Japanese Textbook Controversies, Nationalism, and Historical Memory: Intra- and Inter-national Conflicts

Abstract

Japan's neonationalists have launched three major attacks on school textbooks over the past half century. Centered on the treatment of colonialism and war, the attacks surfaced in 1955, the late 1970s, and the mid-1990s. The present study examines three moments in light of Japanese domestic as well as regional and global political contexts to gain insight into the persistent contention over colonialism and the Pacific War in historical memory and its refraction in textbook treatments.