What Japanese history lessons leave out By Mariko Oi BBC News, Tokyo

What Japanese history lessons leave out
By Mariko Oi
BBC News, Tokyo
Japanese boys taking place in historical re-enactment
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Japanese people often fail to understand why neighbouring countries harbour a grudge over events that happened in the 1930s and 40s. The reason, in many cases, is that they barely learned any 20th Century history. I myself only got a full picture when I left Japan and went to school in Australia.

From Homo erectus to the present day - more than a million years of history in just one year of lessons. That is how, at the age of 14, I first learned of Japan's relations with the outside world.

For three hours a week - 105 hours over the year - we edged towards the 20th Century.

It's hardly surprising that some classes, in some schools, never get there, and are told by teachers to finish the book in their spare time.

When I returned recently to my old school, Sacred Heart in Tokyo, teachers told me they often have to start hurrying, near the end of the year, to make sure they have time for World War II.

"When I joined Sacred Heart as a teacher, I was asked by the principal to make sure that I teach all the way up to modern history," says my history teacher from Year Eight.

"We have strong ties with our sister schools in the Asian region so we want our students to understand Japan's historical relationship with our neighbouring countries."

I still remember her telling the class, 17 years ago, about the importance of Japan's war history and making the point that many of today's geopolitical tensions stem from what happened then.

Japanese history book showing footnote about rape of Nanking
Mariko's Japanese textbook: Only a footnote on the Nanjing massacre
I also remember wondering why we couldn't go straight to that period if it was so important, instead of wasting time on the Pleistocene epoch.

When we did finally get there, it turned out only 19 of the book's 357 pages dealt with events between 1931 and 1945.

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Nanjing massacre, 1937-38

Flowers at memorial for Nanjing massacre
A six-week period of bloodshed, after the Japanese capture of the city in December 1937
International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), set up after WWII, estimated more than 200,000 people were killed, including many women and children
Dispute over scale of atrocity remains a sticking point in Chinese/Japanese relations - some Japanese question whether a massacre took place
Scarred by history: The Rape of Nanking
BBC History: Japan's Quest for Empire
There was one page on what is known as the Mukden incident, when Japanese soldiers blew up a railway in Manchuria in China in 1931.

There was one page on other events leading up to the Sino-Japanese war in 1937 - including one line, in a footnote, about the massacre that took place when Japanese forces invaded Nanjing - the Nanjing Massacre, or Rape of Nanjing.

There was another sentence on the Koreans and the Chinese who were brought to Japan as miners during the war, and one line, again in a footnote, on "comfort women" - a prostitution corps created by the Imperial Army of Japan.

There was also just one sentence on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I wanted to know more, but was not quite eager enough to delve into the subject in my spare time. As a teenager, I was more interested in fashion and boys.

My friends had a chance to choose world history as a subject in Year 11. But by that stage I had left the Japanese schooling system, and was living in Australia.

I remember the excitement when I noticed that instead of ploughing chronologically through a given period, classes would focus on a handful of crucial events in world history.

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“
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Nobukatsu Fujioka
All of the photographs that China uses as evidence of the massacre are fabricated”

Nobukatsu Fujioka
So brushing aside my teacher's objection that I would struggle with the high volume of reading and writing in English - a language I could barely converse in - I picked history as one of my subjects for the international baccalaureate.

My first ever essay in English was on the Rape of Nanjing.

There is controversy over what happened. The Chinese say 300,000 were killed and many women were gang-raped by the Japanese soldiers, but as I spent six months researching all sides of the argument, I learned that some in Japan deny the incident altogether.

Nobukatsu Fujioka is one of them and the author of one of the books that I read as part of my research.

"It was a battlefield so people were killed but there was no systematic massacre or rape," he says, when I meet him in Tokyo.

"The Chinese government hired actors and actresses, pretending to be the victims when they invited some Japanese journalists to write about them.

"All of the photographs that China uses as evidence of the massacre are fabricated because the same picture of decapitated heads, for example, has emerged as a photograph from the civil war between Kuomintang and Communist parties."

As a 17-year-old student, I was not trying to make a definitive judgement on what exactly happened, but reading a dozen books on the incident at least allowed me to understand why many people in China still feel bitter about Japan's military past.

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Comfort women

Former comfort women in South Korea protest against Japan
200,000 women in territories occupied by Japan during WWII estimated to have been forced into becoming sex slaves for troops, or "comfort women"
In 1993 Japan acknowledged use of wartime brothels
In 2007 Japanese PM Shinzo Abe was forced to apologise after casting doubt on the existence of comfort women
While school pupils in Japan may read just one line on the massacre, children in China are taught in detail not just about the Rape of Nanjing but numerous other Japanese war crimes, though these accounts of the war are sometimes criticised for being overly anti-Japanese.

