Firstly, she was Taiwan was technically part of Japan at the time, but for the longest time after the Chinese Nationalist Party My parents are Taiwanese and for them it was about the Japanese occupation. My parents also told me about how the war started much earlier for the Chinese, and how brutal [it was] and how many people died. I went to a Japanese school from elementary to high school, and as far as I remember we were not taught about the [Nanjing Massacre], or Unit I did not actually know what Unit was until I just looked it up.
My grandfather actually fought in China in WWII, but he never talked about it, so I didn't know anything except what was taught in schools. Now, I wasn't the most attentive of students, but at the very most those events were probably just mentioned in our classes, never talked about in detail. On the other hand, we spent the entire week of August talking about Hiroshima those are the days the bombs were dropped.
Japan was definitely portrayed as the [victim] in our classes. I'm actually still a little confused about why non-Japanese people think the kamikaze program was so evil. They were suicide pilots, yes? As far as I understand, a lot of the time the soldiers were forced into "volunteering" for the position, and they died crashing a plane into enemy lines.
From my perspective, they seem more like a group to be pitied than hated. I would be glad to hear the explanation why they are considered so evil, as I don't really understand this. Redditor finchfinch adds :. We have two "history" classes; one is "World History" and another is "Japanese History. The latter one puts emphasis mainly on Japanese history from [the] [S]tone [A]ge to contemporary age, also including the relationships with other countries mostly East Asian countries and European countries according to the situations Japan was facing.
Although we didn't cover WWII then, the teachers told us about some of the cases. As I remember, I heard of Unit , [the Nanjing] Massacre, comfort women, the results of oppression of Japanese [i]mperialism how the people outside Japan were forced to live like a Japanese by changing their names, speaking Japanese, being educated like Japanese , etc.
I never felt a bit of heroic sense from the teachers' or friends' voice when looking at what Japanese people did during WWII. It's always more like Also, as we went to Okinawa as a school trip, we studied about it how Okinawa became a part of Japan and what WWII left there before visiting, and we heard the talk of an old woman I still can't forget the contrast of a beautiful scenery of beaches and ocean and the sheer darkness inside the caves.
Subsequently, each school district can then choose a book from the list of approved material. This system was initially thought of as a beneficiary step in the aftermath of the World War, as it represented one aspect of spreading American capitalistic views of privatization in Japan.
It also, at least on the surface, prevented the interference of the political system in education, which at the time seemed like a good idea, since this political system was born and raised within the recently defeated Japanese Empire.
However, as previously alluded, the government still has a say in the process, since a special board within the Ministry of Education carries the task of approving the content of the textbooks before making them available on the book-list. At this step, it has used its power to reject drafts for reasons that are seen as controversial. Allegedly, simply mentioning wrong-doings committed by the Japanese Empire before has in some instances constituted enough reason for exclusion from the school textbook lists.
These cases are found not just in the s but also in the s. An important note, it is not the mere mention of massacres — such as that of Nanjing — that could cause the exclusion of a book, but the use of negative tone regarding the way the Japanese Empire acted in general at the time. So, although the government is not officially denying the crimes, it does not seem to actively discourage the wave of war crime deniers, even from members of the parliament.
This seems an odd choice, especially when compared to other defeated nations of the same war, again such as Germany, where — as in 17 other European countries — denying the holocaust is explicitly against the law. Furthermore, in the education system of these countries, the war crimes are dealt with in excruciating details, and not only in history class, but extending to almost all other subjects, maybe only maths and physics aside.
In fact, the leadership of Japan did not seem to change as dramatically as in other axis countries after the war. The result is that the newly formed democracy had many links to a period which the Japanese wanted and perhaps still want to be proud of. In contrast to the European axis powers, the Japanese Empire did not have a predecessor which could be used as a basis for a new — or re-established — system of government.
Furthermore, although the U. That said, after the war, the Japanese officially issued many apologies and reached settlements with former colonized countries, such as South Korea in but at the same time, as mentioned, the generations raised after the war tended to learn very little of the atrocities committed in the war.
One of the many reasons for this was the entanglement of the Cold War policy with that of teaching history. In July , two years after the end of the War of Korea, textbooks containing the atrocities of the Japanese army were condemned by the Japanese parliament.
Portsmouth Climate Festival — Portsmouth, Portsmouth. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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.
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