Cram school deletes Nanking Massacre death toll after criticism

Imagine a German parliamentarian ringing up a preparatory school to inquire why their history textbook mentions the death toll of Holocaust victims. This is what basically happened to Sundai Yobigakko, a private operator of cram schools, and their history textbook that mentioned the Nanjing Massacre.

In Sundai Yobigakko's modern Japanese history textbooks, a reference to the Nanking Massacre of 1937 said more than 100,000 Chinese residents, surrendering soldiers and prisoners of war were killed. Another passage regarding the disputed Takeshima islets said Japan named them after incorporating the Dokdo islands during the Russo-Japanese war.

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A Twitter post criticising the school went viral and Yamada Hiroshi, an Upper House member of the LDP, felt obliged to intervene.

That same day, company officials decided to delete the two passages and ordered all branches that use the textbooks to do so. A company official called Yamada's office and said the passages had been deleted. However, company officials also said Yamada never asked for the deletion or correction. They stressed that decision was made because of the many critical tweets. The Asahi Shimbun asked Yamada's office why the lawmaker felt the passages were problematic. The office responded that the Takeshima passage was not in line with the official government position. Regarding the Nanking Massacre, the office said the passage should have stated the various estimates for the number of deaths.

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It's disheartening to see the tendency to deny Japan's war history and haggle over victims' numbers prevail among politicians and certain strata of society.

But Teruyuki Hirota, a professor of the sociology of education at Nihon University, said the deletion was another example of a company bending to outside pressure and conforming with the majority opinion. He pointed out that because cram schools were outside the framework of public education, there should be no problem if they teach items not included in the approved school curriculum or use textbooks not screened by government bodies.

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May I update the thread?

Cram school to retract decision to delete items in history textbooks

The article was published on October 14.

JPeters said:

May I update the thread?

Cram school to retract decision to delete items in history textbooks

The article was published on October 14.

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For sure. Thanks for the update!

A few weeks back, a private lesson student of mine was explaining to me that China had dressed soldiers as civilians, which is why these things happened. He's convinced that Japan was a noble country in the past, and that America essentially soiled Japan's decency by forcing contact. And he believes the complaints about Japan are exaggerated.

Often, in lesson, I have to just stop and say we can't talk about this stuff. My job is to help his communication, not fundamentally reshape how he views the world. And he's not a hateful guy in any way, he just likes the notion of a structured society, not the 'free' thing that is the direction of history. I try to explain that there are sometimes noble people, but there are no noble countries... but it's not what I'm being paid to do.