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History to order

B. S. Raghavan

BAD news for South Korea and China: Japan has pointblank turned down their insistent as well as persistent pleas not to doctor history in its textbooks. The rebuff is understandable and predictable. It is naive and unrealistic on the part of China and So uth Korea to urge Japan to include in textbooks for middle school students gory accounts of its wartime atrocities, or the forced sexual enslavement of tens of thousands of women in occupied territories, or the harsh and cruel treatment of the people dur ing the 35-year Japanese occupation of Korea.

What is more surprising is the self-righteous statement of the Chinese Foreign Ministry seriously regretting the decision of the Japanese Government despite strong diplomatic representations. South Korea has retaliated in more concrete terms: It has refu sed to receive a delegation of Japanese politicians who had come to Seoul to discuss the textbooks issue. Members of Korea's National Assembly angrily demanded the expulsion of the Japanese Ambassador.

The two countries ought to ask themselves which country will agree to show itself in a poor light to its own citizens by including recitals of its own misdeeds? I have not seen textbooks in the US mentioning the inhuman savageries the White Americans per petrated against the native Indians and the slaves. There are, of course, books documenting the horrors, but they have not been prescribed as textbooks in schools or colleges. Likewise, textbooks in the UK do not discuss its black colonial record nor, I am sure, do Spanish textbooks refer to the Inquisition and extermination of the natives in the countries they conquered.

Some time ago, Germany was criticised for glossing over the holocaust in which six millions Jews were gruesomely butchered in gas chambers. Forget these examples. Can China, which has been so sanctimonious about the omissions in Japanese textbooks, affir m in all honesty that it has filled its textbooks with a complete and faithful narration of the terrors unleashed during the tyrannical regimes of Stalin and Mao resulting in the devastation and deaths of millions of innocent Chinese and Russians? In sho rt, there is no country in the world without having to atone for black deeds of some kind.

In this background, Japan, in fact, is to be commended for having gone to considerable lengths to smoothen ruffled feathers. Japan's Education Ministry, while disingenuously maintaining that it has no power to dictate to authors what historical facts the y should include or exclude, has quietly gone about meeting the Chinese and Korean susceptibilities half way by subtly persuading the publishers to carry out as many as nine revisions.

The textbooks now contain a more direct mention of the Nanjing massacre in which Japanese troops slaughtered more than 200,000 Chinese civilians in 1937. They have also removed a previous statement that the Japanese subjugation of Korea was popular with the local population. However, the textbooks, even after the revisions, do not include any mention of the Korean sex slaves, or ``comfort women'' who were forced to submit to the carnal urges of Japanese soldiers. Nor do they explicitly or adequately cov er the aggressive and traumatic aspects of their military expansionism.

The Japanese Prime Minister, Mr Junichiro Koizumi, who may turn out to be the best Prime Minister Japan has had, as evidenced by his bold leadership and statesmanlike qualities, has already tried to mollify China and the Koreas by asking them to look for ward to peaceful cooperation on areas of common interest, instead of harping on matters befouling relations that are best forgotten. He is right.