Portrayals of the Nation in Japanese and German History Education Explained

Three very different actors controlled educational content in the German Democratic Republic, the Federal Republic of Germany and in Japan. All three reached this position of dominance over educational policy-making in the immediate postwar years and exercised their power based on similar criteria. Decisions of the Allied occupations of Japan and Germany determined the

reconstitution of educational policy-making regimes by locating initial decision-making power in the close cooperation of Soviet and German cadres in eastern Germany, in decentralized military administrations in western Germany, and in a centralized military administration overseeing the Japanese bureaucracy. The location of power in the GDR led to a smooth transfer of power to socialist party officials based on the legitimacy of the Soviet occupation. The location of administrative power in decentralized military administrations in western Germany led to a successful re-establishment of teachers’ control over content, based on teachers’ claims to professional expertise through perceptions of their status as academics. In Japan, the U.S. occupation intended to devolve control over educational content to the local level, but acceded to bureaucrats’ insistence on centralized control on the basis of the occupation’s administrative needs and on the basis of claims to the neutral position of bureaucrats as policy-makers. The three actors that emerged as dominant in the educational policy-making

regime were very different and relied on different justifications of the legitimacy of their domination. East German party cadres’ power was based on their association with the Soviet Union and the Socialist Unity Party. Having been handed power by the Soviet occupation, the party continued to look to the Soviet Union and the Soviet Bloc more generally for legitimated models of policy-making for the duration of the postwar period. (West) German teachers gained their position of power over educational content through claims to professional expertise based on perceptions of their role as academics. Teachers looked to academia as legitimating their exercise of power for the duration of the postwar period. Academic historiography thus offered the models for the teachers’ historiographical perspective.