Chronicle illustration; Timothy Cook for The Chronicle Review
Right now I feel I can hold up this piece whenever anyone asks why I'd want to teach abroad, or indeed, why I or anyone should do humanities:
February 14, 2010
Reading History in Japan
Continued...The query sounded harmless enough, though in hindsight it was laced with political arsenic. What did I think of Yoshinori Kobayashi? It came after the first class I taught this semester on media and politics in Tokyo's private Sophia University, and the questioner was a standout student: sharp, motivated, and with unusually well-formed opinions for a Japanese undergraduate. He wants to be a lawmaker with the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, whose views I find toxic.
Kobayashi is one of Japan's best known and more controversial cultural figures, a neoconservative manga author who trades in historical revisionism. For example, he calls the 1937 Nanjing massacre, in which historians say Japanese imperial troops slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians, a "communist lie." He says the thousands of "comfort women" recruited from across Asia and forced by the Japanese military to perform sexual services for the troops during World War II were "prostitutes." He claims that Japan rescued Asia from the evils of white European colonialism.
Such formerly fringe perspectives have become more mainstream in Japan in recent years. Former Prime Ministers Shinzo Abe and Taro Aso were known supporters of revisionist views, and a combined force of newspaper editors, academics, and ruling lawmakers has tried several times over the last decade to force a textbook expounding similar views onto the curriculum of the nation's high schools. But it is Kobayashi who may have done the most to popularize them among the young with his manga comics.
I chatted with the student for a while, telling him my standard line on revisionists: that they invariably ignore the mountain of documentation for Japanese war crimes by focusing on the molehill of tainted evidence that refutes them. He looked unconvinced. Kobayashi resonates with many young men who grow up in a country still trying to digest the disaster of 1933-1945, which ended with the American firebombing of 67 Japanese cities and the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I find Japan's drift toward historical myopia especially disturbing because before arriving in Tokyo I spent a year teaching at a Chinese university, where I saw Japan through a reverse mirror. Most students I taught at the Guangdong University of Technology knew chapter and verse of Japanese war crimes, especially those of Unit 731, a Nazi-style biowarfare unit some believe responsible for a million deaths. Few Japanese students have heard of it. For years, the Nanjing atrocity topped the list of university polls on the single event that Chinese students most associate with Japan.
Both sides have their reasons for playing up, or down, these crimes. Japanese nationalists bemoan the "masochistic" teaching of history at the nation's high schools, which they say has taught generations of citizens to hate their own country. China, like many postcolonial nations, defines itself against its old enemy and spends valuable study time rehashing Japan's wartime atrocities while ignoring its own blind spots. Try criticizing Chairman Mao Zedong, defending Taiwan or Tibet, or telling Chinese students that Japan has been at peace for 64 years.
I see my challenge with my students as avoiding a drift into postmodernism—the notion that the quest for "truth" is quixotic and that historical issues must be viewed through the prism of nationalism. Both progressive and conservative scholars from Japan and China are devising a joint historical curriculum and textbook. But a joint panel of Japanese and Chinese experts—the Japan-China Joint History Research Committee—after four years of research has failed to narrow differences on Nanjing and other war crimes. So for now, students increasingly get their knowledge of history from pop culture, not academe.
To sidestep the political issues, I've been trying to encourage a multiplicity of viewpoints: I give students information they're missing and tell them to make up their own minds. In Japan, for example, I assign research into Unit 731, one of the darker chapters from Japanese—and U.S.—history. Some students are astonished to learn that Japan's top scientists carried out grotesque experiments, including vivisections on live prisoners of war and mass poisonings of Chinese villages, farms, and wells, before being allowed to escape justice after the war by the United States, which offered a quid-pro-quo deal for the experiments' results. Many of the unit's scientists went on to sterling careers in postwar Japan. "Why have we never heard about this?" is a typical student response, the prelude, I hope, to a much more profound question: If I didn't know this, what else don't I know?
In China, these exercises were trickier. My teaching contract explicitly prohibited discussion of politics, religion, and sex. Each class in Guangdong had a "monitor" reporting to the dean, who could have me fired. Challenging orthodoxy on Japan, for example, or hacking away at the stale hagiography of Chairman Mao by discussing his responsibility for the death of millions or alleged fondness for sleeping with young girls was asking for trouble.
I decided to dive right in, steering clear of the school's approved textbooks and distributing photocopies from biographies of Mao I had bought in Hong Kong, which are banned in mainland China. We read articles from American magazines written by Chinese dissidents who had fled the country in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square. We discussed Japan's pacifist postwar constitution and whether the anti-Japanese rhetoric of China's state education was out of date.
The reaction wasn't always pleasant. One red-faced student angrily denounced the Chinese writer of a Time magazine article as a "traitor" and demanded to know why I had made him read it in class. I said that the best way to understand any issue is to read as many sources as possible, and to distrust the ones spoon-fed to you by officialdom. How can I trust you? he asked. You can't, I replied: Make up your own mind.
My reward was some of the most engaged—and argumentative—essays I've ever read. And I kept my job. (I assume I was reported, but two things may have worked in my favor: The school was desperately short of foreign-language teachers and couldn't afford to lose one in mid-term; and I was otherwise reasonably popular.)
Obviously this is not an issue confined to China and Japan. As an Irishman who once taught at a British university, I was often amazed at how little students knew about the key signposts of Irish history, including the 1840s famine and Bloody Sunday (January 30, 1972), the British Army's killing of 14 civilians that changed the course of modern history between the two nations. Textbooks in France whitewash that country's colonial rule over Algeria. High-school history in the United States has been accused of being shockingly selective in its reporting of the Vietnam War.
I'm a sociologist, not a historian, and am way outside my area of expertise when confronted by budding revisionists like my Japanese student this semester. But I find it hard to sit back and watch the vertiginous slide into historical relativism. So I read up on the cartoonist Kobayashi and studied his arguments. They were easy to rebuff after a quick trawl through alternative sources, which I took back to my class.
Try reading some of these and let me know what you think, I told my conservative student. If you like, we can devise an essay assignment so you can explore these issues. He glanced at the list without much enthusiasm. I recognized the look he gave me: Here was a smart, confident youngster who had been challenged and didn't particularly like it. But he didn't say no either.
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