It is no exaggeration to say that Japan’s future path largely depends on how many public schools are going to adopt a particular history textbook this summer. This peculiar situation is due the major struggle over the future course of Japan currently being fought in the arena of education. While the official screening and adoption of public junior high school textbooks, held every four years, takes place this year, the rightist forces are fully mobilizing their energies into ensuring that The New History Textbook, a controversial textbook their writers have penned, will be adopted by a significant number of public junior high schools throughout the country. This textbook passed the Ministry of Education screening in April this year, and in August it is local boards of education that are to select one out of several textbooks on the shopping list for use at public junior highs in their respective jurisdictions. Four years ago, the rightists’ similar drive ended in miserable failure as only 0.039% of public junior high schools adopted it and they are determined to make a successful turnaround this year, taking advantage of the prevailing political climate which is extremely favourable to them.
The phenomenal rise of right-wing extremist groups has been seen across the globe with different manifestations for each country since the end of the Cold War. European ultra-right groups, such as those in France and Germany, tend to use a rhetoric targeting the issue of immigrants as their key domestic agenda, and thus fan the flames of xenophobia. In the United States, ultra-right Christian fundamentalists, with Southern Baptists at their core, have successfully solidified a base for the Republican Right by propagating their emphases on issues of abortion, same-sex marriage and other issues related to “moral values.” In the case of Japan, the hottest area of contention for the ultra-right is none other than public education.
Forty-three years prior to Hitler’s takeover of the German government, Japan already had an ideological mechanism in place that was to prove useful in the 1930-40s as the basis of Emperor fascism that successfully mobilized people onto battlefields abroad. It was the nation’s educational policy proclaimed in the “Imperial Rescript on Education” enacted in 1890 by the Meiji Government in the name of the Emperor. Education’s primary purpose, as designed therein, was to inculcate absolute allegiance to the Throne and the State to the Emperor’s subjects so they would be willing to devote the whole of their lives to the Emperor and his state. Before the issuance of this rescript, the government had introduced a compulsory education system and used this system to force school children to rote memorize this doctrine. So to speak, the values and morals prescribed in this imperial rescript were invented by the Meiji state elite to fill in the spiritual and moral lacunae left after Japan’s departure from feudal society so there would be absolutely no room for such modern ideas as self or human rights in the minds of the Emperor’s subjects. The doctrine of the script had a strong spell on the minds of the imperial subjects until the fall of the Japanese Empire in 1945.
As with the German extreme right-wing, ultra-right groups in Japan do not hide their affinities for the pre-war era. In particular, what they consider to be Japan’s greatest historical legacy is the successful infusion of loyalty to the Emperor and the state into the people’s minds. The ’legacy,’ or the effects of brainwashing by the Imperial Rescript on Education, lasted for such a long period, a phenomenon without parallel in any other developed countries. The ultra-rightists appreciate this role education played in the past. In fact, it was the pre-war educational system that created a people who supported the fascist regime. The ultra-right is now attempting to use the educational system as a means to “re-sculpt” the youth and to reverse the post-war tide that represented a break from the pre-war state of affairs. This is the issue at stake in this year’s struggle over the textbooks.
The uyoku, or literally the right wing, in Japan generally carries the image of gangs on large black vans or buses, waving the Rising Sun flags as they blast raucous noise onto the streets in a smugly-aired procession. However, more often than not, such spectacles are organized by Yakuza elements [gangsters engaged in organized crimes], who take on a façade of political enterprise to extort money by threatening and intimidating businesses, politicians and municipal bodies.
The ultra-rightist organizations that are capable of organizing ideologically-based movements and of actually making an impact on the political arena are only two, namely, the Japan Conference and the Society for History Textbook Reform (hereinafter referred to as the Tsukuru-Kai). The two organizations have many overlapping members who since the 1980s have shown up on most issues involving education.
Post-war Japan has been reigned by a trident of power made up of the corrupt, self-serving conservative Liberal Democratic Party; big business groups that have manipulated national policies for their own ends by greasing the hands of the LDP under the name of “political funding;” and bureaucrats who have guaranteed their own post-retirement positions at private enterprises by working for the LDP and the business world. In this environment where corrupt money politics and diplomatic blind allegiance to the United States prevail, the ultra-right has begun to play an increasingly large role in instigating debates and pitting players into action on ideological matters that the government has long been apt to gloss over. Their political agendas include the restitution of pre-war value systems, restrictions on educational and other post-war democratic systems, and revision of the Constitution. The ultra-rightists benefited furthermore from the LDP’s increasing receptivity to their demands. Unlike their European counterparts, Japanese conservatives traditionally do not keep a distance from the ultra-right.
