일본 보수세력의 교육개혁과 교과서 공격–제3차 교과서 공격을 중심으로

Abstract

This paper examines the background and the reality of the 3rd attacks on history textbooks in Japan. This research is devoted to looking back on the importance of history education and history textbooks in East Asia, and to understanding various historical viewpoints in order to bring about a dialogue on the mutual understanding of history. The 1st attacks on history textbooks began in the 1950s under the Cold War system, and the 2nd attacks in the early 1980s brought about an international issue. The 3rd attacks by “history revisionists” means reversing the well-established academic assessment of histories and spreading an interpretation of histories that is based upon a Japanese ethnocentric viewpoint. Seventy years after a lost war, the generation lacking historical facts on a war of aggression and colonial rule accounts for eighty percent of the Japanese population. Since the mid-1990s, political groups and media with conservative views have taken part in an ethnocentric view of history. The 3rd textbook attacks in Japan are based upon the organized acts of history revisionists who have a liberal historical viewpoint. The background of their attacks is the anxiety and the sense of crisis in Japanese society with a new liberal international order since the end of the Cold War. However, the conservative argument of history revisionists is not new. As in the example of the “group suicide” of residents of Okinawa described in textbooks, that view “restoration” their past argument by distorting facts and justifying acts regarding the Japanese war of aggression. For this purpose, after sixty years they amended the Basic Act on Education and tightened the screening of school textbooks by revising the rules for writing textbooks. By doing so, they pushed the influence of their views on to education and the writing of school textbooks. The 3rd textbook attacks of Japan’s Conservatives are problematic because, based upon historical viewpoints regarding ethnocentrism they intensify the conflicts and the confrontations with neighboring countries holding different historical viewpoints.