ABSTRACT
When I first spotted a copy of Kyōkasho ga oshienai rekishi (“History Not Taught in Textbooks”) prominently displayed in a bookstore, I supposed that this work written by Fujioka Nobukatsu and the Liberal View of History Study Group critiqued the Ministry of Education’s textbook examination system. 1 I was thus surprised to find that this best-selling book is actually a collection of feel-good narratives about “great” men and women in modern Japanese history. Existing textbooks, the book assumes, bad-mouth Japan, promoting a history of “self-abuse “that, as Fujioka baldly states in the introduction, “originates in the interests of foreign nations.” 2 History education, Fujioka argues, must benefit the Japanese state and should make Japanese “proud” of their nation again. It is certainly possible to counter this rose-colored nationalist history by citing facts it ignores or by correcting its numerous errors. The title itself and the presumption that Japanese history textbooks are defined by a “self-abusive” view of Japan seem to warrant a rebuttal at this level. Anyone familiar with Ienaga Saburō’s court case is aware that the Ministry of Education has in the past consistently opposed including any discussion of Japanese war atrocities in school texts. The very assertion that the antiseptically cleaned and excised school books have failed to present Japan in a positive light is at best disingenuous and at worse a fabrication. It is the patent absurdity of such a claim, however, that in a sense makes it immune to positivistic counterargument, since it is from the start not an assertion of fact but an evocation of certain emotions, myths, and popular narratives.
