Lu 2018 Mitra

2017-18 Mitra FAMILY GRANT Recipient Games of Truth: The Evolution of Japan’s History Serena Lu, Class of 2018

Games Of Truth: The Evolution of Japan’s History Textbook Controversy

Serena Lu 2018 Mitra Family Scholar Mentors: Ms. Roxana Pianko, Ms. Andrea Milius, Ms. Susan Smith April 11, 2018

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In September of 2017, San Francisco unveiled a new memorial in the city’s Chinatown: a statue of three girls, hand in hand, as an elderly woman watches them from below. The statues are a memorial to comfort women, or the girls and women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II. Two months later, the mayor of Osaka, Japan responded by officially cutting ties with San Francisco, its sister city, ending a sixty-year long relationship.1 The breakup between the two cities is just the latest chapter in a long-standing battle over the truth of Japan’s World War II war crimes, which has been hotly debated across East Asia for decades. Japanese politicians have sparked diplomatic crises with China and South Korea with visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, a Shinto shrine that honors Japanese war criminals, and official statements from high-ranking officials denying the existence of controversial war crimes. The mayor of Nagasaki, Hitoshi Motoshima, was shot by a right-wing nationalist who was angered after the mayor claimed that Emperor Hirohito shared some responsibility for the war.2 Over the decades, these battles over Japan’s wartime atrocities have largely coalesced around Japanese history textbooks and the government’s role in determining a nation’s history.

In Japan, textbooks are written by private publishers, but they must all be approved by the government in an examination process. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (often shortened to the Ministry of Education) issues the textbook guidelines for each academic subject, including subject-specific standards and general rules that outline the “scope and degree of difficulty,” “selection/treatment and organization/amount” and “accuracy,

Nancy Snow, "Mayor Damages Osaka’s Image by Cutting Ties with San Francisco," The Japan Times, last modified November 30, 2017, accessed February 22, 2018.

1

2

David E. Sanger, "Mayor Who Faulted Hirohito Is Shot," The New York Times, January 19, 1990, national edition, A6, accessed February 22, 2018.

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orthography and expression.”3 All textbooks are submitted for review based on these guidelines to the Ministry of Education, where they are examined and approved by both the Textbook Screening Council and Textbook Screening Examiners.4 In 1955, the Minister of Education Matsumura Kenzō replaced council members with liberal-leaning views with members with conservative-leaning views, and in 1956, the Minister of Education Kiyose Ichirō expanded the Textbook Screening Council from sixteen members to eighty members.5 During the examination process, each textbook is assigned a five-person panel. Originally, the panel was made up of three teachers and two academics, but Education Minister Ichirō restructured the panel to consist of two textbook examiners from the Ministry, two teachers, and one academic.6 Each person on the panel assigned the textbook a score out of 200 based on its quality and adherence to the textbook guidelines, and the scores were tallied up within a 1,000 point scale. Textbooks with over 800 points were considered passing, and those under 800 points were revised and resubmitted.7 However, even with the 1,000 point scale, the examination process was still rather arbitrary: some texts that originally failed to meet 800 points were resubmitted without revision to a different panel and subsequently approved.8 Some texts that received higher than 800 points were still rejected for “slanted” content.9 Even after being approved once, textbooks must be

3

"Textbook Examination Procedure," Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, accessed February 10, 2018.

4

Yoshiko Nozaki and Mark Selden, "Historical Memory, International Conflict, and Japanese Textbook Controversies in Three Epochs," in "Teaching and Learning in a Globalizing World," special issue, Journal of Educational Media, Memory and Society 1, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 118, JSTOR. 5

James Joseph Orr, The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001), 90.

6

Ibid.

7

Ibid., 89.

8

Nozaki and Selden, "Historical Memory," 122.

9

Orr, The Victim, 89-90.

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updated every few years and reapproved.10 In 1957, the Ministry amended part of its policy and no longer shared its conditions for approval with textbook authors. All suggestions and revisions were communicated verbally, minimizing official documentation and transparency in an already obscure process overseen by unelected officials.11 In 1982, following a diplomatic crisis with China over later disproven reports that the Ministry had ordered a change in terminology that minimized the severity of the Nanjing Massacre, the Japanese government introduced the Neighboring Countries Clause, which required the Ministry to consider the concerns of neighboring countries during the screening process.12 Overall, the entire screening process takes several months.13 Afterwards, schools and school districts decide which textbook to adopt for their curricula, and the publishers print and supply them to the schools.14 Because the state runs the textbook screening process, the government has unique control over the exact curricula that students learn. From the late 1960s to the early 2000s, the Ministry of Education utilized this authority to manipulate references to Japanese World War II war crimes from history textbooks to create a revisionist historical narrative for Japan by enforcing flawed guidelines for the restrictive textbook examination process, creating new rules to facilitate publication of nationalist textbooks that denied the severity of war crimes, and pressuring private textbook publishing companies and textbook authors to self-censor information on war crimes. Regardless of whether these war crimes actually occurred, historians

10

"How a Textbook Becomes Part of a School Curriculum," Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, accessed February 10, 2018.

11

Yoshiko Nozaki, War Memory, Nationalism and Education in Postwar Japan, 1945-2007: The Japanese History Textbook Controversy and Ienaga Saburo's Court Challenges (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 20.

12

Kazuya Fukuoka, "School History Textbooks and Historical Memories in Japan: A Study of Reception," International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 24, no. 3/4 (September/December 2011): 85, JSTOR. 13

Nozaki and Selden, "Historical Memory," 118.

14

"How a Textbook."

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have produced an abundance of evidence suggesting they likely did. The Ministry of Education could have legitimately excluded these events if they believed the events did not occur, but it was their obligation to provide sufficient and credible historical evidence to support their arguments, which go against scholarly consensus. Even if the war crimes in dispute are false, the Ministry still employed double standards in favoring nationalist content and perspectives with less academic support.

The Ienaga Trials Throughout the 50s and 60s, when Japan’s current textbook screening system was still in its early stages, the Ministry of Education continuously came under fire from historians who alleged that the textbook screening process was unconstitutional and violated their academic freedom by suppressing their scholarly work. While the Ministry had a pattern of rejecting material critical of Japan, the lack of transparency surrounding the screening process hampered most attempts to challenge the Ministry. Out of frustration for the arcane process, Ienaga Saburo, a prominent Japanese historian and writer of the widely used Shin Nihonshi (New Japanese History) history textbook, published regularly since the end of World War II until Ienaga’s death in 2002, filed three lawsuits against the Japanese government pertaining to the textbook screening process.15 The first two lawsuits, both filed in the late 60s, addressed the constitutionality of the screening process and its restriction of content in Shin Nihonshi.16 In 1974, the Tokyo District Court found that in the first lawsuit, 11 out of 293 of the Ministry’s contested requests constituted abuses of power.17 In 1986, the Tokyo High Court overturned the

15

Yoko H. Thakur, "History Textbook Reform in Allied Occupied Japan, 1945-52," History of Education Quarterly 35, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 273-74, JSTOR. 16

Ibid., 274-75.

17

Nozaki, War Memory, 44.

