Peter Cave

Teaching the History of Empire in Japan and England.

Abstract Japan has often been criticized for allegedly teaching its schoolchildren about the history of Imperial Japan 1895–1945 in selective and misleading ways. Is this criticism justified, and how does it compare with the record of another former colonial power in East Asia: England? International criticism of history teaching in England has been insignificant when compared with criticism of Japan. Yet how much are English schoolchildren taught about the British Empire? This paper is based upon documentary study of national curricula and examinations, together with observations of history lessons at several secondary schools in Japan and in England, as well as interviews with history teachers in both countries, with university students in Japan, and with high-school students in England. It argues that both Japan and England devote relatively little curricular time to the study of their respective imperial pasts. However, this is not necessarily because of a deliberate cover-up of the facts. In each country, teaching about imperialism is partly determined by the way history as a subject is taught. In order to change the way children learn about imperialism, it may be necessary to change the philosophy and practice of history teaching as a whole.

Imagining Japan in post-war East Asia: identity politics, schooling and popular culture

“Wars fought are...followed by a different kind of war...... a war over words. In the aftermath of war, the combatants attempt to re-interpret events, some hoping to wipe away the sting of defeat, others seeking to redefi ne the national purpose........The battleground of this war over words shifts to popular culture and the educational system, whereby the weapons become fi lms, literature and history textbooks.” (Sneider, 2011, p.246). As if responding to the quote above, Imagining Japan in Post-War East Asia was published two years later in 2013. The key term is not the “war over words” but the “Images of Japan”. The book consists of four parts; (1) an introductory chapter, an overview of East Asian imagines of Japan, (2) “Japan” in popular culture and propaganda, (3) “Japan” in offi cial discourse (the narratives in the history-text books from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines) and (4) an epilogue on Sino-Korea-Japan discussions about history text-books. The introductory chapter sets Japan as “the other” and “otherness” in four perspectives (normative, dominant, alternative and distant). These narratives show how and why “Japan and the Japanese” have been experienced, described and explained as enemy, model and alien by other Asians all at the same time. Chapters 2~6 offers readers an explanation of how “Japanese images” have been shaped and shared regionally throughout Asia in fi lms, manga, and architecture historically and currently. The narrative, together with related illustrations is fascinating, intelligible, persuasive, and challenging. Most of this should be very new, if not strange, to most Japanese readers. The textbook discourses in part III are less exceptional in that they describe the state-centered intervention in story-telling about the past of each nation and the region. This section restates the argument on the grammar of modernity by Carol Gluck that established the case for textbooks and curriculum Imagining Japan in Post-War East Asia: Identity Politics, Schooling and Popular Culture

Historical Interrogations of Japanese Children amid Disaster and War, 1920–1945

ABSTRACT Historical research on modern Japan has often given insufficient attention to the lives and experiences of children and young people. However, this situation is beginning to change, as historians start to exploit the rich documentary resources, including children’s diaries and letters, that have been collected by institutions across Japan. Japanese children’s responses to disaster and war are especially well documented, and the articles in this special issue begin to explore the potential of these resources. They illuminate different ideals of childhood in Japan during the years between 1920 and 1945, and show how tensions and conflicts between these ideals played out under the stresses of natural disaster and man-made catastrophe. In analysing documents written by children, one crucial methodological and theoretical question is how to assess the degree of agency that such documents show. Adult influences on children’s writing cannot be ignored, and in modern Japan, the education system was arguably the most important channel for such influences. However, we should remember that children also influence one another, and also that the writing of children is, as is of course the case with adults, powerfully shaped by contemporary cultural and social contexts.

