Big in Japan
Japan's new History and Geography textbooks have reopened past grievances. What can the current controversy tell us international relations in post-conflict society?
In late March this year, Vladimir Putin look time out of his busy schedule of committing war crimes, dredging antiquities from the seabed, and bareback riding to opine on textbooks.
Japanese textbooks do not explain that the United States committed genocide and thus ignore the truth.
Putin’s attention was drawn to Japanese textbooks because Japan had sided with the West in issuing sanctions against Russia. We already know he stans textbooks – at the beginning of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, I wrote about some of the ways in which textbooks were used to shape the national narratives driving the conflict.
More on Russia later, but Putin was ahead of the game. A couple of days after his comments, other countries started talking about Japanese textbooks. More specifically, the batch of History and Geography textbooks recently approved for use in schools.
On 29 March, South Korea’s Director General for Asia-Pacific affairs lodged a formal protest about the textbooks, summoning the Deputy Chief of Mission at the Japanese Embassy to coney his displeasure in person. The next day, China got in on the act, expressing “strong dissatisfaction” and “firm opposition” to the textbooks. And, on 12 April, not wanting to be left out, North Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared that the textbooks “accumulate blood-stained sins”.
Japan’s new textbooks turn out to be so egregious they are the one thing that can unite North and South Korea. Why have they rattled so many cages?
Turning Japanese
Japan updates its textbooks roughly every ten years. The books published this year are the final stage of a curriculum refresh that began to be implemented in 2020.
The country operates a gate-kept open-market. Textbooks are developed by privately owned publishers and reviewed by the Ministry of Education, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). If the books pass muster, they’re available for local education boards to select for schools to use.
This model of decentralised production with centralised approval is similar to systems in many other countries, but with one crucial difference. In 2014, the Abe administration mandated that textbooks must represent the government’s view on certain topics.
Consequently, the approved textbooks stick to the government line on territorial disputes. Japan administrates the uninhabited Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, although China disputes ownership. The Liancourt Rocks in the Sea of Japan are administered by South Korea, but Japan claims them as Japanese territory. (North Korea also claims the Liancourt Rocks, but sides with South Korea over Japan. Better the devil you know.)
The government position on a number of controversial topics in Japan’s imperial history formally changed in 2021. This came in response to questions to the government raised by Nobuyuki Baba, a politician for Nippon Shin no Kai, a right-wing populist party. Consequently, the textbooks in development needed to represent these updated government positions.
These included the following:
When referring to the estimated 780,000 Korean labourers who were transported to Japan to work in mines and factories during Japan’s colonial rule of the Korean peninsula (1910-1945) without proper pay or conditions, publishers will not be approved if they frame this as “forced labour”. The Japanese government’s view is that some Korean labourers voluntarily travelled to Japan, so calling them all “forced” is inaccurate.
When referring to the women forced into sexual slavery by the colonial Japanese army in occupied territories before and during World War II, publishers must use “comfort women”, with no reference to their conscription by the military. The Japanese government’s view is that some women worked in the brothels voluntarily and were remunerated for their services.
Of course, this went down like a lead balloon with Japan’s neighbours who suffered at the hands of imperial Japan.
A history of history
There was a short period where Japanese textbooks actively tried to avoid international disputes.
In the mid-90s, under Tomiichi Murayama the Japanese government started to change the way it taught Japan’s darker periods of history. Over a number of years, it built closer relations with its neighbours in the spirit of reconciliation. In 1998 a panel of scholars from Japan and Korea was brought together to develop a common interpretation of the past.
But seeking reconciliation through a shared past was divisive for domestic politics.
In 1996, the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform was launched by a motley crew of right-wing ultra-nationalist academics and politicians. The Society’s mission was “to change the fact that the textbooks so far have drawn Japan unreasonably badly so that children can learn with textbooks that they can be proud of Japan.”
In 2001, the Society released its own history textbook. After more than 100 amends, it passed MEXT’s scrutiny. The book evaded any mention of “comfort women” and downplayed the Nanjing massacre, striking a much more assertive tone than other books at the time.
In a 2013 interview, Nobukatsu Fujioka, one of the authors, explained his position on the Nanjing massacre:
It was a battlefield so people were killed but there was no systematic massacre or rape.
The Chinese government hired actors and actresses, pretending to be the victims when they invited some Japanese journalists to write about them.
All of the photographs that China uses as evidence of the massacre are fabricated because the same picture of decapitated heads, for example, has emerged as a photograph from the civil war between Kuomintang and Communist parties.
Fujioka’s claim of crisis actors is a classic excuse to airbrush inconvenient details from history. If it sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same excuse currently used by Russian media to explain away evidence of war crimes in Ukraine.
Despite selling 600,000 copies, the Society’s textbook was used in relatively few schools. But it shifted the Overton window and Japan’s subsequent textbooks became more controversial. The summoning of diplomatic staff for in-person remonstration now happens around once a decade, in line with the textbook publishing cycle.
Commentators have expressed concern that the requirement for textbooks to present the government’s view will have a chilling effect on publishers. They fear publishers will self-censure in order to meet the requirements of MEXT’s textbook review, parroting the government’s view rather than drawing attention to disputed history.
