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August 3, 2013

[SSJ: 8222] Re: History textbooks (was Shimomura interview on English education)

From: Sven Saaler
Date: 2013/08/03

Alex,

thanks for that.
Well, indeed, much depends on the questions, I guess.
No doubt, the hate-Korea-wave and anti-Chinese sentiment is on the rise -- if we believe polls.
(interestingly it is not on the rise if we choose to ignore older polls and use only the results of the last three, four years).

Being a historian, i have refrained from creating my own polls and tackling methodological questions.
However, I have actually tried to confirm the results of the NHK poll (parts of it, the questions relating to historical consciousness) and gave it to my students, over a period of 3 years (800 students in total, from
3-4 unis in Tokyo). The results were astonishingly similar to the results of the NHK poll...
I did not ask the question regarding the sources of historical knowledge, but the numbers of those affirming that the Asia-Pacific War was a war of aggression (one of the questions in the poll) was almost identical to that in the NHK poll for the same age group. I agree that this kind of historical consciousness is not necessarily based on profound historical knowledge. Could be the result of "political correctness." Or the writings of Shiba. Most likely it is a combination of several factors. Not all respondents might have even given the "correct answer", i.e. they might not have marked "school classes", although, sub-consciously, they might have massively been influenced by school classes, even noticing. They might have had a traumatic experience in a history school class, which made them erase their own memories of school classes and, thus, not mark "school classes"
as a factor that has had influence on their historical views (although the traumatic experience might have been the most important factor). So, we are speaking, of course, about a large number of individual cases.
Polls are intended to make sense out of a large number of individual experiences, I guess. I am not sure whether questioning the validity of polls as such leads to anything. They are out there, and I think we have to make something out of the results. Or we have to do better polls...

Sven

Approved by ssjmod at 10:11 AM