The same can be said about South Korea, where the education system places great emphasis on our modern history. This has resulted in very different perceptions of the same events in countries an hour's flying time apart.

One of the most contentious topics there is the comfort women.

Fujioka believes they were paid prostitutes. But Japan's neighbours, such as South Korea and Taiwan, say they were forced to work as sex slaves for the Japanese army.

Without knowing these debates, it is extremely difficult to grasp why recent territorial disputes with China or South Korea cause such an emotional reaction among our neighbours. The sheer hostility shown towards Japan by ordinary people in street demonstrations seems bewildering and even barbaric to many Japanese television viewers.

Equally, Japanese people often find it hard to grasp why politicians' visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine - which honours war criminals among other Japanese soldiers - cause quite so much anger.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, visiting the Yasukuni Shrine in 2012
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, visiting the Yasukuni Shrine in 2012
I asked the children of some friends and colleagues how much history they had picked up during their school years.

Twenty-year-old university student Nami Yoshida and her older sister Mai - both undergraduates studying science - say they haven't heard about comfort women.

"I've heard of the Nanjing massacre but I don't know what it's about," they both say.

"At school, we learn more about what happened a long time ago, like the samurai era," Nami adds.

Seventeen-year-old Yuki Tsukamoto says the "Mukden incident" and Japan's invasion of the Korean peninsula in the late 16th Century help to explain Japan's unpopularity in the region.

"I think it is understandable that some people are upset, because no-one wants their own country to be invaded," he says.

But he too is unaware of the plight of the comfort women.

Chinese demonstration 18 September 2012
Chinese protesters often mark anniversaries of 20th Century clashes with Japan
Former history teacher and scholar Tamaki Matsuoka holds Japan's education system responsible for a number of the country's foreign relations difficulties.

"Our system has been creating young people who get annoyed by all the complaints that China and South Korea make about war atrocities because they are not taught what they are complaining about," she said.

"It is very dangerous because some of them may resort to the internet to get more information and then they start believing the nationalists' views that Japan did nothing wrong."

I first saw her work, based on interviews with Japanese soldiers who invaded Nanjing, when I visited the museum in the city a few years ago.

"There were many testimonies by the victims but I thought we needed to hear from the soldiers," she says.

"It took me many years but I interviewed 250 of them. Many initially refused to talk, but eventually, they admitted to killing, stealing and raping."

Tamaki Matsuoka (2010)
Matsuoka accuses the government of a deliberate silence about atrocities
When I saw her video interviews of the soldiers, it was not just their admission of war crimes which shocked me, it was their age. Already elderly by the time she interviewed them, many had been barely 20 at the time, and in a strange way, it humanised them.

I was choked with an extremely complex emotion. Sad to see Japan repeatedly described as evil and dubbed "the devil", and nervous because I wondered how people around me would react if they knew I was Japanese. But there was also the big question why - what drove these young soldiers to kill and rape?

When Matsuoka published her book, she received many threats from nationalist groups.

She and Fujioka represent two opposing camps in a debate about what should be taught in Japanese schools.

Fujioka and his Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform say most textbooks are "masochistic" and only teach about Japan in negative light.

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History tuition in Japan

Students first learn about Japanese history in Year Six, over 105 hours of lessons
In Year Eight of junior high school, they study the history of Japan's relations with the rest of the world - this course now lasts for 130 hours
Seven history textbooks are approved by the Education Ministry - schools can choose which they use
Students can also choose to study World History in Year 11
"The Japanese textbook authorisation system has the so-called "neighbouring country clause" which means that textbooks have to show understanding in their treatment of historical events involving neighbouring Asian countries. It is just ridiculous," he says.

He is widely known for pressuring politicians to remove the term "comfort women" from all the junior high school textbooks. His first textbook, which won government approval in 2001, made a brief reference to the death of Chinese soldiers and civilians in Nanjing, but he plans to tone it down further in his next book.

But is ignorance the solution?

The Ministry of Education's guidelines for junior high schools state that all children must be taught about Japan's "historical relations with its Asian neighbours and the catastrophic damage caused by the World War II to humanity at large".

"That means schools have to teach about the Japanese military's increased influence and extension of its power [in the 1930s] and the prolonged war in China," says ministry spokesman Akihiko Horiuchi.

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Textbook crisis

2005 protest in South Korea against Japanese history textbooks
In 2005, protests were sparked in China and South Korea by a textbook prepared by the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, which had been approved by the government in 2001.

