Dear colleagues,

It is my pleasure to inform you about the December meeting of the Kansai Modern Japan Group, an interdisciplinary platform for scholars based in or visiting the Kansai area who work on modern and/or contemporary Japan. The lecture will be in English, the comments and discussion either in English or Japanese.
All interested are most welcome.

This meeting will be co-hosted by the Italian School of East Asian Studies and the Ecole Francaise d'Extreme Orient. As this is our last meeting of the year the lecture will be followed by a bonenkai at a local izakaya.

Here are the data:

SPEAKER: Peter Cave (University of Manchester & Kyoto
University)
TITLE: Japanese Colonialism and the Asia-Pacific War
in Japan's
Junior High History Textbooks 1992-2010:
Changing Representations and their Causes
DISCUSSANT: tba
DATE: Thursday 15 December
TIME: 18:30
PLACE: ISEAS office, Nihon Itaria Kyoto Kaikan, 4th
floor
(075-751-8132)
Yoshida Ushinomiya-cho 4, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto

The ISEAS (Italian School of East Asian Studies) premises are on the 4th floor of the Nihon Itaria Kyoto Kaikan. The Nihon Itaria Kyoto Kaikan is in the immediate vicinity of Kyoto University, near the crossing of Higashi-Oji and Higashi-Ichijo. For reasons of academic isolation there is no train station that will get you close to Kyoto University, but the Keihan line will get you into walking distance (either Marutamachi or Demachi-Yanagi station). Kyoto City Bus no.31, 201, 203 and 206, however, will get you almost to the doorstep of ISEAS.
You should get off the bus at Kyodai Seimon-mae. The Nihon Itaria Kyoto Kaikan is on the north-west corner of the crossing, on the north side of Higashi-Ichijo.

Those willing to present at one of our monthly meetings, please send an abstract of the presentation you propose to and .

I look forward to welcoming many of you.

Best regards,

Dick Stegewerns
Kyoto University & University of Oslo

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ABSTRACT:

Japanese Colonialism and the Asia-Pacific War in Japan's Junior High History Textbooks 1992-2010:
Changing Representations and their Causes

This presentation examines changes between 1992 and 2010 in Japanese junior high school history textbooks'
representations of Imperial Japan's colonialism and aggression in Asia. Following a trend to increase textbook material on Japan's wartime aggression in the mid-1990s, after 2000 publishers approached this topic in contrasting ways, some expanding and some reducing their coverage, with dramatically varying results in terms of market share. I argue that publishers'
decisions on content were related to their market position, and to changes in local textbook adoption procedures that have increased the decision-making power of appointed boards of education at the expense of teachers. With the introduction of new textbook approval criteria requiring textbooks' conformity with the patriotic emphases of the revised Fundamental Law on Education of 2006, the content of future textbooks will clearly be strongly influenced by both approval and adoption processes.

Peter Cave is Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Manchester, and is currently a JSPS Invited Research Fellow at Kyoto University. He is the author of Primary School in Japan (Routledge, 2007), and most recently, 'Explaining the Impact of Japan's Educational
Reform: or, Why Are Junior High Schools So Different from Elementary Schools?' (Social Science Japan Journal
14: 2, 2011).