Japan is facing a growing crisis about its collective memory of the Second World War. According to The Guardian there is a conflict between those on the political right who are attempting to remove from the historical record acknowledgements of certain atrocities committed by the Japanese government and/or its military.

I am just as skeptical of attempts to sanitize history as I am of claims that there is an absolute truth in the past to be discovered. However, it is troubling to think of the government modifying history textbooks to suit a certain political ideology or to serve a politically charged purpose. Hopefully the Japanese government will decide to leave textbooks and education in the hands of scholars and authors.

This year the education ministry ordered publishers of seven high-school textbooks to be introduced next April to remove references to the forced suicides. The ministry said “it was not clear there were military orders [to commit suicide]” and that “recent studies suggest there were no such orders”.

The demand is part of a growing movement to sanitise - or simply ignore - the darkest episodes in modern Japanese history, which have gathered pace under one of the most conservative governments of recent decades, led by the hawkish prime minister, Shinzo Abe.

A long simmering row over the 1937 massacre of tens of thousands of Chinese civilians in Nanking by Japanese forces has been reignited by renewed efforts to play down the carnage. Last month about 130 Japanese MPs denounced the massacre as a Chinese fabrication and claimed the death toll was nearer 20,000. Several films marking the 70th anniversary are due for release this year, including one by the rightwing director Satoru Mizushima which describes the episode as a myth.

Other attempts by the Japanese right to rectify Japan’s “masochistic” view of its own history have set it on a diplomatic collision course with its closest ally, the United States.

The complete article from The Guardian: “Told to commit suicide, survivors now face elimination from history “