History Textbooks and the Wars in Asia

Divided Memories

Gi-Wook Shin, Daniel C. Sneider, Gi-Wook Shin, Daniel C. Sneider

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415838290
• eBook ISBN: 9781136830907
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Over the past fifteen years Northeast Asia has witnessed growing intraregional exchanges and interactions, especially in the realms of culture and economy. Still, the region cannot escape from the burden of history.

This book examines the formation of historical memory in four Northeast Asian societies (China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) and the United States focusing on the period from the beginning of the Sino-Japanese war in 1931 until the formal conclusion of the Pacific War with the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951.

The contributors analyse the recent efforts of Korean, Japanese, and Chinese scholars to write a 'common history' of Northeast Asia and question the underlying motivations for their efforts and subsequent achievements. In doing so, they contend that the greatest obstacle to reconciliation in Northeast Asia lies in the existence of divided, and often conflicting, historical memories. The book argues that a more fruitful approach lies in understanding how historical memory has evolved in each country and been incorporated into respective master narratives. Through uncovering the existence of different master narratives, it is hoped, citizens will develop a more self-critical, self-reflective approach to their own history and that such an introspective effort has the potential to lay the foundation for greater self- and mutual understanding and eventual historical reconciliation in the region.

This book will be essential reading for students and scholars of Asian history, Asian education and international relations in East Asia.

Part I

Introduction

History textbooks, divided memories, and reconciliation¹

Gi-Wook Shin

Over the past fifteen years, Northeast Asia has witnessed growing intraregional exchanges and interactions, especially in the realms of culture and economy, and there has even been considerable discussion about establishing an East Asian community.² Still, the region cannot escape the burden of history. Wounds inflicted in times of colonialism and war are not yet fully healed and have become highly contentious diplomatic matters. Historical and territorial issues continue to provoke anti-Japanese sentiments in China and Korea, whereas the Japanese suffer from “apology fatigue,” questioning why they must continue to repent for events that took place more than six decades ago. Increased regional interaction has not diminished the importance of disputes over the past.

As in many other cases around the world, reconciliation in Northeast Asia first occurred between governments. With the exception of only North Korea, Japan normalized diplomatic relations with all of the countries it had once invaded or colonized: the Republic of China (Taiwan) in 1952; the Republic of Korea (ROK) in 1965; and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1972. Nevertheless, these societies have failed to come to terms with their shared pasts. Japan paid no “reparations” to its former colonies—though it gave “grants and aid” to South Korea for normalizing relations and provided major economic assistance to the PRC—and China and Korea were not included in the San Francisco Peace Treaty that settled the Pacific War. Historical issues such as war responsibility, disputed territories, and Japan’s colonial rule and atrocities were largely overlooked as the Cold War began and intensified.

The question of history remains central to the development of intraregional relations. Japan–China relations have been conflict-ridden, owing in no small measure to both countries’ failure to reconcile their differing views of the past. Similarly, friction between Japan and South Korea about Japan’s role as colonizer remains salient. South Korea and China are sparring over the status of the ancient kingdom of Koguryo, and Taiwan as well is immersed in a reexamination of the historical past. Even the United States and Russia have been subject to controversy over their involvement in events in Northeast Asian history.

Questions about what happened in the past touch upon the most sensitive issues of national identity, the formation of historical memories, and national myths that play a powerful role to this day. Whether it be Japanese atrocities in China or the US decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, no nation is immune to the charge that it has formed a less-than-complete view of the past. All share a reluctance to fully confront the complexity of their own past actions and blame others for their historical fates.

There is widespread recognition in Northeast Asia of the need for reconciliation and a final resolution of historical issues, both for the sake of justice and to remove a major obstacle to regional cooperation. In fact, many Asians have sought to achieve these goals through diverse tactics, including apology politics, litigation, joint history writing, and regional communication.³ However, there is a fundamental obstacle to reconciliation: the existence of divided historical memories. Involved nations are simultaneously bound together and separated by distinct—often contradictory—historical accounts and perceptions. These are deeply embedded in the public consciousness and are transmitted to succeeding generations formally by education and informally through the arts, popular culture, and mass media.

