History Textbooks and International Relations in Northeast Asia PDF

9 The war over words History textbooks and international relations in Northeast Asia Daniel C. Sneider Wars fought with bullets and battleships are invariably followed by a different kind of war—a war over words. In the aftermath of war, the combatants attempt to rein...

9 The war over words History textbooks and international relations in Northeast Asia Daniel C. Sneider Wars fought with bullets and battleships are invariably followed by a different kind of war—a war over words. In the aftermath of war, the combatants attempt to reinterpret events, some hoping to wipe away the sting of defeat, others seeking to redefine the national purpose. The lessons of victory and of defeat are recast for new generations and for new purposes. And the wartime conflict is re-fought, time and again, through these clashing narratives of the past. The battleground of this war over words shifts to popular culture and the educational system, whereby the weapons become films, literature, and history textbooks. Domestic debates drive these often fiercely contested dissections of history, reflecting broader political forces at work in each society. However, the debate over the past also has become a sore point in international relations. Governments clash over issues ranging from war memorial designs and museum exhibits to the wording in middle school textbooks. Often, the choice of words is seen as evidence of a lack of remorse, an attempt to conceal misdeeds or of a new worrisome nationalism. Among these battlefields of interpreting the past, textbooks are the most prominent. Textbooks are imbued with a powerful role, partly symbolic, in creating what some scholars have called the “master narrative” that defines a nation’s identity. What a nation’s youths learn about the past, it is believed, can shape their response to future conflict. Even if their power to form historical memory and perception is overstated, textbooks represent an official, or sometimes semi-official, version of wartime events. Governments play a direct role—particularly in Asia—and sometimes an indirect role in determining the content of school history textbooks. Such government oversight makes textbooks a legitimate subject for debates among competing forces within a nation and among nation states. This chapter examines the emergence of textbooks as an international relations issue in Northeast Asia in the postwar period. It looks at the circumstances under which textbooks became a public interstate issue and the response of the various governments, including the formation and track record, to date, of bilateral textbook commissions. It examines, first of all, the case of Japanese textbooks and the response principally of China, South and North Korea, and the United States to Japanese textbooks. However, it also looks at disputes concerning Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese textbooks.  The war over words 247 The importance of textbooks after war has been recognized since the aftermath of World War One. The League of Nations promoted textbook revision to reduce the detrimental role of textbooks in shaping a view of a former enemy.1 After World War Two, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) promoted bilateral consultations on textbooks, leading to the 1951 Franco-German Agreement on Controversial Issues in European History (Franco- German Textbook Commission) and a similar 1975 agreement between Germany and Poland. Since the 1960s, Germany has been willing to accept and act on foreign criticism of its textbooks, in part because Germany understood this to be part of the cost of playing a central role in European integration.2 In Asia, however, there has been little success along those lines. Japanese teachers and their German counterparts met in the early 1950s, but it was not an ongoing effort. The UNESCO tried to sponsor a Japanese–South Korean dialogue on history textbooks in the late 1960s, but it was aborted amid domestic political conflict in Japan over textbook issues.3 A joint study group of Korean and Japanese scholars also began in the late 1980s, with limited results, as discussed further. However, the Japanese government explicitly rejected the UNESCO model of government-to-government negotiation of textbook content until the late 1990s.4 Indeed, while Europe grappled with this issue from the earliest days of the postwar period as an international relations issue, history textbooks did not emerge as an international battlefield in Northeast Asia until the early 1980s. Before then, textbooks were almost purely a domestic issue, mainly within Japan. In the last twenty-five years, however, textbooks have become a nexus for significant international tension in the region, especially between Japan and China and between Japan and the two Koreas. In recent years, the content of textbooks has become a growing issue between China and South Korea and also in the cross-strait relationship between China and Taiwan. The disputes over content range from the treatment of the wartime and Japanese colonial period in Asia to other, far more historically distant issues such as the ancient Korean kingdom of Koguryo. Given the episodic nature of these disputes, it is clear that content alone is not driving textbooks as an international issue. Often, they are linked to broader international relations developments in Northeast Asia, to responses to the rise of Japan, and later China, as regional powers, and to growing regional rivalries. Domestic politics clearly drive the textbook issue, not only as it evolves within a nation but as it becomes international. The pattern of activity around textbooks suggests that the issue has internationalized partly in response to a gradual process of regional interaction, if not integration, in Northeast Asia. As China, Japan, and South Korea—and Taiwan—are compelled to create a stable regional order in Northeast Asia, the need to resolve the war over words is more urgent than ever. The United States has been largely reluctant to involve itself in the history issue, either to confront difficult issues regarding American actions in the war or to be drawn into the disputes within Asia over the past. However, to the degree that these issues become a source of instability in the region, particularly between China and Japan but also between South Korea and Japan, US officials have been 248 Daniel C. Sneider more willing to engage this problem and to play a mediating role, though not always with much enthusiasm. Japanese history textbooks as an international issue The controversy over Japan’s history textbooks begins with the surrender of Imperial Japan to the allied powers in 1945. From the earliest days of the American occupation of Japan, the content of textbooks was understood to be a key part of efforts to reverse the militarization of Japan and to strengthen democratic and constitutional rule.5 Reforms aimed at lessening the power of the Ministry of Education to control textbook content and adoption, animated by the belief that public education was clearly linked to the policies that led to war in the Asia. Historian Ienaga Saburo, co-author of one of the earliest postwar textbooks and a long-time crusader for intellectual freedom, summed up this viewpoint: The tragedy of Japan that led to the Pacific War is the result of various political, social, and economic causes, but one important cause lies here: that the vast majority of the people were educated from youth into a frame of mind in which they could not criticize sate policies independently but had to follow along in those policies, mistaken though they were. Education since 1868 carries heavy responsibility for bringing on that tragedy. Moreover, via the sudden plunge into the Pacific War, education itself was fundamentally destroyed.6 Japanese progressives such as Ienaga held Japan itself largely responsible for the war, focusing on Japan’s racism toward its Chinese and Korean neighbors, the failure of democracy within Japan, and the rise of an authoritarian military. Japanese conservatives, however, held a different view of the war, echoing the wartime claim that Japan was leading a resistance to Western imperialism in Asia, and rejecting postwar accusations of war crimes. With the end of the occupation in 1952 and the unfolding of the Cold War, Japanese conservatives felt emboldened to mount a counterattack against what they saw as left-wing domination of the educational system, led by the Japan Teachers Union. Textbook content was challenged, both by conservative politicians and those from within the MOE, whose officials used the textbook screening system to challenge authors such as Ienaga and promote textbooks authored by more conservative academics.7 The screening system requires school textbooks for grades one to twelve to be authorized by the government, following published guidelines. Teachers are obliged to use the authorized textbooks as their main teaching material, although they may supplement with other materials and books.8 The textbook adoption and revision process was the locus of controversy within Japan through the 1970s and, as the ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) gained strength, it challenged what it considered leftwing content in history textbooks. In the 1980–1981 screening, for example, the ministry ordered Ienaga to change forty-one passages in his history textbook, including  The war over words 249 the use of term aggression (shinryaku) to describe Japan’s actions in China. The textbook reviewer told Ienaga that the phrase “has a very strong connotation…of criminality” and suggested he used instead the term advance. Ienaga’s response: Aggression against China is objective fact, and not simply judgment, so I will not change it. “Military advance” and the like are the same deception as substituting “change direction” for “retreat”[the censors did so during the Pacific War] or “the end of the war” for “the defeat” [many people did so after August 15, 1945], and in genuine education such deception should not be allowed. True patriotism expresses itself in recognizing frankly one’s own country’s mistakes and working so that they will not be repeated.9 Though earlier such battles had provoked almost no response outside of Japan, this time Japanese media coverage of the disputes with the MOE catalyzed the first international crisis over Japan’s history textbooks.10 By September, more than 2,000 reports on Japanese textbook screening had appeared in the press of nineteen Asian countries.11 In July, the government of the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the Peoples Republic of China filed formal protests with the Japanese government. Labor unions and other groups in Hong Kong also protested, and the official media of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK [North Korea]) also joined the furor. The government of Vietnam asked the Japanese Ambassador to correct textbook passages that referred to Vietnam. The diplomatic uproar stunned the Japanese government, which tried to stem the damage amid rising protest. The education ministry dispatched senior officials to China, whereas the LDP sent senior Diet leaders to South Korea to explain. On August 26, Chief Cabinet Secretary Kiichi Miyazawa issued a statement acknowledging that the content of Japanese textbooks is a legitimate issue of international relations. It clearly states that the views of other governments, particularly China and South Korea, should be taken into account in the screening of Japanese textbooks and that corrections should be made in response to international criticisms. This became known as the “Neighboring Countries Clause,” requiring that textbooks give “necessary consideration, in the interests of international friendship and cooperation,” to the history of Japan’s relations with its Asian neighbors. It provided a basis, still valid to this day even if it is not consistently followed by Japan, for Asian nations to intervene regarding the content of Japanese textbooks.12 After that intervention, the MOE backed off its demand to soften the term aggression and also on changes that suggested the mass brutalities in Nanjing, China in 1937—the “Nanjing Massacre”—were the product of chaotic conditions rather than the intent of the Japanese Imperial Army. It also allowed authors to cite numbers of victims in Nanjing, provided they gave sources for their data. Textbook revisions also changed the depiction of Japan’s colonial rule of Korea. The South Korean government had demanded the correction of nineteen items, and some fifteen of these changes were reportedly made, with the remaining items “under review.” For several years at least, Japan undertook 250 Daniel C. Sneider an ongoing process of accounting for its textbooks to Asian governments. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported the results of screening to their South Korean counterparts in 1983 and 1984, comparing those with the 1982 versions and the changes that had been made. However, the Japanese government continued to claim that it had not “ordered” those changes, attempting to preserve its insistence that the government role was confined to ensuring balance and accuracy in the textbooks.13 Japanese conservatives were alarmed by this trend. In the fall of 1982, a newly formed right-wing group with significant support from the LDP and right-wing business and media circles, the National Conference to Defend Japan (Nihon o Mamoru Kokumin Kaigi), announced it would publish its own high school history textbook. Under political pressure, the MOE’s textbook screening council approved its textbook, triggering another storm of international protest.14 South Korean media reported on the textbook’s contents, and the Chinese Foreign Ministry issued an official note in June charging that the textbook “grossly distorts the history of the Sino-Japanese war.” Reminding the Japanese government of its obligations under the 1982 statement “to seriously examine the great harm Japan inflicted upon the Chinese people during the 1937–1945 war,” the Chinese took particular umbrage at the textbook’s treatment of the Nanjing massacre as an unproven event about which “research is continuing.” The Japanese Foreign Ministry responded that the book was not yet formally approved, that changes were still underway, and that, therefore, the Chinese protest was premature.15 Behind closed doors, the government tried to soften the textbook in response to foreign criticism. In September 1985, Education Minister Fujio Masayuki was forced to resign after complaints from both South Korea and China over comments he made about the wartime period. Among other things, Fujio denied the criminality of the Nanjing massacre, claimed the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910 was a matter of mutual agreement, and questioned the legitimacy of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal convened after World War Two. The South Korean government initially cancelled a scheduled foreign ministers meeting and threatened to call off a visit by Prime Minister Nakasone to Seoul for the opening of the Asian games.16 This period of controversy overlaps, significantly, with Japan’s most assertive claim to regional and global leadership in the postwar period. Bolstered by its economic success, particularly after the 1985 Plaza Accord, Japanese officials talked much more openly of a Japanese-led Asian rise. The United States–Japan relationship was embroiled increasingly in clashes over trade and economic policy, diminishing the importance to some of the postwar bilateral security alliance. As Japan rose, it was perhaps natural that questions were raised about whether it had learned the lessons of its past, ill-fated attempt at regional domination. One positive product of these international textbook controversies of the 1980s was to revive interest in a UNESCO-style cross-national study of textbooks in a nongovernmental setting. In 1989, Japanese and South Korean historians began to meet and, in 1990, the Japan–South Korea Joint Study Group on History Textbooks, a nongovernmental effort of scholars, educators, and textbook publishers, was  The war over words 251 organized. The group drew inspiration from the example of Germany and by the German–Polish exchanges on textbook development. The group disbanded in 1993, with its discussions summarized in a book.17 Japanese textbook controversies in the 1990s The developments of the late 1980s continued through the early part of the next decade. Politically, the LDP was in retreat, beset by corruption scandals and declining electoral popularity, leading in 1993 to the end of nearly four decades of LDP rule. The passing of Emperor Hirohito in 1989 unleashed a wave of historical self-examination, including the most open discussion to date within Japan of the responsibility of the Emperor himself for the war. Globally, the end of the Cold War called into question a postwar Japanese foreign policy that centered on its security alliance with the United States. Regionally this was also a time of change as South Korea underwent rapid democratization and China was embarking on the beginning of a period of rapid, market-driven economic growth. In this context, the so-called comfort women issue emerged suddenly in the early 1990s. Former Asian victims of Japan’s wartime system of brothels came out in public to speak about their experiences. Japanese historians produced evidence, drawn from Imperial Army archives, of official involvement in the organization of these facilities and of pressing Korean, Taiwanese, Chinese, and other women to become prostitutes servicing Japanese soldiers. In August 1993, Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono Yohei issued a statement acknowledging official involvement. These admissions were followed by statements in August 1993 by Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro, heading a brief-lived non-LDP coalition government, about Japan’s responsibility for a “war of aggression” and for the colonial rule of Korea. In 1995, socialist leader Murayama Tomiichi, head of a coalition government with the LDP, issued a remarkable statement marking the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, clearly condemning Japan’s colonial rule and “aggression” in Asia