A Critic for history education
In the class Education in Japan by Prof Robert Aspinall, a visiting Professor from Shiga University, we discuss about Japanese education system, history, phenomena, future, etc. This week we have a make up class and the topic was nihonshi (the history education of Japanese). One of my friend from US presented the interesting concepts, quoted from the Michael Billig`s book, Banal Nationalism, which gave us an inspiration to rethink the concept of nationalism and history of our own nation and how the learning process is running out in the school.
It is very riveting when we aware that all nations in the world introduce and implant the concept of nationalism to the young generation (children) through nearly the same way, such as, stating the pledge of allegiance, flying the flag, singing the national anthem and telling the good history of their nation. Government will keep, continue, and perpetuate those kind of methods in the primary education level, because that is children who can remember and keep in mind for a long time what they studied, experienced, noticed, familiarized and habituated.
But it is unfair if nation through the teacher teach and implant them the wrong, manipulated, and false history instead of telling the truth of what people, their ancestor, did in the past. Because the foolish, violence, criminals, which you try to wrap it carefully and cover it from the outsider, will be opened and proved by somebody later. At that situation children will confused, disoriented, flustered, lost their identity and confidence, and finally blamed the adult for hidden the truth. That is only the time whether to tell them now or wait till they can understand the reality wisely.
History is the way to tell the people about your life subjectively, because you tend to choose the good and proud part of your life. Neither people nor country, they donft want be ashamed of, be mocked, ridiculed, and humiliated through their bad history. Therefore the purpose of history education is to grow and build the proud and self confidence as a nation in international relationship; however, in fact, there were many ashamed acts of people that should be covered as an untold story.
What Japanese government facing today is how to keep the prestigious name of the nation in children mind, which is hard, stressful, and full of guilty. Japanese government felt that it is disadvantage effort to tell the children what Japanese soldiers did to Indonesian, Korean, and Chinese people during the WWII. Therefore, children never learn about the true history of Japan from their textbooks, and this policy harvesting the fruit of protests in China, South Korea, and Indonesia in which bringing the relationship between those countries being worst. One of the very controversial movies, MERDEKA, directed by Yukio Fuji in 2001 is a good example how Japanese try to manipulate the history of Indonesia. Through that movie, the director depicts their soldiers fighting for Indonesian independence, is really far from the right. As Syahri Sadikin, an incumbent councilor at the Indonesian Embassy in Tokyo at that time, said that in reality, only a handful of Japanese soldiers remained after the war, and that it was unclear from historical records whether they opposed the Europeans to free the colony or only to keep it within their own sphere of influence. The Netherlands ruled the Dutch East Indies for about 350 years until 1942, when the country was taken over by the invading Japanese military. The Dutch regained some power after the end of the war in 1945 until completely withdrawing four years later. During their three-year occupation, the Japanese subjected the population to forced labor and sexual servitude. Indonesian people never ever considered the Japanese was a savior from colonial power.
Japanese government endeavor to ask apologize by helping the development of occupied countries through many kinds of program, such as the scholarship, soft loan, training, and social aids, but still not enough for deleting the bad memory of the suffering people during the war.
As a young generation, I try to understand the war situation in 1940`s rationally. I donft want to blame Japanese or other people who participated in. Not because I got the scholarship from Monbukagakusho, but that was an era of war that nobody could resist from doing immoral acts whatever the purpose of. During the war, the wise thinking is lost, the normal feeling as a human being is also gone. The rest is only the barbarity, willing to kill, oppressing, and the animal survival imitating. It is very bad condition that bring human honor and status lower than animal. No body likes this, and if we study and understand those histories deeply, there is no war again in the world. But my questions are why there are still many wars nowadays, why the occupying countries in WWII still want to repeat their ashamed acts? Why US, England, France, Japan, Germany, Australia and other countries make a conspiracy attacking Iraq? Are the history not enough to teach them about the war? Do those people also think and ready to tell their children, the next generation, about what their hands doing now ?
Nagoya, 23 July, 2005