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| Mariko Oi |
Japanese people often
fail to understand why neighbouring countries harbour a grudge over
events that happened in the 1930s and 40s. The reason, in many cases, is
that Japanese students barely learned any 20th Century history. I myself only got a
full picture when I left Japan and went to school in Australia.
This time of year as Japan marks the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings leaves many Japanese people younger than 60 wondering why the world seems to hate Japan so much. The Chinese and Korean media seem to endlessly run story after story of negativity aimed at Japan. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki Peace Museums seem full of Japanese but they wonder why the American, British, Australian, and even German tourists to these cities choose to stay away.
From Homo erectus to the present day - more than a million
years of history in just one year of lessons at Japanese high schools. That is how, at the age of
14, I first learned of Japan's relations with the outside world.
For three hours a week - 105 hours over the year - we edged towards the 20th Century.
It's hardly surprising that some classes, in some schools,
never get there, and are told by teachers to finish the book in their
spare time.
When I returned recently to my old school, Sacred Heart in
Tokyo, teachers told me they often have to start hurrying, near the end
of the year, to make sure they have time for World War II.
"When I joined Sacred Heart as a teacher, I was asked by the
principal to make sure that I teach all the way up to modern history,"
says my history teacher from Year Eight.
"We have strong ties with our sister schools in the Asian
region so we want our students to understand Japan's historical
relationship with our neighbouring countries."
I still remember her telling the class, 17 years ago, about
the importance of Japan's war history and making the point that many of
today's geopolitical tensions stem from what happened then.
also remember wondering why we couldn't go straight to that period
if it was so important, instead of wasting time on the Pleistocene
epoch.
When we did finally get there, it turned out only 19 of the book's 357 pages dealt with events between 1931 and 1945.
There was one page on what is known as the
Mukden incident, when Japanese soldiers blew up a railway in Manchuria
in China in 1931.
There was one page on other events leading up to the
Sino-Japanese war in 1937 - including one line, in a footnote, about the
massacre that took place when Japanese forces invaded Nanjing - the
Nanjing Massacre, or Rape of Nanjing.
There was another sentence on the Koreans and the Chinese who
were brought to Japan as miners during the war, and one line, again in a
footnote, on "comfort women" - a prostitution corps created by the
Imperial Army of Japan.
There was also just one sentence on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I wanted to know more, but was not quite eager enough to
delve into the subject in my spare time. As a teenager, I was more
interested in fashion and boys.
My friends had a chance to choose world history as a subject
in Year 11. But by that stage I had left the Japanese schooling system,
and was living in Australia.
I remember the excitement when I noticed that instead of
ploughing chronologically through a given period, classes would focus on
a handful of crucial events in world history.
So brushing aside my teacher's objection that I
would struggle with the high volume of reading and writing in English -
a language I could barely converse in - I picked history as one of my
subjects for the international baccalaureate.
My first ever essay in English was on the Rape of Nanjing.
There is controversy over what happened. The Chinese say
300,000 were killed and many women were gang-raped by the Japanese
soldiers, but as I spent six months researching all sides of the
argument, I learned that some in Japan deny the incident altogether.
Nobukatsu Fujioka is one of them and the author of one of the books that I read as part of my research.
"It was a battlefield so people were killed but there was no systematic massacre or rape," he says, when I meet him in Tokyo.
"The Chinese government hired actors and actresses,
pretending to be the victims when they invited some Japanese journalists
to write about them.
"All of the photographs that China uses as evidence of the
massacre are fabricated because the same picture of decapitated heads,
for example, has emerged as a photograph from the civil war between
Kuomintang and Communist parties."
As a 17-year-old student, I was not trying to make a
definitive judgement on what exactly happened, but reading a dozen books
on the incident at least allowed me to understand why many people in
China still feel bitter about Japan's military past.
While school pupils in Japan may read just one
line on the massacre, children in China are taught in detail not just
about the Rape of Nanjing but numerous other Japanese war crimes, though
these accounts of the war are sometimes criticised for being overly
anti-Japanese.
The same can be said about South Korea, where the education
system places great emphasis on our modern history. This has resulted in
very different perceptions of the same events in countries an hour's
flying time apart.
One of the most contentious topics there is the comfort women.
Fujioka believes they were paid prostitutes. But Japan's
neighbours, such as South Korea and Taiwan, say they were forced to work
as sex slaves for the Japanese army.
Without knowing these debates, it is extremely difficult to
grasp why recent territorial disputes with China or South Korea cause
such an emotional reaction among our neighbours. The sheer hostility
shown towards Japan by ordinary people in street demonstrations seems
bewildering and even barbaric to many Japanese television viewers.