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decision on all 11 points, and the Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit in 1993.18 The second lawsuit resulted in an initial victory in 1970, when the Tokyo District Court ruled that the Ministry’s decision to not certify Shin Nihonshi was based on differences in historical interpretation and thus constituted censorship. In 1975, the Tokyo High Court upheld this decision, but in 1982 the Supreme Court rejected it, sending it back to the Tokyo High Court where, in 1989, the court ultimately reversed its previous decision.19 Despite both lawsuits’ ultimate defeats, they successfully forced the Ministry to turn over documents detailing the specifics of the screening of Shin Nihonshi, shedding the first light on the Ministry’s biased and often arbitrary process.20 The Ministry experienced a wave of criticism during the Ienaga trials from the Japanese public and international media and governments, and the textbook guidelines initially underwent significant reform. However, regulations were tightened in the late 70s and early 80s as the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Japan’s leading conservative party, won control of both Houses of the National Diet, and the latest edition of Shin Nihonshi again came under fire by the Ministry’s screening process.21 In 1984, Ienaga sued again, but the third trial ignored the issue of the constitutionality of textbook screening. Instead, the suit challenged the Ministry of Education’s position on specific historical events, focusing on eight of the Ministry’s revisions of Ienaga’s 1983 draft of Shin Nihonshi. Of the eight points, most pertained to Japanese misconduct during World War II, including the Japanese invasion of China, the Nanjing Massacre, Unit 731,

18

Ibid., 124.

19

Ibid., 275.

20

Ibid., 43.

21

Hirano Mutsumi, History Education and International Relations: A Case Study of Diplomatic Disputes over Japanese Textbooks (Folkestone, United Kingdom: Global Oriental, 2009), 110, Ebook Central.

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the Battle of Okinawa, and Korean resistance to Japanese invasion.22 The trial forced the Ministry of Education to clarify their official stances on many high profile World War II controversies, including war crimes, and ground their objections in the historical record. The trials were public, drawing in large crowds and raising the profile of the textbook controversy.23 Ienaga initially won only the point on Troop Somo (an issue pertaining to the Meiji Era) in 1989, later winning the points pertaining to the Nanjing Massacre in 1993 and Unit 731 in 1997.24 Ienaga’s lawsuits spanned three decades, challenging the Ministry of Education’s constructed narrative of Japanese history and revealing the ministry’s systematic effort to censor and minimize Japanese war crimes. The documents and information leaked in 1971 from the first two Ienaga trials reveal that the Ministry of Education intentionally promoted a nationalist historical narrative of Japan. Ienaga’s official Ministry file stated that the 1963 edition was rejected based on “flaws in both accuracy and choice of contents,” with 323 areas marked as “inadequate.”25 Although some areas of revision simply referred to typos, the Ministry took issue with Shin Nihonshi’s depiction of the Pacific front of World War II. In one line, Ienaga wrote, “most [Japanese] citizens were not informed of the truth of the war, and so could only enthusiastically support the reckless war.”26 The Ministry objected on the basis that rather than make an objective statement about the war, Ienaga used the word “reckless” and made a moral

22

Thakur, "History Textbook," 275-76.

23

Saburo Ienaga, "The Glorification of War in Japanese Education," International Security 18, no. 3 (Winter 1993/1994): 128, Project MUSE. 24

Nozaki, War Memory, 126.

25

Ibid., 37.

26

Ibid.

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judgement.27 The Ministry’s objection was reasonable but not consistently applied, as the Ministry encouraged patriotic rhetoric to instill national pride in students, which included moral judgements about the greatness of war.28 The Ministry actively considered the level of patriotism during the screening process, rejecting textbooks that were “useless for cultivation of patriotic spirit.”29 As the Ministry’s documents revealed, they believed that part of cultivating a patriotic spirit required the revisions to and removal of passages on Japanese war crimes.

The Nanjing Massacre The Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking, is one of the most controversial of all Japanese war crimes and featured prominently in the Ienaga trials. The massacre began in December of 1937, when Japanese soldiers invaded the city of Nanjing. For the next six weeks, the city was plunged into chaos and disorder, marked by routine mass executions, arson, looting, and rape.30 According to official records, the massacre resulted in the deaths of over 200,000 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war and around 20,000 cases of rape.31 While the specifics of the massacre (ie. the specific death toll, the number of rapes, the geographic scope of the city of Nanjing, etc.) are disputed, academics generally agree that some mass killing occurred based on an abundance of historical evidence.32

27

Ibid.

28

Caroline Rose, "The Battle for Hearts and Minds: Patriotic Education in Japan in the 1990s and beyond," in Nationalisms in Japan, ed. Naoko Shimazu (London: Routledge, 2006), 134, accessed March 28, 2018.

29

Nozaki, War Memory, 20-22.

30

Encyclopedia of Modern China, ed. David Pong (Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2009), s.v. "Nanjing Massacre," by Timothy Brook.

31

Takashi Yoshida, The Making of the "Rape of Nanking": History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006), 51, accessed May 27, 2016, ebrary.

32

Daqing Yang, "Convergence or Divergence? Recent Historical Writings on the Rape of Nanjing," The American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (June 1999): 859, JSTOR.

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In all three trials, Ienaga objected to the Ministry’s revisions pertaining to the Nanjing Massacre. In Ienaga’s 1982 draft, he wrote: “When Nanjing was occupied, the Japanese troops killed large numbers of Chinese soldiers and civilians, engaged in assaulting, looting, and burning, and were charged with the Nanjing Massacre by the world. It is said that the Chinese victims reached 200,000.”33 The Ministry revised the passage to read: “In the confusion when Nanjing was taken, the Japanese troops killed large numbers of Chinese soldiers and civilians and were charged by the world with the Nanjing Massacre.”34 References to specific actions committed by Japanese troops (ie. “assaulting, looting, and burning”) were removed entirely, minimizing the severity and intentionality of the massacre. Chinese soldiers had already surrendered, and many were taken as prisoners of war. Others had given up their weapons and dressed up as civilians to avoid being killed. Japanese soldiers received explicit instructions from commanding officers to kill all prisoners of war and loot the city when they were done.35 By specifying that the massacre took place in the midst of confusion, the Ministry minimized the responsibility of Japanese soldiers in carrying out devastating actions against the city and its residents. The one part of the passage that was kept claimed that Japan was “charged by the world with the Nanjing Massacre,” which shifted Japan’s role as the aggressor into a victim being accused unfairly by powerful Western countries. A textbook official was later quoted admitting as much, stating that “[i]t was not fair to describe the Nanjing atrocity in three to five lines while mentioning Soviet or American atrocities against the Japanese in only one line or

33

Daqing Yang, "A Sino-Japanese Controversy: The Nanjing Atrocity as History," Sino-Japanese Studies 3, no. 1 (November 1990): 20, accessed June 27, 2017.

34 35

Ibid., 21.

Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1998), 40-42.

Lu 10 two.”36 However, the Ministry had also asked Ienaga to remove descriptions of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings for being too “dark” about the war.37 In the third trial beginning in 1984, Ienaga’s lawyers chose to split the dispute over the Nanjing Massacre into two parts, one on his implication that Japanese soldiers were officially ordered to kill prisoners of war. In a 1983 draft, Ienaga wrote: “The Japanese forces killed numerous Chinese soldiers and civilians immediately after the occupation of Nanjing.”38 The Ministry told Ienaga to modify the passage to clarify that the killing of Chinese soldiers and civilians occurred in the chaos of the battle, not as a result of systematic commands. In the final draft, Ienaga wrote: “The Japanese forces, breaking through the strong resistance of the Chinese forces, occupied Nanjing in a rage and killed numerous Chinese soldiers and civilians.”39 The Ministry of Education justified their objections to the passages on the Nanjing Massacre by deferring to academics. Kojima Noboru, a witness for the government, argued that all perspectives on the massacre should be considered, and since there was no general consensus on the Nanjing Massacre, it should not be included in textbooks.40 However, although the Nanjing Massacre was a highly controversial event, most academic sources agreed that the massacre had occurred, and the primary debates were around the scope and scale of the massacre.41 By advocating for objectivity, Kojima granted credence to less academic but nonetheless popular sources. In addition, he countered evidence from a military combat report

36

Yang, "A Sino-Japanese," 21.

