War Memory, Nationalism and Education in Postwar Japan

The Japanese History Textbook Controversy and Ienaga Saburo's Court Challenges

Yoshiko Nozaki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134195893
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

The controversy over official state-approved history textbooks in Japan, which omit or play down many episodes of Japan's occupation of neighbouring countries during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945), and which have been challenged by critics who favour more critical, peace and justice perspectives, goes to the heart of Japan's sense of itself as a nation. The degree to which Japan is willing to confront its past is not just about history, but also about how Japan defines itself at present, and going forward. This book examines the history textbook controversy in Japan. It sets the controversy in the context of debates about memory, and education, and in relation to evolving politics both within Japan, and in Japan's relations with its neighbours and former colonies and countries it invaded. It discusses in particular the struggles of Ienaga Saburo, who has made crucial contributions, including through three epic lawsuits, in challenging the official government position.

Winner of the American Educational Research Association 2009 Outstanding Book Award in the Curriculum Studies category.

1 Japan’s defeat and educational reforms

The struggle over the Japanese national narrative and identity in the early postwar years, 1945–1965

New questions will be heard:

“What are the modes of existence of this discourse?”

“Where does it come from; how is it circulated; who controls it?”

“What placements are determined for possible subjects?”

“Who can fulfill these diverse functions of the subject?”

Behind all these questions we would hear little more than the murmur of indifference:

“What matter who’s speaking?”

Michel Foucault, “What Is An Author?”

On August 15, 1945, the day Emperor Hirohito announced the acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration to his subjects, the Suzuki cabinet resigned en masse. Ota Kozo, the outgoing Education Minister, presented his final instruction to the schools on that day. His message was that Japan’s defeat had been brought on by the people’s insufficient dedication to the emperor, along with their failure to bring into full play the spirit nurtured by their imperial education. Hereafter, he concluded, students and teachers ought to devote themselves wholly to their duties as imperial subjects, and to the maintenance of the kokutai. ¹ In referring to kokutai, Ota had in mind the emperor, who in presurrender doctrine was the essence of the nation and embodied the national identity. Ota, like many other officials who had promoted ultranationalistic and emperor-centered education in the service of war, persisted in his determination to secure the imperial state even while accepting military defeat.² In this and other related ways, much of the imperial system, which had committed all sorts of atrocities, remained intact at the beginning of postwar Japan.

A modern nation-state governs its people in part by creating and disseminating narratives. One important site of such efforts is the school textbook, especially history and social studies textbooks. After all, education is one of the most effective ways to promote a national narrative (official history) and to make and remake certain identities into the national identity.³ The state, whether or not it is directly involved in textbook production and circulation, can readily reinforce dominant ideologies. In response, alternative and oppositional forces develop their own counter-narratives and identities. For the meanings attached to a given identity—in this case the national identity—are “an unstable and ‘de-centered’ complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle.”⁴

The ongoing battles over educational content in postwar Japan constitute one of the crucial fronts in a long-running struggle over the identity of the nation. To be sure, struggles over the national narrative existed in Japan before and even during World War II, when official narratives such as the Imperial Rescript on Education and other “fine militarist stories” played a crucial role in Japanese identity formation.⁵ The state’s strict and often violent oppression made it difficult or impossible for counter-narratives (e.g., the proletarian educational movement) to redirect the nation’s course.

In the postwar era, Japan professes to have become a “democratic” nation, and asserts that its educational systems have changed accordingly. As Education Minister Ota’s final instruction makes clear, however, the powers that had committed all manner of wartime atrocities were still intact at the formation of the “new” Japan. Those powers retained all the structures developed in the preceding years, including the “common sense” that represented Japanese people as imperial subjects. While a series of “educational reforms” were implemented under the supervision of the occupation forces to meet the requirements of the new “democratic” era, the effectiveness of such reforms was limited by the specific conditions that existed at a fundamental level.

Worse, because U.S. policy shifted from a pro-democracy emphasis to a primarily anti-communist focus, Japan’s conservative and right-wing nationalist forces, which formed a power bloc in the 1950s, quickly succeeded in seizing control over the state. Their successes included the (ultra)nationalist recapturing of the Ministry of Education (Monbusho; hereafter MOE), through which, by the end of 1950s, the right wing was able to “reverse” many aspects of the postwar educational reforms. This move was significant, because it enabled right-wing groups to partially impose nationalist narratives on the schools, especially in the area of history textbook content.

In this context, how did the processes of educational reforms take place at the beginning of the occupation period (1945-early 1950s) and how did the counter-reforms take place in the following years during the period of conservative and nationalist restoration (early 1950s–1965)? How did these reforms affect the actual content of history textbooks written during these two periods? The treatments of World War II-related events in the textbooks are of particular interest here, since the descriptions and meanings of these events would become a center of the textbook controversy in years to come.

