Saturday, December 29, 2007

The Education Ministry Caves to Okinawa Pressure on Textbooks

Norimitsu Ohnishi lets the facts tell the story here, as Okinawa strips away the government’s stock response to complaints on Japanese textbooks. Luckily for the Fukuda administration, Chinese authorities are in no mood to press the point.

Mr. Ohnishi ends this piece with the following:

“The Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, a group of nationalist scholars that, along with politicians like Mr. Abe, led a campaign to rid textbooks of references to wartime crimes committed by the Japanese military, condemned the ministry’s decision. On its Web site, the group said that the ministry “had succumbed to political pressure [emphasis mine] and approved one-sided historical descriptions.”

Mr. Ohnishi has wisely decided that the irony speaks for itself.

2 comments:

MTC said...

Thank you for highlighting the revisionists' drop dead hilarious harrumphing on this pullback. I read the article and could not suppress barking out a derisive "Ha!"

Succumbing to political pressure--who would have ever thought anything wrong with that?

Jun Okumura said...

Few things are more effective against hypocrisy than deadpan humor. That is why the British are so good at it. They have both, in loads. We used to be good at it too, when we had guys like Natsume and Akutagawa. Come to think of it, they learned it from the Brits.

Happy holidays.