In this chapter, Ogawa and Field argue that Japanese history textbooks are controversial as they present a government monitored and endorsed national history, especially in their treatment of history since the beginning of the Second World War. Japan’s first national textbook policy emerged under the Meiji government in 1872. Government control increased with the Imperial Rescript on Education in 1890, and its emphasis on Confucian values, moral education, and the duty of citizens to the state and national policy. In the post-World War II period, the Supreme Command for the Allied Powers (SCAP) brought significant textbook revisions that involved the omission of militaristic and ultra-nationalistic material and an attempt to promote international cooperation. The SCAP also limited moral education and worked with the Ministry of Education to develop new materials. During the 1945-1952 Occupation of Japan the SCAP sought to decentralize the national textbook system, but subsequent conservative governments returned control to the Ministry of Education. Today the School Education Law determines Japanese school curriculum and textbooks must support this. Textbooks must be authorized by the government and approved by the Ministry of Education in order to be used in Japanese schools.

The authors describe historian and textbook author, Sabura Ienaga’s thirty-five year fight against government censorship. This set of legal suits in the end affirmed the Ministry of Education’s ability to standardize public education. It also challenged the Ministry of Education, allowing authors to include more detailed descriptions of controversial history in textbooks. Public debate over textbook content and historical interpretations continued into the 1980s, while at the same time international pressure grew over Japan’s sanitization of textbook content and history textbooks’ incomplete depiction of Japan’s brutal pre-surrender empire. China, South Korea, and other Asian countries increasingly demanded that Japan take responsibility for and make changes to Japanese history textbooks for the sake of international cooperation and understanding.

By the 1990s, Japanese conservative and nationalist forces actively worked to reform the Japanese history curriculum. Professor Nobukatsu Fujioka and his colleagues sought a ‘positive’ view of Japanese history and argued that much teaching about the war stemmed from ‘emotional-pacifist’ ideology, and that teachers often avoided discussing war, focusing instead on the post-war reconstruction and peace education. This, they argued, resulted in anti-Japanese, anti-militaristic, and unpatriotic youth. In response to this Fujioka and his colleagues published a series of textbooks justifying Japan’s entry in World War II, which were to become popular, and provoke response from the Ministry of Education. The latter recognized the need to find balance when including negative depictions of the Japanese in war. New texts suggested Japan’s motives in World War II were not expansionist, but to liberate Asia from the Western Powers. This again resulted in demand for textbook revision. More recently, however, nationalist and neo-nationalist movements have influenced the Ministry of Education’s to introduce nationalistic values, a moral education reader to develop love for the nation (introduced without proper legal procedure), and grading of students’ patriotic attitude. Schools have been ordered to fly the flag and sing the anthem – both associated with Japanese aggression in the Second World War – resulting in much dissention and public controversy.