History books to change in Japan
This is going to be the first of 2 posts about recent news articles concerning Japan that will hopefully interest a few of you and provoke some discussion.
This story concerns something I wrote about in my blog a few months ago: namely, the Japanese government pushing forward with plans to reshape the history of Japan and especially the events that occurred during the Battle of Okinawa in WWII. Textbooks for schools are going to be produced that state that civilians were not forced to commit suicide by the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA). As you can imagine, Okinawans are not too pleased at this - they know what went on and what the Japanese forced the Okinawans to go through in the latter stages of WWII. There have been protests in Okinawa about it from school teachers who recognise this important part of history and that it should be remembered. The idea seems to be that the Japanese government will, in one or two generations, make the Japanese people forget what happened, and that the Japanese people were merely victims of the imperialist American aggressors.
Today, the government has published a position paper on this topic in which is states, “War victims among residents in Okinawa included those who were recognized as combat participants. Some cases were regarded as victims under the military’s orders”. But it says, “Textbook screeners gave appropriate opinions on textbook expressions that might trigger misunderstandings over the Battle of Okinawa”. Apparently the ministry screeners wanted references that some civilian Okinawan suicides had been “forced by the Japanese military” deleted.
This also links in nicely with the topic I wrote about earlier on Japan starting to teach nationalism at schools. Is it only a matter of time until Japanese history lessons are being taught by the oyoku (right-wing nationalists, pictured left), telling them that they are a completely peaceful nature and have always been the victims of foreign aggression in the past?
or Discuss this Article
