Postwar History Education In Japan And The Germanys

How did East and West Germany and Japan reconstitute national identity after World War II? Did all three experience parallel reactions to national trauma and reconstruction? History education shaped how these nations reconceived their national identities. Because the content of history education was controlled by different actors, history education materials framed national identity in very different ways. In Japan, where the curriculum was controlled by bureaucrats bent on maintaining their purported neutrality, materials focused on the empirical building blocks of history (who? where? what?) at the expense of discussions of historical responsibility. In East Germany, where party cadres controlled the curriculum, students were taught that World War II was a capitalist aberration. In (West) Germany, where teachers controlled the curriculum, students were taught the lessons of shame and then regeneration after historians turned away from grand national narratives. This book shows that constructions of national identity are not easily malleable on the basis of moral and political concerns only, but that they are subject to institutional constraints and opportunities. In an age when post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation has become a major focus of international policies, the analysis offers important implications for the parallel revision of portrayals of national history and the institutional reconstruction of policy-making regimes.

How did East and West Germany and Japan reconstitute national identity after World War II? Did all three experience parallel reactions to national trauma and reconstruction? History education shaped how these nations reconceived their national identities. Because the content of history education was controlled by different actors, history education materials framed national identity in very different ways. In Japan, where the curriculum was controlled by bureaucrats bent on maintaining their purported neutrality, materials focused on the empirical building blocks of history (who? where? what?) at the expense of discussions of historical responsibility. In East Germany, where party cadres controlled the curriculum, students were taught that World War II was a capitalist aberration. In (West) Germany, where teachers controlled the curriculum, students were taught the lessons of shame and then regeneration after historians turned away from grand national narratives. This book shows that constructions of national identity are not easily malleable on the basis of moral and political concerns only, but that they are subject to institutional constraints and opportunities. In an age when post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation has become a major focus of international policies, the analysis offers important implications for the parallel revision of portrayals of national history and the institutional reconstruction of policy-making regimes.

Focusing on the post war reconstruction of the education systems in Japan and Germany under U.S. military occupation after World War II, this book offers a comparative historical investigation of education reform policies in these two war ravaged and ideologically compromised countries. While in Japan large-scale reforms were undertaken swiftly after the end of the war, the U.S. zone in Germany maintained most of the traditional aspects of the German education system. Why did Japan so readily accept ideas and values developed in the allied countries while Germany resisted? Masako Shibata explores this question, arguing that the role of the university and the pattern of elite formation, which can be traced back to the period of the formation of Meiji Japan and the Kaiserreich, created the conditions for differing reactions from educational leaders in each country; this had a decisive impact on the proposed reforms. By examining these reactions through a sociological, cultural, and historical frame, an explanation emerges. Japan and Germany under the U.S. Occupation will prove to be a valuable resource both to scholars of history and education reform.

The controversy over official state-approved history textbooks in Japan, which omit or play down many episodes of Japan’s occupation of neighbouring countries during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945), and which have been challenged by critics who favour more critical, peace and justice perspectives, goes to the heart of Japan’s sense of itself as a nation. The degree to which Japan is willing to confront its past is not just about history, but also about how Japan defines itself at present, and going forward. This book examines the history textbook controversy in Japan. It sets the controversy in the context of debates about memory, and education, and in relation to evolving politics both within Japan, and in Japan’s relations with its neighbours and former colonies and countries it invaded. It discusses in particular the struggles of Ienaga Saburo, who has made crucial contributions, including through three epic lawsuits, in challenging the official government position. Winner of the American Educational Research Association 2009 Outstanding Book Award in the Curriculum Studies category.

Visions of the past are crucual to the way that any community imagines itself and constructs its identity. This edited volume contains the first significant studies of the politics of history education in East Asian societies.

Showcasing moments of convergence between the German and Japanese cultures towards common points of interest over the last one hundred fifty years, the chapters in this book cover such topics as culture, diplomacy, geography, history, law, literature, philosophy, politics, and sports. From the creation of two similar modern nation-states, to the aggressive struggle for national supremacy and subsequent total defeat in 1945, the necessity of coping with their earlier militarism and parallel economic miracles in the postwar era, Germans and Japanese look back on a remarkably similar past.

Teaching a Dark Chapter explores how textbook narratives about the Fascist/Nazi past in Italy, East Germany, and West Germany followed relatively calm, undisturbed paths of little change until isolated "flashpoints" catalyzed the educational infrastructure into periods of rapid transformation. Though these flashpoints varied among Italy and the Germanys, they all roughly conformed to a chronological scheme and permanently changed how each "dark past" was represented. Historians have often neglected textbooks as sources in their engagement with the reconstruction of postfascist states and the development of postwar memory culture. But as Teaching a Dark Chapter demonstrates, textbooks yield new insights and suggest a new chronology of the changes in postwar memory culture that other sources overlook. Employing a methodological and temporal rethinking of the narratives surrounding the development of European Holocaust memory, Daniela R. P. Weiner reveals how, long before 1968, textbooks in these three countries served as important tools to influence public memory about Nazi/Fascist atrocities. As Fascism had been spread through education, then education must play a key role in undoing the damage. Thus, to repair and shape postwar societies, textbooks became an avenue to inculcate youths with desirable democratic and socialist values. Teaching a Dark Chapter weds the historical study of public memory with the educational study of textbooks to ask how and why the textbooks were created, what they said, and how they affected the society around them.

This book reflects on how teachers and students use new technologies in classroom settings in order to improve the capacity of teaching and learning in history to successfully meet the challenges of the twenty-first century through a complex understanding of the relation between past and present. Key authors in the field from Europe and the Americas present a comprehensive overview of the central questions at the heart of the book. They contribute to this process of reflection by taking diverse methodological, pedagogical and conceptual approaches to analyse the ways in which digital tools could advance the development of historical comprehension in the fields of formal and informal history education in different settings as schools, museums, exhibitions, sites of memory, videogames and films. Drawing together a disciplinary diversity that approaches the topic from the viewpoints of collective memory, global history, historical thinking and historical consciousness, the book’s cutting-edge content offers interested academics and practitioners with a broad-based view on the current state of debate in this area, examined via theoretical exploration in-depth case analysis.