To Earl Kinmonth,

As I said in my reply to Ehud Harari, my comments are not based on only a sample of one. As you could probably understand if you had a learning experience as a Japanese high school student, it is quite easy to understand other students' performance in learning Japanese history at school or preparatory schools. In addition, it is quite important to examine the issue of whether high school textbooks matter in students'
learning of Japanese history from students'
perspectives, as Fukuoka argued in his article in International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society.
I have this 'student' and 'insider' experience of learning Japanese history at Japanese schools for six years, which you do not (and if you argue that it is not important, what can I say?). I have not conducted any systematic analysis on this issue, as the main field of my research is comparative and international political economy, but at least I know many cases of students' learning performance in Japanese history.

I also taught Japanese history to many high school students as a private teacher and a teacher at different preparatory schools when I was an undergraduate student (as I do to British university students now), so obviously my claim is not based on only a sample of one for this reason too. I know that my claim still suffers from the issue of selection bias but so does yours. Public opinion is more useful in this sense and it is interesting that school textbooks and history class ranked high in the NHK opinion poll on what shaped historical views of Japanese people, as mentioned in Sven's post.

I know better than assuming that all Japanese high schools are exactly the same, as I saw and met many students from different high schools. I also taught high school students and spent many years in Japan enough to know how different Japanese high schools are, especially in terms of their academic performance (I would say that this is just a common sense among most Japanese people).

As for the content of university entrance exams of Japanese history, I investigated exams of at least 50 universities when I was a teacher. I remember that exam questions of many universities (especially private
ones) were multiple questions and many of them were quite meaningless. I still remember the questions of the entrance exam of a top private university such as 'What is the name of a brother of Imagawa Yoshimoto?'.
One of the exceptions was the entrance exam of the University of Tokyo, which was not multiple-choice but actually asked students to analyse how and why. I remember that the average score of mock exams of Japanese history for the University of Tokyo provided by major preparatory schools was usually a little below
30 out of the full score of 60, so Japanese high school teaching that emphasised rote learning (such as 'Iikuni tsukuro Minamoto-no Yoritomo', the year he initiated Kamakura bakufu was 1192) must have been quite useless for analysing the process, causes and consequences of major incidents in Japanese history.

I understand that there is almost no incentive for at least some and probably many high school students to learn Japanese history, as you argue. I was just arguing that history teaching at high school is a major source of learning Japanese history (not just 1930s or after but also before) for Japanese people, if many of them may know little or not much about it. If we focus on the issue of whether history textbooks matter in shaping Japanese people's view of Japanese history at the time of its imperialism, I do not know the answer, although in addition to or unlike school textbooks, parents may have great influence on people's view of history, at least in some cases. Again, the result of a NHK pole mentioned above, saying that history textbooks and school teaching matter in this respect, sounds interesting.

Hiro Watanabe