Australia and New Zealand have stayed on the sidelines in the dispute about the controversial textbook Koreans and Chinese are objecting to. Yet many Australians and New Zealanders suffered badly during World War II as prisoners of war and in other ways because of the actions of the Japanese military of the period.
For instance, the Australian city of Darwin was bombed several times by Japanese planes, the first raid being on Feb. 19, 1942. New Zealand was never attacked, though on the night of March 8-9, 1942, a submarine-borne Japanese aircraft flew over Wellington and on March 13 and on March 24 of the same year an aircraft flew over Auckland.
Singapore had fallen to Japanese forces four days before the first raid on Darwin, which by any measure was critical. Yet it was the first and only time that the Australian mainland has been attacked and that experience has helped shape Australian thinking about its northern approaches.
As Japanese historical documents have since established, Australia and New Zealand were not considered to be at the core of Japan's plans at the time, though some official bits of paper contained ideas that the two were to be colonized once the hold over the core territories had been firmly established. They were thus to be part of a regime dominated by Japan.
Moreover, both New Zealand and Australian soldiers were captured by Japanese and some were brutally treated in camps.
So why are Australia and New Zealand not also raising their voices to add to those of South Korea and China?
One likely reason is that the textbook does not deal with Australia and New Zealand. A country would not usually comment on another's textbooks unless there were deliberate misrepresentation.
If the textbook had dealt with Australia and New Zealand and the governments, former prisoners of war or scholars of those two countries considered that historical facts had been twisted, they would undoubtedly have protested.
The main reason, however, is that Australia and New Zealand were not colonized by Japan as was Korea, nor occupied as were large areas of China.
That makes Australian and New Zealand experiences of Japan different in kind from those of the Korean Peninsula and China.
Furthermore, both Australia and New Zealand have a dedication to freedom of speech and to academic freedom. Hence, they believe that writers should be free to write what they believe and that opinions should be able to be expressed, weighed, and commented on and during that process the truth will come out.
Many Australian and New Zealand scholars would be uneasy about the use of a school textbook that was inadequate unless they could also believe that the school students were being taught how to weigh evidence and find out information for themselves. In any case, the teaching of the capacity to think critically is not an easy task and many teachers might find it less demanding simply to see that their students mastered the content of a set book. There are other obvious differences. China, Korea and Japan are near neighbors and have a long history of dealing with one another. Their situation in Northeast Asia, the only area in the world where the interests of the great powers rub up against one another, colors their outlooks and conditions their behavior.
Their historical experiences differ in another way. Although Japan was on the same side as Australia and New Zealand in World War I, it was a largely unknown country until World War II and that war created bad perceptions.
Nevertheless, after the war both Australians and New Zealanders came to understand Japan better and this gradually changed the negative perceptions that the war had generated. One more factor contributes to the difference. Most Australian and New Zealand observers of Japan believe that there has been a fundamental change in the country. In the years in which the military dominated both domestic politics and foreign policy, Japan followed policies and practices that included ones that were abhorrent and against the country's best interests. Yet that is in the past. It is not simply that Japan has become a true democracy but that it has adopted internationally cooperative policies.
Japan does have its ultra-nationalists, but they seem to have the status of being a fringe group. Japan does not seem like a country that is even latently militaristic. If there were widespread financial and social distress in the country possibly support for extremist groups would grow, but at the moment those groups are not what makes Japan tick.
The differences between Australia and New Zealand, on the one hand, and Korea and China, on the other, apart, the textbook issue raises a number of significant points. One is whether children should be taught only the good and positive aspects of their country's history. I do not believe that. For one thing we owe it to children to tell them the truth. For another I believe in the validity of the saying that those who do not know the past are bound to repeat it. Good history will not deal solely with the dark passages in a country's past, but also with its great achievements, and Japan has plenty of those.
New Zealand has had a different sort of historical debate. Some historians have recently revised the history of the period of European settlement and documented many of the bad things done to the indigenous people, the Maori. Others are now saying that in emphasizing those aspects, other valuable things have been forgotten.
A sealing base was established in New Zealand by Europeans in the first years of the 1790s, but the earliest development of European settlement occurred in the 1820s. The country was already inhabited by the indigenous people, the Maori. The demand for land by the incoming settlers created huge pressures which eventually led to wars between the Maori and the European settlers in the 1860s. They lasted until 1872. Some land was sold by the Maori people and some was illegally seized as punishment for resistance and war. Although the wars were acknowledged and taught in history, the illegal seizure of land was largely ignored. A renaissance of Maori language, customs, crafts and history has occurred in recent years and it was only then that various aspects of New Zealand history came to the fore and were faced by the nation and incorporated into the teaching of history in schools. The arguments are by no means over, but it is widely accepted that the nation has been strengthened by bringing this part of the country's experience into the open.
Secondly, there is a question of whether what is written in Japanese textbooks has anything at all to do with any other country. In many cases it would not. Yet a report in The Asahi Shimbun on July 10 was disturbing. The education ministry admitted that authorities were involved in the deaths of civilians after the Great Kanto Earthquake but argued that the term ``and others'' makes the text technically accurate. This is nonsense. It obscures the issue and makes a mockery of legal distinctions. It needs to be remembered that although it is the governments of Korea and China which have taken up the textbook issue, behind them is the human factor of some people who suffered grievously and are now nearing the end of their lives and they do not want to die believing that no one will know what did happen. In Japan, too, in different circumstances, there was terrible suffering and those who suffered do not want to see that past forgotten.
Thirdly, there are always complications about the interpretation of history. Yet if there are perspectives about that whole period that Japanese historians believe need to be expressed then the appropriate way to do that is to publish these as scholarly works and to let the international community of scholars and critics approach them as they approach other scholarly offerings. The wrong way is to allow a small group, with an agenda of its own, prescribe what should be taught in schools.
Japan's textbook issue seen from Down Under