Japan furious at UNESCO listing Nanjing Massacre documents | Japan may halt funding for UNESCO over the organization's decision to include documents relating to the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in the latest listing for its "Memory of the World" program.

So after reading this, I was bored and decided to do some digging. I found something quite interesting which corrected a misconception I previously held.

In Asia, I was led to believe (by reddit comments no less, I should have known better), that it was Japan misleading its youth with its history textbooks. They were supposed to lie about their war crimes and be incredibly nationalistic.

It turns out the opposite is true. Japan's history textbooks do contain the relevant information about their war crimes and that China and South Korea's textbooks are orders of magnitude worse. In fact, Japan's history textbooks, according to the scientific study linked below, are more factual and less nationalistic than even America's. It turns out that the whole "history revisionism" textbook fiasco in Japan was only about 2 specific books by a single publisher and was going to be used in a private school system.

Here's the actual Stanford University study, and here's the rundown (summary) if you don't want to go through the paywall. Relevant quotes:

"Some common assumptions about history textbooks used in Japan turn out to be ill-founded. Far from inculcating patriotism, as many overseas observers assume, Japanese high school textbooks tend to dryly present a chronology of historical facts, with little interpretive narrative added."

"Nonetheless, Japanese textbooks do offer a clear, if somewhat implicit, message: the wars in Asia were a product of Japan’s imperial expansion and the decision to go to war with the United States was a disastrous mistake that inflicted a terrible cost on the nation and its civilian population."

"Contrary to popular belief, Japanese textbooks by no means avoid some of the most controversial wartime moments. The widely used textbooks contain accounts, though not detailed ones, of the massacre of Chinese civilians in Nanjing in 1937 by Japanese forces."

This bit from wikipedia is also relevant: "less than one percent of Japanese textbooks used provocative and inflammatory language and imagery, but that these few books, printed by just one publisher, received the greater media attention."

/r/worldnews Thread Parent Link - dw.com