With all this in mind, let us examine the Japan Conference first. Characteristically, this organization is made up of extremely right-leaning wings of traditional Japanese Shinto and Buddhist followers. The Shinto faith itself is polytheistic, but one goddess, Amaterasu Omikami, is placed at the apex. Shinto tenets assert that a descendent of the heavenly Amaterasu Omikami came down to earth and later took the throne in Japan’s very first dynasty of his making, thus heralding the birth of the nation. This sort of legend had been pounded into children’s minds through the “National History” of state education during the era of the Empire of Japan (incidentally, the legendary date of the enthronement of the first Emperor, February the 11, was made the National Foundation Day, a public holiday, in 1967).
In the Empire of Japan based on the indivisibility of religion and politics, Shinto was part of the reigning mechanism of the state (hence state Shinto) that served to underpin the divine authority of the Emperor. After the war, state Shinto as part of the state was dismantled by the U.S. occupation. However, in substance it has survived to date as the Association of Shinto Shrines (Jinja Honcho), a religious association linking all Shinto shrines around the country. Furthermore, the Shinto doctrine has stayed unchanged from the pre-war state Shinto doctrine. It consists of the three pillars: (1) the Emperor is a living god and thereby possesses absolute, divine authority, (2) the authority and identity of Japan derive from the Emperor as deity, and (3) the post-war Constitution must be abolished as it denies the divine authority of the Emperor.
In other words, the ultra-rightists of Japan are defined as the believers of an Emperor Religion, or State Shinto, a creation by the state in the process of Japan’s modernization. Therefore, the Fifteen Years War waged by Japan against China, the U.S., Britain, and other countries until 1945 becomes a “holy war” to the extent that it was carried out in the name of the Emperor and, as such, comes to possess sanctity making it inviolable. As a consequence, no room whatsoever is available for them to accept criticisms on Emperor Hirohito’s responsibility for the war, or Japan’s responsibility for the invasion of Asia.
Shinto shrines have close relationships with the local lives of people in Japan, and Shinto priests often become persons of repute in the community. Huge organizations that subscribe to the unity of religion and governance have thus been preserved intact through the years following WWII. The fact that they would now bare their fangs as ultra-right-wing challengers to the ideologies of the post-war Japanese state — namely that war be renounced and that sovereignty lies with the people as scribed in the current Constitution — should not be any wonder. The Japan Conference is precisely the organization these Shinto people founded as their advocacy vehicle.
Polytheism in Japan has witnessed a variety of syncretic fusion between Shinto and Buddhist faiths since ancient times. This process spawned some Buddhist sects amenable to State Shinto ideology. In pre-war days, a multitude of fanatic nationalist organizations originating in traditional Buddhism and supportive of Emperor-fascism burgeoned forth, a current which continues undiminished to this day. Such ultra-right-wing Buddhist organizations are now working side by side with the Association of Shinto Shrines as well as other newer Shinto-based rightist religious cults, and have thereby themselves become an important component of the Japan Conference.
Earlier, in the 1970s, these religion-based groups got together to establish the Society for the Protection of Japan (Nihon wo Mamoru Kai), calling for, among other things, (1) state responsibility for maintenance of Yasukuni Shrine, a special shrine built by the Meiji government to enshrine as deities soldiers who had “given their lives” in wars for the Emperor, 2) legislation establishing the naming of imperial eras (that changes the title of an era with the death of each Emperor), (3) revision of the Constitution, and (4) reinstatement of the Imperial Rescript of Education in what they called “all-round normalization of education.” In May of 1997, the Society for the Protection of Japan merged with another organization of a similar name, the National Forum for the Protection of Japan (Nihon wo Mamoru Kokumin Kaigi) and founded the Japan Conference.
