|
|
Change Your Life! |
Government trying to whitewash Japan's history |
|
News
|
|
|
September 20, 2000
TOKYO, SEPT 19 (UNB/AP) - A Japanese grass-roots group warned Tuesday that an increasingly softer portrayal of Japan's wartime atrocities in textbooks may send students down a dangerous path toward neo-nationalism. The Japanese have feuded for decades over how to present World War II in textbooks. Under pressure from its wartime victims, Tokyo slowly has allowed writers to include details of Japan's bloody conquest of Asia in the 1930s and 1940s. But a conservative backlash, led by right-wing elements in the government, is threatening to erase that progress, said Yoshifumi Tawara, Secretary-General of Children and Textbooks Japan Network 21. He accused the Education Ministry, which screens all textbooks before publication, of pressuring publishing companies to temper their language and cut back on their mention of controversial subjects. "The Japanese government only gives lip service to expressions of regret about the war, while it is interfering politically in the content of history textbooks ... deleting historical facts," Tawara said. Education Ministry officials denied pressuring publishing companies. They said the government had not changed its stance on what is necessary in history books. "Most Japanese textbooks in use now take up controversial issues like comfort women and the Nanking Incident," said Keita Sasada, referring to the Japanese army's massacre of as many as 300,000 civilians during the 1937-38 occupation of the Chinese city now known as Nanjing. Conservatives and revisionist historians have in recent years become more vocal in their criticism of new textbooks, saying they instill in Japanese a sense of self-loathing at the expense of national pride. Some say that accounts by mainstream historians of Japanese wartime brutality - such as those detailing the sufferings of thousands of Asian women forced to work as prostitutes at front-line brothels - are exaggerations or just plain wrong. Tawara, speaking at a news conference for foreign journalists, cited several examples from textbooks now under the ministry's consideration that he said proved a new tendency to whitewash the truth. For instance, more books are cutting back on space allocated to describe the Nanking Massacre, and a greater number are using the word "advance" instead of "invasion" to describe Japan's conquest of Asia, he said. These changes are mainly the result of "powerful political pressure" put on textbook companies by members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and the ministry, Tawara said. "They want to use neo-nationalism as a force to unite the people of Japan," he said. |