Making History
“History is written by the victors.”
It’s one of those pet complaints of education here, enough of a complaint that it makes international newspapers occasionally. Japanese compulsory history education serves as a vehicle for instilling patriotism in the student body. This patriotism not only stems from Japan boasting about its achievements, of which there are many, but also stems from omission or distortion of the facts. The underlying morals are that Japan fights only when Japan is the victim, and that Japan can do no wrong. The most notorious of these is the publishers of the “New History” textbook, which describe the Nanking Massacre as an incident (事件) and downplay the use of comfort women by Japanese soldiers in overseas theaters.
The Japanese government didn’t even admit to the use of comfort women until 1993.
Relatives Koreans who perished in the atomic bomb dropping at Hiroshima had to fight to have a memorial in the Hiroshima Peace Park and, when they were given that opportunity, their memorial had to be seperate from that honoring the Japanese victims.
The bitter taste of making history even creeps its way into the English classroom with the infamous “Mother’s Lullaby” story, a tree’s narrative about the Hiroshima bombing. The passage is perhaps one of the most annoying for any American ALT, fearful they may suddenly be asked to explain the rationale for an attack that occurred forty years before they were born.
One ALT in Akita was actually led into a social studies class where the teacher had written August 6, 1945 on the board, and asked him what his country did on that day. The ALT claimed he didn’t know. The social studies teacher then wrote Hiroshima on the board (or, more specifically 広島, kanji which the ALT could not yet read). The ALT finally got a clue when kids started making explosion gestures. The teacher had apparently made her point, and the ALT was then escorted out of the classroom.
Why I’m Lucky
I feel very forutnate in that, in my job, I have encountered this very little. I’ve been surrounded by fairly open-minded social studies and English teachers. I attended one of semseter’s first social studies classes to see a teacher who opened with a discussoin about the Olympics in China, the possibility of the Japanese team being booed, and why. “We did some really bad stuff when we went in there during the war,” he said. While he didn’t go into details, he wasn’t preaching a Japan that can do no wrong, and he wasn’t telling these kids that Japan was just a victim. He then went on and encouraged every kid in that classroom to go abroad someday, saying, “there is simply no other way to understand the good things about where you’re from, and the bad. To see the world for yourself will teach you volumes more than this textbook and what I can tell you.” The foreign world wasn’t portrayed as something scary or horrible, as the Japanese media tend to do. There were no speeches on how Americans are loud, fat, gun-carrying maniacs or how Chinese are out to kill off Japan with shoddy merchandise and poisoned food. The message was that foreign was okay, too– and to understand the foreign was to understand yourself. Perhaps the message was too deep for the students, but I doubt it. At any rate, at least the seedling was planted, and I doubt their sense of self-worth or patriotism was harmed in the least.
Also to my good fortune, the few crazy nationalistic types I’ve encountered have been in positions where they couldn’t really exploit their craziness. They’re the few scant administration types that claim English education is unnecessary because “our students can’t even speak Japanese.” I’d say it’s time to give up teaching Japanese if you’re students are hearing it 24 hours a day in every subject (including English), on TV, from their parents, and receving three classes or more a week dedicated solely to helping them tackle their mother tongue. If, after all that, it is your crazy delusion that the kids can’t speak their own language, complaining that their education is ruined because they spend a paltry 3 hours a week studying English seems silly.
Calling the Kettle Black
But as morally satisfying as it is to chastise a racially homogenous, small island-mentality-saddled country for its nutty nationalistic tendencies, it would be disengenuous to overstate the argument. The reason I feel uncomfortable when asked questions about the Pacific War (the Asian theater of World War II), is because my World War II education was always centered on Europe. Coming from a country that’s had plenty of wars and embarrassing moments of its own, it always bothered me as a student that I had to learn about another country’s transgression, namely the Holocaust, every year. Junior high school was largely holocaust education. Sixth grade? Holocaust in social studies. Seventh grade? Holocaust in social studies and in English. Eighth grade? The Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel’s Night in English class. Ninth grade? Had to read Night again. Surely something else has happened in the past sixty years that we can talk about?
