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April 05, 2005
Contested texts
In what has become almost an annual ritual, the Japanese Education Ministry's recent approval of textbooks for the 2006 school year has been met with regional outrage. What will be some of the changes for the coming academic year?
Of the newly approved middle school textbooks, some augment more basic content in the hope of increasing the basic academic abilities of students, which is said to have been declining recently.
Textbooks for all of the nine subjects taught at middle school, except for art, have had advanced content added to them.
The number of pages in textbooks for the main five subjects -- Japanese, mathematics, science, social studies and English -- have increased by an average of 10 percent.
The advanced content includes: Inequality (in mathematics for the first grade), quadratic formula (in mathematics for the third grade), regularity of inheritance (in science) and ion (in science). Also, the periodic table of the elements is used in all science textbooks.
There's nothing controversial about "increasing the basic academic abilities of students," is there? In principle, no. It's the reference in one of the textbooks to the 1937 Nanjing Massacre -- in which estimates of Chinese killed run as high as 300,000 -- as an "incident" in which "many people" died, and in another civic studies text to the disputed Takeshima/Tokto islands as being illegally occupied by South Korea. Such language is not unprecedented, nor is the reaction to it. That the regional uproar is so unsurprising is a testament to Japan's tortured and (some would argue) incomplete reconciliation with its role in World War II and its collective memory thereof.
What makes this year's textbook ruckus even more interesting, however, is the unusually tense regional context. In recent months, Japan has found itself at increasing diplomatic odds over Taiwan and with China and South Korea. What's more, Japan has been throwing its weight around further afield by deploying troops to Iraq and in angling for a seat on the UN Security Council. I think this is entirely appropriate. Japan's economic weight is not matched by its diplomatic clout, creating an imbalance that is unnecessary and harmful 60 years after World War II. But a Japan that appears unremorseful for its past -- especially in the eyes of the powerful neighbors that bore the worst of that past -- isn't the best impression to give for a country that aspires to greater world influence.
But this cuts both ways. To be sure, Japan has at the very least been incomplete in its historical reckoning. But at what point will such reckoning become "complete," and who will judge this? It's very possible that China, South Korea, and others have made a strategic decision to rely on Japan's historical reconciliation (or a perceived lack thereof) as a key tool in their contemporary dealings with Japan. There are a plethora of important economic and security issues with which Japan and its neigbors must reckon on a daily basis. But if Japan's neighbors continually hang the burden of imperial history over its head, regional relations will only be able to proceed so far. It is such a realization that leads to frustration in Japan and encourages the growth of far-right, unhelpfully nationalistic sentiment.
It was in this vein that I was struck when reading about the current textbook dust-up. Consulting Chinese or Korean sources, one might naturally assume that the controversial textbooks are indoctrinating the youth of Japan en masse. But for the most controversial textbook, which was among those updated yesterday, this isn't necessarily the case:
The history textbook was adopted in 2002 by less than 0.1 percent of schools, all of them for children with disabilities, although it became an instant bestseller when it went on sale at general bookstores in mid-2001. [emphasis mine]
This doesn't by any means diffuse the controversy, but it provides a needed perspective that is often overlooked -- the textbook ruckus may be more about smoke than fire. It also suggests an important point regarding any potential improvement in contemporary East Asian relations. Finger pointing aside, a complete reconciliation of issues surrounding Japan's collective war memory may be something that Japan alone cannot accomplish.
Posted by Daniel Widome at 04:36 PM to Asia