37

Nozaki, War Memory, 37.

38

Ibid., 99.

39

Ibid.

40

Ibid., 118.

41

Yang, "Convergence or Divergence?," 859.

Lu 11 from the Japanese military that described an order to kill Chinese prisoners of war by suggesting that the order possibly had not been carried out.42 Kojima’s principal tactic was to cast doubts on existing evidence while providing little to advance his own point. Objectivity was an excuse to exclude as much unfavorable material as possible.

The second disputed passage was over Ienaga’s reference to the massive numbers of rapes that occurred. In the draft for the 1982 edition, Ienaga wrote in a footnote: “When occupying Nanjing, … not a few of the Japanese officers and men raped Chinese women.”43 In another, he wrote: “Because of this [meeting with fierce resistance from Chinese guerrillas in Northern China], the Japanese forces almost everywhere caused immeasurable damage to lives, chastity, and the property of Chinese people, including the killing of the local residents, … and the raping of Chinese women.” Both of these passages had passed the 1977 screening, but in 1981 the Ministry ordered Ienaga to remove all references to rape.44 The Ministry’s objection to Ienaga’s passage on rapes committed by the Japanese military was not based in historical fact. Instead, their primary argument was that rape was commonplace during wartime, and that Japanese soldiers should not be unfairly singled out.45 This argument suggested that wartime rape should never be described in textbooks regardless of grade level, barring extraordinary circumstances, which would prevent students from ever learning that rape was common during war. However, the Rape of Nanjing, as the name suggests, was one such extraordinary circumstance. During the six weeks of the Japanese

42

Nozaki, War Memory, 116.

43

Ibid., 99-100.

44

Ibid., 100.

45

Ibid., 84.

Lu 12 occupation of Nanjing, an estimated 20,000-80,000 rapes occurred, and even newspapers at the time took notice of the high numbers of rapes.46 The Ministry argued that the number of rapes committed during the Nanjing Massacre could not be verified. When presented with works such as Honda Katsuichi’s Travels in China, which documented numerous interviews with survivors who emphasized the unique prevalence of rape during the massacre, the Ministry argued that arguments could not be based on oral history, which was unreliable.47 Conventionally held views on the war were based on oral history due to a lack of official documentation by the Japanese military, and the Ministry’s objection was exclusionary and a last-minute condition to their request for research.

Unit 731 Perceived by the Japanese public as the most repugnant of all the war crimes committed by the Japanese, Unit 731 was meant to be a cornerstone of Ienaga’s third trial. Following Japan’s invasion into Manchuria and the establishment of the puppet state Manchukuo, Shiro Ishii, a Japanese military doctor, established a bioweapons research facility in Pingfan near Harbin. The term “Unit 731” is derived from “Water Purification Unit 731,” the facility’s code name.48 There, Ishii and groups of doctors and professors experimented primarily on Chinese civilians and soldiers, but also Russians, Koreans, Mongolians, and other prisoners of war.49 Researchers assigned prisoners serial numbers and tied them up, and soldiers exposed the prisoners to bacteria through numerous distribution methods to test the lethality and convenience 46

Chang, The Rape, 90-91.

47

Nozaki, War Memory, 113.

48

Greg Goebel, "Japan's Unit 731 Program," in Biological Weapons, ed. Clay Farris Naff, Contemporary Issues Companion (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2006), Gale Opposing Viewpoints In Context.

49

Katrien Devolder, "U.S. Complicity and Japan's Wartime Medical Atrocities: Time for a Response.," American Journal of Bioethics 15, no. 6 (June 2015): 40, Academic Search Complete.

Lu 13 of major pathogens such as anthrax and the pneumonic plague on the prisoners.50 Unlike the Nanjing Massacre, the people responsible for the program were not tried in any war crimes trial.

Instead, they were granted immunity by the United States government in exchange for turning over their biological weapons research.51 The existence and veracity of Unit 731 is generally uncontested due to numerous first person testimonies by veterans of the program but is hard to verify due to a lack of survivors.52 Unlike other contested passages, where the Ministry only requested revisions of specific phrasings or framings, the Ministry objected to Ienaga’s entire passage on Unit 731. The passage read: “In the suburb of Harbin, [the Japanese forces] established a bio-warfare unit called Unit 731 and continued to commit atrocities such as capturing non-Japanese, for the most part several thousand Chinese, and killing them in live experiments conducted over a period of several years, until the Soviet Union’s declaration of war.” In response, the Ministry wrote, “it is premature to include the reference to Unit 731 in school textbooks, since there has not been credible research.’’53 The Ministry used shifting definitions of “credible research” to justify the complete removal of the passage on Unit 731. By the time of the screening, there was ample scholarship on and first-hand accounts of Unit 731. The first publication on Unit 731 came out in the 1950s, and the definitive and widely-read works of Seiichi Morimura were published within a year of

50

Goebel, "Japan's Unit."

51

Devolder, "U.S. Complicity," 41.

52

Jonathan Watts, "Victims of Japan's Notorious Unit 731 Sue," The Lancet 360, no. 9333 (August 24, 2002): 628, ProQuest Research Library Prep.

53

Nozaki, War Memory, 101.

Lu 14 Shin Nihonshi’s screening.54 When Ienaga’s lawyers and expert witnesses contradicted the Ministry’s claim that there was a lack of “trustworthy scholarly works, articles, and books” on the subject, the Ministry upgraded their standards, claiming there was a lack of “scholarly books, or academic articles published in scholarly journals, sufficiently examining the reliability of sources,” a condition not present in their initial objections to the Unit 731 passage.55 The Ministry’s objection to the lack of well-substantiated research runs counter to previous stances, as illustrated in Ienaga’s second lawsuit, filed in 1967, when he sued the Ministry for forcing him to depict an ancient Japanese myth that justified imperial rule as fact without any credible evidence.56 When cross-examined by Ienaga’s lawyers, the representative of the Ministry even agreed that Unit 731 had indeed occurred, suggesting that the removal of the passage was not based in fact, educational concerns, or even the Ministry’s own evaluation of existing evidence, but rather an objection to publishing a dark narrative of Japan’s actions in World War II. 57 The Ministry allowed textbooks to include information on the Nanjing Massacre, albeit with significant revision and minimization of its severity. The request for a complete removal of the passage on Unit 731, a war crime less disputed than the Nanjing Massacre, suggests that the Ministry’s revisions were not based solely on historical accuracy.

Throughout the Ienaga trials, the Ministry’s lawyers sought to portray them as an objective arbiter of history. However, the Ministry’s version of history excluded Japan’s war crimes, reframing them as opinions and ignoring the growing academic consensus. The trials revealed the inconsistency in the ministry’s approvals: certain passages, such as the Nanjing

54

Ibid., 89.

