What is less familiar is the fact that nearly every Asian country betrays a similarly slipshod memory. The finger-chopping protesters probably don’t realize that their own high-school history books contain only one sentence on the Korean “comfort women” abused by Japanese soldiers. Indonesian textbooks don’t even mention the estimated 500,000 people massacred in 1965 after Suharto came to power, an event one CIA report described “as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century.” New history books in the Indian state of Gujarat, run by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, claim that Aryans are indigenous to India and all other non-Hindus–Muslims, Christians, Parsis–are foreigners. A university-level textbook in neighboring Maharashtra says bluntly, “Islam teaches only atrocities.”
The vast gaps and distortions in memory raise the obvious question of whether there is some willful cultural forgetfulness at work in the region–whether Asians in particular cannot look squarely at the past. Even Youk Chhang, the Cambodian researcher most responsible for collecting thousands upon thousands of documents chronicling the terror inflicted by the Khmer Rouge, says his countrymen’s reluctance to face up to the genocide “is perhaps a matter of an Asian way. Face is more important than truth or justice.” The fierce debate in Cambodia over whether and how to try Khmer Rouge leaders underscores how critical the process can be in one particular society. Many historians wonder whether the region itself requires a similar catharsis, one that might free minds to see flaws in contemporary Asian society as well as in the past.
In Japan’s case, the issue of the war continues to bedevil relations with China, while South Korea has withdrawn diplomats and threatened to block Japanese cultural imports over the current textbook row. The dueling histories promulgated in India and Pakistan naturally fuel their rivalry on the Subcontinent. But in other countries the danger of not engaging in a re-examination of the past is perhaps more subtle: how healthy can Thai democracy be when its high-school students learn virtually nothing about Army-led student massacres in 1973 and 1976? “One reason we have so many ethnic, religious and social problems is because important subjects are either taboo or explained incorrectly,” says Arief Rahman, director of the Lab School, a private school in Jakarta. “We have to start openly writing about and discussing all controversial issues in the classroom if we want to promote understanding and peace.”
Unlike many Asian countries, Germany has learned the value of facing history squarely; the country has not simply owned up to the atrocities committed during the war, but delved into them in a way that inspired a reappraisal of German society itself. The impetus, however, came more from political will than from cultural inclination. The country had lost two major wars, not just one, and “there were no more excuses,” says Rainer Riemenschneider, a historian at the Institute for International Textbook Research in Braunschweig, Germany. Key postwar politicians had spent the war in exile or out of favor with the Nazi regime, and even among ordinary citizens, a consensus quickly developed that the country had to make a break with its past if it was to move forward. Integration into NATO demanded that the country mend fences with its neighbors, which now promotes the kind of easy economic and social intercourse that is still lacking in North Asia. “If you face your own past, you can better plan your future,” says Riemenschneider. “It’s the same for individuals as for the psyches of nations.”
Japan’s inability to follow the German example, on the other hand, has similarly little to do with any innately Japanese characteristics. The seven history textbooks currently used in junior-high schools do admit Japanese responsibility for atrocities like the Rape of Nanking, in which up to 300,000 Chinese were killed by Imperial Army soldiers, and for the brutal occupation of Korea. Guidelines issued by the Education Ministry instruct teachers “to make [students] understand that our country did great harm to many foreign countries, particularly Asian nations.” One could argue, in fact, that the minds of Japanese youth are not being poisoned by right-wing revisionism: Even the “New History Textbook” that has provoked such ire in Seoul and Beijing–and which doesn’t deny the Nanking massacre, only its extent–was ordered for use only by six special-education schools and six private schools.
The problem is outside the classroom, where adults are enacting a debate about Japanese nationalism by promoting such textbooks. For the authors of the “New History Textbook,” the real question is how assertive a role Japan is going to allow itself to play in the region today. “It has become a kind of symbol of what these people [involved in selecting books] believe in, rather than what and how children should be taught,” says Tetsuya Hashimoto, a history professor at Kanazawa University.
That same dynamic plays out across Asia, where education is often confused with indoctrination. Not surprisingly, a great many of the most egregious historical errors in Asian schoolbooks stem from these countries’ authoritarian beginnings. Dictators from Taiwan to Indonesia to Cambodia actively rewrote textbooks to engender loyalty to regimes and ruling ideologies. “History taught to the current generation of Chinese youth has less to do with learning than with ensuring that they will support the Communist Party,” says a Beijing middle-school instructor who has taught history for more than 20 years. North Korean textbooks continue to deify both Kim Il Sung and his son, Kim Jong Il. In Pakistan, where textbooks still blame the creation of Bangladesh on propaganda spread by “pro-Hindu teachers” in the former East Pakistan (and don’t mention the thousands of civilians massacred by Pakistani troops), historians were formally instructed by the military government in 1981 to guide students toward the “ultimate goal of Pakistan–the creation of a completely Islamized state.”
