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2015 August 26 - September 1 TOP3 [SOCIAL ISSUES]

Imabari City decides to stop using war-glorifying textbooks

Pushed by citizens’ movements, the board of education of Ehime’s Imabari City on August 28 decided that next year public junior high schools in the city will stop using textbooks published by a rightist publisher, Ikuhosha.

Since 2012, Ikuhosha’s history and civics textbooks that glorify Japan’s past war of aggression and try to implant students with support for a constitutional revision have been used in the city’s public junior high schools.

An Imabari local of the National Association for a Peaceful, Democratic, and Progressive Japan (Imabari Kakushinkon) and eleven civic organizations in the city have been tenaciously campaigning against the use of Ikuhosha’s textbooks in public schools. They in July made representations to the education board, demanding that it select textbooks other than Ikuhosha.

Osawa Hiroaki of the Imabari Kakushinkon said, “We appreciate the education board making a decision respecting teachers’ opinion.”


Past related articles:
> Nagoya City decides not to use rightist textbooks in schools [July 30, 2015]
> War-glorifying textbooks to be used in Tokyo-run junior high schools [July 24, 2015]