55

Ibid., 101.

56

Thakur, "History Textbook," 275.

57

Nozaki, War Memory, 38.

Lu 15 Massacre, were approved in past and future screenings, and despite the Ministry’s stated stance on the necessity of credible scholarly research, they still conflated myth with fact. As long as there was some doubt about the existence and severity of the war crimes, the Ministry could continue constructing their narrative of a more positive war. However, the consequences of the Ienaga trials, both legal and cultural, meant that the Ministry could no longer rely solely on the examination process to create this narrative. In the 80s, even as all three trials were still ongoing, dominant textbook narratives on the war were already shifting.

Shinpen Nihonshi and the 1980s Throughout the 70s and into the 80s, the Ienaga trials prompted heightened awareness of Japan’s textbook screening process. Ienaga’s 1970 legal victory in his second lawsuit, which led to a loosening in textbook criteria, and new research on the Pacific front of World War II published in the late 70s encouraged publishing companies to include more detailed descriptions of war crimes into their textbooks.58 The leftward shift in the historical narrative became clear during the 1982 textbook controversy, when newspapers reported with varying degrees of accuracy that the government was attempting to reinforce a nationalist agenda in history textbooks.59 Most notably, the Ministry replaced terms such as “invasion” (shinryaku) with “advancement” (shinshutsu) in reference to the Nanjing Massacre.60 In response to the backlash, the Japanese government officially permitted the usage of the term “invasion,” and by 1985, all

58

Ibid., 46.

59

Takashi Yoshida, "A War over Words: Changing Descriptions of Nanjing in Japanese History Textbooks," in "ア ジ ア 文 化

研 究 別 冊 ," supplement, 国 際 基 督 教 大 学 学 報3-A, no. 14 (March 31, 2005): 63, accessed February 12, 2018.

60

Daqing Yang, "A Sino-Japanese Controversy: The Nanjing Atrocity as History," Sino-Japanese Studies 3, no. 1 (November 1990): 20, accessed June 27, 2017.

Lu 16 high school Japanese history textbooks included descriptions of the Nanjing Massacre.61 The evolving historical narrative of the war prompted a massive backlash from Japanese nationalists, who perceived the increasingly open discussions of Japanese war crimes as an assault on a bright, patriotic history.62 A major right-wing nationalist group, the National Congress to Protect Japan, responded by publishing their own textbook, Shinpen Nihonshi (New Edition: Japanese History).63 Shinpen Nihonshi was not subtle in its nationalist overtones, containing numerous factual errors and controversial opinions.64 The textbook criticized the Tokyo war crimes trial, or the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMFTE), and minimized Japan’s responsibility for wartime atrocities: This court [the IMFTE] in the name of ‘civilization’ ruled that waging a war of aggression was a ‘crime against peace.’ But no law stipulated that warfare was a crime; the IMFTE’s jurisdiction was dubious. The court rejected Justice Pal’s opinion that Japan was innocent, and branded Japanese as outlaws who had launched a war of aggression.

War occurs among nations because of mutual misunderstanding; after the conflict both sides must reflect on their conduct and attain mutual understanding. For this reason, many people are calling for a reexamination of the IMFTE’s unilateral condemnation of Japan as the guilty party.65

61

Nozaki, War Memory, 128.

62

Nozaki and Selden, "Historical Memory," 129.

63

Ienaga, "The Glorification," 130.

64

Nozaki, War Memory, 138.

65

Ienaga, "The Glorification," 130.

Lu 17 Shinpen Nihonshi’s thinly veiled criticism of the IMFTE mirrored a prominent criticism among right-wing nationalists, who argued that the trials created a “masochistic” historical narrative. 66 Justice Pal’s dissent, cited in the passage, was based on his dissatisfaction with the way the trial was conducted, not his belief in Japan’s innocence. He ultimately concluded that Japan had committed a war of aggression and was guilty of war crimes.67 The textbook contained extensive praise of Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War as a victory against European imperialism, but excluded any information on Japan’s annexation and occupation of Korea or the forced suicides of Okinawans in the Battle of Okinawa.68 In addition to the textbook’s nationalist bent, the textbook contained numerous factual errors because it was rushed to completion in the summer of 1985 in commemoration of Emperor Hirohito’s 60th year on the throne (writing only began in the spring of 1984).69 Shinpen Nihonshi was conditionally approved by the Ministry, but even after multiple rounds of revision, Textbook Screening Council members noted that the textbook was “distasteful,” “biased,” and “lacking in consideration for neighboring countries.”70 Shinpen Nihonshi violated numerous Ministry guidelines but was ultimately approved for publication through “measures beyond laws and rules.”71 After the text’s conditional approval in January 1986, the authors received a total of 420 corrections.72 For context, Ienaga’s rejected

66

Sven Saaler, Politics, Memory and Public Opinion: The History Textbook Controversy and Japanese Society, 2nd ed. (MuÌnchen: Iudicium Verlag, 2005), 15.

67

Ibid., 30.

68

Ienaga, "The Glorification," 131.

69

Nozaki, War Memory, 138.

70

Ibid.

71

Ibid.

72

Mutsumi, History Education, 132.

Lu 18 1963 text received 323 corrections and scored 784 points, just short of the 800 point minimum.73 In a second meeting in May 1986, some Textbook Council members again expressed discomfort with the overt nationalist tone of the revised draft but approved the text for publication after political pressure from Prime Minister Nakasone. Soon after, the Ministry requested additional revisions despite already giving its final approval, an unprecedented move.74 Around this time, the Chinese government launched an official protest under the Neighboring Countries clause for its glorification of the war and the exclusion of prominent war crimes, and South Korea’s Foreign Ministry closely monitored the revisions to the textbooks.75 The governments of North Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam criticized the textbooks through the press but did not launch official protests, as neither North Korea nor Vietnam had any official contact with the Japanese government at the time.76 The Ministry then requested another revision, focusing on sections pertaining to World War II, including the replacement of the term “Nanjing Incident” with “Nanjing Massacre.”77 Members of the cabinet and Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs began to pressure the Ministry of Education to completely withdraw their approval of the text to avoid a diplomatic crisis, but the Ministry chose to revise the text a third time, and then a final fourth.78 In violation of Ministry guidelines, a high-ranking Ministry official requested the publisher change the date of the first two revisions to appear as if they occurred before the Ministry had

73

Nozaki, War Memory, 37.

74

Mutsumi, History Education, 135.

75

Ibid., 132.

76

Ibid., 166.

77

Nozaki, War Memory, 138.

78

Mutsumi, History Education, 135.

Lu 19 granted final approval in May.79 In 1988, two years after the Shinpen Nihonshi controversy, the Ad Hoc Council on Education granted the Minister of Education the power to order revisions after the final approval of a textbook, justifying the Ministry’s legally dubious actions.80 The publication of Shinpen Nihonshi represented a new technique by the Ministry of Education in the creation of new historical narratives: rather than focus solely on restricting the current textbook market, which was mostly dominated by left-wing academics and historians, the Ministry could also help facilitate the publication of right-wing nationalist texts. The four postapproval revisions toned down the nationalist rhetoric and added increased recognition of war crimes, but they only came after external pressure from foreign governments and Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who feared an escalating diplomatic crisis.81 Without foreign intervention, the Ministry of Education would have published a textbook that its own members acknowledged was biased, both during the deliberations before the official approval and the four post-approval revisions.82 The Ministry’s decision to publish Shinpen Nihonshi despite overwhelming backlash from the Japanese public and foreign countries contrasted with the Ministry’s continued rejections of textbooks that were more critical of the war, illustrating the double standards enforced against textbooks that advanced historical narratives that differed from the government’s. The Ministry had a consistent history of rejecting left-leaning texts that were biased or inaccurate: in 1955, the Minister of Education Matsumura Kenzō abruptly replaced

79

Nozaki, War Memory, 138.

