, though not yet in all classrooms. In those two cases, the newly revised
textbooks offered very different accounts of this wartime period. The “old” and “new” textbooks in those two systems were
both translated and excerpted in this study, offering an interesting internal comparison as well.

Heavy on Facts, Light on Patriotism

What the research uncovered was quite different from the common perception found in media, not only in Asia but also in
the United States. Far from being nationalistic, Japanese textbooks seem the least likely to stir patriotic passions. They do
not celebrate war, they do not stress the importance of the military, and they tell no tales of battlefield heroism. Instead they
offer a rather dry chronology of events without much interpretive narrative.

Japanese textbooks are deliberately written in this somewhat subdued

manner, partly to avoid overt interpretation and because they are aimed at
preparing students for university entrance examinations. Nonetheless,
Japanese textbooks do offer a clear, if somewhat implicit, message: the wars
in Asia were a product of Japan’s imperial expansion and the decision to go
to war with the United States was a disastrous mistake that inflicted a terrible
cost on the nation and its civilian population. Indeed, that basic tale is what
prompted revisionist critics to author their own textbooks to correct what was
seen as a “masochistic” view of modern Japan.

Contrary to popular belief, Japanese textbooks by no means avoid some of

the most controversial wartime moments. The widely used textbooks contain
accounts, though not detailed ones, of the massacre of Chinese civilians in
Nanjing in 1937 by Japanese forces.(*2) Some, but not all, of the textbooks
also describe the forced mobilization of labor in the areas occupied by Japan,
including mention of the recruitment of “comfort women” to serve in wartime
brothels.(*3) One clear lacuna is the almost complete absence of accounts of
Japanese colonial rule in Korea.

Passage from a Japanese history textbook on the

1931 “Manchurian Incident.”
History as Our Story

From their earliest days, history textbooks “have been fashioned to nurture a Passage from a South Korean history textbook
sense of national identity,” points out Stanford historian Peter Duus, one of on the economy under Japanese colonial rule.

the collaborators in our project.(*4) In this regard, Duus argues, the Japanese
textbooks are perhaps the least overt in their mission to present a patriotic
narrative about the story of the nation. In contrast, national curriculum guides
in most other East Asian countries assert the promotion of national pride and
national identity as the primary function of history education. The “war stories”
told in their textbooks are clearly intended to do just that, Duus notes.

The desire to nurture a sense of national pride sometimes produces curious

forms of myopia about the wartime period, most notably in the South Korean
textbooks. The narrative of the wartime period offered to South Korean
students is focused almost entirely on the oppressive experience of Koreans
under Japanese colonial rule and on tales of Korean resistance to their
overlords. The larger wartime context for Japan’s increasingly desperate and
forced mobilization of Koreans for the war effort—namely the quagmire of the
war in China and the mounting retaliatory assault of the Americans after 1942
—is not provided. South Korean textbooks barely mention the outbreak of
war in China in 1937 or the attack on Pearl Harbor, and in the case of the
main textbook published by the government there is no mention at all of the
atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Chinese textbooks are most

obviously imbued with a
passionately patriotic and
ideologically shaped narrative
of the war. In the textbooks
used up until the last decade,
the war story is one of heroic
military operations mounted by
the Chinese, and for the most
part by the Communists,
against Japan. Little or no
mention is made of the fighting
in the Pacific or the role of the
Allied powers. The role of the
atomic attacks in ending the
war is mentioned in only a
single line. Mao Zedong’s call
Passage from a Chinese history textbook on the
for an all-out attack on beginning of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937.
Japanese forces and the
Soviet declaration of war in August 1945 are seen as the decisive factors. The victory in the anti-Japanese war represents,
in this account, the end to a century of humiliation at the hands of foreign imperialists who rode roughshod over China’s
rights and interests, and the return of China to its historical position as a major world power.

The Chinese textbooks, published by the People’s Education Press, underwent a significant revision in 2002. The revised
textbooks were slowly introduced around the country and offer a distinctly more nationalistic account of the wartime period.
The previous edition focused on the civil war struggle between the Communist Party and the Nationalists, supporting
Communist claims to have borne the brunt of the resistance to the Japanese invasion. The new version downplays the civil
war in favor of a narrative of national unity against Japan. The Nanjing massacre had previously been downplayed—it was
inconveniently a battle in which the Nationalists played the main role. Now Nanjing occupies extensive space in the
textbooks, complete with graphic descriptions of Japanese atrocities.
The long used Chinese textbook hewed closely to classic Marxist
historiography, presenting the war as an outgrowth of the crisis of capitalism
and as a struggle against fascism, led by the Soviet Union and its Communist
allies in China. The revised textbook largely drops that Cold War rendition in
favor of tale of national resistance against a foreign invader. In its narrative
about the events leading to the Japanese invasion of China, for example, the
2002 Chinese textbook offers an extensive quote from the so-called Tanaka
Memorial to demonstrate the origins of Japanese ambitions in Asia from the
1920s. That there were aggressive Japanese ambitions in Asia during this
period is undoubted, but modern historiography in the West and in Japan
considers the “Tanaka Memorial” a spurious document.

