Japan Press Weekly

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2012 April 4 - 10 [EDUCATION]

Tokyo education board praises Japan’s past war in supplementary textbook

The Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education has incorporated in a supplementary textbook on Japanese history for high school students a sidebar that glorifies Japan’s war of aggression without informing the book’s authors or supervising editors.

Copies of this book have already distributed to about 43,000 students.

The authors and supervising editors told the press that they were unaware of the revision, and that they never saw the revised-version of the book. None of them had any part in the revision.

Azegami Miwako, Japanese Communist Party member of the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, took up this issue at a meeting of the assembly’s committee on education last month.

Ohara Masayuki, an official of the education board, in response to Azegami argued that public education should refrain from imposing a particular ideology on students, revealing his understanding that the war was “war of aggression” is just a “particular way of thinking”.

The JCP assemblyperson pointed out that Ohara’s statement conflicts with the 1995 official government admission that its colonial rule and aggression had “caused tremendous damage and suffering to many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations.”

Assemblypersons of the Liberal Democratic Party even called for the deletion of an account of the Nanjing Massacre from the supplementary textbook, claiming that such an account being placed in the school book itself is a problem in the first place.

Behind these moves lies the policy of Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintaro. He frequently asserts that the war waged by Japan liberated colonies in Asia, and that conventional education has forced students to have only an overly critical view of war history.