Japan's revisionist agenda evidenced in newly-approved high school textbooks

The Japanese government under the stewardship of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and under the auspices of the education ministry has intervened into the authorization of textbooks to be used in high schools to ensure its controversial revisionist stance on historical and territorial issues is upheld.

The move, almost certain to draw the ire of Japan's neighbors who were brutalized by the Imperial Japanese Army during its barbaric WWII reign, has seen more emphasis in 24 humanities textbooks placed on Japan's belief in its sovereignty over islands and islets disputed with its neighbors such as South Korea and China.

According to the education ministry, the newly-authorized textbooks' amount of description on territorial issues regarding contested islands and islets south of Okinawa, northeast of Hokkaido and west of Japan's main island, have increased by 160 percent, compared to the amount of references in the current books.

The education ministry's screening process has been kneaded to ensure that the government's revisionist view that the South Korean-controlled islets in the Sea of Japan, for example, known as Dokdo there yet claimed by Japan and referred to as Takeshima here, is upheld, and the islets described in the books as "an inherent part" of Japanese territory.

Similarly, China's Diaoyu islands, controlled by Japan and referred to as the Senkaku Islands are presented in the books as being inherently Japanese, as the school books here increasingly lean towards toeing the government's revisionist line, since the education ministry amended its screening criteria and guidelines in 2014 for senior high school textbooks.

History textbooks screened here have also been urged by the government to revise accounts of incontrovertible events that Japan has and continues to try and whitewash, with specific regard to the number of murders in the 1937 Nanjing Massacre and the number of Korean lives lost in the aftermath of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake.

The government, in a move certainly to be harshly criticized by Japan's neighbors, who have consistently found themselves on the receiving end of Japan refusing to face up to history squarely and suitably atone for its heinous wartime atrocities, requested one textbook, as well as saying reparations for the "comfort women" issue had been resolved, to revise its content to also say that Japan's forced labor of Chinese nations during the war had also been resolved.

Of 261 books that were entered into the screening process, the government said that 259 have passed its process, with the results likely to compound Japan's frosty relations with its neighbors, that while showing embryonic signs of thawing towards the end of last year, have seen Japan once again estrange itself for trying to, literally, rewrite its barbaric war time past and current erroneous claims over territory. Endit