ABSTRACT
The Japanese Education and Science Ministry approval of the “New History Textbook (hereafter called Fusosha Textbook)” in April 2001 has had a significant impact on East Asians’ approaches to their history, although in the end the textbook was adopted by fewer than 0.04 per cent of middle schools in 2002 and 0.4 per cent in 2005, way below the original goal of 10 percent. The ripple effects are still being felt at the end of the decade. As soon as the book was published, critical analyses of the book and of distortions in history textbooks in general were published in many forms Asia-wide. Transnational Japan-Korea history activists organized the “Coalition for Blocking Japanese Textbook Reform” and the “Network to Block the adoption of the New History Textbook” and engaged in the “anti-campaign” movement in Japan. Ironically, because of the textbook-style narrative of the Fusosha Textbook, the writing of alternative textbooks became the hot button issue in the war of and in the dialogue on history in East Asia. In April 2005, the second edition of the Fusosha Textbook came out, and one of the third revised editions, now expected in two versions because of a division of the New Textbook Society,1 has come out in December 2009 whereas the other is scheduled for late 2010.
