Seoul Searching: Hot Potato

In Japan, this is the time of year when the Education Ministry sets about tweaking and buffing the latest crop of high-school textbooks. History texts come in for special scrutiny. Ministry mandarins pour over the fine print to make sure the tomes contain nothing that might give young Japanese any wrong ideas about their history. And authors who ignore "suggestions" are unlikely to see their textbooks on school shelves. Most often, this is an exercise aimed at sanitizing the history of Japanese colonialism and wartime atrocities, and it has often angered Japan's neighbors, particularly China and Korea.

This year, the ministry has a hot potato in its hands and tensions are rising, again.

The story starts three years ago, when the ministry changed tack and allowed more detailed mention of Japan's forced recruitment of Korean, Chinese and other Asian women to provide sex to the Japanese military. This triggered a vociferous backlash among conservative watchdogs of Japan's education policies, who vowed to roll back the changes. Led by Nobukatsu Fujioka, a professor at Tokyo University, Japan's Harvard, they set up a group to attack what they call a "masochistic" view of Japan's history that discourages kids from feeling patriotic. This year the group is trying to push through its own textbook and that has alarmed Seoul.

The text presents a "distorted" description of Japan's wartime atrocities and its 1910 annexation of Korea, according to Korean press reports. The annexation issue is just as important as the war crimes -- it is code for describing Japan's seizure of Korea as legal and therefore legitimate. It is the opening volley in the conservative argument that Japan's colonial rule of the peninsula from 1910 to 1945 was benign, even beneficial -- look at all the roads and schools we built! It is also a red herring; the point is not the legality of the takeover but its morality and consequences. Need it be said again?

Japan's colonial rule of Korea was brutal, and at times barbarous. Japan built roads, yes, but the aim was to strengthen Japan's economy and military, not Korea's. Japan built schools, yes. But those schools trampled on Korean culture and punished students for using anything but Japanese. The treatment of Korea's women was unspeakable. It would be deeply disturbing to see Japan's Education Ministry give its backing to a textbook that tries to bury this history rather than illuminate it. Picture the outcry if Germany's education authorities even considered publishing a school textbook written by neo-Nazi scholars.

In 1998 Japan signed an official apology for its treatment of Korea, marking a turning point in relations between the two countries at the official level. But what are these words worth if the government contradicts their spirit in what it teaches young Japanese?

Seoul is quietly trying to make Japan understand that publication of the textbook would be a big step backward. But both countries want to maintain the fiction that all is well as they head toward joint hosting of the World Cup Soccer next year. So neither government wants this out in the open.

The book, though, should be talked about. For Fujioka and his pals need to be exposed for what they are -- Japan's equivalent of Holocaust revisionists.