Organizer and Chair: Abigail Schweber, University of Tennessee

In Japan today, the school textbook functions as a fiercely contested site. The content, character and approval system for these texts are the focus of controversy, both within Japan and in Japan’s relations with its neighbors. Criticism has focused on the uses of textbooks to promote nationalism and patriotic feelings. The universality of the issue has been widely noted, through comparisons of the Japanese case to those of China, the United States and other countries. This panel will historicize this debate within the Japanese context, exploring how the role of the State in textbook production has evolved and the consequences of that role. Abigail Schweber will present a paper on the process and reasons for which the early Meiji government first took on involvement in textbook production. Andrew Hall will then discuss how Japanese education officials in Korea and later in Manchuria adapted national textbook policies to the colonial situation. Deborah Solomon will examine the consequences of this adaptation, with a paper on the contribution of textbooks and the Japanese educational curriculum to the Korean student movement. Finally, Yoshiko Nozaki will discuss how these issues have played out more recently, with a paper on the controversy over the treatment of comfort women in contemporary Japanese textbooks.

Abigail Schweber, University of Tennessee

The creation of textbooks for Japanese public schools has been problematic from the inception of the modern education system in the early 1870s. The first textbooks used in Japanese public schools were translations of Western texts. Their appropriateness and relevance to daily life were questioned, first by concerned parents and teachers, and later by imperial advisors and conservative leaders concerned with the loss of traditional values. Furthermore, publishers could not produce sufficient quantities for the burgeoning school system, nor could schools or parents afford to buy those which were produced. The situation worsened in 1880 when, in response to the growth of the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement, the Ministry of Education began banning the use of some of the more popular textbooks. School districts that had invested in those texts resisted the government’s attempts to impose unwanted and expensive changes. The government’s first attempts to create cheaper, ideologically suitable, indigenous textbooks were likewise criticized, both for their quality and for the character of their content. It was a full 14 years after the establishment of the national education system that the Meiji government first set up a system of textbook approvals similar to that in use in Japan today. This allowed schools flexibility in choosing between a set of sanctioned texts and granted the Ministry of Education formal jurisdiction over the content and character of those texts. This paper traces the controversies and political forces that led to the eventual passage of the Schoolbooks Authorization Act in 1886.

Andrew R. Hall, University of North Texas

Japanese colonial education officials in Korea and Manchuria took advantage of their distance from Japan to create independent education systems, in which they implemented pedagogical experiments which would be impossible in their homeland. These educators displayed their independence from Japan’s Ministry of Education by creating their own textbooks, in which they tried out new teaching methods, orthography, and original content, particularly that dealing with local history, characters, and customs. For this paper I will discuss the context and form of elementary school textbooks from the 1910-1945 period, comparing them to contemporary textbooks in Japan. In Korea, this spirit of independence was most evident in the period from 1910 to 1930, when the Korean Education Department created its own pronunciation-based kana system, foreshadowing that which was created in Japan after World War II, and tried to win local support by including frequent scenes of Korean historical events and contemporary Korean life. The Korean historical figures, however, were almost always passive scholars, never powerful political or military figures. This was part of the Japanese attempt to portray Korea as a weak and dependent on outsiders. After 1935 educators in Korea lost their independence, and government editors began to closely imitate Japan textbooks. In Manchuria, however, educators retained their independence until 1943. For two decades they produced some of the most distinctive textbooks in the empire, limiting the amount of Japan-centered material, particularly avoiding any discussion of State Shinto, and including a great deal of material which portrayed Manchurians as active, vital figures.

Deborah Solomon, University of Michigan

On November 3, 1929, a fight broke out between Japanese and Korean students on a train from Kwangju to Naju in southwestern Korea. When only the Korean students involved were prosecuted by police, networks of Korean social activists organized a citywide anti-Japanese student protest. This protest was echoed by sympathetic protests in other cities across the Korean peninsula, which ultimately involved 194 schools and as many as 54,000 students.¹

This paper argues that the intensive Japanese colonial education reforms of the 1920s, themselves a response to the level of student activism witnessed in the 1919 March First Movement, greatly contributed to the tensions that allowed a small fight between several students on a train to become a massive, peninsula-wide protest movement. By providing a close reading of the textbooks used in classrooms in Kwangju in the late twenties, as well as the accompanying guidelines provided for teachers by the Japanese government, I will analyze the goals of local colonial education and particularly highlight the ways in which the Japanese government used education as a forum to create sympathy for their larger colonial project. I will contrast the content of these textbooks and the explicit goals for their classroom use with their actual reception, and show how intense dissatisfaction with both the curriculum and the material conditions of the colonial classroom formed a consistent and recurring theme throughout the Kwangju student protests.