80

Ibid., 139.

81

Ienaga, "The Glorification," 131.

82

Nozaki, War Memory, 138.

Lu 20 liberal members of the Textbook Council with conservative scholars, who, in just one screening period, rejected eight textbooks that scored over 800 points in front of the five-person panel, which usually guaranteed at least a conditional approval, for being “slanted.”83 In Ienaga’s third lawsuit (which was ongoing during the Shinpen Nihonshi controversy), the Ministry couched their rejection of Ienaga’s depiction of war crimes in an argument in favor of “objective facts,” an “impartial position,” a “full picture,” and an “undistorted picture.”84 Meanwhile, the Textbook Council conditionally approved Shinpen Nihonshi, a text that even Ministry members stated was biased.85 Ministry members anticipated international backlash to their decision but decided to risk multiple diplomatic crises to publish the textbook anyway.86 Shinpen Nihonshi violated Ministry guidelines on bias, contained numerous factual inaccuracies, and infuriated critical regional countries, but it was still permitted a conditional approval, a revision prior to final approval, and four revisions post-approval. The Ministry stated that they took such extraordinary actions to salvage Shinpen Nihonshi because they had a responsibility to ensure that all approved textbooks were of high quality.87 However, the Textbook Screening Council could have simply rejected the textbook and required revised drafts until it met the Ministry’s standard of quality, as it often did with Ienaga’s textbook.

Ultimately, Shinpen Nihonshi failed to attract a significant share of the textbook market, as the backlash deterred schools and school districts from adopting it. The textbook was renewed

83

Orr, The Victim, 89-90.

84

Nozaki, War Memory, 95.

85

Ibid., 138.

86

Mutsumi, History Education, 132-135.

87

Nozaki, War Memory, 139.

Lu 21 again in a future screening, but its market share remained low.88 The Ministry has limited jurisdiction over Japan’s textbook adoption process, which is controlled by local school districts and individual schools, meaning that publishing a major new textbook alone was insufficient to significantly change the dominant historical narrative.89 As Japan entered the 90s, Shinpen Nihonshi was renewed, and conservative members of the Diet began considering reforms to textbook adoption and authoring processes.

“Self”-Censorship and the 90s By the start of the 90s, the LDP was embroiled in political infighting, Shinpen Nihonshi had failed to attract a large share of the textbook market, and multiple courts had already ruled somewhat favorably for Ienaga against the Ministry of Education. All high school history textbooks published in 1992 contained references to the Nanjing Massacre, and some even mentioned Unit 731.90 To reinforce this growing trend, in 1993 a High Court ruled that the Ministry’s revisions of Ienaga’s passages on the Nanjing Massacre were illegal, and in 1997 the Supreme Court ruled the removal of passages on Unit 731 were illegal as well.91 Comfort Women and Textbook Politics The early 90s also came with the emergence of the comfort women issue, as former comfort women began speaking out. In a statement in 1993, Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono Yohei issued a statement admitting the Japanese government’s direct involvement in the implementation of the comfort women system (known as the “Kono Statement”), deeply

88

Ibid.

89

"How a Textbook."

90

Yoshifumi Tawara, "Junior High School History Textbooks: Whither 'Comfort Women' and the 'Nanking Massacre'?," Sekai, no. 681 (November 2000), accessed February 10, 2018 91

Nozaki, War Memory, 131-32.

Lu 22 upsetting Japan’s right-wing nationalists. In the same year, the LDP lost its majority for the first time in 40 years, and seven anti-LDP parties formed a coalition government.92 The newly elected Prime Minister Hosokawa issued a statement acknowledging Japan’s responsibility for the war, referring to the war as a “war of aggression” and admitting the “colonization” (instead of the more neutral “annexation”) of Korea.93 After the collapse of the seven party coalition in 1994, the LDP retook control of the government with a three party coalition, and they attempted to issue an official apology to the victims of Japanese aggression to appease the moderates in their fragile coalition. The numerous public admissions and apologies infuriated the right wing of the party, and they began redoubling their efforts to amend Japanese textbooks to their liking.94 In 1998, Education Minister Machimura Nobutaka proposed three possible methods of restoring balance to textbooks: rejecting biased textbooks during the screening process, improving the textbook adoption process, and ensuring that textbooks were balanced as they were being written.95 The Ministry of Education’s restrictive and biased screening process could not restrict all references to war crimes, and Shinpen Nihonshi failed to be adopted by many schools largely due to intense public backlash and international pressure. To avoid similar controversies, in the late 90s, the Ministry began pressuring textbook publishing companies to self-censor references to war crimes in their textbooks. Nobutaka claimed that intervening in the textbook writing process could “ensur[e] a good balance” in the texts before they ever reached the eyes of Ministry

92

Nozaki and Selden, "Historical Memory," 130.

93

Ibid., 131.

94

Ibid., 131-32.

95

Nozaki, War Memory, 144.

Lu 23 examiners.96 In 1999, the Ministry began pressuring textbook publishing companies to keep the books more “balanced� and replace certain writers, especially those responsible for sections on the war. Initial drafts of textbooks showed minimal changes from previous editions, but by 2000 all final drafts abruptly revealed an almost complete removal of any passage pertaining to war crimes.97 Although a singular textbook company could realistically and understandably decide to scale back references to war crimes, a sudden industry-wide removal indicated widespread government pressure on publishers. Unlike the Ienaga trials or the Shinpen Nihonshi controversy, self-censorship left no paper trail and largely went unnoticed until the full text of the approved textbooks were already released to the public, and even then failed to attract significant media attention. Suddenly, decades of progress in the increasingly open discussion of Japanese war crimes were reversed.98 By pressuring private textbook publishing companies to self-censor references to war crimes, the Ministry changed the historical narrative without attracting controversy.

Given the resurgence in Japan’s right-wing nationalist movement in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was entirely possible for textbook publishing companies to decide to remove controversial passages on war crimes.99 However, these changes typically did not happen across all companies in one screening, even in previous periods of right-wing backlash. Additionally, the preliminary drafts submitted in early 1999 showed no significant difference from previous editions. The changes abruptly appeared in the final drafts submitted in the months before the

96

Ibid.

97

Ibid., 144-45.

98

Tawara, "Junior High."

99

Yoshida, "A War over," 67.

Lu 24 deadline in spring 2000 following phone calls from the Prime Minister’s office.100 Neither the Ministry nor publishing companies have ever publicly confirmed what happened between 1999 and 2000, but the private testimonies of publishers, the bizarre circumstances, and the Education Minister’s 1998 speech claiming the Ministry would focus more on authors who supported the idea of self-censorship.

