As reported in the Japan Times and other media outlets, the Otawara Board of Education, in Tochigi Prefecture, has adopted controversial - some say revisionist - junior high school history and civics textbooks edited by the infamous Society for History Textbook Reform, or Tsukurukai, for short.

China is irate, Seoul is disappointed, and the Tochigi teachers union is annoyed by the Otawara BOE’s decision to use the Tsukurukai’s “New History Textbook”, because according to the Japan Times :

The texts play down the 1937 Nanjing Massacre and ignore the sexual enslavement of women for Japanese soldiers and depicts Japanese wartime actions as aimed at liberating other parts of Asia.

The Tsukurukai, anticipating negative foreign reaction to the textbooks, has posted translations of the newest edition of the book, online and in pdf form, in English, Korean, and in traditional and simplified Chinese.

Do the Tsukurukai textbooks distort the truth? The answer is “yes”, if only because the books convey a ton of abstract information that would be very difficult to teach to an average fourteen-year-old student. There doesn’t seem to be any attempt at teaching historiography or critical thinking, and historical events are prescribed as facts as experienced by a single point of view throughout the ages.

It’s a typical problem presented by most history textbooks. The Japanese Ministry of Education (now called MEXT), like most educational authorities in other parts of the world, tries to compensate for the problem of textbooks by requiring educators to help students develop critical thinking skills. Most Japanese history teachers employ supplementary teaching materials to do just that.

However, the question remains, do the Tsukurukai textbooks teach a particularly distorted version of Japanese history? The books could hardly be said to hail from the liberal or progressive side of the political spectrum, and could be accused of teaching moral relativism:

Most people may believe that the reason for studying history is to learn what happened in the past, but that is not necessarily correct. A more accurate definition of history as a discipline is learning how people of the past lived in the context of the events of the past.

Japundit readers can judge for themselves the merits of the textbook that has been the cause of so much tension in Asia in recent months.

The Tsukurukai on the Meiji restoration:

The Meiji Restoration was unlike the revolutions that took places (sic) in Europe, the French Revolution in particular. No violent, angry mobs attempted to purge the nobility. It was none other than the Meiji government, all of whose members were warriors, that abolished the warrior class…The Meiji Restoration was an age of reforms set in motion by warriors who viewed the pursuit of the public good as their personal missions.

On Japan’s need to invade and eventually annex the Korean Peninsula:

If the Korean Peninsula came under the control of Russia, which was extending its empire eastward, it would serve as the base for an attack on Japan. As an island nation, Japan would have great difficulty defending itself…It was important to Japan’s national security that Korea become an impregnable fortress.

On the annexation of Korea:

The Japanese government decided that it was necessary to annex Korea to protect Japanese security and Japanese interests in Manchuria. In 1910, Japan proceeded with the annexation, suppressing protests with military force. Within Korea, there was bitter opposition to the loss of independence. Even after Japanese annexation, the movement to restore independence remained deep-rooted and active. Some of the colonial policies implemented by the Government-General of Korea, established after annexation, were development projects designed to construct railroads and irrigation facilities; land surveys began. But due to the surveys many Koreans were driven off the land they had been cultivating. Furthermore, introducing of Japanese language instruction into school curriculum and other assimilation programs increased anti-Japanese sentiments among the Koreans.

The 1937 Rape of Nanjing rates a footnote:

Many Chinese soldiers and civilians were killed or wounded by Japanese troops (the Nanking Incident). Documentary evidence has raised doubts about the actual number of victims claimed by the incident. The debate continues even today.

Far from rejecting war, or at least questioning the motives of the Fascists who helped lead Japan into war against the United States and the European colonizers in the first place, the “New History Textbook” instead tries to present Japan as Asia’s liberator during Pacific War:

In November 1943, Japan sponsored the Assembly of Greater East-Asiatic Nations…At the Assembly, a joint declaration (Joint Declaration of the Assembly of Greater East-Asiatic Nations) was issued in response to the Atlantic Charter. It spoke of the autonomy and independence of all nations, economic progress achieved through cooperation, and the eradication of racial discrimination. Following the assembly, Japan issued clearer explanations of its reason for waging war: the building of a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, from which the Western powers would be excluded.

While not quite as bad as some of the slogans blasted from a sound truck in front of the Asahi Shimbun building, the perspectives presented in the “New History Textbook” are unabashedly chauvinistic to the point of being disturbing:

The history you are about to study is the history of Japan. In other words, you will be familiarizing yourselves with the stories of your ancestors — your blood relatives.

Blood relatives? That’s not a very inclusive or pluralistic way of thinking, unless you remember that the current Japanese emperor has claimed shared kinship with the people of Korea. That blood goes a long way back.

As a textbook intended for fourteen-year-olds, Tsukurukai’s “New History Textbook” either makes you admire both the skill of the teachers and the academic level of students expected to wade through the course material, or the book makes you feel glad you don’t have to teach it or read it for credit.

But you also might wonder how the “New History Textbook” would compare to a Chinese or Korean textbook. And it’s also worth noting that only 0.04% of Japanese boards of education have chosen to use the “New History Textbook.”