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.

> 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.

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,
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.

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