Curriculum, instruction and assessment in Japan: beyond lesson study, by Koji Tanaka, Kanae Nishioka, & Terumasa Ishii

Editing a book with such a diverse content, despite the unity of theme, presents many problems. Not least is to ensure complementarity between authors and cohesion between chapters in order to produce a book and not a collection of essays. Ricci achieves this, bringing to the task her cultural awareness, sense of history and linguistic knowledge. The result is a model of how successful and fruitful a workshop can be when the participants’ writing reflects their conversations, shared concerns and exchanges. The maps prepared by Robert Cribb, one including lines in different fonts to distinguish between the routes used by the different colonial powers to transport their prisoners to exile, are a valuable complement to the text. They enhance the place of the book as an original contribution to the study of that alluring, enchanting, pivotal aggregation of human activity, the Indian Ocean.

Introduction: children, education, and media in Japan and its empire

An important part of the story of modern Japan is the story of the construction of a modern nation-state, in all its aspects economic, political, social and cultural. An essential part of that enterprise was the creation of Japan as an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991). This was necessary because to transform economic, political, military and social structures as the Meiji leaders and their successors desired was unsustainable, unless the Japanese people could be brought to imagine and feel an idea of Japan that would elicit their loyal commitment. However, the creation of a national imaginary that would have real power over the minds of the Japanese was a huge enterprise that took decades of determined effort, as authors such as Gluck (1985) and Fujitani (1996) have shown. Once Japan gained an empire, a new problem emerged how to present Japan to its colonial subjects in a way that would impress upon them the power, authority, and (preferably) legitimacy of the imperial power. Whether in Japan proper or its colonies, the process was most effective if it started in childhood. School education and commercial media were perhaps the most important means by which children’s imaginations were fed and their feelings and dispositions shaped to conform to a national and imperial imaginary. The foundations of education and media for children were laid in the nineteenth century, but they developed to a much fuller extent during the first few decades of the twentieth century. It is this period, from about 1900 to 1945, that is the focus of the articles in this special issue, which explores the ways in which education and media in Japan and its empire provided children with ways of imagining and feeling about Japan, its empire and the wider world. A mass education system was one of the earliest and most ambitious endeavours of the Meiji state, with the promulgation of the Gakusei (Fundamental Code of Education) in 1872 (Nagai 1971; Duke 2009). However, in practice it was to take three decades before the vast majority of Japanese children were

Internationalising Japan: Discourse and Practice ed. by Jeremy Breaden, Stacey Steele, and Carolyn S. Stevens (review)

ple, Ibuse Masuji’s 1965 novel Kuroi ame (Black Rain) dealt with personal atomic bomb traumas and phobias lingering two decades after the event; and Shayō (The setting sun, 1947) and Ningen shikkaku (No longer human, 1948) were novels about more immediate postwar anomie by Ibuse’s pupil Dazai Osamu (1909–48), himself so traumatized by postwar social disruption that he took his own life soon after he fi nished the second work. The Hanshin earthquake and the nerve gas attack on Tokyo subway commuters in 1995, and the more recent Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, were undeniably apocalyptic events, with the effects of the nuclear disaster ongoing some years later. The literature, art, and fi lms related to one or another of this long chain of disasters within the space of less than 90 years are all refl ections of reality. Consequently, some may regard such works as to some degree creative nonfi ction—fi ction based on real events—somewhat different from works of science fi ction and speculative fi ction set centuries in the future, or involving space travel or time travel, or other matters quite divorced from current reality. By contrast, some may argue that the series of major disasters spanning nearly a century in Japan has created a unique apocalyptic art and literature not found in other nations. Tanaka’s book provides both specialists and general readers with an authoritative, updated general history of Japanese science fi ction, with a focus on the apocalyptic, based throughout on a consistent and clear application and exposition of postmodern literary theory. This is not a broad encyclopedic survey but a careful and concise historical account of the development of Japanese science fi ction of the apocalyptic subgenre. The main focus is on modern literature, as well as manga and anime, using well-selected illustrative examples from key works by leading authors of the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries. It will be highly useful for years to come, both as a reliable reference and as a concise, consistent, and informative textbook, and it is a work that all reference libraries will be well advised to acquire.