Foreign critics said it whitewashed Japan's war record during the 1930s and early 1940s.

It referred to the Nanjing massacre as an "incident", and glossed over the issue of comfort women.

The book was not used in many schools, but was a big commercial success.

"Students learn about the extent of the damage caused by Japan in many countries during the war as well as sufferings that the Japanese people had to experience especially in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Okinawa in order to understand the importance of international co-operation and peace.

"Based on our guideline, each school decides which specific events they focus on depending on the areas and the situation of the school and the students' maturity."

Matsuoka, however, thinks the government deliberately tries not to teach young people the details of Japan's atrocities.

Having experienced history education in two countries, the way history is taught in Japan has at least one advantage - students come away with a comprehensive understanding of when events happened, in what order.

In many ways, my schoolfriends and I were lucky. Because junior high students were all but guaranteed a place in the senior high school, not many had to go through what's often described as the "examination war".

For students who are competing to get into a good senior high school or university, the race is extremely tough and requires memorisation of hundreds of historical dates, on top of all the other subjects that have to be studied.

They have no time to dwell on a few pages of war atrocities, even if they read them in their textbooks.

All this has resulted in Japan's Asian neighbours - especially China and South Korea - accusing the country of glossing over its war atrocities.

Meanwhile, Japan's new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe criticises China's school curriculum for being too "anti-Japanese".

He, like Fujioka, wants to change how history is taught in Japan so that children can be proud of our past, and is considering revising Japan's 1993 apology over the comfort women issue.

If and when that happens, it will undoubtedly cause a huge stir with our Asian neighbours. And yet, many Japanese will have no clue why it is such a big deal.

http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/kiko10da/14385722.html

慰安婦教育ノススメ

３月21日のＮＪ（ニュージャージー）州の下院で、またまた民主、共和両党が結束し出席者全員一致により、また新たな慰安婦決議が可決された。これは、やはり今年の１月に可決されたＮＹ州上院の慰安婦決議に次ぐものだ。この州決議は1999年のカリホルニア州、2013年のＮＹ州、と米国では三番目の州決議である。

ＮＪといえば、世界大都市ＮＹに隣接するベッドタウンとして目立たない小さい州であったのが、最近では元祖慰安婦記念碑のあるパリセーズ・パーク、最近のバーゲン郡慰安婦碑と、名前だけは日本人にもすっかりおなじみとなった感がある。

パリセーズ・パークの慰安婦記念碑は2009年に設置された。去年の５月、晴天の霹靂のごとくはるばる日本から殴りこみにきたネトウヨ衆のことがおきるまでは、記念碑自体は、市の図書館のの横で人知れずひっそりと立っていた。拙者のブログ記事、『パリセーズ・パークの慰安婦騒動』でもこの事件を取り上げている。興味のある方はどうぞ。

今回のＮＪ決議案は、2007年の合衆国下院の慰安婦決議案を州全体として支持することの決意表明だそうだが、ＮＹ州のように、人道に反する罪、という表現は使用していないものの、内容的にもっと突っ込んだものでかなり日本に対してきつい、というのはさる著名なネトウヨ・ブログから。

拙者は、この決議文は、去年の５月にパリセーズパークに殴りこみをかけ、墓場の卒塔婆を思わせる白い竹島杭を打ち込んだり、住民の心理を逆撫でするような内容と書き方に問題のあるヘタな英語で地元新聞に宣伝広告を出した日本のネトウヨによる執拗ないやがらせ攻撃に対するＮＪ側の反撃だと思っている。
要するに、“Doｎ‘t mess with NJ”（ＮＪにケチつけるのは許さんぞ！）というネトウヨ衆への警告なのだ。

特に決議文の中で、自称日本代表議員団がケチをつけた２点についてしっかり反撃されていることに注目しよう。

まず、ネトウヨが捏造だと主張する慰安婦人口総数20万人については、単なる推定に過ぎないが、正確な数が不明なのは、終戦直後の日本政府が資料を破壊したからだ、という州側の逆襲に注目。

もう一点は、パリセーズ・パークの碑文に使われた“abducted” の意味であるが、日本側はもちろん拉致一点張りであり、それが捏造の証拠、とケチつけたのだ。このabductは主張者側の視点から「違法に連れていかれる」、という意で、拉致も意味として含まれている。
しかし、この決議文では、何と、forcibly kidnapped を使っている。疑いの余地なく「暴力を使った女性の連行」である。だが、これは歴史的にも一致している。朝鮮半島からの供給が間に合わない時には、自分たちで現地女性を暴力的に集めたのだ。