The National Forum for the Protection of Japan consisted chiefly of ultra-right or extremely conservative cultural elites and former soldiers. Its organizational agenda was nearly identical to that of the Society for the Protection of Japan. However, one aspect of their track record that is worthy of particular note is that they had already published a high school textbook, The New Edition of Japanese History, in 1986, which passed the screening of the Ministry of Education (currently the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) and had been used by some public high schools. The New Edition of Japanese History not only includes a full-text reprint of the Imperial Rescript for Education but also makes a point of calling the Pacific War by its pre-war name, “The Great East Asia War.” After approval by the Ministry of Education, the textbook became subject to powerful protests not only by historians and educationists in Japan, but also from Asian countries including China and Korea. Under this pressure, the Ministry of Education had dictated changes in the text four times after its initial screening. Despite these efforts, only a few public schools adopted this textbook for class use and publishers backed off from this project. The ultra-right’s first attempt to step into production of history textbook in a significant way ended in failure. But the question remains: Why at that time did the ultra-rightists feel the need to step into production of their own history textbook?
Originally, the Ministry of Education used to ensure through its screening process that no school textbook would describe the miseries of war or include “one-sided” stories about the sufferings Japan had inflicted upon Asian people. It was therefore difficult for history textbook authors to introduce Japan’s history of aggression against Asian countries. But, in 1982, the distortion of history by the Japanese Ministry of Education emerged as a serious diplomatic problem with neighbouring Asian countries. The government had to admit distortions and introduced a set of history textbook screening criteria for avoidance of future troubles, called the “neighbouring countries clause,” requiring that “due consideration should be paid from the point of view of international understanding and international cooperation in handling modern history involving other Asian countries.”
As a result, some facts about Japan’s infliction of damage came to be written in junior high and high school history textbooks. The National Forum people were alarmed by this move, considering it to be a case of foreign governments interfering in Japanese domestic affairs. They felt that the textbook screening by the Education Ministry had ceased to be of any use for their purposes. So they made up their mind to engage in drawing up a textbook of their own to defend the cause of the “holy war.”
The New Edition of Japanese History which rightist scholars authored passed the Ministry of Education’s screening in 2001 under a new title, The Latest Japanese History. As ordinary publishers hesitated to undertake its publication, the textbook was published by a company directly affiliated with the Japan Conference. In 2004, only 25 high schools across Japan — the majority of them private – were using the textbook for their pupils. It is striking to find that five of the public high schools using the textbook are located in Fukuoka prefecture in northern Kyusyu where ultra-right teachers are concentrated.
The Japan Conference born from the melding of the two aforementioned organizations, declared as the first item of its program: “To pass on the tradition and culture nurtured in the course of our eternal history and to expect the healthy national spirit to rise and flourish in our nation.” Obviously what has emerged in the form of this new organization is a fresh effort to resurrect Emperor-centred nationalism. The founding statement of the Japan Conference emphasizes that the two founding organizations had been working together for 20 years to develop a “broad-based national movement for the recovery of the national spirit.” That spirit, they argued, was brought to the verge of extinction in the post-war period and therefore they were there to collaborate to “develop nation-building on the basis of Japan’s beautiful history and tradition.” It enumerates the following immediate goals to be achieved by their national movement: (1) making a law for mandatory use of the Imperial Era system, (2) proper observance of ceremonial occasions of reverence for the Imperial Household, (3) compilation of new school textbooks, and (4) introduction of a new constitution based on tradition-based state principles.
It should be noted that the Japan Conference relies heavily on religious organizations for money and mobilization. Eight of its twelve senior advisors and 16 of its 56 board members are from Shinto and other religious backgrounds. The incumbent board chairman is a prominent Shinto priest from a big Shinto shrine. In addition, one particularly notorious ultra-right politician, Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintaro, is also one of its board members. Ishihara used to receive financial support from ultra-right Buddhist organizations during his days in the Diet.
The period around 1997 when the Japan Conference was founded will be remembered as the time when ultra-right forces in Japan suffused their work with renewed vitality. A key issue that provoked ultra-rightists into action was the military sexual slavery of Korean and other Asian women by the Japanese military during the 15-year war. Commonly referred to as the “comfort women” (ian-fu) system, this stands as one of the most shameful criminal acts committed by the Japanese Military.
In 1991 a Korean woman who had been made a “comfort women” came out as the first victim to seek redress in a lawsuit she filed against the Japanese government. In 1993, the government had no choice but to recognize the involvement of the Japanese military in the organisation of “comfort women,” and subsequently the topic of “comfort women” made its way into all history textbooks for the first time at high schools in 1994 and at junior high schools in 1997. Some textbooks took up the Emperor’s war responsibility and introduced on-going lawsuits for redress of wartime damage filed by Asian victims. Reacting to this situation, the ultra-right set out to launch an across-the-board counteroffensive.
