Not quite sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, Japan should be teaching truth to their students. On the other hand, they are a sovereign nation and China should not be able to tell Japan what to teach their students. Japan's textbooks have to be approved before they are used in school. The problem is, from the Chinese perspective, they grossly ignore the attrocities the Japanese committed against the Chinese in WWII. This is not the first time I've heard of Japan teaching something in such a way that it misguides or is even completely false. I've been told (though I've never seen it in print) that at one point in Japanese history (possibly still so today) they taught that Pearl Harbor was revenge for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I understand why Japan would want to ignore the attrocities it committed. I know from my time in Germany that the older Germans still feel bad for what their country did. Southwestern Germany was filled with guest houses because it was the "sunny" part of Germany and the Germans were too ashamed to travel abroad after WWII. Still, denying it does not seem to be the way to go about it.
To bring it closer to home, it would be like ignoring what we did to the Native Americans or saying something such as "There were only a few isolated cases of slaves being mistreated by their masters."
You can see the Chinese perspective of the current debate here. The South Koreans have a problem with the textbooks as well. An article that tells more of Japan's side can be found here. Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, and Technology can be found here, but after a quick glance I did not see an article about the middle school textbooks.
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