Don't Know Much About History...

Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries.  Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of the soul in order to encounter it.

            Benjamin Franklin

In the mid-2000s, I was in Japan with a group of high school students as part of a cultural exchange.  As a part of the exchange, I as the teacher met the education director for the Niigata Prefecture.  At the time, a controversy had erupted over the presentation of Japanese history in school textbooks.  Typically, the Japanese are reluctant to address controversial issues publicly but the education director asked me, as a history teacher, of my thoughts on the textbook debate. 

Risking a possible international incident, I suggested that history is not history unless it is embraced fully, warts and all.  Otherwise, it’s propaganda.  The director smiled and I smiled for I realized he was a reformer and I did not create an international row.  Today, however, the issue has re-emerged in Japan over the atrocities committed by the empire during World War II.  Nationalist Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, in the aftermath of his recent visit to the controversial war dead shrine (Yasukuni), is attempting to shore up his conservative base and the issue of school textbooks is as impactful as it gets.   

Japanese schools are a model of, if nothing else, efficiency in providing a national narrative.  The Japanese have gone to great lengths to push and emphasize the importance of school lessons and the message that such lessons disseminate.  What is presented in Japanese schools is digested and learned to the letter and forms students their concepts of the various subjects – everything from math to history.  The idea of the proposed changes in the history textbooks could go a long way to change and shape how young Japanese students view their country and its past actions.   

Typically, Japanese history textbooks have an almost bullet-point style presentation – heavy on the core facts and figures and shallow on depth and context.  Some of the proposed changes (some examples recently published by the New York Times) are more a question of comprehensiveness than ideology.  A comprehensive discussion on the peace treaty that ended the war might include the typical Japanese view of the treaty, American objectives and the Japanese government’s response to those goals.  On a more nefarious and ideological level, the changes seek to whitewash the role the Japanese military played in the abuse and murder of civilians in Korea, China and a host of other subjugated countries at the mercy of the Japanese during World War II.     

In the United States, we have various groups who are seeking to re-write history.  In some cases, these groups simply seek to further explain or more greatly enumerate the details in which things happened.  However, other groups seek to re-cast history and its events to suit their own world view, regardless of facts.  Like these groups, the Japanese are playing a dangerous game.  What they sow here in 2014 in the form of whitewashed history textbooks could reap a risky flirtation with past mistakes.  George Santayana’s oft-quoted quip of history repeating itself might be trite but no less applicable.  Until the Japanese come to grips, as a culture, with their actions, the country as a political entity could become a wild card in the regional political power structure.   

In some ways, the effort of the Japanese is admirable as many places around the world are filled with those who bemoan the loss of who they are.  However, that same culture prevents the Japanese from fully embracing and accepting what it did as a country.  The salvation of any culture is a better understanding of its history – with all the blemishes and imperfections (and horrible abuses) that understanding brings.  The textbook crisis will be a turning point for the country and will drive it towards something new and better or toward something old and destructive.  History is not the romper room seen in elementary and middle schools (and high schools for that matter).  It is the most important subject one can pursue in order to have a better comprehension not only of ourselves but our culture.