Do you mind exploring an international problem this week? Nations are teaching children about their nation's past. This topic came up at a recent Sunday morning chat over coffee and doughnuts. When Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan paid a visit to Yasukuni Shrine, it was explained that he was trying to imbue patriotism in the young children.
But Japan is not the only nation confronting the issue of national identity. The Economist last month gave a splendid review of how children in other countries are being taught nowadays.
For 750 years after the first invasion of an English king, children were taught Ireland suffered oppression as late as the 1950s and that her sons rose against English tyranny the Easter of 1916, when the leaders were shot but their cause prevailed. The fact that Catholics and Protestants fought for Britain during the two world wars was hardly mentioned in the schools.
Then in the 1980s, some began to question elementary Irish history. Ireland was rich and confident and they saw less need to simplify history to children and proceeded to correct its curriculum without much controversy.
In the modern history of Mexico, a big landmark was the introduction of textbooks in 1990 "that were a bit less anti-American."
In Australia, Prime Minister John Howard made history one of his favorite causes. He told educators last summer to "re-establish a structured narrative" about the nation's white settlement of the 1900s. "Settlement" of those days has been replaced by "invasion," and for the first time, with stories of Aborigines and women.
Howard's bid to promote a patriotic view of history has met strong resistance in New South Wales, the most populous state in Australia. However, one educator in history at a girl's high school in Sydney, who grew up as a Chinese child in white Australia in the 1950s, welcomed the approach that includes the dark side of European settlement.
Russia's a country where its national story seems natural to many people. President Vladimir Putin last year introduced a new national holiday, Nov. 4, to replace the old communist holiday, Revolutionary Day on Nov. 7. What Nov. 4 will recall is a moment in 1612 when Russia drove the Catholic Poles and Lithuanians out of Moscow and reinforced the defensive towards western Christendom, despite the positive steps shown when Putin and Pope Benedict XVI held a 25-minute chat last month. As themes and ideas take time to flow from elite to the classroom, Russian schools are still quite liberal and free-ranging, the Economist added.
In South Africa where white rule collapsed in 1996, the new republic seems to have done a better job forging a new national story. The main message of the post-Apartheid story for children looks at primary sources, such as oral histories and documents, "instead of spoon-feeding them on textbooks," a history teacher at Cape Province told the newsmagazine. Dec. 16 used to remember white settlers clashing with the Zulus in 1838; now it's the Day of Reconciliation.
And a popular adjunct to textbooks is the computer and laptops.
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About Japanese Americans, the Go for Broke National Education Center, Japanese American National Museum and the Japanese American Memorial Foundation are three active organizations engaged in preserving, telling and publishing the story of the World War II internment of persons of Japanese ancestry. And despite the humiliation, young men enlisted from these camps to prove their loyalty on battlefields; some paid the supreme sacrifice with their lives.
Textbooks at Japanese language schools in California do carry the story the 442 Butai. Perhaps we can be apprised of other Japanese American stories.
National JACL, I can add, has preceded the above organizations through various national committees to tell and retell our story, though one resolve remains: "To insist Japanese Americans are distinct, separate and independent of Japan." This "therefore be it resolved" was passed at the national JACL convention in 1960 in wake of the anti-U.S. demonstrations in Japan that destroyed the projected visit of President Eisenhower.
The Washington JACL Office had received phone calls demanding why "we" didn't do something to control "your" young people [in Japan]. And don't say, "the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor," but "when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor."
In 1996, the National JACL Education Committee produced a three-ring binder curriculum and resource guide, "A Lesson in American History: the Japanese American Experience" ($15), to also help local chapters develop an effective education program. I'm sure, the committee has added material to fatten the binder with points on PowerPoint presentation slides.
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