The end result is I knew only two things about the war in the Pacific: Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. I didn’t get a more extensive education on the matter until I hit freshman year in college, when I accidentally got placed in a Japanese History course. I was always taught that the Vietnam War was a mistake– but I hadn’t heard of things like Agent Orange until I was a sophomore in college. And, while my government was willing to pay compensation to American victims of Agent Oranges’ effects, the Vietnamese victims were turned away with nothing.
I specifically remember the end of world history in high school. World history ended at the end of World War II, I was told, because, “After World War II, world history essentially becomes American history.”
There’s no telling what kind of historic permutations CIA secret prisons and accusations of torture will take in future history books, but it may end up as less of a footnote than Special Unit 731 of the Japanese military, which conducted ‘research’ on biological and chemical weapons during the war– on human subjects, dissecting them alive without anesthetic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
How many Americans are willing to consider the torture of ‘enemy combatants’ with no rights as wrongful? How many Japanese know and are willing to own up to the human rights violations of Special Unit 731?
The Good News
The good news is that something along the lines of 0.03% of Japanese public schools use the New History textbook. That’s still 0.03% of a nation’s population being fed blatant disinformation and being brainwashed into narrow-mindedness. And that figure doesn’t count the number of teachers who insidiously sneak the image of Japan Can Do No Wrong Unless the Victim mentality without using the textbook. When I first arrived in Akita, my school was working on that Hiroshima-Tree story. I was asked to make a bulletin about the American perspective on Hiroshima. I could write anything I wanted, I was told, so long I remembered one thing: Japan was the victim. Yes, as long as I ignored the rest of the war and kept the myth intact, I could write anything I wanted.
That teacher has since moved on, eternally so, and been replaced by more open-minded educators.
Over spring break, a Japanese friend of mine put the Japanese whale-hunting controversy this way:
“What’s the point with our government putting up this front about hunting whale for research? Everyone knows it’s bullshit. We should just do like the whalers up in Scandinavia. Say it straight. We like whale. Whale is delicious. We’re going to hunt it, and that’s all there is to it.”
Surely it would be direct, undeniable, and very un-Japanese– but it would throw down the gauntlet and remove the charge of hypocrisy on the whaling debate. The argument could shift to questions of ethics, animal rights, and practicality.
The day the Japanese can do the same about their history will be the day some of their wartime demons can be put to rest.
Extra reading for the interested:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Society_for_History_Textbook_Reform
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_textbook#Junior_high_school_history_textbook.2C_2005
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_orange
Land-Bound-Lawyer 
history is always a difficult subject, no matter how long ago it happened, and how much of a say we had in the actual event (mostly our parents were still children, or not even born) – people blame countries and their inhabitants. (if i were at the actual meeting and raised my hand in assent to “drop the bomb(s)” – i would understand if they were pissed at me) I say there are no such things as bad or good countries or religions or anything like that, but only good and bad people. Luckily, no one’s brought up anything like that here – plus i have the added Ehimemaru incident that involves Ehime and Hawaii, but no one’s thrown anything at me or said anything just because i am from hawaii or america. Possibly it’s because my parents are japanese and i’m considered “one of us” or something like that, but i know there are some militant/patriotic jerks out there that just believe their own country is above all the others. Every place in the world has its ugly history and its share of bad people, it’s time we focus on stopping the list as it is, instead of arguing about the contents while adding to it.
Never again, is the phrase that lives from the Holocaust. To that end, and maybe partially because the US is an ally for the creation and existance of Israel, the history of the Holocaust is indeed taught in the school system. Having recently listened to a survivor of such places as Auschwitz and Muthausen, his perception is that people are less affected by his description of the Nazis using children for target practice in the ghetto, and the smell of the concentration camp, and the day he was liberated in 1945, weighing 70 pounds at the age of 16. Time and today’s culture leaves the listeners calloused, less able to react. He thinks 9-11 has had something to do with it, maybe.
I don’t think it is an intentional slight of the war in the Pacific. My grandfather fought there. My aged friend recalls watching the beheading of his father, as a teen in the Phillippines during that war. “World History” covers so much. In the realm of public education, what gets left out, and what gets put in? There is a push to encourage the WWII veterans remaining to tell their story. This would include the Pacific. As for my grandfather, it was a story he didn’t share.