誤解しないでほしいのは、拙者の意図は決して日本人を卑しめることではないということだ。拙者は一体この原因はどこにあるのか、ということに一人の読書忙人として興味を抱いている。

とにかく、ＮＪ州は今回もまたヘタなＥメールでシツコクつきまとったネトウヨ勢に肘鉄を喰わせたといったところだろうが、これは戦争であるから、この先何が飛び出すがわからない、といったのが現状だろう。
　
そもそも、米で州が次々に慰安婦決議を出すこと自体はかなり異様、と拙者は思う。
州決議だから、日本に謝罪を求めることは出来ない。外交は連邦政府の領域であるからだ。しかし、ＮＪ州は、日本政府による若い世代の慰安婦教育推進をよびかけている。つまり、『慰安婦教育ノススメ』、というわけだ。

ＢＢＣの大井真理子さん、あなたはやはり正しかった。



以下は拙訳である。

ニュージャージー州下院　慰安婦決議　：　ＡＣＲ１５９

日本軍陣地において強制的に抑留された慰安婦の耐えなければならなかった苦難を記念することを主旨とする

日本軍陣地で強制的に抑留された慰安婦の耐えなければならなかった苦難を記念する同意による決議は、

『慰安婦』という用語は日本政府が使っている修辞語（＝体裁を繕う言葉）であり、1932年から1945年の期間大日本帝国軍により性奴隷を強要された女性達を指していること；そして　

ほとんどの慰安婦達は韓国または中国系であったがタイ、ヴェトナム、インドネシア、マレーシア、フィリピン、オーストラリア、オランダの女性達も皆同様に、大日本帝国軍による直接運営の、または軍の委託業者による、慰安所に抑留されたこと；そして

その内のある女性達は未成年でありながら慰安所に売られ、他の女性達は勧誘時にブローカーによる就業または金銭的援助という虚偽の約束を真に受け、そしてその他の女性達は暴力で誘拐され、日本の占領地域内くまなくに配置されていた兵士達に『つくす』目的で送り込まれたこと；そして

公式文書のほとんどが第二次大戦直後に日本政府の命令で破壊されてしまったので、慰安婦総数を推定することが困難にされ；多くの歴史家とメディアはおよそ20万人の若い女性達が勧誘又は兵士達による誘拐により日本軍の売春宿でサービスを強いられたと推定していること；そして

約３分の４の慰安婦人口は抑留先で過酷な待遇を受けたことが原因で死亡した。生存者達は暴力的性交と性病が原因で身体不妊となったが、強制的に抑留された日本軍慰安所でのしいられた苦難の数々に対する日本政府のきちんとした認識なくして、今日多数が亡くなりつつあること、そして

大日本帝国軍による性奴隷制について歴史上の責任を受け入れ、あのような数々の犯罪について若い世代を教育することを、日本政府に呼びかけた合衆国下院の慰安婦決議（H.R.121）５周年を記念することは、この州下院にとってふさわしいこと、等の理由によって今日、

ニュジャージー州下院議会により決議されるべし。


このネトウヨ・ＮＪ戦争がここまで発展してしまったことに対しての日本政府の責任は重大だ。なぜなら、最初にパリセーズ・パークを先駈け訪問したのは、他でもないＮＹのヒロキ総領事だからだ。彼はその時市長に慰安婦記念碑を撤去することを持ちかけたのだ。

撤去が日本政府の意にもとずいたものであれば、このヒロキ総領事は政府の仕事をしているわけだが、そうでなかったら当然失職である。まず、政府及び外務省はその点を明確にする必要があった。だが、日本領事館側の対応はそれに輪をかけたかのごとく全く不可解。

当時の野田政権のノラリクラリぶりと日本領事館によるヒロキ発言はなかった！という米国住民を全くバカにした不誠実きわまりない態度で乗り切ろうという官僚による外交失態が、今日のこの深刻な日米対立の原因となっている。結果的にこの代償は日本国民が負わねばならないという、昔も今も変わらぬ責任ある人々の見事な責任転嫁ぶりだ。外務省は責任を明確にすべきだ。これも、日本人が日本人を騙す、の典型だ、というのが拙者。

冷戦の真っ最中であったニクソン時代だと思うが、かって極地戦争の論理というのが唱えられた。これは東西冷戦としての米・ソの対立は中心をはるか離れた極地で紛争化となって現れるというのだが、そのよい例としてヴェトナム戦争があげられたものだ。

ところで、ネトウヨ・NJ 戦争というのは何やらそれを思いおこさせないだろうか。