Equally, Japanese people often find it hard to grasp why
politicians' visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine - which honours
war criminals among other Japanese soldiers - cause quite so much
anger.
I asked the children of some friends and colleagues how much history they had picked up during their school years.
Twenty-year-old university student Nami Yoshida and her older
sister Mai - both undergraduates studying science - say they haven't
heard about comfort women.
"I've heard of the Nanjing massacre but I don't know what it's about," they both say.
"At school, we learn more about what happened a long time ago, like the samurai era," Nami adds.
Seventeen-year-old Yuki Tsukamoto says the "Mukden incident"
and Japan's invasion of the Korean peninsula in the late 16th Century
help to explain Japan's unpopularity in the region.
"I think it is understandable that some people are upset, because no-one wants their own country to be invaded," he says.
But he too is unaware of the plight of the comfort women.
Former history teacher and scholar Tamaki Matsuoka holds Japan's
education system responsible for a number of the country's foreign
relations difficulties.
"Our system has been creating young people who get annoyed by
all the complaints that China and South Korea make about war atrocities
because they are not taught what they are complaining about," she said.
"It is very dangerous because some of them may resort to the
internet to get more information and then they start believing the
nationalists' views that Japan did nothing wrong."
I first saw her work, based on interviews with Japanese
soldiers who invaded Nanjing, when I visited the museum in the city a
few years ago.
"There were many testimonies by the victims but I thought we needed to hear from the soldiers," she says.
"It took me many years but I interviewed 250 of them. Many
initially refused to talk, but eventually, they admitted to killing,
stealing and raping."
When I saw her video interviews of the soldiers, it was not just
their admission of war crimes which shocked me, it was their age.
Already elderly by the time she interviewed them, many had been barely
20 at the time, and in a strange way, it humanised them.
I was choked with an extremely complex emotion. Sad to see
Japan repeatedly described as evil and dubbed "the devil", and nervous
because I wondered how people around me would react if they knew I was
Japanese. But there was also the big question why - what drove these
young soldiers to kill and rape?
When Matsuoka published her book, she received many threats from nationalist groups.
She and Fujioka represent two opposing camps in a debate about what should be taught in Japanese schools.
Fujioka and his Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform
say most textbooks are "masochistic" and only teach about Japan in
negative light.
"The Japanese textbook authorisation system
has the so-called "neighbouring country clause" which means that
textbooks have to show understanding in their treatment of historical
events involving neighbouring Asian countries. It is just ridiculous,"
he says.
He is widely known for pressuring politicians to remove the
term "comfort women" from all the junior high school textbooks. His
first textbook, which won government approval in 2001, made a brief
reference to the death of Chinese soldiers and civilians in Nanjing, but
he plans to tone it down further in his next book.
But is ignorance the solution?
The Ministry of Education's guidelines for junior high schools state
that all children must be taught about Japan's "historical relations
with its Asian neighbours and the catastrophic damage caused by the
World War II to humanity at large".
"That means schools have to teach about the Japanese
military's increased influence and extension of its power [in the 1930s]
and the prolonged war in China," says ministry spokesman Akihiko
Horiuchi.
"Students learn about the extent of the damage
caused by Japan in many countries during the war as well as sufferings
that the Japanese people had to experience especially in Hiroshima,
Nagasaki and Okinawa in order to understand the importance of
international co-operation and peace.
"Based on our guideline, each school decides which specific
events they focus on depending on the areas and the situation of the
school and the students' maturity."
Matsuoka, however, thinks the government deliberately tries not to teach young people the details of Japan's atrocities.
Having experienced history education in two countries, the
way history is taught in Japan has at least one advantage - students
come away with a comprehensive understanding of when events happened, in
what order.
In many ways, my schoolfriends and I were lucky. Because
junior high students were all but guaranteed a place in the senior high
school, not many had to go through what's often described as the
"examination war".
For students who are competing to get into a good senior high school
or university, the race is extremely tough and requires memorisation of
hundreds of historical dates, on top of all the other subjects that have
to be studied.
They have no time to dwell on a few pages of war atrocities, even if they read them in their textbooks.
All this has resulted in Japan's Asian neighbours -
especially China and South Korea - accusing the country of glossing over
its war atrocities.
Meanwhile, Japan's new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe criticises China's school curriculum for being too "anti-Japanese".
If and when that happens, it will undoubtedly cause a huge
stir with our Asian neighbours. And yet, many Japanese will have no clue
why it is such a big deal.
Mariko Oi