Comfort Women While the Ministry pressured textbook companies to add more “balance” generally to their textbooks, officials specifically singled out the issue of comfort women.101 “Comfort women” is a common euphemism that refers to the Japanese Imperial Army’s sexual enslavement of women and girls from territories occupied by Japan during World War II. Many of the women involved were abducted by Japanese soldiers and sent to brothels known as “comfort stations,” and some were manipulated with the false hope of employment.102 These brothels were intended to raise the spirits of soldiers and decrease the amount of sexual assault and rape.103 The stations were originally filled with professional Japanese prostitutes, but they were replaced by women from Korea, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Taiwan to minimize sexually transmitted diseases. Approximately 200,000 or more women were forced to become comfort women, and many were killed to cover up the existence of the brothels once the war ended.104 For decades, no survivors came forward to testify about their experiences due to

100

Nozaki, War Memory, 145.

101

Tawara, "Junior High."

102

Thomas P. Dolan, "Comfort Women," in Encyclopedia of Modern Asia, ed. Karen Christensen and David Levinson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2002), 2:143, Gale Virtual Reference Library.

103

"Comfort Women in World War II," in Macmillan Encyclopedia of World Slavery, ed. Paul Finkelman and Joseph Calder Miller (New York City: Macmillan Reference USA, 1998), Gale World History In Context.

104

Dolan, "Comfort Women," 2:143.

Lu 25 the trauma and social stigma surrounding rape, and the issue attracted very little attention.105 Numerous veterans of the war, including Prime Minister Nakasone, recounted constructing comfort stations and/or raping the women in diaries and memoirs.106 In 1991, the first former comfort woman from Korea spoke out about her experiences, prompting a wave of testimonies from other survivors, and soon after historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki found documents proving the Japanese government was involved in the implementation of the comfort women system.107 In 1993, the Kono Statement acknowledged the Japanese government’s direct responsibility in creating this system of sexual slavery.108 Significant controversy continues to surround the questions of whether or not the women were actually forced into slavery and the extent of the Japanese government’s involvement.109 As textbooks began to include more information on comfort women, the Ministry of Education applied specific pressure to the publishing companies to significantly scale back references to the issue. In the 1992-93 and 1993-94 screenings following the Kono Statement, twenty two out of twenty three approved high school history textbooks included comfort women in their texts (the lone exception being Shinpen Nihonshi, which was renewed), and by the 199596 screenings, all seven junior high textbooks mentioned comfort women.110 The sudden increase in references to comfort women angered right-wing activists and politicians, prompting the LDP and Ministry officials to focus significant attention on restricting content on comfort

105

"Comfort Women."

106

Nozaki, War Memory, 140.

107

Nozaki and Selden, "Historical Memory," 130.

108

Ibid.

109

Dolan, "Comfort Women," 2:144.

110

Nozaki, War Memory, 141.

Lu 26 women.111 While the Ministry pressured textbook companies to add more “balance” generally to their textbooks, officials singled out the issue of comfort women. At least one president of a textbook publishing company confirmed that the Office of the Prime Minister called and advised the company to “deal with the statement on ‘comfort women’ with prudence.”112 The editor-inchief of some publications requested the authors of sections on comfort women to consent to removing the passages. When asked why, the editor replied, “It's a voice from heaven,” an oblique reference to the Ministry.113 Of the original seven textbooks, three texts removed all information on comfort women entirely, and another three texts restricted information to a sentence or less.114 The Nanjing Massacre In addition to comfort women, history textbooks saw significant shifts in references to the Nanjing Massacre. One area of change was in the specific terminology used to refer to the Nanjing Massacre. In 1999, four out of seven junior high textbook publishers used the term “Nanjing Massacre” (Nankin gyakusatsu), but by 2000 two publishers replaced it with “Nanjing Incident” (Nankin jiken).115 Although the revision appeared innocent, the difference between the two phrases had been central to the Nanjing controversy for decades. “Nanjing Massacre” or “Nanjing Atrocity” (Nankin daigyakusatsu) is typically associated with the “massacre faction,” or people who believe that Japanese soldiers systematically killed a significant number of Chinese. Meanwhile, “Nanjing Incident” is used by Japanese historians and commentators from

111

Nozaki and Selden, "Historical Memory," 132-33.

112

Tawara, "Junior High."

113

Ibid.

114

Nozaki, War Memory, 145.

115

Tawara, "Junior High."

Lu 27 all sides of the controversy, but is more often used by the “illusion faction,” or people who believe the event never happened or was greatly exaggerated.116 The Ministry was vividly aware of the significance of these two terms: during the third Ienaga trial, Ienaga sued the Ministry for forcing him to use “Nanjing Incident” instead of “Nanjing Atrocity.”117 The textbooks’ change from “Nanjing Atrocity” to “Nanjing Incident” appeared minor but carried loaded significance in larger debate over the severity of the Nanjing Massacre.

In addition, textbooks downplayed the death toll of the Nanjing Massacre, obscuring and sometimes openly questioning official statistics. Six junior high publishers used to list the death toll as approximately 200,000, but in the new drafts only two textbooks listed any concrete numbers at all. Instead, the texts referred to “many” or “massive” casualties, subjective descriptions that failed to provide any general idea of how many people died.118 Another text added a new footnote that created even more uncertainty, claiming “there is no proven number of victims.”119 Due to the proliferation of first-person narratives from Japanese soldiers, conservative commentators and historians could no longer deny the entire event outright. Instead, they began to argue that the death toll of the massacre was far lower than the often-cited 100,000-300,000 number, a far more defensible position.120 It is true that the exact death toll of the Nanjing Massacre is unknown, and current numbers are based on flawed data and differing conceptions of what is considered “Nanjing.”121 However, conservative commentators used the

116

Yang, "A Sino-Japanese," 29.

117

Thakur, "History Textbook," 276.

118

Tawara, "Junior High."

119

Ibid.

120

Yang, "A Sino-Japanese," 23.

121

Yang, "Convergence or Divergence?," 851-52.

Lu 28 legitimate scholarly debate over the death toll to deny the entire event itself. As some claimed, if the “Nanjing Massacre” referred to an event where Japanese soldiers systematically killed 100,000-300,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers, and less than 100,000 Chinese were killed, then the massacre did not happen.122 Not only did the obfuscation of the Nanjing Massacre’s approximate death toll downplay the scope and severity of the massacre, it was also a common technique used by right-wing commentators to deny the massacre completely.

Other Wartime Atrocities Numerous atrocities that were less widely referenced in history textbooks were removed from texts as well. The only junior high textbook that discussed Unit 731 deleted the entire passage in the 2000 draft.123 The passage would not have been deleted for academic reasons, as no new scholarly evidence had disproven Unit 731, and the Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that Unit 731 was a historical fact that could not be forcibly removed from textbooks.124 Additionally, five textbooks used to mention the Three Alls Strategy, a scorched earth policy employed by the Japanese military against the Chinese that referred to “kill all, burn all, loot all,” but four deleted the passages in the new drafts in 2000.125 Textbooks also restricted content on the Battle of Okinawa: one junior high textbook removed all references of the Japanese military forcing Okinawans to commit suicide, while five other texts decreased the number of passages on the battle. Notably, one junior high textbook originally discussed the battle in ten lines, describing the forced suicides and the discrimination against Okinawans by mainland Japanese. In the new

122

Yoshida, "A War over," 65.

123

Tawara, "Junior High."

124

Nozaki, War Memory, 132.

125

Tawara, "Junior High."

Lu 29 draft, the textbook only discussed the battle in two and a half lines in the middle of a larger passage on Japan’s surrender in the war.126 Overall, the new textbook drafts represented a massive shift in tone and coverage across all Japanese World War II atrocities from previous drafts.