However, some publishers have found a way through this time, as reported in The Asahi Simbun:
The original wording in a history textbook of Hiroshima-based Daiichi Gakushusha Corp. was that “many Koreans were forcibly brought to work” in Japan.
The screening committee issued a dissenting view about that passage. But rather than rewrite the segment, the company added a note to the side of the same page that referred to the government view issued in April 2021 along with wording, “There is research that records many instances of the workers being virtually forced to come” to Japan.
An education ministry official said that as long as the government view was included, there was no problem if other conflicting views were also included.
Meanwhile, in Germany
Education can be an important tool for peace-building in post-conflict societies. It can build a shared narrative of the past with neighbouring countries and support cohesion. It can confront and address unpleasant and uncomfortable parts of a country’s history to try to ensure history doesn’t repeat itself.
In 1998 The Think Tank of the Youth Association for a Greater Europe surveyed students from seven European countries to see how World War II was taught across borders. In stark contrast to Japan, teaching in Germany deals head-on with the country’s dark past.
In practice, though, the aim of German teaching on WWII history is clear: To educate students about the genocide and inhuman cruelties that happened during the Hitler dictatorship and in this way prevent it from happening again.
Racism, Antisemitism, the totalitarian state and its propaganda, Holocaust and civil disobedience – these are probably the most central terms German students have to deal with in history, but are also apparent in their German, biology, political and religious education classes. More or less obligatory is a trip to one of the former concentration camp sites to make the topic more understandable and relatable to the students. The role of the individual in the National Socialism system is granted a prominent place in WWII education.
This approach no doubt helps political relationships with Germany’s neighbours. Germany plays a central role in the European Union. While there are disagreements and disputes, the trading block is much more aligned than Japan, Korea and China.
Education can be an important tool for peace-building, but it can also be a weapon. Let’s return to modern-day Russia.
The old man’s back again
In Russian schools lessons about the World War II are mostly focused on the Great Patriotic War ‒ the final five years of the war, in which USSR was directly involved. The majority of Russians don’t remember the date when World War II started, although everybody knows that the Great Patriotic War broke on June 22, 4 am, when Luftwaffe suddenly attacked the western border of Soviet Union. […]
9th of May ‒ the Victory day ‒ is one of the biggest national holidays in Russia, and most schoolchildren would go to some commemorative event the week before, or take part in a concert for old veterans, playing music or singing war-era songs.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine…
WWII is observed as a consequence of a world economic crisis and the German policy of breaking the Versailles treaty and preparation for war together with Italy and Japan. The policy of keeping peace with Germany failed and caused the beginning of WWII. A special place in the lesson is devoted to Soviet-German friendship at the beginning of the war and the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as well as the destiny of Eastern Europe according to that document.
After a month of war – although Russia remains cautious to avoid the word “war”; this is still a “special operation” – Russian propaganda became transfixed by the teaching of World War II in Ukrainian schools.
On 26 March, Dmitry Steshin, a kp.ru special correspondent, posted a report from two war-torn schools in the “newly liberated territories” of Donbas, a region which includes the heavily besieged city of Mariupol. He was appalled. Classrooms were full of Western influence, with EU flags, logos from the UN, Save the Children, Unicef and various others. He found a selection of textbooks, declared them “Russophobic”, “militaristic”, and designed for “reprogramming children”.
The Russian military sent more than 300 Ukrainian school textbooks back to Moscow, where they were analysed by a textbook committee. Sergey Kravtsov, head of the Russian Ministry of Education, expressed concern at the findings.
[The textbooks] represent in reality the literature of Western militaristic content, telling schoolchildren about NATO’s military tactics and schemes, calling in places to move from theory to practice.
Such facts are amazing, because the textbook, in fact, is what education begins with, it is the main tool. We see what is happening with the Ukrainian education system. They openly promote cruelty among children, militaristic Western concepts, show photographs of the [Russian-sponsored separatists] of Donbas, portraying them as terrorists. In my opinion, it is impossible to find an explanation for this, there can be no place for such manifestations at school, and there is no justification for this.
The captured books will now be put on display in a “liberation exhibition” at the Russia – My History museum in Volgograd so “everyone will be able to get acquainted with the content of the Ukrainian textbooks”.
There is a grim irony that this cache of looted books has prompted calls for Russia to send humanitarian aid to Ukraine. This aid is not in the form of food or medicine, but history textbooks. On 19 April, the Ministry of Education pledged to send 40,000 books to Donbas.
Two days later, Putin declared victory in Mariupol, with the remaining Ukrainian defenders encircled in the Azovstal steel plant. Marking the occasion, according to reporting:
Andrei Turchak, a senior official of Putin's party, visited a school in Mariupol on Wednesday, which has switched to the Russian curriculum. “Many textbooks have already been delivered and these deliveries are ongoing,” he said in a video posted on social media of his visit.
Russia’s “special operation” is not the cake-walk Putin originally expected, and the conflict will run for some time yet. Years, we’re warned. Possibly without a decisive victory or loss. (Lawrence Freedman’s account of this is worth a read.)
But one way or another, Ukraine and Russia will eventually move to a post-conflict stage. And, one way or another, Vladimir Putin will have a successor. And in this post-conflict post-Putin future, how will textbooks tell the story of Russia and Ukraine’s shared history?
We can only hope Russia chooses to learn from Japanese history lessons, rather than emulate them.