Thanks very much Sven.

In a debate like this, there is plenty of scope for argument about methodology, question selection, sample size, sample selection, margin of error, age of the survey (the internet must be a bigger influence in 2013 than in 2000 for instance) etc., etc. before we even start debating the interpretation of data. Clearly multiple answers were permitted, so one would naturally want to know what the percentages would be if just one answer were allowed, on the most influential source; and whether a certain percentage answered "none of the above." A few people choosing a lot of sources could greatly distort the data if the sample is small.

Despite all these issues, my personal instinctive impression is that the findings of the study, as described by you, may well be roughly right: there is no strong support for prime minister Abe's style of nationalistic historical revisionism in Japan. All the stuff about whether Japan was forced to fight by the ABCD line, whether the colonialism was justified, whether "comfort women" were sex slaves or willing prostitutes... Such things are the obsession of a small minority of the Japanese population, nearly all of them male and most of them of Abe's age and above.

Regarding youths, my own experience closely matches Earl's. Like him, I have taught at several Japanese universities, including some quite elite ones. The problem with college students etc. is not that they have been brainwashed into admiring Japan's wartime activities, far less embracing fascism as an ideology for today. No, the problem is one of apathy and ignorance. When those South Korean football fans raised banners praising Yi Sun-Sin and An Jung-Geun at the big game in Seoul the other day, I am guessing that most of the Japan fans had no idea what they were going on about. The other Korean banner, accusing Japan of forgetting history, was strictly speaking correct. They have forgotten -- but not in the sense intended by the Koreans, in which Japanese people forget all the history that is inconvenient to a nationalist agenda, but in a much more literal sense -- they've forgotten the lot.

Or when deputy prime minister Taro Aso made his recent bizarre comment referring to how the Nazis revised the Weimar constitution (which I see he has just retracted, for what little/nothing it's worth) very few young Japanese would know what the Weimar Republic was, what the Nazis did to its constitution etc. Looking around 2-channel etc., I can see a few people denouncing Aso, a few defending him or attacking the media for making too much fuss about the comment... My guess is that there is a big swathe of people in between who are just bemused or not interested.

My personal impression is that very few young Japanese people actively support the Abe revisionist agenda. On the other hand, very few actively oppose that agenda. Most neither know nor care what it is all about. We are looking at a political vacuum, in which any politician with a bit of determination and charisma who gives the state a hefty shove can move it -- to the left or the right. Just because the voters gave the LDP a big majority in the last 2 elections, that does not mean they have all gone right-wing, any more than they had all gone left-wing when they handed the DPJ its landslide win in 2009. Neither of these spectacular results produced fireworks or street dancing. Both were mostly negative results caused by people being fed up with the other lot. The low turn-out at last month's upper house election calls into question the idea of a big surge of enthusiasm for old-school right-wing nationalism, though the money-printing aspect of Abenomics may have a certain fleeting appeal.

So I would wholeheartedly agree with Earl that most of the stuff in history textbooks, good, bad or indifferent, is water off a duck's back, even in those cases where the teacher does stick to the textbook -- which as Earl and others point out is far from always being the case.

But that doesn't mean there is nothing to worry about. Mischief-making political leadership, apathetic population, Korea and China really enjoying rubbing Japan's nose in the brown stuff to see if they can provoke a response... The way things are going, Abe might well be able to start tinkering with the constitution and enforcing greater political control, even if his agenda is only actively supported by a very small minority of the population.

Returning to the NHK survey, which I can't seem to find on Amazon or Google books by the way, we would want to know not just what people know about history, and what they think about it, and where they learned about it... But also how deep their knowledge is, how that knowledge interacts with political consciousness, and whether people care about historical issues enough to take action based on that awareness.

Tom Gill
Faculty of International Studies
Meiji Gakuin University