Textbooks, After Self-Censorship By pressuring textbook companies to self-censor references to war crimes, the Ministry of Education effectively changed the dominant historical narrative of war crimes in textbooks without attracting significant controversy. The approval of Atarashii Rekishi Kyōkasho (New History Textbook) in 2001, a nationalist textbook similar to Shinpen Nihonshi, became the new focus of the textbook debate and sparked significant domestic and international backlash.127 Meanwhile, history textbooks published in 2006 continued to avoid controversial issues such as comfort women. The absence of transparency and accountability limited the public’s ability to rally against the new changes.128 The Ministry’s ability to restrict content during the textbook screening process had been somewhat limited in the Ienaga trials, and nationalist textbooks like Shinpen Nihonshi failed to attract large market shares. However, the Ministry still managed to successfully remove information on Japanese wartime atrocities from textbooks.

The end of the United States occupation of Japan in 1952 led to a right-wing nationalist takeover of the Japanese government, led by thousands of wartime leaders and officials. In the following decades, the Ministry of Education used the opaque textbook screening process to affect the portrayal of Japan’s actions during World War II, with a focus on minimizing and 126

Ibid.

127

Yoshida, "A War over," 66.

128

Nozaki, War Memory, 145.

Lu 30 excluding particular atrocities and war crimes. The Ministry followed a double standard in the screening process, denying textbooks with negative portrayals of the war but facilitating the publication of nationalist textbooks with positive portrayals of the war. More recently in the late 90s, the Ministry and other high ranking government officials used their authority to force publishers to self-censor descriptions of war crimes and atrocities.

Although this paper begins with the assumption that all referenced war crimes and atrocities did occur, the Ministry of Education’s biased handling of Japanese wartime history is independent from the truth or falsity of these events. Rather, the textbook screening process allowed the Japanese government to become the arbiter of truth of its own past abuses. With its authority, the Ministry chose to restrict information on war crimes despite supporting evidence while allowing patriotic depictions of Japan rooted in ancient myths to be published. In the hands of the state, this ability to dictate history is a powerful tool to shape the ideologies and worldviews of students. For decades, right-wing nationalist groups and politicians have understood the revolutionary potential in controlling the content of textbooks and advocated for nationalist textbook reform as a stepping stone to the repeal of Japan’s Article 9, which bars Japan from waging wars. It is impossible to quantify or determine the scope and scale of the impact of the textbook debate on the Japanese public’s perception of World War II and military force, but the ability of the state to shape the understanding of history at such a foundational level can have significant consequences.

Lu 31 Bibliography Brook, Timothy. "Nanjing Massacre." In Encyclopedia of Modern China, edited by David Pong.

Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2009. http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX1837900413/GVRL?u=harker&sid=GVRL&xid= 8dcd7bb8.

Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1998.

Iris Chang was a Chinese American journalist who documented issues affecting Asians and Chinese Americans throughout history. In The Rape of Nanking, Chang constructs a comprehensive narrative about the Nanking Massacre using official statistics and primary sources from Japanese soldiers, Chinese survivors, and the foreigners of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone. The Rape of Nanking is one of the most recognizable and detailed writings of the incident that helped spark popular interest in the incident after decades of cover-ups, but its content occasionally contains sensationalist undertones that befit a bestselling book more than a historical analysis.

"Comfort Women in World War II." In Macmillan Encyclopedia of World Slavery, edited by Paul Finkelman and Joseph Calder Miller. New York City: Macmillan Reference USA, 1998. Gale World History In Context.

Devolder, Katrien. "U.S. Complicity and Japan's Wartime Medical Atrocities: Time for a Response." American Journal of Bioethics 15, no. 6 (June 2015): 40-49. Academic Search Complete.

Katrien Devolder is a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, with a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Ghent University. In this article, Devolder summarizes the atrocities committed by Unit 731 and the U.S. government’s role in helping the perpetrators of Unit 731 escape legal punishment and argues for the need of a response and apology from the U.S. government. Devolder’s article illustrates a surprising link in the U.S. government and the Ministry of Education’s denial of Unit 731: without official prosecution in the war crimes trial, there continues to be no officially acknowledged evidence of Unit 731.

Dolan, Thomas P. "Comfort Women." In Encyclopedia of Modern Asia, edited by Karen Christensen and David Levinson, 143-45. Vol. 2. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2002. Gale Virtual Reference Library.

Fukuoka, Kazuya. "School History Textbooks and Historical Memories in Japan: A Study of Reception." International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 24, no. 3/4 (September/December 2011): 83-103. JSTOR. Kazuya Fukuoka is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University, specializing in Japanese collective memory and nationalism. In Fukuoka’s study, he summarizes the textbook controversies and analyzes the actual impact of history textbooks on Japanese students’ understanding of history. Through interviews with university students, Fukuoka finds that history textbooks are less influential than

Lu 32 most people assume. Fukuoka’s study adds nuance to the debate over the significance of the textbook controversies.

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Accessed February 10, 2018. http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/education/textbooks/overview-1.html.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan (MOFA) is responsible for managing Japan’s relations with other countries. On their official website, they detail the stages a textbook must pass to be used in a school. The page provides a clear timeline of the entire process.

The website was updated over a decade after the end of this paper’s timeframe, but its descriptions are consistent with other earlier sources.

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3 (Winter 1993/1994): 113-33. Project MUSE. Saburo Ienaga was a professor emeritus of education at Tokyo University of Education and a prominent Japanese historian, and he wrote the widely used Shin Nihonshi high school Japanese history textbooks. Ienaga held a central role in Japan’s textbook debate, suing the Japanese government three times over controversial revisions to his textbooks.

In "The Glorification of War in Japanese Education," Ienaga criticizes Japanese textbooks for their promotion of militaristic values while demonstrating how texts have evolved over time. He makes special note of the 1986 Shinpen Nihonshi textbook and its nationalist undertones, translating notable passages. Switching between historical analysis and first-person narrative, the article offers rare insight into Ienaga’s personal opinion of his lawsuits and the Ministry’s actions.

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Mutsumi Hirano is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Asia Research Centre of the London School of Economics and Political Science, with a Ph.D. in International Relations from the London School of Economics. In History Education and International Relations, Mutsumi illustrates the significance of history education on international relations through a case study on the Japanese textbook controversy. Her book provides detailed day-by-day descriptions of the domestic developments of major controversies while placing them in global contexts.

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Lu 33 Nationalism, and Education in Postwar Japan, 1945-2007, she explores Japan’s history textbook controversy, specifically Ienaga Saburo’s three lawsuits, and its role in defining Japan’s national identity and political future. Nozaki’s book goes into extreme detail about Saburo’s legal battles, including and analyzing court testimonies and the role of the Textbook Authorization and Research Council. Additionally, her work includes numerous translations of contested textbook passages, court testimonies from the Ienaga trials, and commentary from textbook examiners and Ministry officials from Japanese to English. Her research confronts difficult questions about the content of education and how we reach an objective history in a society with such fractured memories.

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James J. Orr is an associate professor of East Asian Studies at Bucknell University, with a Ph.D. from Stanford University in History, focusing on modern East Asia. In The Victim as Hero, Orr analyzes the rise of Japan’s "victim consciousness” in the mid-1950s.

