大象传媒

Historian Priya Atwal explores the global pitfalls in telling textbook national history. Japan's 20th century Imperial past and war in South East Asia has often been a fault line at home & abroad. Within Japan itself the American occupation left a confusing legacy of freedom from direct government interference as to what should be told in the history textbook and a system of opaque censorship. For a generation of teachers scarred by the war there was an insistence on airing the crimes of the recent past and series of trials brought by one historian over freedom from textbook interference eventually saw a nationalist backlash over the emphasis on 'negative' history. In turn these internal disputes over textbook accounts of the war and their possible distortions provoked diplomatic rows with China and South Korea over the legacy of the past & Japanese contrition.
Producer: Mark Burman