Blacking-out Textbooks

The Japanese government’s postwar textbook policy began with a process referred to as blacking-out (suminuri) textbooks. At the end of August 1945, while considering how to maintain the kokutai, the MOE instructed the schools to exercise discretion in using the existing textbooks when reopening in September. On September 20, the MOE directed the schools to have teachers delete the militaristic content from textbooks and other educational materials.⁶ In all likelihood, however, the MOE’s actual intention was more to conceal, than to negate, militarism in education, as some officials, looking back on the event years later, referred to its purpose as trying to make a favorable impression and to keep militarist content from the eyes of the occupation force.⁷

In any case, the textbook blacking-out did not aim at eliminating the emperor-centered education programs. While the MOE listed several general criteria for content removal, it did not specify the exact items to be removed, except those contained in the second-semester Japanese-language textbooks for elementary schools. Moreover, the items specified were mainly war-related descriptions, and many stories concerning adoration of the emperors remained, as well as the use of Kimigayo, a song wishing for the prosperity of imperial sovereignty.⁸ Finally, the MOE also recommended the introduction of educational content concerning the kokutai and the moral establishment, as the blacking-out would result in a shortage of materials. This provision implied the use of the Imperial Rescript on Education.⁹

In October 1945, the Supreme Command for the Allied Powers (hereafter known as SCAP) began to issue directives concerning education, in which curriculum content and textbooks were central issues. For example, on October 22 SCAP ordered the elimination of militarist and ultranationalist ideologies from schooling, and ordered that the teachers who had implemented extremely militaristic and ultranationalistic education be purged.¹⁰ On December 15 it ordered the abolition of any government propagation of shinto, including a ban on the use of some state-authored texts and teaching materials such as Kokutai no Hongi (The True Meaning of the Kokutai) and Shinmin no Michi (The Path of the Imperial Subject). In its informal pronouncements, SCAP made it clear that Japanese history textbooks would have to be rewritten. Finally, on December 31, it ordered that teaching of morals (shushiri), Japanese history, and geography be suspended and that textbooks and teacher’s guides in these subject areas be withdrawn.

While SCAP’s orders were issued in Tokyo, notification of the MOE’s instructions concerning textbook content removal eventually reached the local schools, and teachers began to have students black out—in some cases, cut out or paste over—parts of the textbooks. Because the MOE’s instructions lacked specifics, local officials and schools needed to develop their own lists of items to be removed from the textbooks in all subject areas. In some prefectures, it was the prefecture that developed and sent the list; in others, the school officials and teachers developed the list. These locally developed lists included far more items for removal than the instructions given by the MOE. In any case, no two blacked-out textbooks emerged from the process exactly alike, indicating that each classroom teacher took some liberty in determining which items were to be removed. In a sense, though to a limited extent, a different construction of national narrative took place in each classroom.

By the middle of November, the MOE completed a list of the items to be removed from all textbooks in use in all schools, and in February 1946, it sent a second notice to the local schools. However, the notice contained only items for elementary Japanese and math textbooks. It thus failed to provide schools with a complete set of instructions for carrying out the task.¹¹ The MOE allowed the schools to use the blacked-out textbooks until July 31, 1946. In April (the beginning of the 1946 school year), it published and distributed “stopgap” textbooks in the subject areas permitted to be taught by the occupation forces. These textbooks were in short supply, which provoked criticism from both teachers and parents.¹²

Renewed Interest in History Teaching and the Last State-authored History Textbooks

SCAP’s December 31 order referring to the development of new history textbooks encouraged some Japanese historians, including Ienaga Saburo, to articulate new national narratives. Soon after the order, Ienaga and others began to address the issues of Japan’s history education, textbook writing, and publishing in the postwar era. For example, Ienaga, who was a historian and a former teacher at a high school and a teacher training school (shihan gakko), wrote an article on this topic in which he essentially argued for a history education based on historical scholarship, an education that would teach verified—kagakuteki (scientific) to use his word—facts. As he stated:

How do we search for the correct knowledge of Japanese history that should be the content of the correct teaching of the national history? I believe there is no other way but to seek it through the right kind of research on national history (kokushigaku). It has often been said that history as a specialized discipline and the teaching of history are different. Some critics have even argued the two to be completely separate, but I have always disagreed with this view. In my view, the correct teaching of history has to be based on historical scholarship to the utmost.¹³

Ienaga also drafted his own history textbook in early 1946, at the request of the Fuzanbo, a commercial press (this project preceded Ienaga’s involvement in writing a state-authored textbook, discussed below). His book Shin Nihonshi (New Japanese History) reflected his view that education should convey democratic values and the desire for peace. In 1947, the Fuzanbo published the text as a book for a general audience, because the Japanese government at that point appeared not to allow non-governmental school textbooks.¹⁴ (It was after the state began to certify history textbooks for secondary schools through its textbook screening system that the text was eventually published as a school textbook. The lawsuits Ienaga later filed were for the revised versions of this book.)

