Japanese Education, Nationalism, and the Politics of War Memories, 1945-2000

Yoshiko Nozaki

Why does the Japanese history textbook controversy continue as if there were no end to it? This may well be a question most observers of Japan—whether or not they were interested in Japanese education—asked at one point or another in the past two decades, and it is one with no easy answers. Part of the problem is that the controversy has arisen intermittently and repetitively (or the way it has been reported would make it seem that way), so that developing a meaningful historical perspective has been difficult. For another, understanding nationalism (and its power over a nation) demands a more complex analytical perspective than one might expect. This paper presents the Japanese history textbook controversy as a persisting cultural and political struggle of the last twenty years, even though in some years it gathered very little attention. It analyzes the politics and power relations surrounding the controversy, by looking at the processes by which the power of nationalists was exercised and resisted by various actors in the struggle—including, but not limited to, the members of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), bureaucrats of the Ministry of Education (MOE), textbook authors, and ordinary citizens.

About Yoshiko Nozaki

Yoshiko Nozaki is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy, State University of New York at Buffalo. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she studied curriculum history, educational anthropology, cultural studies, and critical and feminist theories. In her dissertation, she examined the Japanese textbook controversies in the years since 1945, including particularly Saburo Ienaga's court challenges to the state's de facto censorship of school textbooks. She was a social studies teacher in Japan in the 1980s, and has also had experience teaching in public schools in the United States and Australia. Before joining the SUNY-Buffalo, she taught at Massey University in New Zealand.