Ultimately, Northeast Asian societies need to come to a reconciled view of history to achieve “thick” reconciliation.⁴ However, as Peter Duus points out in Chapter 1, writing a “common history” may be intellectually but not politically feasible, because “the teaching of history in many East Asian countries is clearly tied to building and strengthening national identity.” Previous experiences (e.g., the Franco-German case) have taught us that successful reconciliation via history education requires a particular political environment, one that is lacking in Northeast Asia today.⁵ It would thus be more fruitful to recognize and understand how each society has developed its own distinctive memory of the past and how that memory has affected its national identity and relations with others. To illustrate the merits of this approach, I first examine earlier attempts to create a common history.

Writing common history?

Northeast Asian nations have engaged in numerous efforts to address historical issues and even write a common history. Frequent clashes over history textbooks in Northeast Asia (1982, 2002, and 2005) demonstrate that history is not simply about the past but implicates the present and the future. Moreover, the situation attests to the central importance of a common view of history that will foster overall reconciliation. One approach to solving this problem has been to form both official and unofficial joint committees that study history and produce commonly written textbooks and supplementary materials. Such efforts invariably involve a long and complex process and it is too early to make a final judgment about their efficacy. Even in Europe, it took many years to produce common history textbooks. It is already evident, however, that this approach is fraught with difficulty and far from achieving reconciliation.⁶

Japan and South Korea undertook the first official attempt to deal jointly with history in October 2001 by establishing the Japan–ROK Joint History Research Committee. This was the first state-sponsored effort toward placing a reconciled view of the past in a new regional history framework. Though not a complete failure, the committee has yet to see its envisioned goals materialize. Even though it adopted the UNESCO model of writing a “parallel history,” when it finished the first phase in May 2005, both sides disagreed on what exactly should be incorporated into the textbooks. Apparently there was significant divergence over how to interpret Japan’s colonial rule, including the question of Japan’s role (or lack thereof) in Korea’s modernization. Though consensus was reached in some areas, contended areas were relegated to footnotes.⁷

After Koizumi’s controversial visits to the Yasukuni shrine, the work of the joint committee was put on hold until October 2006, when Prime Minister Abe and President Roh Moo Hyun agreed to relaunch efforts. The committee finally met on April 27, 2007, in Seoul. In addition to the three existing groups studying ancient, medieval, and contemporary history, members decided to form a new subgroup that would examine history textbooks. The idea reportedly was to narrow differences between both nations’ textbooks. The second report was published in March 2010. Despite some tangible results of the joint study (e.g., rejection of the existence of Japanese base known as imna ilbonbu between the fourth and sixth centuries, a claim often used to justify Japan’s colonization of Korea in the twentieth century), the report still failed to resolve many points of contention.

Japan and China launched a comparable effort, also as part of the thaw in relations that followed the leadership transition in Japan from Koizumi to Abe. The two countries announced an agreement to form a similar joint research committee. Consisting of 20 leading historians from both countries, the Japan– China committee commenced in late 2006. Led by Chinese Professor Bu Ping and Japanese Professor Shin’ichi Kitaoka, the committee sought to produce an account of 2,000 years of Sino-Japanese interaction by 2008. This would be in time to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the signing of the Japan–China Peace and Friendship Treaty.

From the first meeting, it became clear that their goals were daunting, despite reaching an agreement to pursue discussion on three broad themes: the 2,000 years of Sino-Japanese exchange; the “unfortunate” history of the modern era; and the sixty years of “progress” in relations since the end of the war. Not surprisingly, the Japanese wanted to focus on the postwar era, whereas the Chinese were more interested in taking inventory of the colonial and wartime periods.⁸ At its second meeting in 2007, the committee agreed on a list of major historical events to discuss, including the Nanjing Massacre and Japan’s 21 demands of China; the issue of “comfort women” was excluded.

