Organizer: Laura Hein, Northwestern University
Chair: Ellen H. Hammond, Kei-Ai University
Discussants: Yue-Him Tam, Macalester College; Kathleen Woods Masalski, Five College Center for East Asian Studies
This panel will explore the way that textbooks specifically and public memory generally have become a major site of debate over nationalism, war responsibility, and the relationship between citizens and their state. This panel treats textbook nationalism comparatively because textbooks’ content and their relationship to nationalism is often presented as a peculiarity of one country alone, as has been the case at various times in Japan, the USA, and the Peoples’ Republic of China, the tripartite focus here.
In Japan in 1997, two of the top ten best-sellers in Japan were Fujioka Nobukatsu’s Japanese History Not Taught in School Texts, vols. 1 and 2. Charging that current textbooks demean the nation, Fujioka called for more positive views of the Japanese state during WWII and denounced Japanese who in any way wish to criticize their own wartime government. This is just the latest salvo, although one of the most intense, in an on-going battle over textbook content in Japan, as Inokuchi will discuss. The assessment of war, particularly the Vietnam war, is equally contentious in American history texts, as Potts explores. Like the Japanese case, the battleground is as much over the level of criticism Americans should allow of their own government as it is of depictions of the enemy. Selden and Hein add the example of China, where World War II is still presented as a great moment of national unity, although there too the message about the relationship between citizen and state is changing.
Mark Selden, SUNY, Binghamton; Laura Hein, Northwestern University
This paper explores textbook controversies over the treatment of the Pacific War in China, Japan and the United States for clues to the changing parameters of citizenship, nationalism, and international conflict in each nation and the region, particularly in the post Cold War era. Education everywhere is central to battles over state-building, the shaping of national consciousness, and articulation of state-society relations.
This paper compares the way World War II became the touchstone for contemporary issues of citizenship, nationalism and international conflict, as reflected in recent controversies over textbook revisions in Japan, China, and the USA. In both China and the U.S., the anti-Japanese struggle remains emblematic of national unity and sacrifice for the nation in what is recalled as a kind of golden age, burnished all the brighter by the hardships of the era. On the other hand, assessments of the postwar experience have lurched sharply, in the case of China since the passing of Mao and the rise of new approaches to social class, market, and the global economy, and in the United States since interpretations of the Korean, Vietnamese, and subsequent wars have become the subject of unresolved debate. For Japan, by contrast, the Pacific War has always been the subject of conflicting interpretation—with new levels of bitterness emerging in the 1990s with revelations about the "comfort women." the biological warfare Unit 731, and the Nanjing Massacre. This paper explores the renewed importance of the war in the national images of each country as a set of clues about likely realignments in post-Cold War Asia.
Hiromitsu Inokuchi, University of Wisconsin, Madison
The major goal of this paper is understanding the significance of Ienaga Saburo’s lawsuits by situating them within the historical/political context of contemporary Japan and Asia. First, I briefly trace the development of textbook policy in Japan, from establishment of the modern education system in 1872 through Ienaga’s first lawsuit. The key issue here is the development of a certification and censorship program by the Ministry of Education. Second, I describe Ienaga’s first and second lawsuits, especially in terms of their contents, contentions, and decisions. Third, I examine Ienaga’s third lawsuit, which centered on assessments of World War II, especially Japan’s actions in Asia. Fourth, I discuss the importance and historical effects of the lawsuits. Finally, I discuss the significance of Ienaga’s lawsuits, finally concluded in 1997, in terms of the political struggle against the resurgence of nationalism, and suggest the importance of the formation of internationalism that links Japan’s democratic struggle to those of other countries.
Steve Potts, Hibbing Community College
Great efforts have been made in recent years to develop adequate curriculum for teaching about the Vietnam War in American colleges and universities. Publishers have produced college-level text books that, despite the competing demands of adequate coverage yet brevity, generally include the latest research and scholarly debate on the war.
Unfortunately the same cannot be said for high-school and primary-level textbooks produced for American students. The lack of adequate textual context for the war is compounded by political, pedagogical, and ideological considerations that sometimes reduce teaching about the war to a few hastily assembled and carefully proscribed approaches to a complex subject.
This presentation will discuss some of the challenges facing primary and secondary educators who wish to approach this complex subject in a globally aware, culturally sensitive, and informed fashion. This includes constraints of time, space, and budget. The presentation’s focus, however, will be on the creation and appropriation of a culturally nationalistic view of the war in American primary and secondary textbooks.