South Korean Revisionist Textbook

The Daily NK, a very informative website on North Korea, reports on “A Textbook Alternative to the Historical Leftist View”. According to the report, the Textbook Forum of the New Right Party, which published the “Alternative Textbook, South Korean Modern History”, “claims the need for an alternative textbook because current textbooks negatively depict South Korea's 60-year history since liberation from Japanese colonialism. The most significant characteristic of the alternative textbook is that it emphasizes the "legitimacy" of the establishment of the South Korean government in 1948 saying the true meaning of Korea’s Liberation that it bought freedom, human rights, and the market economy, all of which were oppressed under colonial rule.” According to TNK, the alternative textbook offers some corrective on the colonial years as well:

While describing the Japanese colonial government as "a violent and repressive regime which denied the political autonomy of Korea," it held a different perspective from the currently recognized view giving credit to the colonial rulers for initiating industrial development in Korea.”

This evaluation by itself is not particularly remarkable. Even Bruce Cumings, a revisionist from the left in the American sense and notable non-fan of Japan, allows as much. Of course for the Japanese media, the story is mostly about… us, as this Sankei report shows. The hard copy Yomiuri is also carrying a shorter article, with the same focus.

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.

When Is History History? (The U.S.H.R. Resolutions)

And here a terrible spectacle displayed itself: the women first cast their infants down the cliff, and then they cast themselves after their fallen little ones, and the men likewise. In such a scene, Aeneas the Stymphalian, an officer, caught sight of a man with a fine dress about to throw himself over, and seized hold of him to stop him; but the other caught him to his arms, and both were gone in an instant headlong down the crags, and were killed. Out of this place the merest handful of human beings were taken prisoners, but cattle and asses in abundance and flocks of sheep.

- from The Anabasis by Xenonphon (ca. 431 – 355 BC), as translated by H. G. Dakyns

I remember being stunned by this passage many, many years ago, in my youth. In fact, it is about the only thing I retained from the book. Nevertheless, it did not evoke the sense of anger and revulsion that I much, much later felt over the 9.11 attacks. It was, after all, history. (note: I was in Manhattan at the time.)

But so much of the Middle East has yet to pass into history. Europeans carved out Israel after WW II to solve their Jewish problem, and the wound continues to fester; many of the other ill-fitting borders they etched across tribal and religious boundaries have not lost their tenuousness either. Likewise, so many of the deeds and misdeeds of the local actors continue to resonate in the hearts of their descendants. The Armenian genocide may have looked like history to Democrats, but not to its Armenian-American constituency in California, nor to the Turks.

Did Nancy Pelosi think that since Japan was a good sport, Turkey would roll over too? But there was only one loach under this willow tree. Japan put WW II and everything that led to it behind when we lost to the Americans. Thus, we do not vent our anger at Russia for unlawfully shipping our soldiers and civilians to Siberia to use them as slave labor, or seek recompense for the Japanese women who were forced to provide sexual satisfaction to the Soviet soldiers who marched into Manchuria. And the Hiroshima Epitaph famously leaves us wondering, “Who will not repeat the mistake?” even as we bade them, “Sleep peacefully”. Never mind the righteousness (or not) of such grievances. We decided, collectively, that it was all history.

---

Actually, though I did not notice it at the time (I think), Xenophon, a disciple of Socrates, and his men appear to have been uncommonly civilized for those days. For later in the narrative, Xenophon explains: “But wherever we come, be it foreign or Hellenic soil, and find no market for provisions, we are wont to help ourselves, not out of insolence but from necessity. There have been tribes like the Carduchians, the Taochians, the Chaldaeans, which, albeit they were not subject to the great king, yet were no less formidable than independent. These we had to bring over by our arms. The necessity of getting provisions forced us; since they refused to offer us a market.”And there is nothing in the narrative to suggest that they did otherwise.

Publisher Drops New History Textbook; A Victory for China and South Korea? Not So Fast

Yomiuri and Asahi tell more or less the same story: Fusosha, the publishing arm of the conservative media conglomerate Fuji-Sankei Group, has decided to drop the controversial New History Textbook written by the members of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform and publish a new textbook that "receives broader support from all layers of society". After ten years, only 5,000 students, or less than 1% of the national total, use the textbook , and Fusosha could not take it any more, it seems. JSHTR is going to seek a new publisher. The JSHTR named Nobumasa Fujioka to replace the previous chairman, who had opposed the attempt to continue to publish the New History Textbook.

So, a victory for China, South Korea, and Japanese liberals?

No. Mainichi adds some crucial details. Fusosha is going to cooperate with the Nihon Kyouiku Saisei Kikou, or Japan Education Rebuilding Organization (my translation; its website does not display an English name) to produce the new one. Sankei goes even further and gives the name of the new Fusosha partner as the soon-to-be-established Kaisei Kyouiki Kihonhou ni Motozuku Kyoukasho Kaizen wo Susumeru Yuushikisha no Kai (Committee of Learned People Promoting the Improvement of Textbooks Based on the Revised Education Basic Law; my translation again) and the name of its head as Taro Yayama.

If Nihon Kyouiku Saisei Kikou, or Japan Education Rebuilding Organization, sounds familiar, take note that it was established on 22 October 2006, twelve days after the Abe administration's Kyouiku Saisei Kaigi or Education Rebuilding Council (official translation), and one of the six JERO advisors is Taro Yayama, a writer who is reputedly a close confidante of Shinzo Abe. Terumasa Nakanishi, the conservative historian, is a JERO advisor as well, and also has the prime minister's ear. However, neither the NKSK chairman, nor any of its six advisors nor 112 elders serves on the ERC.

Incidentally, one of the 112 elders is Tadashi Kobayashi, the deposed JSHTR chairman, and would be one of the three advisors to the new textbook committee. (The others would be Taro Yayama and Shuji Yagi, the JERO chairman.) There should be other overlaps in membership, which will likely be unwound in JERO's favor.

What does all this mean? I think Mr. Abe or his friends have engineered a masterful coup within the conservative ranks. Or, more gently stated, they put an old workhorse to pasture. Without financial support from the Fuji-Sankei Group, the money losing New History Textbook will surely wither away.

JERO, of course, has a much broader agenda (education rebuilding) than JSHTR; and a distinctly conservative one too, unlike the high profile and sometimes-unpredictable ERC. Mr. Abe may or may not long outlast the July Upper House election, and public acceptance of the conservative agenda becomes highly suspect, once you begin trying, for example, to define "patriotism". Yet, at worst, he will leave a legacy of an institutionalized advocacy in education for the conservative cause with the backing of a powerful national media group.