Japan Press Weekly

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2008 November 5 - 11 [HISTORY]

Defense Academy’s textbook describes Japan’s past wars of aggression as for self-defense

The National Defense Academy of Japan (NDA) uses a textbook that describes the Second World War as “clashes arising from the need of self-defense against Western powers’ aggression.”

This is what the “Introduction to Defense Studies,” a textbook used for the required subject “Outline of the theory of self-defense,” states. The textbook was obtained by Akahata.

Descriptions in the textbook are similar to ousted Self-Defense Force Chief of Staff Gen. Tamogami Toshio’s argument that he presented in his essay to express the view that Japan was not an aggressor country and raise questions about the NDA education program.

The textbook was written by the NDA in March 2007 when Abe Shinzo was the Japanese prime minister.

In the second paragraph of Article 4 titled “History of the World Wars”, it explains the pre-World War II era as follows: “Placed under the Versailles system that imposed hard work and penal servitude, it was natural in Germany that nationalism flamed and drove the nation into vengeance. The nationalistic fever traveled to Italy, Japan, and Spain.” This in effect justifies the wars of aggression carried out by Nazi Germany and Japan’s militarism.

The textbook uses pre-war names to describe some of Japan’s past wars as wars in self-defense. In the “History of Japan’s Wars” (Paragraph 3 of Article 4), it claims that all Japanese acts of aggression since the Meiji era, including the Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, World War I, the Manchurian Incident, the “China Incident” (Japanese-Chinese War), and the “Greater East Asia War” (Pacific War), were “to defend Asia from the Western powers, and this caused threats to Japan’s rights and interests.”

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Japanese Communist Party Secretariat Head Ichida Tadayoshi on October 10 commented on reports that Tamogami asserted that his thesis has been supported by two former prime ministers, including Mori Yoshiro.

He said, “If the reports are true, it is a serious matter suggesting that politicians laid the groundwork for Tamogami’s ultra-nationalistic arguments”.

Ichida also pointed out that many of the members of then Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s cabinet, which appointed Tamogami as ASDF Chief of Staff in March 2007, were “pro-Yasukuni” politicians claiming that Japan’s past war was not a war of aggression but a just war in self-defense and that then Prime Minister Abe himself also called for “breaking away from the post-war regime.”