ABSTRACT

Japanese textbook treatments of war and colonialism have been a highly politicized issue within Japan since 1945, but they did not become a major source of diplomatic conflict with Asian nations until 1982, after government officials tried to use the textbook certification system to mute the critical tone of textbooks. The government of the republic of Korea was particularly critical of depictions of Japanese rule of the Korean peninsula. One important response to that controversy was the creation of the Japan-South Korea Joint Study Group on History Textbooks, which subjected the issues of war, citizenship, and imperialism to cross-national study. The joint research by Japanese and Korean scholars on Japanese textbooks offers new perspectives on the issues and illustrates the difficulties of achieving historical consensus. 1