The committee released its first report in early 2010. It covers ancient, medieval, and modern history, describing themes from Japanese and Chinese academics’ submitted papers. As with the Japan–Korea joint study, there was some progress in mutually understanding modern history: both sides used the word aggression to refer to the invasion by the Japanese army, asserting that it “left a deep scar on China” and that the causes of war “were created by the Japanese side.” However, they disagreed on the Nanjing Massacre’s casualty total—The Japanese side mentioned various estimates ranging from 20,000 to 200,000, whereas the Chinese side claimed more than 300,000.⁹

These official efforts, though useful, are unlikely to produce a common rendition of history, particularly regarding the most controversial periods. As Shin’ichi Kitaoka points out, perceptions of history among Northeast Asian nations will never be identical, and efforts should be aimed at “ascertaining precisely where the two sides’ perceptions differ and where they are in agreement.”¹⁰ Moreover, it is a serious challenge to insulate the involved historians from political pressures generated by their governments and publics so that they can devote themselves to a careful investigation of historical facts.¹¹ As the Korean historian, Chung Jae-Jeong, a member of the Joint Japan–ROK Committee and the author of Chapter 4 in this volume, notes, “It requires a lot of courage, effort, patience and sincerity to publish a history textbook for common use via a joint project spanning countries which had once been antagonistic toward each other.”¹²

In contrast to official textbook-writing efforts, Japanese and Korean scholars have worked together privately to move toward a mutual understanding of regional history. The first of such efforts was the Japan–South Korea Joint Study Group on History Textbooks. Organized in the late 1980s, without the direct involvement of either the Korean or the Japanese government, the group met four times in eighteen months. Likewise, the Korea–Japan Solidarity 21 (Hanil yŏndae 21) was formed with the objective of building regional solidarity between the two nations through self-reflection. Also, after several years of collaborative work, a regional nongovernmental organization consisting of historians from China, Japan, and South Korea produced the first-ever East Asian common history guidebook, A History That Opens to the Future: The Contemporary and Modern History of Three East Asian Countries (Mirai o hiraku rekishi or Miraerŭl yŏnŭn yŏksa) in early 2005.¹³ In spring 2007, after ten years of work, another group of forty historians and experts from Japan and Korea published a comprehensive history of Korean–Japanese relations, titled A History of Korea–Japan Relations (Han’il kyoryu ŭi yŏksa). Additionally, a number of teaching materials for history education have resulted from such efforts.¹⁴ It remains to be seen how these “unofficial” history books will be incorporated into schools’ curricula.

Divided memories and identity politics

Despite these official and unofficial efforts to overcome differences over history, we have yet to see the emergence of a shared view of the past or regional identity among Northeast Asian nations. The official projects to produce joint history texts generated “a certain bond of mutual trust” between scholars and promoted a certain “common intellectual community,”¹⁵ but participants came to the painful if not unexpected conclusion that writing a shared official history textbook is all but impossible. At best, historians discussed issues on the basis of open inquiry into historical facts and narrowing perception gaps. Meanwhile, as noted, private efforts did result in the publication of common history books, but how they will affect the formation of a shared historical memory among Northeast Asians is yet to be seen.

If anything, the experience of the past two decades underlines how profoundly historical writing and especially writing history texts is affected by nationalistic politics. Particularly, an obsession with national history, based on a single historical memory embodied in history textbooks has exacerbated Asia’s history problem. Why?

As the first modernizing Asian country but still a late developer by Western standards, Japan felt an urgent need to catch up through “defensive modernization.” In this process, nations (especially the notion of a racially distinctive and ethnically homogeneous Japanese nation [minzoku]) emerged and was promoted as a force to bring about reform and social change. The myth of a tan’itsu minzoku constituted the core of Japanese national history (kokushi) and identity and continues to do so even today in the form of nihonjinron.¹⁶

Korea’s history writing also evolved from dynastic to ethno-national history in the process of modern nation building. Koreans stressed the uniqueness and purity of the Korean people and developed nationalist historiography to counter Japanese colonialist view. Developed during the colonial period and continuing into the postcolonial era, Korean nationalist historical accounts reflected the competition between the North and South to be the sole legitimate representative of the Korean ethnic community.¹⁷

China’s experience was similar. Early “modern” China (the Republic of China) claimed itself to be “nationalist,” and the People’s Republic of China prided itself on its victory over colonialism and imperialism; not surprisingly, central to its historical narrative were themes of national resistance and liberation, a focus that remains today (see Chapter 1 in this volume). As historian Qi Chen’s asserts, “The ultimate goal of history educatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Comparative excerpts from textbooks of China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States on eight historical issues
• Part III: Textbooks and history: comparative analysis
• Part IV: Textbooks and international relations
• Index