Earl,

thanks for your thoughts. I partly agree with your comments regarding the need to put the numbers into context. The data is 15 years old, and we have to see the numbers in this context, as you say. However, in context, the data is highly relevant, particularly since no more recent data is available. For a historian like me, data that is merely 15 years old is brand new, anyway. And since the data is out there, we cannot just ignore it, but we have to use it to try to explain what is going on. Yoshida Yutaka in his Nihonjin no sensokan has looked at these kind of opinion polls and has come to astonishing findings regarding the long-term development of the Japanese views of the war (even people in Korea found the findings astonishing so that his book was translated into Korean). He used polls from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. I think we (or rather the sociologists among us) cannot produce polls like this all of the time and then simply discard them. We have to take the context, and also methodological issues, into account, sure. But if the results of such polls cannot be used after only 13 years, then sociologists should stop doing this kind of polling.

I agree with some of the points you raise in this concrete case. The percentage for the internet would be higher today. But I doubt that internet would be 30% while both school classes and textbooks would be, say, less than 10%. I am also sure the percentage for "people close to me" would be lower today, since those with direct experiences from the war are getting smaller in number. The rest is speculation.

The surveys you are suggesting sound highly interesting, and I look forward to the results...

> "if it's in the textbooks, they learn it, if it's not
in the
> textbooks, they don't learn it" -

Here i completely agree with you. I dont think this is case.
Teachers use supplementary materials and do teach issues that are not dealt with in the textbooks. In some cases, it is difficult to do that, and i heard there were cases of disciplinary action against teachers talking too much about war crimes, although these were not mentioned in the textbook used in that school (which led to parents complain and the school taking disciplinary action against the teacher). But in general, teachers have some freedom to choose what they are teaching and what not. Some, of course, choose to not teach wartime history and war crimes. But some do, and some do so quite intensively.

Even more I agree with your assessment of the influence of Shiba Ryotaro. I have written about this topic in my book, and I think Alex Bukh also has. As have others.
When the Special NHK Drama "Saka no ue no kumo"
(recently translated into English) was aired 2009-11, a huge body of literature was published in Japan on the "Shiba view of history" (Shiba shikan). (there were some older titles by Narita Ryuichi and Nakamura Masanori before that already) Historians like Nakamura Masanori and Nakatsuki Akira agree (grudgingly) that Shiba's influence on the postwar Japanese historical consciousness is unrivaled. Notwithstanding the results of the NHK poll, I agree with this judgement=