October 8, 2007
Japanese Textbooks Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:15 AM EST An interesting story in today’s New York Times, “Okinawans Protest Japan’s Plan to Revise Bitter Chapter of World War II,” describes recent attempts by Japan’s Education Ministry to purge high school textbooks of embarrassing facts. The Japanese Education ministry has long had a reputation for minimizing Japanese atrocities against foreigners—recent changes have tended to suppress references to the Rape of Nanking, the sexual enslavement of Koreans, etc.—but the story in the Times explains that the Ministry is now sanitizing textbooks by purging or eliding discussion of the Army’s atrocities against people who are (nowadays, anyway) more or less considered Japanese. More precisely, the Ministry is removing references to the role of the Japanese Army in pressing or coercing Okinawan civilians into mass suicide, and in some cases murdering their families, out of fear of being raped and murdered by the approaching American forces. Previous accounts of the suicides—at least the ones I’ve seen—asserted the effectiveness of propaganda about the Americans as genocidal rapists, but the Times article states that there were no mass suicides by Okinawan civilians in villages that were not occupied by the Japanese Army. That suggests that on Okinawa, unlike on Saipan, propaganda without coercion was unlikely to produce many results. The Education Ministry is widely reported to worry that accurate history is incompatible with patriotism. This worry seems to me to be overblown. I think Japanese patriotism will wax, and inhibitions on the expansion of the armed forces wane, in response to escalating Chinese aggressiveness and bluster. Pacific (or militaristic) political cultures matter, and in many cases probably require certain versions of history to flourish, but popular access to an accurate history of the Second World War seems unlikely to forever forestall Japanese rearmament. The tendency to think that control of the past is attainable, and means control of the future, is pretty widespread—it is presumably part of the point of the Howard Zinn school of American history, as well as of the Japanese Education Ministry’s revisions of textbooks. This tendency probably reflects the omnipotence fantasies of historians (and Education Ministry types) more than it reflects reality. To pick a recent example, some EU-friendly histories tend to mute or otherwise blur the history of intra-European conflicts. I was intrigued to see a recent issue of an EU-financed magazine imply the equal plausibility of English beliefs that Louis XIV was running an ominously expansionist foreign policy, and French notions that he was the victim of English aggression fueled by Protestant bigotry. Further EU integration may come, or it may not, but in a modern democracy government propaganda does not go unchallenged, and an egregious example of it is generally more contemptible than it is alarming.
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