Reporting the 2001 textbook and Yasukuni Shrine controversies: Japanese war memory and commemoration in the British media

Globalization and Education in Japan

“…The national program and its survey, analyzed and explained with the use of chronological charts and age cohorts of physical strength, reinforced the agentive desire for being average or like every other student (MECSST, 2000). This is what is found in the arguments of, for instance, Popkewitz (1998) and Fendler (2001). As Popkewitz points out, teaching is treated as a problem in psychology for normalizing students.…”

The Japanese History Textbook Controversy in East Asian Perspective

“…4. In his study of the 2001 Japanese textbook controversy in the British media, Seaton (2005) found that it presented a stereotypical and biased version of Japanese war memory, with the complexity of the inner Japanese debate largely underrepresented.…”

Globalization and Education in Japan

“…The shift has certainly been slow and occasionally indefinite. As known widely, especially through the “orthodox” view of the Western media about Japan's treatment of the past, some hard‐line conservatives, including Cabinet members, have remembered the war as a justifiable act for the salvation of Asia from the yoke of the West (Season, 2005). Some have also argued that Japan had paid enormously out of its own pocket for the construction of modern institutions such as industry and education in Taiwan and Korea rather than having exploited them, as Japan's colonial rule ended long before Japan could take advantage of it, unlike the case of the centuries‐long European rule of the rest of the world.…”