ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I will show how the initial institutionalization of the educational policy-making regime in Japan was perpetuated, how this institutionalization shaped the construction of the historiographical perspective of actors involved in educational policy-making, and how the combination of the policy-making regime and the historiographical perspective of actors involved in decision-making ultimately shaped the portrayal of the nation in Japanese history education. In the immediate postwar years, bureaucrats of the Ministry of Education
resisted efforts by the U.S. occupation to devolve authority over educational content to the local level and to effect massive changes in curriculum and textbook content. While bureaucrats stalled administrative and substantive reforms, they developed arguments for the legitimacy of their stalling by claiming to take a neutral position as administrators of policies. In slowing down substantive changes in the content of education that were demanded by the occupation as well as by the domestic opposition, bureaucrats chose a seemingly neutral historiography that concentrated on presenting chronologies of historical facts. Although various alternatives were available at the time, not least the progressive historiographies initially favored by the occupation and championed by the domestic opposition, the empiricist perspective on national history was institutionalized in the immediate postwar years. From its initial institutionalization, the educational policy-making regime
in Japan remained stable for the duration of the postwar period. Bureaucrats continued to dominate educational policy-making and to perpetuate the empiricist historiography adopted initially, even though they were challenged by the Left and the Right on their formal and substantive dominance of policy-making. Changes to portrayals of the nation that were made in the postwar period were made in the context of this empiricist historiography. Coverage of Asia Pacific War atrocities in particular was expanded through the addition of facts in the 1980s without altering an overall narrative that was not concerned with causal explanations of historical developments. Portrayals of the nation generally fostered a sense of identity by offering explicit and implicit connections between students and their supposed ancestors, but,
overall, portrayals of the nation in teaching materials were as constant in Japan as the educational policy-making regime that produced them.
