Yoshiko Nozaki

The controversy over official state-approved history textbooks in Japan, which omit or play down many episodes of Japan’s occupation of neighbouring countries during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945), and which have been challenged by critics who favour more critical, peace and justice perspectives, goes to the heart of Japan’s sense of itself as a nation. The degree to which Japan is willing to confront its past is not just about history, but also about how Japan defines itself at present, and going forward. This book examines the history textbook controversy in Japan. It sets the controversy in the context of debates about memory, and education, and in relation to evolving politics both within Japan, and in Japan’s relations with its neighbours and former colonies and countries it invaded. It discusses in particular the struggles of Ienaga Saburo, who has made crucial contributions, including through three epic lawsuits, in challenging the official government position. Winner of the American Educational Research Association 2009 Outstanding Book Award in the Curriculum Studies category.

The Japanese History Textbook Controversy and Ienaga Saburo's Court Challenges

War Memory, Nationalism and Education in Postwar Japan

Roger Openshaw

Allan Luke

Disrupts popular myths about education in Asia and the Pacific. Struggles over Difference addresses education, schools, textbooks, and pedagogies in various countries of the Asia-Pacific, offering critical curriculum studies and policy analyses of national and regional educational systems. These systems face challenges linked to new economic formations, cultural globalization, and emergent regional and international geopolitical instabilities and conflicts. Contributors offer insights on how official knowledge, text, discourse, and discipline should be shaped; who should shape it; through which institutional agencies it should be administered; and social and cultural practices through which this should occur. The book disrupts popular myths about education in this part of the world, including base suppositions about the “other”: that Asian pedagogy is exclusively rote learning, that educational systems and governments here are faced with classical developing country issues, and that institutional and state formation in the region can be assessed on a North/West or left/right continuum. The essays not only map and reframe issues of difference for those who work in education in the Asia-Pacific, but also illuminate critical issues of curriculum and policy for teachers, students, teacher educators, and researchers worldwide. Yoshiko Nozaki is Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Roger Openshaw has a Personal Chair in Education History at Massey University at Palmerston North in New Zealand. Allan Luke is Professor of Education at the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Yoshiko Nozaki

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