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Japanese sue gov't over history textbook
(China Daily)
Updated: 2006-02-10 05:28
A group of Japanese are taking legal action over a history textbook that
whitewashes Japan's wartime aggression and has angered Asian neighbours,
demanding yesterday that a local government cancel its adoption of the text.
Japan's Education Ministry approved the new edition of "The New History
Textbook," written by reactionary scholars, last April, prompting outrage in
China and South Korea, where bitter memories persist of Japan's wartime
aggression.
The lawsuit was filed by eight residents of Suginami, a residential district
in western Tokyo that attracted media attention last year when it became one of
the few school districts to adopt the junior high school textbook.
"As a resident, I can't keep silent over the choice of an unwanted textbook
for growing children," Eriko Maruhama, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, told a news
conference.
Besides a cancellation of the decision to use the text at 23 junior high
schools in Suginami starting this April, the plaintiffs want a symbolic 8,000
yen (US$68) in total damage.
A similar textbook lawsuit was filed in December by around 1,000 plaintiffs,
including Chinese and South Koreans, against the governor of Ehime in western
Japan for adopting the textbook for use at four government-run schools from
April.
Plaintiffs in the latest suit say the defendant, the Suginami local
government, adopted the textbook even though school teachers gave it low marks
compared to other textbooks.
The Suginami school board said it had yet to see the lawsuit but had arrived
at its decision appropriately.
"The textbook adoption was conducted properly based on laws and ordinances,"
the board said in a statement.
The textbook plays down the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in China and ignores the
sexual enslavement of women for Japanese soldiers.
The book's authors and supporters have argued that the text's approach
corrected a "masochistic" view of history which they said had deprived Japanese
of pride and patriotism.
Fewer than 0.5 per cent of 583 school districts had decided to adopt the
text, the daily Mainichi Shimbun said last August. But the number was still up
slightly from 2001 when an earlier version of the book was approved by the
Education Ministry.
(China Daily 02/10/2006 page1)
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