War Is Short in U.S. and Japanese Textbooks

In studying Pearl Harbor and World War II, students in Japan and the United States have one thing in common, according to experts in both countries: They learn very little.

Most American history courses devote little attention to 20th-Century history, said Esther Taira, Los Angeles Unified School District curriculum specialist.

Similarly, teachers in Japan “spend months teaching pre-modern Japanese history but very little time teaching modern history,” complained Takakazu Kuriyama, who retired last summer as vice foreign minister.

Indeed, the 378-page “Japan History--New,” an Education Ministry-approved textbook used by more than half the high schools in Japan, doesn’t get around to the four years of World War II until Page 320 and devotes only 20 pages to it. Even that length, however, is extensive compared with the 21 pages it devotes to 45 years of Japan’s postwar history.

Questions about the war are usually not included on college entrance examinations, “so students don’t study it,” added Waseda University Prof. Kenichi Goto.

Although previous Japanese textbooks were condemned for trying to whitewash Japan’s role in the war, “Japan History--New” presents facts accurately. What is lacking, Kuriyama and Japanese students alike say, is interpretation and “feeling.”

Japan’s Education Ministry follows a policy of avoiding value judgments on recent history. It also refuses to approve the use of estimates for numbers of war dead.

“Japan History--New” factually describes Pearl Harbor as a “surprise” attack in a mere 12 words. Later, in another 12-word sentence, the book explains that the attack stirred Americans into a “boiling” rage and united them as they went to war against Japan.

No mention is made of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s characterization of the attack as “a date which will live in infamy.” Nor does it mention Prime Minister Hideki Tojo’s description of the attack as “a blow for the liberation of Asia.”

By comparison, old history books that are still in use in most California high schools devote fewer than half a dozen paragraphs to Pearl Harbor. They characterize the bombing as a “sneak attack,” describe how the Japanese preceded it by sending a peace envoy to Washington and add:

“The move was only a camouflage for the preparation of a treacherous strike against the United States.”

“Japan History--New” says nothing about the peace envoy. But who did what to whom in the war is clear enough.

“On Sept. 18, 1931, the Kwantung army, which had suppressed Manchuria with the use of force, itself blew up a section of the South Manchurian Railway near a suburb of Mukden, creating a pretext for war, and launched an attack on the Chinese army,” the Japanese textbook relates at the beginning of its account of what led to World War II.

Nor does the text exonerate average Japanese.

It points out that not only did the people applaud the Manchuria invasion, the Pearl Harbor victory and the war itself but that the nation’s mass media--which in postwar days has been anti-war to the point of self-righteousness--led emotional celebrations over Japan’s “glorious victories.”

Claiming that no evidence exists, the book takes a neutral stand on who fired first in a 1937 incident that ignited all-out war through the rest of China. But it does point out how rightists, through assassinations, brought to an end eight years of political-party-led cabinets in 1932.

Japan, it adds, began “to tread the path of isolation” by rejecting “a considerably compromising” League of Nations report on the invasion of Manchuria and walking out of the league, the predecessor of the United Nations.

Conspicuously missing, however, is any detailed information about Japanese atrocities.

The text mentions only three examples--the “Nanking Incident,” killings in Singapore and “many atrocities” in the Philippines. “Large numbers” of deaths occurred in each, the book adds.

Later, when discussing the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the book applies the same standard of not using estimates by stating only that “large numbers” were killed.

No mention is made of the widespread maltreatment of prisoners of war that has created bitter memories against Japan among not only Asians but also Americans, British, Dutch, Australians and New Zealanders.

By contrast, new textbooks that are being put into use in California explain the Vietnam War’s My Lai massacre at length, with the caveat that it “was not typical of American behavior in Vietnam.”

One textbook also points out that while Lt. William Calley was convicted in a U.S. court in connection with the killings, his superiors, “who many believed were equally responsible for the massacre, were not charged with any crime.”

The new California textbooks focus on explaining the significance of historical events, rather than merely reciting names, dates and places. They move away “from a one-perspective delivery to provide youngsters the ability to walk around and view an event, to understand that in a given decision there are varying perspectives and varying points of view,” said Taira, the curriculum specialist.

“We’re trying to put it in context, instead of ‘This just happened on Dec. 7.’ ”

The newer California books use narratives by survivors to describe the attack on Pearl Harbor, as well as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“That way you get the notion that this is not just something that’s happening to numbers. It’s something that’s happening to real-life people, on both sides of the ocean,” Taira said.

Older textbooks take the position that America was the innocent victim of Japanese aggression.

But the newer books go to great lengths to explain the rationale, from the Japanese perspective, for Pearl Harbor and the role of the bombing in propelling the United States into the war.

In “The Human Experience, a World History,” five paragraphs are devoted to the attack, explaining how the Japanese navy commander “convinced” Japanese leaders that a surprise strike would show the United States how strong and powerful Japan was and force the United States to abandon its efforts to thwart Japan’s expansionist plans.

That kind of detail is precisely what Japanese textbooks lack.

“The mechanical facts are all there,” said Daisuke Honda, 21, a Waseda University sophomore. “But there is no feeling in the textbooks.”

“How you teach history to younger generations is very important,” Kuriyama said. “There is a danger that younger Japanese may not know enough about what Japan did in the first half of the century.”

Jameson reported from Tokyo and Banks from Los Angeles.