Elements of war and peace in history education in the US and Japan: a case study comparison

Abstract

History praxis can transform perceptions of the ‘other’ by reshaping ideas about events transpiring between groups. Nevertheless, peace education research has rarely examined history teaching. This article addresses the potential for teaching peace through history teaching. After laying out a conceptual framework for understanding the importance of teaching peaceful values in history, as well as providing a background of history teaching in the US and Japan, an analysis is given of qualitative interviews with junior high school teachers regarding history teaching in Japan and the US. Findings revealed teachers in both countries feel expected to teach mostly historical facts, find it difficult to give satisfactory coverage to events in which their country engaged in immoral acts, and are expected to teach a curriculum generally favourable to the national state. The countries differed in that American students are presented with extensive coverage of their country’s activity around the world whereas Japanese students are not, and Japanese students are taught that war is an immoral act of which their country is historically guilty whereas American students are not necessarily taught this.

Keywords:

• historical facts
• peaceful values
• global citizenship
• reflection
• pacifism

Acknowledgements

Part of the research for this study was done as a visiting scholar at the University of Washington Center for Multicultural Education.

Notes

1. According to the United Nations Population Division Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2002), the US witnessed a net immigration of 1.25 million individuals in 2002, the highest number in the world. The second highest net immigration figure that year was 769,000, reported for the region of ‘Europe’.

2. As in the 1985 song written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and performed by an all‐star choir to raise money to help alleviate starvation in Africa.

3. Short of an exhaustive comparison of curricula across US states and territories, the decentralized nature of American education necessitates a sample analysis, using one state’s curricular standards.

4. Barnard argues that including China as one of the enemies threatening Japan during the Second World War is dubious, when Japan had invaded and occupied China. Rather than describing the situation and discussing and questioning what some historians have referred to as an ‘ABCD Line’, for instance, the texts assert the reified ‘ABCD Line’ as something that simply existed.

5. These criticisms, while understandable, are not always coherent. The author met a university student in Beijing recently, eager to speak English. Shortly he stated brightly, ‘We hate Japan.’ Conversing with him, it became clear that he believed Japan refuses to teach its young people about the Nanking Massacre or other Second World War atrocities (a claim evidence easily refutes). Asked whether he had ever been taught in school about the numbers of Chinese who had died in the Cultural Revolution, he immediately changed the subject. He was representative of the way that many Chinese young people have been known to respond. South Korean young people also encounter disjunction when discussing understandings of modern East Asian history with Japanese. Taiwanese people the author has spoken to seem to have a milder negative perception of Japan, tempered by the developmental progress Taiwan made as a Japanese colony and accounts of the older generation, a good number of whom are much more negative about the takeover by Mandarin Chinese from the mainland after the Japanese government left that island.

6. In Asia, developing countries’ expectations for ODA from Japan have in fact been historically rooted in national reparations (E. Saito, personal communication).

7. Chang argues that more victims died in Nanking than in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Tokyo combined, and their deaths were utterly cruel. Neither was Nanking an isolated event, as Japanese forces are believed to have committed atrocities in numerous other locations and times during their occupation of various territories. However, Chang’s historiography and numbering (she clings to the figure of 300,000 victims commonly given in China) has been widely criticized (e.g. Fogel, 1998). Nevertheless, the weight of human cruelty involved is difficult to overstate (even more conservative figures estimate hundreds of thousands of victims).

8. Full profiles are provided in Langager (2006, 380–5).

9. Just how long that obligation will continue to be met may hinge on another political debate within Japan, which emerged in the latter 1990s. According to Children and Textbooks Japan Network21 (2000), references to numerous Japanese state atrocities during the early twentieth century have been significantly removed or scaled back. This watchdog points to the notoriously right‐wing Sankei‐Fusosha publishers’ junior high‐school history textbook, adopted by the Municipality of Tokyo in 2004 for its new contiguous secondary schools, as a catalyst for a wave of subsequent acts of self‐censorship on the part of would‐be textbook authors vying for Ministry approval of their works. Sankei‐Fusosha’s ultraconservative model of how to write a pro‐nationalist history textbook, together with its acceptance by the Tokyo Board of Education, is thought to have initiated this trend.