Kwan Weng Kin: The Professor Who Got Japan to Adopt Patriotic Textbooks

Kwan Weng Kin, in the Straits Times ( Singapore) (5-13-05):

IT ALL began with 'comfort women', a euphemism to describe the thousands of mostly Asian women forced to provide sexual services to Japanese soldiers during World War II.

In 1996, when Professor Nobukatsu Fujioka, 62, learnt that all seven history textbooks for Japan's junior high schools included that term, he rounded up several like-minded acquaintances to rewrite history.

Together, they established the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, or 'Tsukurukai' for short.

One of its founders, the late historian Takao Sakamoto, once derisively compared the comfort women issue to the 'history of the toilet', saying it had no place in any textbook.

He was a professor of political thought at no less than Gakushuin University, which counts Emperor Akihito and his children among its alumni.

Prof Fujioka, an educationist by training, thinks comfort women never even existed.

In a public forum last month, he contemptuously dismissed Korean comfort women who regularly picket the Japanese embassy in Seoul as 'North Korean spies' up to no good.

Like others of his ilk, he believes that post-war history education in Japan has been hijacked by left-wing ideologues intent on portraying the country as the Evil Empire that mounted wars of aggression all over Asia.

The Tsukurukai is convinced that textbooks written by left-wing authors give the Japanese a poor self-image, which does not make for building a great nation.

So Prof Fujioka and company set out to change all that in 2000.

Not only would their textbook not refer to comfort women, it would also make the Japanese feel good about themselves.

After all, Prof Fujioka noted, the education ministry wanted children to love their country and its history.

What better way than to pack a textbook with uplifting anecdotes of Japanese heroes?

The Tsukurukai also sought to exclude anything it considered historical fiction - the atrocities committed by the Japanese military in China, Korea and across South-east Asia.

Prof Fujioka denounces all criticism that the Tsukurukai textbook, now into its second edition, is an ultra-nationalist work that glorifies Japan's past.

He will tell you, without batting an eyelid, that his textbook is certainly disapproving of Japan's military adventures.

But he conveniently ignores its omission of the horrors committed by the Japanese military in Asia. Or that the book makes it appear that Chinese soldiers were the ones who provoked the Japanese military into engaging in a war on the Chinese mainland....