and calling for bilateral and regional dialogues on history education.18 The revelations about comfort women and the Kono statement opened the door to the inclusion of this dark piece of the past in textbooks. Virtually every high school history textbook that was screened by the MOE in 1992–1993 and 1993– 1994 (some twenty-two textbooks in all) contained such references, as did all of the junior high school social studies textbooks screened in 1995–1996.19 In this atmosphere, Japanese and South Korean scholars made another attempt to organize a joint review of their high school history textbooks, with the support of the UNESCO, though again Japan rejected proposals to carry this out on an official level. A Japan–Republic of Korea Joint Committee to Promote Historical Research was formed in 1997 and operated for three years, followed by the creation in 2001 of the South Korea–Japan Dialogue of Historians.20 This academic-level dialogue gained some official backing from the official visit of then President Kim Dae Jung to Japan in October, 1998.21 The history education issue also came up for discussion when Chinese President Jiang Zemin visited Tokyo from November 25 to 30, 1998. Jiang took 252 Daniel C. Sneider a more aggressive stance on this issue, accusing Japan of trying to whitewash history and calling on the Japanese government to “learn the lesson” and stop the “denying or twisting of history, and educate the younger generation in Japan on the correct assessment of history.”22 The New History Textbook controversy Meanwhile, Japanese conservatives began to rally against this shift, particularly after the fall of the Murayama government and the restoration of LDP leadership in early 1996. Demands for the removal of textbook references to comfort women were raised by parliament members and by intellectuals associated with this view of history. In late 1996, education professor and prominent Tokyo University scholar Fujioka Nobukatsu led the formation of a new group, the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform (Atarashi Rekishi Kyokasho o Tsukurukai). The group, like its predecessor in the 1980s, focused on publishing new history textbooks. The textbook reform society marshaled considerable intellectual resources, including scholars who mounted detailed challenges to historical accounts of events such as the Manchurian Incident, the Nanjing massacres, and Japan’s colonial rule of Korea and Taiwan. It offered a far less repentant view of Japan’s wartime past, arguing that Japan had been subjected to a form of “victor’s justice” that wrongly placed sole responsibility on it for the war, what it characterized as “masochistic” history. “The people that does not have a history to be proud of cannot constitute itself as a nation,” Fujioka wrote.23 The conservative counter-attack forced a retreat by publishers and textbook authors. In June 1998, the Education Minister criticized the lack of “balance” in history textbooks and, in the following year, the MOE asked publishers to introduce more balance, not only in content but in their choice of authors.24 The final drafts of some textbook editions submitted to the MOE in the spring of 2000 showed the impact of this pressure, with toned-down descriptions of wartime atrocities, including the removal of references to comfort women in a number of junior high textbooks. The textbook reform society submitted its own high school “New History Textbook” and a civics textbook for middle school use in 2000, unleashing a firestorm of international controversy, dwarfing the events of the early 1980s. The society and the publisher, Fusosha (a subsidiary of the conservative Sankei Shimbun), immediately engaged in a public relations campaign to promote the book, including distributing copies of the proposed text. The history textbook touched a number of neuralgic points—it used the word advancement in place of invasion to describe the war in Asia; it referred to the “Nanjing incident,” downplaying the number of casualties; it removed all references to the comfort women; and it extolled the benefits of Japan’s colonial rule of Korea and other parts of Asia. As the content became known, it drew protests from within Japan and from Korea, China, and other Asian countries.25 Within Japan, the battle was building. A statement issued by Japanese historians and educators in December 2000 compared the textbook to the prewar education  The war over words 253 intended to mold imperial subjects. “The certification of such a textbook by the Japanese government and its adoption for use in history education would pave the way for the revival of the chauvinistic history education of prewar and wartime Japan,” and would break international promises made to take neighboring countries views into account, they warned.26 The Chinese and South Korean government communicated concerns about the text, prompting reassurances from Japanese officials that their views would be taken into account in the screening process. In February 2001, another furor erupted over the remarks of a leading LDP figure that Japan had been forced into the war by the United States and crediting Japan with liberating Southeast Asia from European colonialism.27 One partial exception to this reaction was in Taiwan, which was immersed in its own reexamination of history in its high school textbooks. “In the current environment, it is futile to seek to forge a consensus on Japan’s wartime conduct given that most Asian nations use history education for building nationalist sentiment,” said Wu Mi-cha, vice chairman of Taiwan’s cabinet Council for Cultural Affairs and a former history professor. He suggested that Japan provide South Korean and Chinese textbooks as additional teaching material to its students and let the students make up their own minds. Japan’s neighbors could reciprocate and discuss Japanese textbooks, he said. However, this was a relatively lone voice of reason.28 In early March, the Japanese media reported that the authors had made 137 changes in the text on the recommendation of the MOE screening council. Among the changes, the text acknowledged Korean resistance to Japanese rule and the mass murders in Nanjing. However, it continued to exclude references to comfort women and contained language that Japanese critics claimed legitimized the war. The text was approved later that month, and the MOE declared that it would not request any further revisions. Both the South Korean and Chinese governments filed protests that the revisions were not sufficient. The text contained material “rationalizing and glorifying Japan’s past wrongdoings based upon a self-centered interpretation of history,” the South Korean foreign ministry spokesman said on April 3. The Korean government is gravely concerned that the distorted view of history that such textbooks [contain] are likely to instill in Japan’s growing generations is not only undesirable for Japan’s future and its responsibilities in the international community but also highly detrimental to Korea–Japan relations.29 China’s official Xinhua news agency said the Japanese screening had not altered the “nature of distorting historical facts and glorifying wars of aggression.”30 The Japanese government refused to yield to these protests, arguing that they could not interfere further in the textbook screening and adoption process.31 Chief Cabinet Secretary Fukuda Yasuo issued a statement insisting that the textbook should not be seen as an expression of the historical views of the Japanese government. The authorization process did, he acknowledged, take into account 254 Daniel C. Sneider the concerns of neighboring countries, based on the MOE’s regulations.32 Speaking to reporters several days later, a foreign ministry spokesman explicitly rejected charges, then being made in conservative circles, that the foreign protests constituted interference in Japan’s domestic affairs.33 Amid this growing controversy, Koizumi Junichiro became Prime Minister on April 26. Later that summer, in August, he made a controversial visit to the Yasukuni shrine to Japan’s war dead. Tensions with China and Korea were already rising, partly a response to a perception that Japan was becoming more assertive in regional security but also driven by rising nationalism in both China and Korea. In April, the Chinese government protested a decision to allow a visit by former Taiwanese president Lee Teng-hui, a prominent advocate of greater Taiwanese independence and a close friend of Japan. In a meeting with the Japanese Ambassador on April 20, the Chinese government linked that visit to the supposed lack of “a proper explanation on the Japanese history textbook issue to the Chinese people.”34 On May 8, South Korean foreign minister Han Seung-soo conveyed an aide memoire to the government of Japan containing a list of specific corrections it sought in the Japanese textbooks. Based on a report prepared by a team of Korean researchers, the list sought twenty-five changes in the Fusosha textbook and ten others in seven other textbooks, to correct parts they considered “false, obscuring, distorting and/or misleading.” The demand cited the 1998 joint declaration and the 1995 