1950년대 일본의 교과서 국정화 시도

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze the following: What motivated the plan for state-authored textbooks in post-war Japan? Who pushed for the plan, and what course did they take to achieve their aims? By investigating the process behind the failure of Japan's original plan for state textbooks, we can discover the pretense and logic of the government-authored textbook initiators and the perennial education ideology intended by Japan as a state. In the first half of the 1950s, six pre-war conservatives who held posts in the Ministry of Education pushed for a state-controlled education policy, shifting Japan’s education policy from philosophically individual-first thought to one of politically state-dominated thinking. To promote an education policy in line with their own view of history and state, statesmen of the ruling party, bureaucrats in the Ministry of Education and members of the conglomerates built up a tripartite cooperation system. Facing opposition from intellectuals, teachers and civic groups, these state-oriented forces failed in realizing their initial plan for state textbooks. The tripartite reactionaries, however, succeeded in reinforcing the state-initiated textbook inspection system, rejecting the democratic and liberal education policy of the SCAP. The historical phenomenon of the rise and coalescence of the ultraconservative forces which attempted to construct state educational control can be explained as a reaction to the education policies of the occupation troops in Japan. But it can also demonstrate that Japan’s pre-war rulers and post-war governing elites do not have any meaningful differences between them, at least in educational policy and ideology.