As part of his analysis, he studies the emergence of the modern Japanese textbook screening system and the changing narratives of the war. Orr offers a detailed comparison between history textbooks at all grade levels and systematically breaks down the exact nature of the textbook examination stage.

Rose, Caroline. "The Battle for Hearts and Minds: Patriotic Education in Japan in the 1990s and beyond." In Nationalisms in Japan, edited by Naoko Shimazu, 131-54. London: Routledge, 2006. Accessed March 28, 2018. https://books.google.com/books/about/Nationalisms_in_Japan.html?id=_ixJ4wd9TjIC. Caroline Rose is a professor of Sino-Japanese Relations at the University of Leeds, specializing in nationalism and history education in China and Japan. In "The Battle for Hearts and Minds," Rose discusses education reform in Japan, focusing on the textbook authorization process and the textbook battles between the 1950s and 1990s. Rose covers large periods of time in concise paragraphs, and the essay contains numerous details about each stage of the process and different offensives in the textbook battles.

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Lu 34 Sven Saaler is a professor of Modern Japanese History at Sophia University with a Ph.D. from the University of Bonn in Japanese Studies, specializing in Japan’s historical memory. In Politics, Memory and Public Opinion, Saaler analyzes historical revisionism in Japan by combining English, German, and Japanese scholarship with his own research to reveal issues often overlooked by English sources. Although the subject of his writing is fascinating, his writing style often includes unnecessary editorialization.

Sanger, David E. "Mayor Who Faulted Hirohito Is Shot." The New York Times, January 19, 1990, national edition, A6. Accessed February 22, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/19/world/mayor-who-faulted-hirohito-is-shot.html.

David E. Sanger is currently the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times and was bureau chief in Tokyo for 6 years, and he has won two Pulitzer Prizes. In the article, Sanger describes the shooting of the mayor of Nagasaki who had previously claimed that Emperor Hirohito bore some responsibility for World War II by a right-wing nationalist. Sanger discusses whether the shooting was part of a larger trend in Japanese history, where assassinations by right-wing military officers coincided with rises in militarism, or whether it was an anomalous action taken by fringe groups.

Snow, Nancy. "Mayor Damages Osaka’s Image by Cutting Ties with San Francisco." The Japan Times. Last modified November 30, 2017. Accessed February 22, 2018. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2017/11/30/commentary/japancommentary/mayor-damages-osakas-image-cutting-ties-san-francisco/#.WpzbkpPwaRu. Nancy Snow is a Professor of Public Diplomacy at the Kyoto University of Foreign Studies, an Adjunct Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies in Temple University Japan, and has a Ph.D. in International Relations from the American University School of International Service. She is also a special contributor to the Japan Times, a major Japanese newspaper published in English. In the article, Snow describes San Francisco's comfort women memorial and the rift it caused with Osaka, previously its sister city. Snow is highly critical of Osaka's response, claiming that it was immature and undermined the city's reputation as a large and open city.

Tawara, Yoshifumi. "Junior High School History Textbooks: Whither 'Comfort Women' and the 'Nanking Massacre'?" Sekai, no. 681 (November 2000). Accessed February 10, 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20120505031155/http://www.iwanami.co.jp/jpworld/text/tex tbook01.html.

Yoshifumi Tawara is the Secretary General of the Children and Textbooks Japan Network 21. In "Junior High School History Textbooks," Tawara reveals information from the executives of textbook publishing companies demonstrating government influence in the abnormal mass deletions of references to comfort women in textbook drafts between 1999 and 2000. The article is roughly translated from Japanese, with some instances of awkward phrasing and grammatical errors, but Tawara’s argument and supporting evidence are clear, with detailed comparisons of textbooks from before and after 2000 across different publishing companies and quotes from textbook publishing company employees on the self-censorship. For reasons unknown, the article is no longer accessible, and it was obtained through the Wayback Machine from May 5, 2012.

Lu 35

"Textbook Examination Procedure." Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan. Accessed February 10, 2018. http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/education/textbooks/overview-3.html.

The website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan describes the general guidelines of the textbook screening process. The guidelines are rather vague, and MOFA does not go into detail about guidelines for specific academic subjects. The website's description is consistent with sources from earlier time periods.

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"History Textbook Reform in Allied Occupied Japan, 1945-52" is based on her doctoral dissertation, completed at the University of Maryland. Thakur closely analyzes the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers’s development of Japan’s now controversial textbook system and describes major controversies such as the Ienaga trials that occurred in the decades after. Thakur’s chronology illustrates the fascinating evolution of a textbook system originally designed to prevent the prewar trend of militaristic textbooks.

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Jonathan Watts is an acclaimed journalist and served as the vice president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan from 2001-2003, reporting on East Asia and Latin America for the Guardian. In "Victims of Japan’s Notorious Unit 731 Sue," Watts reports on a civil lawsuit filed by 108 Chinese survivors of Unit 731 demanding an apology and monetary compensation from the Japanese government. Watts provides important context for the significance of Unit 731 to the Japanese populace, including sarin gas attacks on Tokyo that occurred two years before Japan’s Supreme Court ruled it illegal for the Ministry of Education to restrict content on Unit 731.

Yang, Daqing. "Convergence or Divergence? Recent Historical Writings on the Rape of Nanjing." The American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (June 1999): 842-65. JSTOR. Daqing Yang is an associate professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University’s Elliot School of International Affairs, specializing in modern Japanese history. He was appointed to the U.S. National Archives as a Historical Consultant to The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group. In “Convergence or Divergence?,” Yang analyzes major research on the Nanjing Massacre from the late 90s, looking at areas where consensuses have formed and disagreements have intensified. In this article, Yang is notably more optimistic about a possible resolution to the historical debate over the Nanjing Massacre than in his previous works as scholars get closer to a consensus on the subject.

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Lu 36 In "A Sino-Japanese Controversy: The Nanjing Atrocity as History," Yang delves into the historiography of the Nanjing Massacre in Japan and China. Yang’s coverage illustrates the wide range of thought on the massacre, and his writing begs the question of whether history can ever arrive at the truth.

Yoshida, Takashi. The Making of the "Rape of Nanking": History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006. Accessed May 27, 2016. ebrary.

Takashi Yoshida is a historian with a Ph.D. from Columbia University and is a professor of Early Modern/Modern East Asian history, world history, and war and memory. In The Making of the “Rape of Nanking”, Yoshida dissects the historiography of the Nanjing Massacre in Japan, China, and the United States and explains the causes and effects of important political events and conflicts such as the Cold War on the perception and knowledge of the massacre. Yoshida’s book has received praise from numerous other historians specializing in the Nanjing Massacre and for good reason: he maintains a mostly objective perspective and composes a nuanced narrative explaining how the controversy has shaped the incident today.

———. "A War over Words: Changing Descriptions of Nanjing in Japanese History Textbooks." In "ア ジ ア 文 化 研 究 別 冊 ," supplement, 国 際 基 督 教 大 学 学 報 , no. 14 (March 31, 2005): 59-71.

Accessed February 12, 2018. http://id.nii.ac.jp/1130/00003009/.

In "A War over Words," Yoshida addresses the controversy over the 2001 New History Textbook, a controversial nationalist textbook, through a historiography of Japan’s history textbooks from 1931 to the late 1990s. Yoshida concisely summarizes major events in Japan’s evolving textbook controversy, but his writing reveals a clear and staunch opposition to nationalist efforts to deny war crimes and promote militarism in textbooks.

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