apology issued by Murayama and the 1982 statement on textbooks. “In making the demand for corrections,” the memorandum said, “the Korean Government has no intention to interfere with the education of history in Japan.” It called for creating a permanent body within the Korean government to promote exchanges of historians and to promote an understanding of Korean history. Meanwhile, the Chinese Foreign Minister, in a May 7 meeting with the new Japanese foreign minister Tanaka Makiko, pressed the issue in somewhat milder tones. The Japanese government, led by Koizumi, continued to insist that it could not intervene further in the screening process and that its own views of the past were not reflected in the new textbook. In July, the Education ministry announced that it would make only a few changes in the books, rejecting formally most of the list sought by Seoul.35 The Korean government responded with an angry statement denouncing the “duplicity” of the Japanese government’s position: While stating that its official position lies with the view of history as contained in Prime Minister Murayama’s Statement of 1995 and the Joint Declaration on Korea–Japan Partnership of 1998 on one hand, on the other it condones historiography that distorts and beautifies Japan’s imperial past which inflicted indescribable pain and agony so vividly remembered by the Korean people. Tensions continued to escalate around this issue until an October summit meeting between Koizumi and Korean president Kim Dae Jung announced an  The war over words 255 agreement to form, for the first time on an official level, a bilateral committee on history. The agreement created a “Korea–Japan Joint History Research Committee” composed of twelve academics from each country to “promote an accurate and mutual understanding of historical facts and historical perspectives regarding the issue of history textbooks.” That committee was to conduct research for two years on Korean–Japanese relations and then submit its report to another group—the Korea–Japan Joint History Research Steering Committee, composed of government officials and academics. The research results were expected to be widely circulated and be used in the making of history textbooks in both countries. In the three years during which it operated, the joint research committee held tens of meetings, publishing more than 40 research papers on nineteen subjects. The committee attempted what has been described as “parallel history,” in which both sides drafted written arguments, critiqued each other’s drafts, revised the drafts, and then noted the remaining points of conflict. Some of the topics were fairly narrow, for example the role of the Japanese military on the Korean peninsula or the expansion of Japanese department stores into Korea. The Joint Committee bogged down, however, in disputes over historical events—the project was “overwhelmed by nationalism,” raising claim and counter-claim, reported historian Chung Jaejeong. “This kind of atmosphere can be found in between lines of the reports of the Joint History Research Committee.”36 “Despite the heated debates on certain subjects and a failure to narrow their differing views, there was at least one productive result: they came to understand why and where their differences lay,” Chung concluded. “On the whole, the Japan–ROK project has probably not had much practical impact,” commented Japanese historian Kitaoka Shin’ichi, a participant in the effort and a current similar committee formed with China. However, he credits the effort with having “generated a certain bond of mutual trust between scholars from the two countries, and created a sense that a common intellectual community was taking shape.”37 Still, there was reluctance on the part of the Japanese to create a common textbook. Only after a two-year hiatus, in 2007, amid growing international attention and after the formation of a joint China–Japan history committee, was the second phase of the project begun. The uproar over the New History Textbook had another outcome—it discouraged Japanese school authorities from adopting the book. After it was offered in the spring of 2002, the textbook garnered a tiny 0.04 per cent of the market, though versions sold to the general public did become bestsellers.38 A second edition of the textbooks, published in 2005, did not do any better—a mere 48 of 11,035 schools opted to use it, according to the Mainichi Shimbun. Nonetheless, the authorization of the new edition of the Fusosha textbooks in April 2005 served to usher in a new and, in the case of China, even more vituperative international crisis. Both the Chinese and South Korean governments, for domestic political reasons, encouraged a wave of anti-Japanese protest that sent Japan’s relations with its Asian neighbors to a postwar low. The Korean government again protested what it saw as an alteration of historical fact in the textbooks. The Koreans were careful to acknowledge that the Japanese 256 Daniel C. Sneider government made some efforts to correct problems and that “a substantial number of textbooks tended to make relatively objective descriptions of the coercive nature of Japan’s annexation of Korea and on the resistance movement of the Korean people, among other things.” The Koreans were incensed, however, by language in the civics textbook that lent support to Japanese claims over the Dokdo islets. Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, suffering a serious decline in his popularity after only two years in office, seized on the territorial issue to assail Japan. “Together with the distortion of Japanese history textbooks and visits to Yasukuni shrine, the matter of Dokdo will be dealt with head on,” he said in a emotion-laden speech on Korea–Japan relations delivered on April 25. “Physical provocations will be met with strong and firm responses...The nature of this matter is such that no compromise or surrender is possible, whatever the costs and sacrifices may be.”39 The joint history research committee wrapped up its first phase of work in June 2005 but, in this atmosphere, the project stalled. It did not revive until two years later, when Korea–Japan relations warmed up slightly. At a meeting between foreign ministers at the end of March 2007, the two governments agreed to carry out a second round of joint discussion focused on textbooks. The new effort was supposed to yield results that would be reflected in the textbooks used in both countries, and a joint report was to be issued in June, 2008. An initial meeting of the new committee, headed by Tokyo University professor Toriumi Yasushi and Korea University professor Cho Kwang, took place in June, 2007. The committee was divided into four subgroups, one of which deals specifically with textbooks. The others were devoted, as they were in the earlier effort, to ancient history, medieval history, and modern history. The progress of this new project was slow, but the thirty-month study was finally wrapped up in March 2010. A 2,200-page document was issued, tackling forty-eight topics from the ancient period to modern times. Sharp differences among the thirty-four-member Joint History Research Committee remained, but participants spoke positively about a narrowing of those gaps. “There continue to be differences and such differences are not abnormal but natural. I believe the most significant meaning of this research was that we tried to find the differences and bring them to light,” Professor Cho told a press conference.40 The researchers agreed to reject the assertion that Japan had established a base on the Korean peninsula from the fourth through sixth centuries, a claim used in the past to justify Japan’s colonization of Korea in the twentieth century. However, the committee sparred over a number of sensitive topics, including comfort women and the forced recruitment of labor during the wartime era. The textbook subgroup aired conflicts, with Koreans continuing to assail the screening system in Japan and Japanese countering with criticisms of Korean textbooks for their failure to reflect Japan’s postwar transformation.41 The tensions over textbooks continue to arise, meanwhile. In May 2008, the South Korean government and civic organizations, including the Korean Federation of Teachers’ Associations, protested reported guidelines issued by  The war over words 257 the Japanese education ministry that purportedly instructed textbook authors and publishers to describe the Dokdo islets as Japanese territory. “The move by the Japanese government to assert its territorial claim to Dokdo in the curriculum handbook for teachers is an act of usurpation of the sovereignty and the territory of the Republic of Korea,” the teachers’ association said in a protest letter to the Japanese authorities.42 The Japanese education authorities, apparently responding to the South Korean protests, reportedly asked publishers to refrain from this description of the disputed territory in the new social studies textbooks due to be published in 2010.43 Despite this, several social studies textbooks for elementary school use contained these descriptions, triggering Korean government protest.44 Sino-Japanese textbook