To Ehud Harari,

It is difficult to know and demonstrate in an objective manner how many Japanese (high school) students learned Japanese history a lot from school textbooks. One
(incomplete) way to measure this may be to examine the results of students' performance in Japanese history exams at school or major preparatory schools for university entrance, given that school textbooks are a major teaching tool, but conducting this investigation sounds unrealistic. What I can say is that school textbooks are the most common tool for teaching Japanese history at high schools and it cannot be just me (I was expecting somebody to say that I used only one example of myself) but at least some students (should be quite a lot if we think the number of all high school students in Japan) that learned Japanese history from school textbooks at least to some extent.
Here it is important to have own experience to learn Japanese history at a Japanese high school (or preparatory schools), as you can then know the performance of other high school students somehow, partly through the distribution of the results (such as average scores and 'hensachi') by high schools or preparatory schools (I am not saying that 'hensachi'
education is good).

In any case, this issue does not seem so important and a much more important issue is to examine the possible impact of the nationalist Abe/LDP regime on the content of Japanese history textbooks. I kind of understand what Earl wanted to say from his experience but I also want to say that claiming Japanese textbooks is not a major source of knowledge of Japanese history for Japanese people only by considering some poor performing students is a little extreme. This claim seems to be equivalent of saying that most Japanese students are so stupid or bored that they cannot learn almost anything from history textbooks (if this may be true).

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Dr. Hiroaki Richard Watanabe, D.Phil. Oxford, MA Yale, BA Tokyo Lecturer, School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield

http://www.shef.ac.uk/seas/staff/japanese/watanabe.html
http://www.wreac.org/people/WREAC-People/Core-Researche
rs/Watanabe%2C-Hiroaki-Richard/details