History Textbooks in Twentieth Century Japan

2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-121
Author(s):  
Chinichi Arai

Despite modernization of the Japanese school system after 1872, this period was marked by the war in East Asia and nationalism focusing on the emperor, whereby the imperial rescript of 1890 defined the core of national education. Following defeat in the Second World War, Japan reformed its education system in accordance with a policy geared towards peace and democracy in line with the United Nations. However, following the peace treaty of 1951 and renewed economic development during the Cold War, the conservative power bloc revised history textbooks in accordance with nationalist ideology. Many teachers, historians and trade unions resisted this tendency, and in 1982 neighboring countries in East Asia protested against the Japanese government for justifying past aggression in history textbooks. As a result, descriptions of wartime misdeeds committed by the Japanese army found their way into textbooks after 1997. Although the ethnocentric history textbook for Japanese secondary schools was published and passed government screening in 2001, there is now a trend towards bilateral or multilateral teaching materials between Japan, South Korea, and China. Two bilateral and one multilateral work have been published so far, which constitute the basis for future trials toward publishing a common textbook.

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 36-57
Author(s):  
Lina Klymenko

This article explores the theoretical understanding of the relation between school history textbooks and the state-led construction of national identity. It does this by conceptualizing a history textbook as an assembly of historical narratives that provide young readers with an opportunity to identify with the national community in which they live. By focusing on narrative techniques, including plot, concepts of time and space, and the categorization of characters as in- and out-groups, this article shows how narratives of the Second World War in Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian textbooks contribute to nation-building.


Author(s):  
Anna Belogurova

In South East Asia the Marxist message came primarily to address issues of nation-building. The article traces the development of communist parties from their early diasporic networks and engagement with the Comintern, to their relations with the colonial powers, to the establishment of communist-ruled states after the Second World War, through to the Cold War and US efforts to contain communism. The article looks at the various forms that communism took in the region, from hybrid Chinese associations in British Malaya and Hồ Chí Minh’s Indochina network, to the constitutional party of Sukarno’s Indonesia, to the semi-Buddhist Burmese Way to Socialism of Ne Win, to the neo-dynastic communism of Pol Pot. Special attention is paid to the interplay between nationalism, internationalism, and communism.


2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
PERTTI AHONEN

This article analyses the process through which the dangers posed by millions of forced migrants were defused in continental Europe after the Second World War. Drawing on three countries – West Germany, East Germany and Finland – it argues that broad, transnational factors – the cold war, economic growth and accompanying social changes – were crucial in the process. But it also contends that bloc-level and national decisions, particularly those concerning the level of autonomous organisational activity and the degree and type of political and administrative inclusion allowed for the refugees, affected the integration process in significant ways and helped to produce divergent national outcomes.


The destruction of Japan’s empire in August 1945 under the military onslaught of the Allied Powers produced a powerful rupture in the histories of modern East Asia. Everywhere imperial ruins from Manchuria to Taiwan bore memoires of a great run of upheavals and wars which in turn produced revolutionary uprisings and civil wars from China to Korea. The end of global Second World War did not bring peace and stability to East Asia. Power did not simply change hands swiftly and smoothly. Rather the disintegration of Japan’s imperium inaugurated a era of unprecedented bloodletting, state destruction, state creation, and reinvention of international order. In the ruins of Japan’s New Order, legal anarchy, personal revenge, ethnic displacement, and nationalist resentments were the crucible for decades of violence. As the circuits of empire went into meltdown in 1945, questions over the continuity of state and law, ideologies and the troubled inheritance of the Japanese empire could no longer be suppressed. In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire takes a transnational lens to this period, concluding that we need to write the violence of empire’s end – and empire itself - back into the global history of East Asia’s Cold War.


Author(s):  
Andrew I. Port

The ‘long 1950s’ was a decade of conspicuous contrasts: a time of dismantling and reconstruction, economic and political, as well as cultural and moral; a time of Americanization and Sovietization; a time of upheaval amid a desperate search for stability. But above all, it was a time for both forgetting and coming to terms with the recent past. This article focuses on the two forms of government that controlled Germany, democracy, and dictatorship. The Cold War was without doubt the main reason for the rapid rehabilitation and integration of the two German states, which more or less took place within a decade following the end of the Second World War. This article further elaborates upon the political conditions under dictatorship and its effect on the social life. East Germany, under the Soviet control underwent as much political upheaval. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that Germany became a democracy.


2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 368-376
Author(s):  
Harold Behr

This article presents the writings of Gregory van der Kleij, group analyst and Catholic priest, whose experiences of the holocaust during the Second World War shaped his thinking, not only as a therapist but also as a campaigner against the nuclear arms race. The author re-visits two significant articles on the group matrix published in this journal in the 1980s and introduces the reader to a little-known monograph addressed to the Catholic community which examines the moral dilemma faced by Christians during the Cold War. The monograph contains an exhortation to rise up in protest against what Gregory considers to be ‘the madness’ of high-level thinking on the morality of the nuclear deterrent.


Author(s):  
Hasan Dinçer ◽  
Emrecan Aracı

The process of financial liberalization draws attention as a process that took place after the 1980s and led by the strong countries, in order to overcome the narrowing in the economies of the world countries which have become polarized because of the Second World War and the Cold War period immediately following the Second World War. In this chapter, firstly, the definition of the financial liberalization period and the effects according to the countries are examined, while the risk and crisis issues are also evaluated. Economic and political crises that have occurred in Turkey after the financial liberalization process in ongoing part of the study also were assessed by considering the effects on the economy. In this context, the economic and political crisis in Turkey are analyzed as to their effects on the country's economic performance. Accordingly, every 10 years, an economic and political crisis in Turkey took place. The country's economy is affected negatively in the macro-frame.


2021 ◽  
pp. 141-159
Author(s):  
Uta Andrea Balbier

Anti-Communism constituted a core feature of Billy Graham’s preaching in the 1950s. In Graham’s sermons Communism did not just stand for the anti-religious thread of an atheistic ideology, as it was traditionally used in Protestant Fundamentalist circles, but also for its opposition to American freedom and Free Market Capitalism. This article argues that the term Communism took on significantly new meaning in the evangelical milieu after the Second World War, indicating the new evangelicals’ ambition to restore, defend, and strengthen Christianity by linking it into the discourse on American Cold War patriotism. This article will contrast the anti-Communist rhetoric of Billy Graham and other leading evangelical figures of the 1950s, such as Harold Ockenga, with the anti-Communist rhetoric used by early Fundamentalists in the 1910s and 1920s. Back then, Communism was predominantly interpreted as a genuine threat to Christianity. The term also made appearances in eschatological interpretations regarding the imminent end-times. The more secular interpretation of Communism as a political and economic counter-offer by evangelical preachers such as Billy Graham will be discussed as an important indicator of the politicization and implied secularization of the evangelical milieu after the Second World War.


Arthur Szyk ◽  
2004 ◽  
pp. 217-232
Author(s):  
Joseph P. Ansell

This chapter encompasses Arthur Szyk's final years. It shows his continued dedication to freedom struggles around the world even as it contemplates on the dwindling number of exhibitions he held during this period. During this time, the United States was also turning inward after the Second World War. This attitude was one which Szyk did not share and which his work, with its liberal and international themes, did not support. Moreover, the chapter reveals his growing sympathy towards the Soviet Union, which was so evident in the political cartoons and related works from the years of alliance during the Second World War. It also shows that, by the early years of the Cold War, his health was somewhat precarious, forcing him to choose his activities carefully.


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