Where blatant revisionism takes place now, it’s usually driven by such ideological concerns. In India, Hindu chauvinists have gradually infiltrated cultural, academic and government institutions ever since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party took power in 1998. A new school curriculum is being introduced in which history will be subsumed under the subject of “heritage,” and the period from 1000 to 1800, during which Muslim emperors held sway in the Subcontinent, will be ignored completely. New textbooks haven’t been written yet, but an indication of what’s in store can be gleaned from schools in Gujarat. There, history books for 14-year-olds call the caste system “a precious gift from Aryans to all mankind” and say of untouchables, or Dalits, that “their ignorance, illiteracy and blind faith are to be blamed for [their] lack of progress.”
Politics also drives the decision about what to ignore in textbooks. Writers steer clear of passages that would implicate current leaders, even if by association. Chinese histories mention the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution but not the estimated 30 million to 40 million Chinese who perished in those two addled mass movements. “If they admitted how many people had died, how could they continue to rule? People already doubt the party enough as it is,” says the Beijing teacher. In Cambodia, passages that described “the crimes of the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique” were struck out of history textbooks during peace talks with the Khmer Rouge in 1990-91; only from next year will students read a relatively extensive account of the Khmer Rouge period.
In countries like Cambodia, too, experts argue that the memory of certain events is simply too fresh–and the material too sensitive–to bear much scrutiny, especially by schoolchildren. “If we teach and it divides the nation, what is the use of teaching?” says Thor Sor, dean of the faculty of pedagogy at the University of Phnom Penh. The Indonesian massacres may have begun as an Army-led witch hunt for communists, but they ended as a settling of scores between neighbors. “The people themselves want to erase this tragedy from their collective memory,” says Indonesian historian Hermawan Sulistyo. Malaysians don’t learn much about the racial tensions that sparked pivotal riots in 1969, in part because ethnic relations are considered “too sensitive,” says history professor Khoo Kay Kim. “The government wants the public to forget.”
Part of the problem is also the way in which history is written and taught. From China to Thailand, narratives are still structured around and valorize ruling classes. “Historical studies in Thailand… [are] a collection of stories by and for the national elite, celebrating their successful mission of building and protecting the country despite great difficulties,” historian Thongchai Winichakul has written. In several countries, instructors complain of having less and less time to teach history. Japanese textbooks are being revised this year to delete 30 percent of their material since the number of hours devoted to history is declining from 140 to 105 hours. In the Philippines, where history has been subsumed under a general social-studies course since the 1970s, the education system as a whole is overextended and underfunded; a 1991 congressional report found that “pupils on average learn only 55 percent or even less of what must be learned at every grade level.”
And in Japan’s case, the degree of historical amnesia is itself debatable–and subject to external political forces. Deng Xiaoping first raised the issue of an apology for atrocities like the Rape of Nanking–an issue that Mao did not champion–in order to provide himself political cover for making economic overtures to Japan. Chinese authorities keep the issue of an apology alive in part because they are leery of Japan’s reasserting itself militarily in the region.
By contrast, the Philippines, recalling perhaps that Tokyo is its biggest source of development assistance and major trading partner, has played down the impact of the Japanese occupation during the war. According to Corazon Echano, an official of the Education Ministry’s Curriculum Development Division, two years ago Tokyo even tried to suggest through unofficial channels that the Philippines further water down accounts of Japanese abuses, including the notorious Bataan Death March. The anecdote remains, although nowhere in high-school textbooks is it mentioned that more than a million Filipinos died in the war.
The most fundamental influence on the thoroughness and honesty of Asian textbooks, though, is the degree of political accountability in each country. In places like Cambodia and Indonesia, recent textbook revisions have been spurred by greater political openness. “Our aim was to provide a more balanced account of events… to take into account sources that had been set aside by textbook writers at the height of Suharto’s power,” says Juwono Sudarsono, who served as Education minister after the Indonesian strongman stepped down in 1998. Taiwanese textbooks have undergone some of the most drastic rewriting: now high-school histories delve into indigenous history, Kuomintang military abuses and communist rule on the mainland–topics barely mentioned under nationalist rule. In South Korea, the newly established Ministry of Gender Equality is pressing education officials to expand passages on comfort women. “If we don’t correct our own textbooks, and we ask Japan to change theirs, it’s not right,” says history professor Han Hong Koo.
And if more countries around the region aren’t similarly conscientious about how and what they teach their children, they will have a hard time developing as mature and reflective nations. History is certainly useful as a tool of nation-building. But rather than encouraging broad thinking about the past–and by extension, the present and future–lessons have too often tended to present safe national narratives meant to create good (read: obedient) citizens. Uncomfortable questions are avoided–and often, that means reforms that would prevent the region’s many and varied tragedies from happening again are also ignored. “The falsification of history has created a fossilized mind-set,” warns Pakistani political-science professor Mohammed Wasim. Until that changes, the future as well as the past will remain something of a closed book.