wars The textbook issue only served to feed a growing, and explosive, expression of anti-Japanese sentiment in China. In March 2005, a massive Internet campaign had been launched, with the backing of the Chinese government, to collect signatures opposing Japan’s bid for permanent membership on the United Nations Security Council. Chinese officials and scholars argued, as a central theme of their campaign, that Japan’s inability to come to grips with its wartime past made it unsuitable for permanent membership. The authorization of textbooks announced on April 6 was the signal for a wave of protest in China the next weekend, with tens of thousands of Chinese surrounding the Japanese Embassy in Beijing, throwing stones and shouting “Be ashamed of distorting history.” Violent protest spread to Shanghai and shook the Sino-Japanese relationship, sending into a period of frozen ties and mutual recrimination.45 The Sino-Japanese war over history words is captured in a semi-official exchange in 2005 between two academics: Japanese historian Kitaoka Shin’ichi, who had taken up the post of Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations, and Professor Liu Yiangyong, the deputy director of the Institute of International Studies of Tsinghua University. Kitaoka penned a widely read article, “Answering China’s Japan Bashers,” that appeared in the June issue of the influential monthly Chuo Koron.46 Kitaoka responded to Chinese charges that Japan had failed to apologize for its wartime actions and accused China of orchestrating a global campaign to block Japan’s Security Council bid. He defended the textbook screening process and, while acknowledging differences with the Fusosha textbook, he argued it did not glorify Japanese aggression. The Japanese scholar and diplomat took up a number of sensitive issues, among them the accuracy of death count claims in Nanjing, whether the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal was fair, and the Prime Minister’s visits to Yasukuni. Kitaoka proposed that Japanese and Chinese scholars participate in a joint history research project similar to the effort with Korea (while admitting that project has failed to yield “the kind of results we seek”). The goal would be to clear up historical misunderstandings, he said. “This may not be enough 258 Daniel C. Sneider to create a common textbook, but it should be enough to compile a common reference work.” For this to work, however, the process must be reciprocal. “A situation in which the Japanese are open to revising their thinking but the Chinese are not is untenable,” Kitaoka wrote, pointing out that “Chinese and South Korean textbooks have their own issues.” Japanese officials had already tried to mount a counter-attack against Chinese history textbooks, accusing them of engaging in their own version of nationalistic education.47 The Chinese response to this, Liu’s “On Correct Understanding of the Historical Issues between China and Japan,” was published in November and circulated by the Chinese government.48 He insisted that Chinese did not demand agreement from Japan on their view of history. “What China asks of the Japanese side is that it should not whitewash its history of aggression and eulogize those who died in the war of aggression,” Liu wrote. The Chinese scholar rejected the charge that the China and Korea use historical issues to “bash” Japan. Rather, it is the denials of responsibility for the past by Japanese politicians that undermines trust in Japan, he said. The conflict over historical perception, as embodied in the textbook disputes, has greater impact now than actual memories of the past. The Fusosha textbook reflects pre-war propaganda views, Liu said, citing passages that he contended justify Japan’s occupation of Manchuria, its invasion of China in 1937, the Nanjing Massacre, and the need to occupy Korea to protect Japanese security. Liu cited other history textbooks approved by the MOE that “watered down its history of invasion” and deleted references to atrocities such as experiments on human beings by the infamous 731 Unit. “The textbook issue is definitely not an isolated one,” wrote Liu. Rather it is the continuation of the long struggle between the two standpoints on history in Japan, an important component of the activities by Japanese right-wing forces aiming at glorifying the history of invasion and an indicator of the growing rightist tendency in the post-Cold War Japanese political life. The Chinese rejected Japanese accusations of interference in Japan’s domestic affairs. These are legitimate “matters of international concern” under international law, the article argued, citing the 1982 textbook statement as acknowledgement of that assertion. It also cited the terms of surrender, the Potsdam proclamation, as dictating that Japan “should absolutely not allow the right-wing textbooks and the militarist view of history to continue deceiving and misleading the Japanese people.” Writing later, Kitaoka admitted the Chinese campaign on historical issues had considerable impact. “Japanese diplomacy clearly suffers whenever China decides to trump Japan’s initiatives by playing the ‘historical issues’ card,” he observed. Japanese and Chinese perceptions of history may never be identical, but the experience at the UN made me more convinced than ever that dialogue  The war over words 259 among concerned historians from both countries, aimed at ascertaining where the two sides’ perceptions differ and where they are in agreement, would go some way toward deterring China from playing the history card.49 Kitaoka’s proposed joint history research project was embraced in the thaw in Sino-Japanese relations that followed the departure of Koizumi from office. During Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s visit to China in October 2006, the two governments created a joint project that would bring Chinese and Japanese experts together to conduct joint research spanning the entire 2,000-year history of contact and exchange between the two countries. The Japanese insisted that the project not focus exclusively on the war period but take into account Japan’s postwar development. Kitaoka was appointed the Japanese chairman, along with Chinese historian Bu Ping, director of the Institute of Modern History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The opening meeting was held in Beijing on December 26 and 27. Bu Ping pointed to the failure of some in Japan to “accept responsibility for the war,” people who “deny even the historical facts of its aggressive war. It offends the victim country and is the reason why the historical issue has not yet been solved.”50 He said the goal of the committee was to create a “common historical perception” built “on the joint confirmation of historical facts.” Professor Kitaoka outlined a much more modest aim of narrowing the gap of historical perception between the two countries. At the second meeting in March 2007 in Tokyo, the committee abandoned the idea of creating a joint textbook or even of agreeing on a common view of events. Instead, they opted for the “parallel history” formula used by the UNESCO and also adopted in the Japan–Korea committee. They divided into two groups— one dealing with ancient, medieval, and early modern history and the other with modern and contemporary history.51When it came to the modern period, the two sides could not even fully agree on the chapter topics. Conflicting memories of the Chinese occupation of Japan proved to be “the key problem in our relations,” Bu Ping told an American reporter later that year.52 Touchy issues were left aside for later discussion. At a third meeting in January 2008, the group ran into problems concerning the section on postwar history, including disagreements over the treatment of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal and the characterization of events in modern Chinese history, including the Cultural Revolution. It decided to keep the postwar section of the report confidential and to publish the other parts of the report without a summary of their discussion, at the request of the Chinese side.53 The 549-page report was finally issued on February 1, 2010, offering parallel statements on history issues. The historians—ten from each country—did agree on some crucial issues. Both sides characterized the 1937–1945 Sino-Japanese war as an “act of aggression” waged by Japan. Both referred clearly to the atrocities committed in Nanjing, while continuing to differ over the scale of killing, with the Chinese sticking to the official figure of 300,000 plus massacred whereas Japanese scholars put the range of deaths at a maximum of 200,000, and making note of 260 Daniel C. Sneider lower estimates of 20,000 to 40,000 killed. Chinese scholars acknowledged the possibly accidental nature of the Marco Polo Bridge incident, which triggered the war, while insisting that it was consistent with a Japanese plan to wage full-scale war against China.54 A warming trend in China–Japan relations eased overt tensions over textbook issues. However, it is not so clear that there was the political will, on either side, to push this officially backed bilateral history dialogue