In 1996 the National Forum carried out a one-month propaganda caravan across the country, criticizing most of the textbooks for spreading a “masochistic and dark view of history” and “damaging the Japanese sense of pride.” They also conducted a petition campaign to demand that the “comfort women” issue be totally dropped from the textbooks. In addition, Yakuza gangsters affiliated with the ultra-right groups, ran aggressive pressure campaigns by blasting rants over microphones in front of publishing houses of textbooks in their disfavour and sending threatening mails to their authors.
One development that must be noted is that, in response to the “comfort women” issue, another ultra-right organization, the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, came into being in December 1996. One key player in this move was FUJIOKA Nobukatsu, former professor at Tokyo University, who converted from the Japanese Communist Party to a rightist position of historical revisionism. Launching in 1995 a research group that later became the most conspicuous crusader of an ideology known as “Liberalist View of History,” Fujioka began to spread his influence to the realms of history and social education. “The Liberal View of History,” Fujioka pleads, consists of (1) healthy nationalism, (2) realism, (3) de-ideologization, and (4) critique of bureaucracy. In reality, however, it is nothing but a Japanese version of globally rampant historical revisionism.
In advertising the textbook produced by the Tsukuru-Kai, Fujioka declares, “Nowhere [in this book] will you find the lies of the ’Nanjing massacre,’ the ’forcible taking of Koreans,’ the ’forcible taking of comfort women,’ or other stories that were concocted in order to lay blame on Japan. It is written entirely free of the propaganda spread by our former enemy countries.” However, the portrayal of this chain of facts as “lies” is itself the meticulous propaganda line followed by the Japanese ultra-right for decades. It is difficult to find anything “new” or “liberalist” in what they assert as their “new view of history.” What underlies their discourse is precisely the ideology of “Japan as the divine nation” that fought a “holy war.” Their self-serving aversion to meeting the gaze of Japan’s wrong-doings in modern history as well as their puerile wish to sing their own praises in the history of Japan derives from this ideology.
Another key player is NISHIO Kanji, professor of German philosophy at the University of Electro-Communications. He has long spent great amounts of energy accentuating the “difference” between German Nazism and Japan’s imperial fascism. According to Nishio, Nazi Germany “started a war out of a desire for territorial expansion and carried out the holocaust for the purpose of exterminating all Jewish people from the face of the earth.” Japan, in contrast, “did not wage war for such purposes, nor did it attempt to exterminate any race.” But “purposes” and “plans” aside, Japan’s slaughter of Chinese and countless other Asian people stands as an indisputable fact. To try to cover up the historic criminal act by emphasizing differences between Japan and Germany sounds as flimsy and self-serving as Fujioka’s rhetoric.
What all leading figures in Tsukuru-Kai seem to have in common is a dogged obsession with justifying what the Japanese Empire did in its history of wars of aggression and colonial rule. Their history textbook presents a peculiar approach to history. It says, “Let us stop treating history like a court in which events of the past are called to judgment by the morals of today.” According to them, “the study of history is the study of how people of the past thought of the truths of their time.” If so, learning the history of Auschwitz must be nothing but to study what Hitler, Hess, and Eichmann were “thinking” about it then. I shudder at the prospect of their history textbook infusing doses of historical nihilism and egotism into children’s minds.
Nishio never hesitates to declare, “We ought to stop saying something in-between (to Koreans) like, ’We have done bad things to you, but done some good things, too.’ We have done nothing wrong.” He also says, “There is absolutely no need for feeling guilty over events that inevitably took their course in our distant past. There is no need to apologize.” This arrogance based on self-righteous justification of modern Japanese history is what demarcates the ultra-right from the conservatives.
In January 1997, Tsukuru-Kai held their inaugural assembly and appointed Nishio Chair (now Honorary Chair) and Fujioka Deputy Chair. Another vital member of Tsukuru-Kai was TAKAHASHI Shiro (then a board member later to become Deputy Chair), known within educational circles as one of the most militant right-wing extremists. An ultra-right activist to the core, he had helped organize the Youth Council of Japan (Nihon Seinen Kyougi Kai) in the early 1970’s, whose stated mission was “To revise the Constitution, restore the structure of the Empire of Japan and build a nation centring on the Emperor.” Incidentally, KABASHIMA Yuzo, who had played a part in the Youth Council’s formation, is currently serving as the General Secretary of the Japan Conference.
