The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan

Chapter 4 Educating a Peace-Loving People: Narratives of War in Postwar Textbooks

71 Chapter 4 Educating a Peace-Loving People Narratives of War in Postwar Textbooks Our country lost. The people suffered greatly during the long war. This misfortune was caused by the militarists oppressing the people and waging a reckless war. —Kuni no ayumi (Footsteps of the Nation; 1947) There is no more dramatic indication of the change from democratic politics , which had developed gradually since the Meiji period, to the dark, gloomy reactionary politics, than the phrase reportedly uttered by Premier Inukai as a pistol was pressed against his breast—“Let us discuss it,” the blunt reply of the naval officer, “No discussion needed,” and the following report of the pistol. Parliamentary government is politics based on “discussion”; dictatorial government is the politics of “No discussion needed.” When we reflect on it, the report of the pistol at the time of the May 15 Incident was the funeral knell for democratic party politics, which had begun to progress. It was an ominous sign of things to come, driving toward the outrage of the Pacific War from which there was no turning back. —Minshushugi (Democracy; 1949) ducation was an integral part of the Occupation’s efforts to reconstruct Japan and rehabilitate the Japanese as a democratic, peaceloving people. The strategy was straightforward: SCAP’s Civil Information and Education (CIE) Section eliminated courses in history, geography, and morals that inculcated ultranationalist thought; it then directed the Ministry of Education to produce new textbooks for social studies courses that condemned militarism and ultranationalism and encouraged democratic habits of thought. From the prosaic Kuni no ayumi (Footsteps of the Nation) to the dramatic Minshushugi (Democracy), these texts built the basis for pacifism and democracy by condemning the militarist leadership for forcing the Japanese E 72 The Victim as Hero people into a reckless war and causing misery to the Japanese and other peoples.1 Occupation-era texts established two perennial themes in what came to be called “peace education” (heiwa kyòiku): the people had been forced or duped by their militarist leaders into cooperating with the war effort; science and culture were the proper realms in which Japan could contribute to the postwar international community. After independence, history narratives in social studies textbooks became the object of contention between politically progressive forces —often allied with the Japan Teachers Union (JTU), which championed the UNESCO credo that education is the surest safeguard for peace— and conservative forces that viewed Occupation reforms to have been as excessively destructive of the national fabric in education as in other areas. Between these two camps in the struggle over the content of peace education lay a chasm between progressives’ alienation from state authority and conservatives’ faith in it. Progressives feared any revision that encouraged patriotism without unconditionally condemning Japan’s militarist past, for they felt this threatened a return to wartime militarism and its intolerance of pacifist and liberal thought.2 Conservatives argued that textbooks had become so thorough in condemning ultranationalism and so radical in promoting liberal thought that younger generations were becoming deficient in patriotic sentiment and bereft of any moral foundation as Japanese. Yoshida Shigeru complained near the end of the Occupation: “Since the termination of the Pacific conflict, the individual had become everything and the state nothing.”3 In the half century since the Occupation’s end, conservative groups have made repeated attempts to regain a measure of control over history and social studies textbook narratives.4 The first and most successful effort took the form of the Democratic Party’s commitment to revise what were termed “lamentable” (ureubeki) texts in the middle 1950s.5 Conservative political and administrative pressure brought several changes to the textbook authorization procedures in the late 1950s and early 1960s, generally making publishers more sensitive to Ministry of Education guidance. In 1956, local boards of education were made appointive rather than elective, and these boards were given final authority to choose textbooks the next year. In 1957, Education Minister Kiyose Ichirò brought examination and approval of texts more directly under ministry control by adding and expanding ministerial representation in the evaluative and review stages of certification. The 1963 Textbook Law required publishers to register Educating a Peace-Loving People 73 as qualified textbook providers and limited them to two resubmissions of texts. There were two primary consequences of these developments : smaller publishers were driven out of the textbook business, and the remaining textbooks became generic. Ever since...