Japanese history textbooks and the Asia-Pacific War

The issue of history textbooks, (or rather social studies textbooks, to use Japanese postwar terminology) has been for the last three decades one of the major points (if not the major point) of political contention between Japan, its main neighbours (South Korea and China) and even, by proxy, the rest of the world (Western media have tended to take at face value Korean and Chinese attacks against Japanese textbooks, often without cross-checking them). ² It has been argued that the textbooks were dissimulating all the crimes committed by the Japanese army and government during the Asia-Pacific War (1937–1945) and that a ferocious official censorship was blocking any dissenting view. However, the reality is less simple than generally assumed. To be more specific, there has been no permanent domination of nationalist or revisionist theses. Nor was there any unacceptable authoritarianism from an almighty Ministry of Education (Kim 2008). The textbooks are indeed quite problematic in many aspects, but a dispassionate scan of their contents (since 2006 partly accessible in English on the Internet) shows at least an admission of guilt, with some details on specific crimes – except in one textbook, by far the least used in schools. Whatever their limitations, they are (with one exception, again) much less nationalistic and one-sided than their counterparts in China and (more surprisingly) in democratic South Korea. Furthermore, according to at least one study of 33 junior high school textbooks spanning the years 1950–2000, most narratives have by and large changed very little during that half-century (Dierkes 2005). ³ That does not concern the main object of our focus – the treatment of the Asia-Pacific War – but that could explain the feeling of surreality of many Japanese when they had to face the violent protests of neighbouring countries, triggered by supposed U-turns in textbook content.