Seoul Searching: Back to School

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Wednesday, Apr. 4, 2001 True to its revisionist traditions, Japan's Education Ministry this week approved a new high school textbook that whitewashes its modern history. Glossed over are issues such as Japan's use of forced labor and the enslavement of young Asian and Dutch women to provide sex to the military during World War II.

Understandably, many Koreans are outraged and worried: Will the next generation of Japanese fail to learn the lessons of history and somehow end up repeating the past? But Koreans angry at Japan need to take a tough look at their own educational system and what it teaches about universal values.

Just last month, a Nazi theme bar down in the southeast port of Pusan changed its name after protests from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. The "Hitler" bar will become, wait for it, the "Ditler" bar (the owner reportedly couldn't afford to change the whole name).

Last year I wrote a story on Nazi theme bars in Seoul. One of them, called the Third Reich, promised to redecorate after protests by the Israeli and German embassies. But when it reopened, it had become the Fifth Reich and it still had the swastikas for sale at the front desk, the glass wall panels full of SS insignia, and the black-and-white photos of Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and other stars in the Nazi constellation. The customers were not skinheads and punks: they were college kids attending some of Korea's top schools.

So what are Korean kids learning about the Holocaust? I asked one student if she knew how many Jews the Nazis had killed: "Two thousand?" she guessed. I asked another two young smartly dressed types at the counter of the Fifth Reich: they figured about 4 million. No matter: the Nazis had the coolest costumes of World War II and that's why these guys were attracted to the bar.

All the Koreans I talked to said they would have been outraged to find an Imperial Japan bar done up with rising sun flags and shots of Emperor Hirohito riding his white horse. This was their reasoning: Koreans suffered at the hands of the Japanese not the Nazis so it's O.K. to treat German fascism as a fashion issue.

An editorial in a major Korean daily last week declared Japan unfit to become a member of the United Nations Security Council. Before lobbying for a spot in the exclusive UN club, Japan should "unshackle its historical fetters," the piece argued. The implication was Japan's crimes violated universal humanitarian norms, and that the country has to somehow cleanse itself in the eyes of the world.

Sometimes Japan's conservative ideologues seem to sense that, too. But they resist the notion, minimizing Japanese atrocities and creating false debates over the number of victims. Why? Because they are determined that Japan not be tarred with the same brush as the Nazis. They want Japan to be able to say, 'bad things happen in war, but they happen in any war.'

The universal value argument says, 'No, Japan went over the line' -- the policy of forcing women into sexual slavery didn't just happen in the heat of battle; it was deliberately formulated and carried out by military officers, bureaucrats and political leaders sitting quietly at their desks far from the front. In its transgression of the norms of civilization, it was akin to gassing innocent people.

But if Koreans think its case against Japan is based on universal values, it should teach them better at home.