Teaching East Asia: Korea Teaching East Asia: Korea | Page 104

Asia in AP, IB, and Undergraduate Honors Courses
RESOURCES
TEACHING RESOURCES ESSAYS
School Textbooks and East Asia’s “History Wars”
A Comparative Approach to Teaching About
Perspective, Bias, and Historical Memory
By Rylan Sekiguchi
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
—William Faulkner
A
s EAA readers are well-aware, the question of historical memory is
considerably salient in the context of East Asia. History—especially
twentieth-century history—remains a recurring source of debate
and contention in the region. At times, such disagreements have escalated
into rancorous national and international disputes, even sparking violence
and disrupting normal international relations, economic activity, and in-
dividuals’ daily lives.
of knowledge courses. Analyzing these disagreements over history allows
students an ideal opportunity to consider the nature of historical knowl-
edge, practice their document analysis and historical thinking skills, and
reexamine their own understanding of the past.
The “Divided Memories and Reconciliation” Research Project
The “Divided Memories and Reconciliation” research project began at
Stanford University’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC)
in 2007 to compare the most prevalently used history textbooks from five
Pacific Rim societies: China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United
States. How do these textbooks treat sensitive episodes in twentieth-centu-
ry history? Do they present similar or dissimilar interpretations of histo-
ry? Is there wide agreement on historical facts, or are there many contra-
dictory claims? Scholars from the five target societies examined nineteen
textbooks to explore these questions. Their goal was to better understand
how wartime historical memory is being shaped today—not only in Japan
(the most frequent subject of East Asia’s textbook controversies), but in the
other four societies as well.
News headlines from recent years. Historical memory—especially of the World War II period—
remains an extremely contentious topic in East Asia. Image created in PowerPoint by author from
various news sources including The Economist and The New York Times.
Many of these disputes have typically focused on Japanese textbooks’
portrayal of the World War II era. Critics see certain Japanese textbooks as
evidence of growing Japanese nationalism and a failure to assume respon-
sibility for wartime deeds. Defenders respond that these most controversial
textbooks represent just a tiny fraction of those in use, and that the vast
majority adequately address Japan’s role in the war.
But it is not just a Japanese issue. Textbooks elsewhere in East Asia
have attracted heated opposition, too. In the past few years alone, domestic
textbook issues have ignited massive protests in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and
South Korea, some of which lasted weeks and drew tens of thousands of
demonstrators into the streets. The ardor of these disputes over historical
memory suggests that the past is, indeed, far from dead.
These so-called “history wars” are an area ripe for exploration in the
classroom. Not only can they serve as a rich source of alternative perspec-
tives and narratives of the past with which students may be unfamiliar,
but the fundamental issues they raise—for example, about the reliability of
history textbooks, the intended goals of formal history education, and the
question of “how we know what we know”—can make these controversies
a powerful teaching tool, particularly for instructors of history and theory
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Education About ASIA
Five of the nineteen history textbooks analyzed in the “Divided Memories and Reconciliation”
research project. Photo courtesy of author.
The research project’s findings—along with translated and reprinted
excerpts from the nineteen textbooks—are published in the scholarly work
History Textbooks and the Wars in Asia, edited by Gi-Wook Shin and Dan-
iel C. Sneider. The Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural
Education (SPICE) collaborated closely with APARC to develop a com-
panion curriculum unit, Divided Memories: Comparing History Textbooks,
for classroom use.
Volume 21, Number 1
Spring 2016
99