Red, White, and Blue Textbooks

Perhaps surprisingly to some, the American textbooks offer a similarly
triumphant narrative of the war. The American Pageant, one of the most
widely used textbooks in the United States, portrays the war as a critical
turning point in the American maturation as an international power. Before the Passage from a Taiwanese history textbook on
the Japanization movement under Japanese
war the American people retreated from the outside world into a “head-in-the- colonial rule.
sand” isolationism. The attack on Pearl Harbor brought the realization that
isolation was no longer possible in a world of international anarchy. The unity of the American people forged by the attack,
and equally important, the economic strength of the United States, brought victory in a global struggle against fascism,
dictatorship, and militarism.

The language of the American account is unambiguous in portraying Japan as a rapacious aggressor and the United States
as a largely innocent victim of unprovoked Japanese perfidy. The world history textbooks do offer more context for the start
of the Pacific conflict, including the war in China and the rising tensions between Japan and the U.S. in the months leading
up to the attack on Pearl Harbor. But the primary American history textbooks tend to ignore the war in Asia and present the
conflict as having begun with Pearl Harbor and ending with the atomic bombing. American textbooks are much more willing,
however, to present students with arguments for and against the decision to drop the atomic bombs, a debate that is absent
from all the Asian textbooks.(*5)

In an odd echo of the approach of the Chinese textbooks, the American Passage from an American history textbook on
account emphasizes that the victory made the United States the most the Pearl Harbor attack.

powerful country in the world. The wartime triumph sets the stage, in this “war
story,” for the postwar struggle against the Soviet bloc. Having learned the
dangers of isolationism and appeasement, Americans emerged prepared to
use their new global power status in a new struggle against the Communist
threat.

The language of American textbooks is less blatantly nationalistic than the

Chinese but it supports the country’s Cold War policies in much the same
way Chinese textbooks support the triumph of the Communist Party. The war
story in The American Pageant narrative is consistent with both the liberal
internationalism and the conservative interventionism that governed
American foreign policy from Truman and Acheson to Nixon and
Kissinger. And like much in American popular culture, it celebrates World War
II as a “good war.”

Pacifism Over Patriotism

The patriotic passions of the Chinese, Korean, and American accounts of the
war provide a striking contrast to what Duus, a preeminent historian of
modern Japan, describes as the “muted, neutral, and almost bland” tone of
Japanese textbooks. This may surprise those whose view of Japanese
textbooks is derived from accounts that conflate the content of the rarely used
revisionist textbook with the textbooks that are actually on the desks of
almost all Japanese high school students.

As Duus points out in our book, the primary reason that it is difficult to fashion
the same kind of triumphalist narrative in Japan is simple—“Japan lost the
war.”(*6) Almost as important is the lack, as demonstrated by the varying
contents of Japanese textbooks, of a postwar consensus on how to interpret
the war in Japan. The battle to shape the memory of the war is an ongoing
one in Japan—in contrast to China, Korea, and the United States, where the
grounds of contention about the past are much narrower. In Japan, there are
still vigorous attempts to refute the view, held by a majority of Japanese, that
the nation waged a war of aggression in Asia and the Pacific. Still, the
dominant narrative in Japan is not of a war of liberation fought against Western imperialism but of a disastrous militarist
adventure that should never be repeated.

The low-key treatment of the war in Japanese textbooks reflects the enduring legacy of that post-war pacifism. “While the
war may have ended China’s century of humiliation and America’s isolationism,” Duus writes, “it also ended the Japanese
illusion that national pride can be based only on military power.”

Reconciling Different Historical Views

The divergent nature of the accounts of the wartime period reflected in high school history textbooks helps us understand
why it is so difficult to reach a common understanding of wartime history among the main combatants. That has frustrated
the efforts of bilateral commissions formed by China and Japan and by South Korea and Japan to emulate the success of
Germany and France in creating common textbooks. But the commissions do have some value in narrowing issues of
contention and creating awareness of the parallel historical perceptions of others.

A barrier to reconciliation lies, in the view of the scholars of Shorenstein APARC, in the existence of conflicting historical
memories of the war. But the path to reconciliation also lies through recognizing the divided nature of historical memory.
“Understanding how each nation has created its own memory and identity is an important first step,” Professor Shin argues.
(*7)
By putting Japan in a comparative context, the Divided Memories project hopes to further the mutual understanding that
can form the basis for enduring reconciliation.(*8)

(*1) ^ The results of this study, including the comparative excerpts and the commentaries of historians and textbook writers from China, Japan, Taiwan, South
Korea and the United States were presented in Gi-Wook Shin and Daniel C. Sneider, eds., History Textbooks and the Wars in Asia: Divided Memories (New York:
Routledge, 2011). A subsequent volume on the role of film in shaping wartime historical memory will be published by the University of Hawaii Press, and a third
book on elite opinion, is being co-authored by Shin and Sneider.

(*2) ^ Shin and Sneider, pp. 27–30.

(*3) ^ Shin and Sneider, pp. 65–67.

(*4) ^ Peter Duus, “War Stories,” in Shin and Sneider, p. 101.

(*5) ^ Shin and Sneider, pp. 55–64.

(*6) ^ Duus, in Shin and Sneider, p. 113.

(*7) ^ Gi-Wook Shin, “History Textbooks, Divided memories, and Reconciliation,” in Shin and Sneider, p. 14.

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