Japanese Teachers Charge Censorship of Textbooks

Japanese schoolteachers accused the government today of censoring school textbooks, playing down Japan’s aggression in World War II, overemphasizing the emperor’s importance and distorting facts.

“The government is pushing hard to incorporate its political ideology and policy in every single textbook,” said an official of the Japan Teachers Union.

The Education Ministry has just finished examining 188 textbooks for use at elementary and senior high schools in the school year starting in April, 1989.

Teachers and publishers said the ministry’s screening amounts to political censorship.

The union official, who declined to be identified, said the ministry asked for unreasonable revisions or deletions in textbooks, especially on touchy political and social issues.

Chinese Criticism

This is not the first time Japan’s textbook screening has been under attack. China has repeatedly criticized Japanese textbooks for distorting the country’s role in World War II.

According to a publishing official, it happened again this year. He said the ministry deleted a section in one of the textbooks that blamed Japanese fascism for the killing of Chinese in Shanghai and Nanking during the war.

The ministry explained the deletion by saying there was no consensus on whether fascism is the same as militarism, the official said.

The union official said the ministry also demanded deletion or alteration of a passage in one textbook which read: “The emperor has no authority over the nation’s politics.”

“The government is obviously trying to push up the status of the emperor,” the official said.

Fingerprint Controversy

Publishers and teachers union officials also accused the government of trying to play down the dangers of nuclear power plants and the controversy over the fingerprinting of foreign residents.

Koreans, who have lived in Japan for generations, are required to be fingerprinted as foreigners.

According to the publishing official, the ministry even went so far as to forbid the use of a photograph of former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone with the caption quoting him as saying: “There are many racial groups in the United States whose intellectual levels are low.”

Nakasone triggered a storm of protest in the United States when he said the average American is less knowledgeable than the Japanese because of the presence of Mexicans, blacks and Puerto Ricans in the United States.

The publisher wanted to use the photograph to describe Japan’s internationalization and its conflicts with other countries, the official said.