How the textbook issue plays in Japan

Last week, Japanese watched in astonishment as Chinese protesters calling for a boycott of Japan-made goods smashed windows of Japanese-owned businesses, attacked the Japanese Embassy in Beijing, and beat up Japanese exchange students in Shanghai - all, seemingly, over a textbook issue that comes up regularly.

Beijing is ostensibly angry over Japanese schoolbooks that gloss over the Imperial Army's World War II rampage through Asia. The issue is longstanding, but not something that registers with Japanese as being so outrageous that it can provoke rioting overseas.

Many in Japan see the real source of China's protests in Japan's bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, something China deeply opposes. Japan's ongoing insensitivity over official visits to the Yasukuni shrine, where a number of convicted war criminals are memorialized, are another source of tension.

But the textbook issue can't be written off altogether, as it offers insights into what is often seen as Japan's peculiar myopia about Asian sensitivities.

All schools in Japan choose their history texts from a list of seven or eight that are approved by the Japanese Ministry of Education. A group known as the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform got a book written by nationalist historians onto the list in 2001. The ministry regularly demands that phrasing overly critical of Japan's wartime activities be toned down. Left-wing historians have unsuccessfully sued the government over such edits as changing the Japanese army's "aggression in" China to its "advance into" the country.

Past criticism by Beijing as well as Seoul resulted in a new guideline that texts must show understanding and international harmony in their treatment of modern Asian history.

Despite this, the ministry this year inserted a phrase into a text to say that Japan claims the Takeshima islands, now controlled by Korea and known as Dokdo. The amended book was approved on April 5.

Some of the nationalist historians have close ties to schools within Japan's prestigious Tokyo University, which produces most of Japan's bureaucrats and politicians. Accordingly, their views can hold significant sway. One of the authors in question recently was appointed to the Board of Education in the populous prefecture of Saitama at the governor's recommendation.

But many teachers in Japan, who traditionally lean to the left, refuse to have such books in their classrooms - almost no schools use the History Textbook Reform text. Others say recent history should be decided in a more inclusive way. "The textbook issue is something that shouldn't be decided just by looking at domestic opinion - it should take into account the positions that foreign countries hold," says Masaya Shiraishi, a professor at Waseda University in Tokyo.

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