John Yamamoto-Wilson wrote:

> masayuki yoshida wrote:
>
> > What you and Eric want to say in this thread may be so simple that I
> > will rephrase as follows:  Contemporary Japanese should learn what
> > their own nation did as an invader during the war times.
>
> Well, I won't deny that that is part of it. But I am shocked at how little
> aware my students sometimes appear to be of *any* environment apart from the
> one they are themselves living in, be it life in modern Mexico or life in
> Edo-period Japan.

Japanese I've known blame it on the schools and their focus on academics and
tests. B.S. In the first place, they aren't really studying so much that they
can't take notice of the outside world, and secondly they are making the
deliberate choice to be more interested in say, aping Shibuya fashions or the
features of new models of cell phone; than more serious issues which actually
affect real people like say, women's rights or war overseas.

This ignorance is hardly unique to Japan, either.

> > However, how
> > to teach history is not so simple.  If you tell us what of Japanese
> > war history you want to teach Japanese students, it would be
> > appreciated.
>
> I remember some Japanese girls coming to me (as their teacher) when I was
> working in a language school in the UK years ago. They were very upset
> because a little boy had spat at them and called them "dirty Japs" and said,
> "Please tell us who hates us because of history". I guess if Japanese
> children could get that kind of information as a standard component of their
> education that would be empowering for them.

I am sure that Japanese know that much, that people in countries such as South
Korea and China bear grudges over the war. They can get that from the news.
What is not dwelt upon is WHY such people might remain angry nearly 60 years
after the war ended.

> In that case, I got a retired army major to come and talk to them, and he
> went through the basics of WWII in a very kind and non-judgmental way,

Remarkable. Was he a WWII veteran himself? What was the students' reaction?

> including an explanation of the fact that many local lads in that area were
> in a regiment that ended up as prisoners of war of the Japanese. You may
> remember that even the Emperor did not understand, when he went to England,
> why about a thousand old men turned their backs on him in the procession
> through London.

Perhaps he did not understand because he did not realize who they were, not
because he is ignorant of history. Even the Emperor now makes his own public
expressions of "remorse" over wartime actions.

> By the way, I don't think it's only Japan where there is a lack of
> appropriate information about things one would imagine would form the basis
> of an education in the modern world. In this newsgroup we've heard about the
> Texan schoolteacher who thought Spanish was the national language of Canada
> and there've been reports of Japanese returning from the United States being
> asked by schoolchildren things like, "Do you have television?"
>
> Being from the UK myself, I doubt that all that many British schoolchildren
> realise that (for example) the conflict in Northern Ireland resulted mainly
> from the British policy of giving Protestants incentives to go and live in
> Ireland (not to mention laws depriving the Catholics of the right to own
> land or receive an education), much less that faraway conflicts like the one
> in Sri Lanka might have anything to do with British colonial policies.
> However, information is available, and well-informed people will know what
> the issues are, whereas in fjlij we've seen intelligent Japanese people, who
> are quite well-informed in other areas, bring up things like Britain's
> occupation of Burma (Myanmar) in apparent ignorance of Japan's occupation of
> that country (http://tinyurl.com/g4u7, scroll down to the end).
>
> --
> John
> http://rarebooksinjapan.com