Meanwhile, the MOE, pressed by SCAP, began preliminary arrangements for writing new history textbooks sometime in the fall of 1945. Toyoda Takeshi, historian and one of the compilers from the MOE’s Textbook Bureau, was in charge.¹⁵ In December, the MOE officially formed a committee of ten prominent historians to develop elementary and secondary school history textbook(s), and Toyoda, in consultation with the committee (and some historians outside the committee), began to draft a history textbook for elementary schools. From the beginning there had been a conflict between SCAP and the MOE. While SCAP thought it necessary to write entirely new history textbooks, the MOE insisted that it was sufficient to simply eliminate the militaristic content from already existing textbooks. Toyoda’s draft began with accounts of Japanese history in terms of some archaeological findings, which pleased the Civil Information and Education Section (hereafter CIE) of SCAP. But the text also included the mythology on Japan’s divine origin and epic imperial figures at great length—an element that the CIE could not overlook. The project was canceled in May 1946, just after the account of the ancient period had been completed.¹⁶ SCAP suggested that the MOE begin a new project with historians who were not affiliated with the Textbook Bureau.¹⁷

The MOE launched a new project to develop three textbooks—for elementary, secondary, and teacher training schools¹⁸—each dividing Japanese history into four periods: the Kodai and Heian period (ancient-1192), the years from the Kamakura to Momoyma period (1192–1600), the Tokugawa period (1600–1868), and the Meiji era and thereafter (1868-present).¹⁹ The site of this project was the refectory of the Historiographical Institute at Tokyo Imperial University, and the MOE commissioned eleven historians for the project, with each member selecting and organizing the textbook content for his or her assigned sections.²⁰ All eleven, however, followed three common principles: (1) prohibition of propaganda of any kind; (2) prohibition of militarism, ultranationalism, or propagation of shintoism; and (3) inclusion of accomplishments of ordinary people in the areas of economy, invention, scholarship, and art, with mention of the successive emperors’ achievements if appropriate.²¹

Ienaga was asked to write about the ancient period for the elementary school textbook, later entitled Kuni no Ayumi (The Course of the Nation).²² He used Toyoda’s draft as a basis because he faced severe time restrictions—the manuscript had to be finished in about one month’s time. But he revised Toyoda’s text in some significant ways. For example, although he followed Toyoda’s example to begin the text with a description of stone-age civilization and archeological findings, he deleted much of the (remaining) mythology Toyoda had included, and he proceeded objectively to describe the formation of Japan as a state.²³

CIE had its Japanese employees examine the manuscript daily, and, according to Ienaga, even though CIE did order them to remove some language (e.g., evaluative modifiers and adjectives), it never asked the authors to include specific descriptions prior to their writing, except for requesting that a reference to Japan’s building of a democratic nation under the occupation be included in the last section and that a chronological table be attached to the text.²⁴ On balance, Ienaga, who believed in the separation of history and mythology, thought the CIE oversight was less oppressive than the censorship he had experienced during the war. Ienaga felt other authors shared his feeling, and indeed Okubo Toshiaki, one of Ienaga’s co-authors who wrote the modern/contemporary section of Kuni no Ayumi, later stated that the content was left entirely up to the authors.²⁵ Other authors might have felt differently about the CIE’s role, however, as Okada Akio, another co-author who was assigned to the Edo period and who edited the entire text with others in the end, later stated somewhat critically that the CIE had the phrase “ravag[ing] in Nanjing” (a line referring to the Nanjing Massacre) inserted in the section describing the Japanese invasion of China, from Shanghai to Nanjing in particular, in 1937.²⁶

Kuni no Ayumi, published in September 1946, was the first postwar state-authored history textbook. It was also the first state-authored book to disclose the names of the actual authors. The MOE published two other textbooks: Nihon no Rekishi (History of Japan, published in 1...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword by Richard Minear
• Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Japan’s defeat and educational reforms: The struggle over the Japanese national narrative and identity in the early postwar years, 1945–1965
• 2 The politics over education: Oppositional forces and Ienaga Saburo’s first and second textbook lawsuits, 1950s–1970s
• 3 Counter-memories of the Asia-Pacific War: The struggle for recognition, the history controversy, and school textbooks in the 1970s
• 4 Ienaga Saburo’s third lawsuit and strategic conjunctures: Changing intra- and inter-national relations and the textbook controversy in the 1980s
• 5 What is historical fact? Dispute over historical research and education in court
• 6 Court decisions on Ienaga Saburo’s lawsuits: Critical trends in history textbooks, the late 1980s–1997
• 7 Nationalism, democracy, and the textbook market: Right-wing nationalist history textbook projects, 1982–2007
• Epilogue: The Japanese history textbook controversy and the significance of Ienaga Saburo’s textbook lawsuits
• Notes