Lies my teacher told me
10/11/06 22:47![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomyLately I've been reading in bits and pieces about the Japanese history textbook controversy--largely from this book, which I like despite the slightly alarmist tone and tendency to use too much bold type.
In a nutshell, a group of conservative scholars started declaiming current K-12 history textbooks as being too left-wing and self-loathing, and "brainwashing students with Marxist thought," and, believing that the study of history should instill patriotism and pride in one's heritage, they wrote their own textbook. Which omitted any mention of "comfort women," and said about the Nanjing Massacre: "At the Tokyo war crimes tribunal, there was testimony that many Chinese civilians were murdered when Nanjing was captured. However, there are doubts about the historical documents, and there are many diffferent viewpoints, and the debate continues to this day." And, in general, the book puts a little bit of a smiley face on Japan's colonization of Korea and Manchuria, though it doesn't go into the depths of historical denial that you see on some right-wing Japanese web pages. Textbooks do have to get government approval as objective, factual, and unbiased, and after over a hundred changes, this one squeaked by, and there was a large publicity campaign for it.
About five hundred copies were actually bought, for use in a very small handful of schools.
However, the publicity campaign did work at least somewhat, because orders for the textbooks most attacked as self-loathing Marxist propaganda dropped, and several of those textbooks ended up toning down their descriptions of the most-criticized bits (in particular, comfort women, and the Nanjing Massacre). Which weren't actually anything to get up in arms about to begin with; they were adequate, not overly graphic or anything.
And China and Korea protested about the conservative textbook being approved at all, even if hardly any schools ended up using it.
When reading what the "Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform" has to say, it ends up coming off as very... "C'mon, every country did some awful stuff, so why do you have to keep picking on me?" It's an interesting question for me; when I moved to the south I was really quite surprised by the statues of civil war generals and such, and generally the idea that anyone would be proud that their ancestors fought on what so obviously was the wrong side. And of course the US has these issues too, over the glorification of Christopher Columbus, and so forth. It's true that the past can't be changed. It's true that everyone's history has some pretty terrible stuff in it. But it doesn't have to be "self-loathing" to acknowledge the truth of one's history. We don't have to see it with guilt, or shame, but with simple humility. We're not perfect; we don't have all the answers; and we cannot be completely innocent. But that's all the more reason to try to be a little bit kinder and a little bit more open-minded.
It is interesting to read the parts of the conservative textbook that touched on how we interpret history, which said things like, "History is written by the winners. It's wrong to judge history based on our modern morality."
So often, it's liberals who get accused of excessive relativism. ;)
In a nutshell, a group of conservative scholars started declaiming current K-12 history textbooks as being too left-wing and self-loathing, and "brainwashing students with Marxist thought," and, believing that the study of history should instill patriotism and pride in one's heritage, they wrote their own textbook. Which omitted any mention of "comfort women," and said about the Nanjing Massacre: "At the Tokyo war crimes tribunal, there was testimony that many Chinese civilians were murdered when Nanjing was captured. However, there are doubts about the historical documents, and there are many diffferent viewpoints, and the debate continues to this day." And, in general, the book puts a little bit of a smiley face on Japan's colonization of Korea and Manchuria, though it doesn't go into the depths of historical denial that you see on some right-wing Japanese web pages. Textbooks do have to get government approval as objective, factual, and unbiased, and after over a hundred changes, this one squeaked by, and there was a large publicity campaign for it.
About five hundred copies were actually bought, for use in a very small handful of schools.
However, the publicity campaign did work at least somewhat, because orders for the textbooks most attacked as self-loathing Marxist propaganda dropped, and several of those textbooks ended up toning down their descriptions of the most-criticized bits (in particular, comfort women, and the Nanjing Massacre). Which weren't actually anything to get up in arms about to begin with; they were adequate, not overly graphic or anything.
And China and Korea protested about the conservative textbook being approved at all, even if hardly any schools ended up using it.
When reading what the "Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform" has to say, it ends up coming off as very... "C'mon, every country did some awful stuff, so why do you have to keep picking on me?" It's an interesting question for me; when I moved to the south I was really quite surprised by the statues of civil war generals and such, and generally the idea that anyone would be proud that their ancestors fought on what so obviously was the wrong side. And of course the US has these issues too, over the glorification of Christopher Columbus, and so forth. It's true that the past can't be changed. It's true that everyone's history has some pretty terrible stuff in it. But it doesn't have to be "self-loathing" to acknowledge the truth of one's history. We don't have to see it with guilt, or shame, but with simple humility. We're not perfect; we don't have all the answers; and we cannot be completely innocent. But that's all the more reason to try to be a little bit kinder and a little bit more open-minded.
It is interesting to read the parts of the conservative textbook that touched on how we interpret history, which said things like, "History is written by the winners. It's wrong to judge history based on our modern morality."
So often, it's liberals who get accused of excessive relativism. ;)
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11/11/06 01:05 (UTC)