forward. Indeed, the Japanese administration led by Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo, which helped push this warming trend, seemed eager to move on to other subjects of discussion. In a speech delivered at Beijing University on December 28, 2007, Fukuda called for expanded cooperation on issues such as energy and environment and stressed the importance of creating mutual understanding through intellectual exchanges. However, he did not mention the joint history research project at all.55 The ouster of the LDP government in the August, 2009 election and the advent of a new cabinet led by the Democratic Party of Japan could create some new impetus, however, to the official dialogue on these historical issues. The DPJ has consistently argued that Japan must acknowledge its past mistakes in Asia and make efforts to repair its relations, particularly with China and South Korea. Foreign Minister Katsuyo Okada welcomed, for example, the Japan–China report and urged a second round of meetings. “If the two sides could gain mutual understanding, just a little, we can call it a success,” Okada said.56 Beyond Japan: textbook tensions in Northeast Asia Textbooks and cross-strait relations In the complex relationship between the Peoples Republic of China and Taiwan, history textbooks have emerged as a new arena for cross-straits conflict. The lifting of martial law and the coming to power in 1988 of Lee Teng-hui, a native Taiwanese, ushered in an important change in approach to history education on Taiwan. Propelled by the growth of political movements that emphasized a distinct Taiwanese identity, Taiwan’s school system began to move away from what had been a China-centric history curriculum established during the period of Koumintang rule. From the late 1990s, Taiwan initiated a major reform of its high school history curriculum. Previously, high school students learned primarily Chinese history along with a limited world history curriculum. Under the reform, students begin with a separate course on Taiwan history followed by a shortened course in Chinese history and an expanded version of world history. Multiple publishers were allowed to offer textbooks after approval by a screening committee of scholars, similar in form to the Japanese system. The publication of draft guidelines for high school history textbooks by Taiwan’s ministry of education in 2003 prompted protests from Chinese authorities who saw the curriculum reform as part of the broader effort by the administration of Chen Shui-bian to promote Taiwanese independence.  The war over words 261 “This is a fresh attempt by the ideologically-driven Chen and his administration to dominate local culture and education with their incorrect, separatist view of history,” Professor Fan Xizhou of the Taiwan Research Institute at Ziamen University was quoted in an article distributed by the official China Daily. “The separatist move is meant to confuse the Taiwanese public and disguise the historical fact that Taiwanese history is an indivisible part of Chinese history.”57 As the textbooks were published, based on the guidelines, Chinese protests grew. China’s Taiwan Affairs Office complained about textbooks that separated Taiwan’s historical experience from that of China. The Office pointed to what it called an effort to play down or neglect events such as the Nanjing Massacre in the new textbooks. “The Nanjing Massacre was a monstrous crime committed by Japanese militarists against the Chinese people,” said Li Weiyi, a spokesman for the Office. “Past experience, if not forgotten, is a guide for the future. We firmly oppose any move to distort, obliterate and confuse history.”58 Chinese commentators—echoing some within Taiwan—also noted a different treatment of the Japanese colonial era, with textbooks referring to this as a period when Taiwan was “Japan-governed” rather than “Japan-occupied.”59 History disputes between China and the Republic of Korea In the past decade, China has taken on a far more visible role in the Korean peninsula, acting as the mediator of the negotiations on North Korea’s nuclear program and generally asserting its role as a regional power. South Korean economic and cultural ties with China have grown dramatically since the late 1980s, and Koreans have generally had a favorable view of China’s regional role. However, there are also anxieties growing in recent years about what some see as a Chinese ambition for domination and a tendency to view Korea as a historical satellite of China. One manifestation of these tensions focuses on the treatment of history, including in Chinese textbooks. The launching of a research project on the Northeast Border Region in 2002, under the auspices of the Chinese Academy of Science’s Center for the study of Borderland History and Geography, opened the door to a significant and ongoing history dispute. Under the project, Chinese research on the ancient history of this area, particularly the kingdom of Koguryo, has treated it as part of Chinese national history, contrary to Korean historiography that understands it to be part of the development of the Korean nation. Chinese history textbooks reflected these claims to that region’s historical heritage, prompting protests from Korean historians (in both Koreas) and from the Korean government.60 In August 2004, the two governments reached a verbal agreement to convene an academic conference on the issue. The Chinese pledged to take “corrective measures.” Among those were to revise a Chinese middle school history textbook’s references to Koguryo. However, the issue remains a continuing source of contention between the two governments. More recently, the Korean parliament protested the “distortion of history” in Chinese university textbooks.61 262 Daniel C. Sneider The United States response to textbook issues in Northeast Asia At the official level, the United States has largely treated history textbook controversies about the wartime era as if it were a bystander, although in historical terms, of course, it is very much a participant. American textbooks are written and published entirely privately, though they do go through an approval process that varies widely state by state and sometimes by school district. Unlike Asian textbooks, however, there is no national process and no official role, even an indirect one, at the federal level. There are some recent cases of challenges to US textbooks by nongovernmental organizations. Hindu nationalist organizations in India, for example, challenged approval by the State of California of a history textbook for middle school, objecting to the descriptions of India and the history of Indian civilization. However, such internationalizing of American textbook issues have been rare. The United States government has tended to avoid involvement in the textbook controversies in Northeast Asia as well, preferring to position itself as a neutral party, if not a potential mediator. It has also been reluctant to criticize its ally, Japan, on its handling of historical issues. This position reflects, in part, the desire of the United States to avoid reopening the decisions made at the time of the San Francisco Peace Treaty to formally end the Pacific War, a treaty that did not include either mainland China or the Republic of Korea as signatories and which left unsettled a number of difficult issues, among them territorial disputes that remain to this day. It is also undoubtedly a product of US strategic priorities, formed during the Cold War period, in which maintaining the security alliance with Japan has always been a primary goal. The United States has been compelled to respond in recent years out of concern that the tensions over historical issues, particularly between China and Japan, might threaten stability in the region. However, still the response of the State Department spokesman to the controversy surrounding Japanese textbooks in 2005 typifies a cautious approach: “We are aware of concerns raised by other countries,” the spokesman said. “It is unfortunate that such controversies continue to persist. We hope that these nations will find a mutually satisfactory and amicable solution to this issue.”62 For the most part, American officials tried to strike a tone of impartiality. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Christopher Hill, speaking before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on US relations with Japan, put it this way: However, frictions remain, fed by territorial disagreements, including East China Sea energy exploitation; historical disputes; and other issues of concern. For its part, Beijing shares with some of its neighbors, including the Republic of Korea, a lingering distrust of Japan’s view of its past. Tokyo, in return, is concerned about inaccuracies in and the anti-Japanese tone of textbooks in China and Korea. Given the growing common interests of the nations of  The war over words 263 Northeast Asia, these differences constitute unfortunate obstacles to taking full advantage of the tremendous opportunities that exist in the region. As Deputy Secretary Zoellick suggested last week, part of the solution is greater dialogue. For our part, we will continue to stress to our allies and partners in the region the importance of finding mutually satisfactory and amicable solutions to these issues.63 During a trip to Japan and China in January 2006, Zoellick suggested that Chinese, Japanese and US historians engage in nongovernmental, “track-two” efforts to examine the history of the war in Asia. He mentioned ongoing work on this at both Harvard and Stanford universities. However, even that recognition of the problem was not sustained. The US Congress has taken up history issues regarding the war, though also in an episodic manner. Most recently, the House of Representatives passed a controversial resolution, H. Res. 121, criticizing Japanese handing of the comfort women issue. The resolution cites “some new textbooks used in Japanese schools” that “seek to downplay the ‘comfort women’ tragedy and other Japanese war crimes during World War II.” It calls on the Government of Japan to “formally acknowledge, apologize and accept historical responsibility in a clear and unequivocal manner” for these acts. Japan, the resolution concluded, “should educate current and future generations about this horrible crime while following the recommendations of the international community with respect to the ‘comfort women.’” Ultimately, the United States continues to find itself unable to avoid being entangled in these historical issues or to maintain its distant stance of impartiality. A recent example of this, not directly related to textbooks, took place in late July, 2008 as a result of a decision by an obscure government agency, the US Board on Geographic Names, to change the designation of the Dokdo islets (or Liancourt Rocks, as the Board officially refers to them). The board provides geographic names for a database to be used by the Federal government and by the public. By its own description, “the names, variants and associated data may not reflect the views of the United States Government on the sovereignty over geographic features.”64 The board’s data on the islets on its Web site changed the designation of the country administering the islands from South Korea to “undesignated sovereignty,” a decision apparently made without consultation with the State Department. The agency reportedly told Korean officials initially that it had done so to be in accordance with the official US stance of neutrality on the conflicting claims of sovereignty by South Korea and Japan. The Korean government filed a protest over the change, however, seeing it as a shift in US policy.65 The initial US response was to try to downplay the issue: “The US position for decades has been not to take a position regarding the sovereignty of the islands in question,” a State Department spokesman told reporters on July 28, 2008. “The change in the BGN web site does not represent a change in US policy, but rather an action to ensure consistency with that policy.”66 President George Bush intervened personally a few days later, as he was preparing for a visit to Asia (including South Korea), to calm Korean anger 264 Daniel C. Sneider over this issue. He ordered the restoration of the database to its previous wording, while being careful not to change the underlying US neutrality on this dispute. “It’s in our national interest that South Korea have good relations with Japan,” Bush told a group of Asian reporters prior to his visit, announcing this reversal. “And I understand there’s tensions…We can’t fix certain disputes; that will be up to the sovereign governments. But we can help facilitate dialogue.”67 In reality, the United States has done little to facilitated dialogue on these historical and territorial issues in Asia. It does not acknowledge its own role in creating these disputes. However, as this case demonstrates, it cannot avoid responsibility and a role in helping to resolve these historical tensions. Conclusion: ending the war over words The history of textbooks as an international issue has an apparently contradictory character. At a distance of six or seven decades from the war itself, the war of words in Northeast Asia remains remarkably persistent, if not fierce. It does not diminish with the passing of those who directly experienced the wartime events. Indeed, the battle over how historical memory is being created among younger generations may even intensify as actual memory disappears. At the same time, it is striking how late Asia came to grips with this problem. As we have seen, the importance of textbooks to the task of bringing a true peace was understood going back to the aftermath of World War One. The basic approach of bilateral and even regional attempts to air and resolve issues of historical perception through joint commissions, even if it was not always fully successful, was well established, particularly in Europe after end of World War Two. Yet, almost nothing was done in Asia to come to grips with this problem until the 1980s. History textbooks were not an invisible issue before then: within Japan, there was a vibrant debate over textbooks going back to the earliest days of the American Occupation, rising in intensity through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Despite that, no Asian government raised this issue until the early 1980s. There are several explanations for this lag. First, the Japanese government resisted preliminary attempts, from the UNESCO mainly, to engage in the kind of official or semi-official textbook discussions that Germany had agreed to in Europe. Laura Hein and Mark Selden, in their introductory essay to their edited volume, Censoring History, suggest that Germans’ willingness to subject themselves to that kind of international narrative construction was the price it was willing to pay to become part of a regionally integrated Europe. Japan, in contrast, was locked into a bilateral security alliance system and was ambivalent about promotion of a regional Asian association. “Without clear incentives for regional reconciliation, many Japanese are reluctant to take on the domestic battles inherent in rethinking their World War II actions,” Hein and Selden write. “Frustrations with those facts helps explain much of the intensity of the Japanese debate, not just over imagining the future but also over remembering the past.”68  The war over words 265 In that view, the emergence of history textbooks as an international issue in the early 1980s was a response to Japan’s bid for regional leadership propelled by its economic success. And as South Korea and China rose as economic powers and as competitors for leadership in an integrating Northeast Asia, the past has an increasing importance, they argue: Other Asian nations will keep war memories on the negotiating table because, like Europeans negotiating with Germans, they, too, want reassurances that Japanese today will not behave as did Japanese before. Moreover, they hope to construct an international framework that will “tame” Japanese economic and strategic power in the future. They also see this issue as a way to gain concessions from Japan. This logic also suggests that the emergence of textbook issues between other Asian nations, such as between China and South Korea, may become more ubiquitous as those countries maneuver for leadership in the region. Certainly, the way in which the history issue—and that of textbooks in particular—rises and falls in intensity with Japan indicates that Asian governments use it for bargaining purposes. The Chinese anti-Japan wave in 2005 had that character compared to the relative calm that seems to be prevailed at the time of the seventith anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre, widely anticipated as the trigger for another wave of anti-Japanese feeling. And the focus on Japanese textbooks that have a very tiny circulation, rather than on the more widely used textbooks, is somewhat deceptive. However, it would be a mistake to believe that content does not matter. History textbooks have a significant impact on the formation of historical memory in all these countries. In their broad approach, if not in the specific use of language and the details of historiography, they communicate an understanding of the nation’s evolution, its relationship to its neighbors, and an approach to the future. As we have seen, the content of textbooks is shaped by forces of domestic identity politics, particularly in Asia, where they are written and approved with the direct intervention of governments. From that point of view, the bilateral textbook commissions may be late and limited in their impact, but they are hardly unimportant. Without the unachievable goal of creating a common textbook as a yardstick, the effort to begin to construct detailed parallel histories along the lines of European examples is a necessary starting point to begin to draw down the war over words. As the premise of this conference argues, historical memory is necessarily divided in nature. There is little hope of ever achieving a consensus view of history. Hoever, it is possible to create awareness of the parallel historical perceptions of others. The work of the official bilateral commissions between Japan and Korea and Japan and China will be of value, even if it falls short of creating common perceptions. It is crucial, however, to return to what is the real aim—to reshape what Asian students learn about the past to avoid a repeat of that past. In that spirit, the 266 Daniel C. Sneider suggestion offered by the Taiwanese official—that Chinese and Korean school children be exposed to Japanese textbooks and that Japanese students be able to compare their textbooks with their Asian neighbors—has merit. The comparative textbook study that prompted this conference hopefully offers a practical next step in that direction. Notes 1 These early efforts and post–World War Two efforts along the same line are described in “Bilateral consultations for the improvement of history textbooks,” a document issued by the UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) in July, 1953. 