Asia’s Textbook Case

The Contemporary and Modern History of Three East Asian Countries
229 pages, Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2005 (in Chinese)

In East Asia, history is not always a source of great comfort, but it often has a way of taking on a peculiar rhythm. In Japan, for example, watershed developments in the complex, sometimes traumatic relationship with its neighbors, follow an unusual pattern: They tend to land on years that end with "5." In 1895, Japan’s military bested China’s in a struggle for control of the Korean Peninsula. Ten years later, the Russo-Japanese War ended, proving that Japan’s forces could more than hold their own against a European power. The victories emboldened Japan, eventually leading to its notorious "21 Demands" of 1915, which forced China to acquiesce to Japan’s hegemony — or risk being invaded. And 1945 was, of course, the year in which Emperor Hirohito famously surrendered, ending Japan’s dreams of empire.

With the publication of The Contemporary and Modern History of Three East Asian Countries, 2005 could, in retrospect, mark another watershed moment in Asian relations: the point at which Japan, China, and South Korea finally began to accept a shared story of the past. The very existence of History, a book intended for use as a supplementary classroom textbook in the three countries, deserves notice. Historians tend to work in solitude, and when they do collaborate, it’s often with a small number of colleagues based in the same institution or at least in the same country. This work, by contrast, is the product of three years of work by teams of 13 to 23 Chinese, Japanese, and Korean researchers and writers, ranging from graduate students and professors to historians based at museums. Historians generally focus on telling the tale of a single nation’s past, or chart the course of world history during a particular stretch of time. This book, which was published simultaneously in all three major East Asian languages, strives to present readers with a unified narrative of the way three different nations experienced the turbulent years between 1840 and 1945.

Just how much use it will receive in schools remains to be seen, but the book has already done unusually well for a work of this sort. In China, the first run of 20,000 copies sold out in two days, and the publisher predicts total sales of 100,000 to 200,000 copies. Its success speaks to people’s ongoing interest in the often volatile debates over hot-button issues discussed in the book, such as what happened in Nanjing in 1937 when the Japanese army took control of the city. Was there a "massacre" that cost hundreds of thousands of civilian lives, as all Chinese schoolchildren learn and this new joint history book contends? Or merely an "incident" in which Japan’s troops took reasonable steps to bring "order" back to the city? In recent years, China, Japan, and South Korea have become increasingly interconnected economically and diplomatically, yet arguments over the meaning of such events have led to flare-ups inspiring crowds of Chinese and Koreans to take to the streets, calling on Japan to make the kind of thorough and unqualified repudiations of its imperialist past that the German state has for its Nazi period.

In fact, with History’s arrival on bookshelves on the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, the book seems to have struck a chord with a widespread desire in East Asia to understand its past. In August, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi — whose past visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine (a site that honors all deceased Japanese soldiers, including a few war criminals) have periodically angered Chinese and Korean observers — chose the anniversary of the surrender as a fitting date to apologize for his nation’s past aggression. Just over two months later, though, he undid much of the good of that apology and provoked outrage across Asia by paying the shrine yet another visit. And all of the discord dredged up by the anniversary of the war’s end emerged just as tensions over a controversial right-wing Japanese textbook — which glossed over historical atrocities committed by Japanese troops — reached a fever pitch, garnering headlines around the world and sparking riots in China and South Korea. History, by contrast, gives readers a sense of the wildly different ways the story of Japan’s military campaigns has been told. The editors juxtapose short excerpts from standard Chinese and South Korean textbooks, which condemn Japanese invasions of China and the Korean Peninsula, with a section from that right-wing Japanese work (appropriately described as atypical, but nevertheless one that Japan’s Ministry of Education has approved for use) that treats these invasions as heroic efforts to "liberate" fellow Asians from "European and American colonial control."

The novelty of a history book that "aims to set the record straight" about the shared history between these three countries doesn’t completely explain its success. As it turns out, History is also a captivating read, and it ably handles some of the most sensitive issues in Asian history. The book uses eyewitness accounts and excerpts from Japanese military documents to portray the Japanese takeover of much of Asia as they often were — events of almost unspeakable horror, accompanied by the rape of many women and the use of some populations for medical experimentation. The book also displays a wide variety of well-chosen images, from a poignant shot of a group of four Korean "comfort women" who were forced to provide sexual services to Japanese soldiers, to images of cities such as Hiroshima and Tokyo laid to waste by U.S. bombs.

To be sure, History suffers from some of the flaws one is bound to find in any narrative produced by committee. Because of political considerations, some issues were simply not on the table. For example, a central unifying theme of the book (flagged by the choice of the Opium War as a starting point and the collapse of the Japanese Empire as a concluding one) would seem to be that imperialist projects are immoral, no matter where they originate. But, not surprisingly (given the involvement of Chinese scholars), although Western and Japanese colonialism is criticized, Chinese efforts to control borderland regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang are not.

And then there is the matter of whether the idealistic endeavor of producing a definitive history between nations is even possible. There is, of course, no uniform — and unchanging — "Japanese" view of the past. In fact, public opinion is divided in Japan on many historical issues, from whether hundreds of thousands or only dozens of Chinese civilians were killed in Nanjing to whether or not it is appropriate for high officials to visit the Yasukuni Shrine. And there is considerable debate over sensitive subjects, from reparations for victimized groups, to the desirability of more thorough official apologies for the sins of the past. In addition, even if Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean publics could somehow reach a common understanding of the past, it would hardly amount to a region-wide consensus; after all, it would have been much more difficult to create a work such as History with the inclusion of scholars based in, say, Taiwan or North Korea.

It remains an open question whether, when students in 2025 reflect on 2005, the year’s place in the history of Asian relations will be remembered for the tumultuous events of a region struggling with its past or whether they will view the publication of this textbook as a small but significant turning point. One important variable is how many schools end up using the book. Another is whether future Japanese leaders follow in Koizumi’s footsteps and visit the Yasukuni Shrine, which continues to serve as the same sort of flashpoint for East Asia that the Confederate battle flag does for America. As long as historical issues tied to Japanese imperialism are unsettled, the existence of this book will benefit all three countries, even if its lofty goal of freeing the next generation from the shackles of the past remains too much to ask.