War Memory, Nationalism and Education in Postwar Japan, 1945–2007: The Japanese History Textbook Controversy and Ienaga Saburō's Court Challenges (review)

University history professors do not teach right and wrong answers; we provide a range of plausible explanations backed by evidence and let students decide on their own. But the writing of grade-school history textbooks is different, especially in Japan. It requires definitive, unambiguous accounts with no room for qualifications and subtleties like "but on the other hand" or "it depends on how you define 'massacre.'" When politics intrude as well, confrontation will surely result. In this book, Yoshiko Nozaki describes and provides political contextualization for lawsuits that Ienaga Saburō (1913–2002) lodged against the Ministry of Education (MOE)¹ over textbook screening. Nozaki "participated in the Ienaga movement as a volunteer in its international campaign" (p. x). Ienaga-sensei was my graduate adviser from 1972 to 1979. So Nozaki and I both supported his antigovernment litigation, but today I suspect our main cause for disagreement is that she feels a duty to carry on his activist/reformist legacy (p. 156) whereas I seek academic detachment in historical distance.

Briefly, Nozaki's thesis is that war memory, as formed through education, is central to the hegemonic narrative that every state constructs in order to forge a national identity. But in Japan, which claims to have "moved from a totalitarian regime to a democratic society" (p. xiii), citizens have a say in deciding which war narratives and memories are conveyed in schools. Based on that assumption, Ienaga and his supporters constructed what Nozaki repeatedly labels "counter-memories" rooted in "progressive, critical, cosmopolitan peace-and-justice narratives" to foster an "alternative identity" opposed to the "imperialist, right-wing nationalist" one perpetuated by MOE textbook censorship (pp. xii–xviii and passim). Nozaki identifies "right-wing nationalist" as "revisionist approaches to historical memory and textbook controversies" ranging from "moderate conservatism to something akin to fascism" (p. 157). She does not define "imperialist" but seems to mean emperor-centric historical views carried over from the pre-1945 era or glorifications of past aggression to facilitate remilitarization. Exploiting conditions under the reverse course and cold war, the MOE revived something "close to the state-authorized textbook system in place during World War II" (p. 21) and launched attacks on textbook authors in 1955 and in 1979–82. Ienaga responded by suing the MOE in 1965, 1967, and 1984. His decision was anchored in personal experiences. The pre-1945 education system, with its MOE-authored textbooks, prevented students such as him from questioning emperor-state morality and abuses of power by the military; that, along with media censorship, precluded youths from halting Japan's slide to war.

In his litigation, Ienaga argued three main points. First, textbook screening violated rights and freedoms enshrined in the constitution and the Fundamental Law on Education. Second, if overruled on that point, he would argue that the MOE could legally order editorial changes or factual corrections but no major changes in content. Third, if overruled on that point too, he would argue that the MOE overrode its legal powers by applying arbitrary, inconsistent procedures and empirically flawed criteria to demand changes on eight specific historical issues. Six of these dealt with war memory: Japan's aggression, rapes in the Nanjing Massacre, the systematic nature of that atrocity, Unit 731, military orders for mass civilian suicides in Okinawa, and Korean resistance during the 1894–95 Sino-Japanese War. The courts ruled favorably only on his third point and only on some of the six war-memory issues, but Ienaga achieved much despite those disappointing results. Although conceding his most important point, the constitutionality of textbook screening, he made the MOE more transparent and amenable to criticism than ever before; and, by daring to indict his government for criminal wrongdoing, he raised citizen awareness of public education as a sphere of participatory democracy. This produced a decisive change...