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Textbooks in Japan avoid wartime past
November 29, 2004
Tokyo — Japan’s education minister has praised recent history textbooks that
reduce references to the country’s past atrocities, including the military’s
use of sex slaves, news reports said today.
Education minister Mr Nariaki Nakayama said every country should reflect on its
past wrongdoings, but Japan’s education system must rid itself of
“self-condemning” perceptions that everything the country did was bad,
according to the Tokyo Shimbun daily.
Recent school texts that only fleetingly mention Japan’s past transgressions
were better than old versions, the miniser said in a speech in southern Oita
prefecture yesterday.
“There was a time when they were filled with extremely self-deprecating
material, as though Japan had done nothing but bad things,’’ the minister was
quoted as saying. “I’m glad to see that, at last, the use of terms like
‘comfort women’ and ‘forced labour’ has decreased recently.”
‘Comfort women’ was the euphemism used to describe sex slaves for Japanese
troops.
Similar comments attributed to the education minister were carried by national
daily Mainichi Shimbun also today. Japan’s history textbooks are a sensitive
issue for Asian countries that suffered Tokyo’s aggression. The approval of a
middle-school textbook in 2001, written by a group of nationalist scholars,
damaged the country’s relations with South Korea and China, who said it
whitewashed Japan’s wartime past.
Japan’s military seized up to 800,000 people from China, Korea and other Asian
countries in the early 1900s, and shipped them to Japan to work in coal mines
and ports, often under brutal conditions. Another 200,000 women from Korea,
China, the Philippines, Taiwan and the Netherlands are also estimated to have
been forced into sex slavery. Tokyo has acknowledged its wartime military’s
offences, but has refused to compensate victims directly or apologise, saying
all government-level compensation was settled by postwar treaties.
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