2 Laura Hein and Mark Selden, Editors, “Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States,” M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, New York, 2000, p. 10. 3 Kimijima Kazuhiko, “The Continuing Legacy of Japanese Colonialism: The Japan– South Korea Joint Study Group on History Textbooks,” in Hein and Selden, p. 222. 4 Hein and Selden, p. 25. 5 Nozaki Yoshiko and Inokuchi Hiromisu, “Japanese Education, Nationalism and Ienaga Saburo’s Textbook Lawsuits,” in Hein and Selden, pp. 97–102. 6 Ienaga Saburo, “Japan’s Past, Japan’s Future: One Historian’s Odyssey,” Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. New York, 2001, p. 9. 7 Nozaki and Inokuchi, pp. 102–107. See also the introduction to Ienaga. 8 The textbook screening process is described officially by the Japanese government in “Japan’s School Textbook Examination Procedure,” available in English on the Web site of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan: http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/ education/textbooks/index.html. See also Nozaki Yoshiko, “Japanese politics and the history textbook controversy, 1982–2001,” in the International Journal of Educational Research, Volume 37, Issues 6–7, 2002, pp. 603–622. 9 Ienaga, p. 167, citing an exchange recounted by Ienaga in a book published in 1993. 10 Nozaki, IJER, p. 606. The reporting on the changes in language was not entirely accurate, it was later revealed, in that the requested changes in at least one case in the use of the word aggression were not in fact new, having been made by the MOE in earlier screenings. Then-chief cabinet secretary Shinzo Abe attempted to use to this inaccuracy to argue in April, 2006 that the government was “clearly wrong” in issuing the Miyazawa apology, as reported by the Asahi Shimbun on April 4, 2006 and in an editorial on April 5, 2006. 11 Nozaki and Inokuchi, p. 113. 12 The statement can be found in full in English on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Web site at http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/postwar/state8208.html. 13 Kimijima, p. 205. 14 Nozaki, IJER. 15 Daniel Sneider, “Japan Encounters Fresh Flak in Battle Over its Textbook Accounts of WWII,” The Christian Science Monitor, June 23, 1986. 16 Daniel Sneider, “In Sacking a Top Aide, Japanese Premier Averts Diplomatic Crisis,” The Christian Science Monitor, September 11, 1986. 17 Kimijima offers a detailed account of the group’s work, of which he was a participant. 18 The full text in English of the statement is available at http://www.mofa.go.jp/ announce/press/pm/murayama/9508.html. 19 Nozaki, IJER.  The war over words 267 20 Chung Jae-jeong, “Recognition of History and the Dialogue Between South Korea and Japan,” a paper presented to the International Forum for East Asia History Reconciliation, October 9–10, 2007. 21 The full text of the statement, “Japan–Republic of Korea Joint Declaration A New Japan–Republic of Korea Partnership toward the Twenty-First Century,” is available at http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/korea/joint9810.html. 22 Chinese official account of the visit, available at http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/ ziliao/3602/3604/t18038.htm. 23 Cited in Gavan McCormack, “The Japanese Movement to ‘Correct’ History,” in Hein and Selden, p. 53. This article provides a detailed account of Fujioka and the textbook reform movement he led. See also Nozaki in IJER. 24 Nozaki, IJER. 25 David McNeill, “History Redux: Japan’s Textbook Battle Reignites,” Japan Policy Research Institute Working Paper No. 107, June 2005, available at http://www.jpri. org/publications/workingpapers/wp107.html. 26 The statement and other protests filed are available in English on the Web site of the Children and Textbook Japan Network 21, a civic organization, at http://www.ne.jp/ asahi/kyokashi/net21. 27 BBC News report, February 20, 2001 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1180656. stm). 28 Kyodo News, August 13, 2001. 29 South Korean statements on the textbook issue, including those cited below in the text, are available in English at http://www.mofat.go.kr/english. 30 BBC News report, April 3, 2001, “Japan textbook angers neighbors” (http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1257835.stm). 31 BBC News, April 4, 2001, “Japan Stands firm on history book” (http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1259906.stm). 32 The statement is available in English at http://mofa.go.jp/announce/ announce/2001/4/0403.html. 33 Press Conference, April 6, 2001: http://mofa/go/jp/announce/press/2001/4/406.html. 34 See http://www.mfa.gov.cn/eng/wjb/zzjg/yzs/gjlb/2721/2726/t16045.htm. 35 Don Kirk, “History Texts Divide South Korea and Japan Again,” International Herald Tribune, July 10, 2001. 36 Chung, in “Recognition of History and the Dialogue Between South Korea and Japan.”. 37 Kitaoka Shin’ichi, “Japan China Joint History Research Gets Under Way,” Gaiko Forum, Fall 2007, p. 11. 38 McNeill, JPIR Working Paper. 39 Full text on presidential Web site: http://english.president.go.kr/cwd/en/archive. 40 “South Korea, Japan inch closer to shared perception of history,” Yonhap news agency, March 23, 2010. 41 “Japan, S Korea researchers at odds over forced labor, ‘comfort women,’” Kyodo news agency, March 24, 2010. 42 “South Korean teachers demand Japanese apology over territorial dispute,” Yonhap news agency, May 21, 2008. 43 The Straits Times (Singapore), July 16, 2008. 44 Peter J. Brown, Asia Times, April 9, 2010. 45 David McNeill and Mark Selden, “Asia Battles Over War History,” YaleGlobal, April 11, 2005. 46 An English translation of the article was published in three parts in Japan Echo, August, 2005, September 2005, and a Special Issue published also in 2005. 47 Associated Press, April 25, 2005. 48 The full text is available on the Web site of the Chinese Permanent Mission to the United Nations at http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/ce/ceun/eng/zt/af60/default.htm. 268 Daniel C. Sneider 49 Kitaoka, Gaiko Forum, p. 4. 50 Summary report of The First Meeting of the Japan–China Joint History Research Committee, December 2006, at http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/china/ meet0612.html. 51 Kitaoka, Gaiko Forum, pp. 8–9. 52 Peter Ford, “China commemorates Nanjing Massacre with quiet nod,” Christian Science Monitor, December 14, 2007. 53 According to interviews with both Chinese and Japanese chairmen, conducted by the author in March and April, 2010. 54 “Nanjing massacre death toll divides Japan, China scholars,” Mainichi Shimbun, February 1, 2010. 55 The speech text, “Forging the Future Together,” is available at http://www.mofa.go.jp/ region/asia-paci/china/speech0712.html. 56 Mari Yamaguchi, “Japan, China still at odds over ‘Rape of Nanking,’” Associated Press, February 1, 2010. 57 “Taiwan’s New History Textbook Draft Condemned,” China Daily, September 24, 2003. 58 Xinhua News Service, February 14, 2007. 59 Ting-OI Tsai, “China chokes on Taiwan’s history lesson,” Asia Times, February 15, 2007. 60 Yonson Ahn, “The Korea–China Textbook War—What’s It All About?” Japan Focus, http://hnn.us/articles/21617.html. 61 Asia News, September 8, 2006. 62 “Question Taken at the April 7, 2005 Press Briefing,” http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ ps/2005/44446.htm. 63 “US Relations with Japan,” Remarks by Christopher Hill, Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, September 29, 2005. http://www.state.gov/p/eap/rls/rm/2005/54110.htm. 64 From the Web site of the Board: http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/index.html. 65 For a presentation of the background of this issue from a South Korean viewpoint, going back to the US decision to refuse to recognize Korean sovereignty over the islands in the text of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, see Kim Young-soo, “Dokdo and the Korea-Japan Normalization Talks: A Study on the ‘Treaty of Basic Relations’ and the San Francisco Peace Treaty,” Korean Political Science Review, Volume 42, No. 4, Winter 2008, published by the Korean Political Science Association. 66 “Premier Regrets US Dokdo Stance,” Korea Times, July 29, 2008. 67 Roundtable Interview of the President by Foreign Print Media, July 31, 2008, White House online archive, July, 2008. 68 Hein and Selden, p. 18.