On 2013/07/30 15:41, SSJ-Forum Moderator wrote:
> From: Hiroaki Richard Watanabe
> Date: 2013/07/30
>
> 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?).

Whatever your intent, this sounds like classic Nihonjinron - no foreigner can ever understand Japan without growing up Japanese.

"Insider" experience is just that. A view of a particular place at a particular point in time. Whether that insider experience has any general validity can only be established through an "outsider"
perspective and research. I would never dismiss anything a Japanese or other foreign scholar said about American high school education simply by asserting that I have "insider" experience that they lack. My "insider" experience was more than a half century ago (gasp, shudder) at a particular high school in a particular part of the United States. A Japanese or any other foreign scholar who has done recent research on American high schools will almost certainly know more about them than I do without having any "insider experience." Indeed, it is not just foreign scholars who will know more than I do. My returnee 帰国子女
students are a source of information on US (and other) schools from the perspective of students.

Further, it is not obvious to me how you could spend six years on Japanese history. The national syllabus
(学習指導要領） must have been very different in your era from what it is now. The current high school history syllabus offers two courses: Japanese History A
(2 credits) and Japanese History B (4 credits). If my reading of the national syllabus is correct, neither course is compulsory. They are electives within geography (地理). The MOE has resisted calls for Japanese history to be made compulsory.

There is no history as such at the elementary school level although it is touched on within "society" (社
会). Judging by what my two sons had, it is very light touch. That also seems to be the case for middle schools. There appears to be no distinct history course as such, least of all, Japanese history as a stand alone course. There is history within middle school "society," but it does not look like something that occupies the full three years of middle school. I'll ask my thirteen-year old who is a first year student in a Tokyo public school.
Once I get through a hundred or so exam scripts from my students at the two private universities, I'll research the subject myself. I've been planning to build a lecture on this subject. This exchange has given me the incentive to finish my project.

It might also be relevant that of the sixty or so exam scripts for a course on modern (Tokugawa to the
present) political history that I have read so far, not a single student has mentioned a textbook other than the one for the course. Wikipedia seems to be the weapon of first choice followed by mass market books on history by popular authors in the field.

EHK