The textbook issue

Last week I showed a brief news video about the government's plans to adjust the textbook approval issue.  The spokesman in the video mentioned the need to strength laws mandating that local districts follow the textbook decisions of the supervising board of education.  I wasn't able to explain the background of the case in Okinawa that was referred to so I did a little research on the internet.  Here are some relevant articles that I found in English:

• Taketomi Town’s prerogative (Japan Times, 27 Oct 2013)
• Freedom to choose textbooks vs law on supplying free textbooks to public schools (copy of 23 Feb 2013 Yomiuri Shimbun article)

Note that the two articles take very different approaches to the issue.  The Yomiuri Shimbun is fairly conservative whereas the Japan Times is much more progressive/liberal.

The controversy has its roots in some procedural issues (the way the head of the school board got the decision he wanted) and conflicts between local and national laws.  It is also about the effort to push textbooks with a more conservative bent on Taketomi Town. It should not be surprising that this issue came up in Okinawa, where resistance to conservative or reactionary politics is deeper than in other parts of Japan.  The conservative text book that Taketomi Town is resisting was authored by the 新しい歴史教科書を作る会 (Literally "The Committee to Write New History Textbooks" but official known in English as "The Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform and abbreviated in Japanese as "作る会").  See the Wikipedia article "Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform" for examples of how several sensitive historical issues are treated.

Finally, I also mentioned Ienaga Saburo last week.  This article reviews three suits Ienaga brought against the Japanese government.  In the first two suits, the regional court recognized some abuse of discretion of the part of the government but the higher courts overturned those decisions.  In the third suit, abuse of discretion in regard to certain historical issues was upheld through the Supreme Court. Ienaga surely had some impact on the textbook approval process (demonstrating that there were limits to the legitimate power of the Ministry of Education officials) but he had to work incredibly hard to make these points.  By the way, the Wikipedia article points out that Noam Chomsky and others have nominated Ienaga for the Nobel Peace prize.