In December of 2004, Takahashi was appointed a member of the Saitama Prefectural Board of Education. This was a shocking development as the board of education is required to be a politically neutral organisation. Takahashi is one of the editors of the new textbook. KIYOSHI Ueda, Governor of Saitama prefecture and a former Diet member from the Democratic Party, appointed this notorious rightist to the board. Ueda himself supports Tsukuru-Kai’s textbook. He said, “I basically appreciate this textbook as a new venture” and rebuffed foreign criticism of it as “interference in our national affairs.” No doubt Ueda appointed Takahashi to get the prefectural board of education to adopt the Tsukuru-Kai textbook.
By July 1999 Tsukuru-Kai organized 48 branches in 47 prefectures and increased the number of branches to 51 by August last year. However, 2001, the year of last national public school textbook screening and adoption, became a calamitous year to the new textbook promoters. Many historians, educationists, and citizens, alarmed by the ultra-rightists’ campaign and the government approval of the ultra-right textbook, unfurled energetic activities nationwide against its adoption by local boards of education. As the result of this campaign, the rightist textbook ended with a dismal national adoption rate of 0.039%. Faced with this failure, Tsukuru-Kai swore its “revenge” and subsequently engaged itself in an extremely proactive nationwide campaign presenting lectures and panel exhibitions on the textbook. Such local-level events rested decisively on mobilization of the Japan Conference’s network. Tsukuru-Kai now set itself the goal of getting 10% of public schools to use its textbook as the result of the 2005 text adopting process. Its mid-term goal is to make its Japanese history textbook one of the major textbooks used in Japan within 10 years.
In order to achieve these goals, Tsukuru-Kai concentrates its activities on the strengthening of its alliance with the ruling LDP. In June last year Tsukuru-Kai held a joint meeting with ultra-right LDP politicians. About 20 Diet representatives and 180 local council representatives participated in the meeting and decided that local assembly representatives would conduct full-swing activities to get the Tsukuru-Kai textbook adopted by local boards of education in summer 2005. Present at this meeting was Minister of Education MURAKAWA Takeo, who openly commended the ultra-right textbook in these words: “The emergence of this new textbook is one step in the right direction.” The tripod alliance of the Education Ministry, local boards of education, and the LDP solidly behind the ultra-right textbook is a new factor that did not exist in 2001. Things are certainly moving in an alarming direction this year.
Should Tsukuru-Kai’s textbook become one of the mainstream school textbooks as its promoters wish, Japan’s relationship with China, Korea, and other Asian countries will be irreparably destroyed. Let us see what this year’s version that passed the government screening says about the colonization of Korean Peninsula. It states: “Since it was essential to Japan’s security to have Korea as a modern state not subjected to foreign rule, Japan assisted Korea’s military system reform to accelerate its modernization.” Also, the textbook describes colonization of Korea as an expression of Japanese altruism: “After annexing Korea, Japan engaged in land surveys while undertaking development projects to equip the new colony with irrigation and railroad facilities.”
Concerning the Pacific War, the textbook includes passages as though taken from a wartime school textbook: “The Japanese Army, led by bicycle units, proceeded through lands between jungles and rubber forests…in a rapid victorious advance…and in a mere 70-day span felled Singapore, effectively leading to Japan’s dissolution of British rule over Southeast Asia.” One more quotation: “These regions had national independence movements from before the outbreak of the war and Japan’s southward march served as a trigger to accelerate the achievement of independence by Asian nations.” This passage wants to say that Japanese invasion had legitimate aspects as well.
This textbook in fact goes against Nishio’s dictum. It is not a “study of how people of the past thought of the truths of their time.” Instead, the history presented by this textbook is intended to be a court where Japan is by definition to represent the side of the good. Nishio’s claim notwithstanding, the code of values used in this court is precisely “today’s moral code,” namely, the “liberalist view of history” that posits unbroken consistency of the Emperor’s authority that makes Japan automatically infallible through history. Unlike at standard trials where the defendant and plaintiff appear before the bench, in this court Japan is the only testifying party present and any other parties’ accounts are rejected with detestation by hysterical cries of foreign interference raised in unison. The Japan Conference and Tsukuru-Kai’s current demand that the government drop the “neighbouring countries clause” is precisely another manifestation of this mass hysteria.
Despite the 60 years that have passed since the end of WWII, it appears that Japan is called upon to begin from scratch to establish awareness of what it truly was before August 15, 1945. If the ultra-right, with the backing of the government and the LDP, succeeds in achieving victory on the textbook issue this year, then we may have to admit that we are entering into a new pre-war era before we have come to terms with the post-war era.