The Legacy

To the middle-aged Japanese couple, who clearly remember the days before Pearl Harbor, their young son's reaction to the historical film Emperor Meiji and the Great Russo-Japanese War was incredible. "Who were all those people?" asked the boy when he got home. "Who was General Nogi? I never heard of him." Fifteen years ago, every pupil would have known about the Japanese commander at Port Arthur. but to the present generation, such national heroes as Nogi might never have existed.

The boy's parents soon found the reason. "We concentrate," blandly explained their son's teacher, an avowed Marxist, "on the real forces that made our country's history--the class struggle, the search for markets and profits. The history of Japan in modern times has been one of economic oppression at home and aggression abroad." But was that not a rather sweeping generalization? asked the father. Replied the teacher: "I'm only repeating what General MacArthur said."

Chauvinism Out. Of all the legacies of the postwar occupation, none has had a more ironic effect than U.S. efforts to democratize Japan's schools. Old, chauvinistic textbooks were discarded, traditional shushin (moral training) abolished, Japanese history drastically cut down. Today the primary schools (ages 6 to 12) completely ignore Japanese history; the junior high schools (12 to 15) give it only one year. Even worse: the little history that is taught largely follows the Communist line.

Though the Ministry of Education is supposed to pass on all textbooks, those who really do the selecting are members of the powerful (500,000 teachers) Japan Teachers' Union, which is dominated by Marxists. Each year Japan's publishers woo the teachers at "hot spring parties," and the teachers see to it that Marxist texts get adopted by their schools. One such text, Model Junior High Social Study, was edited by the author of the story that inspired the anti-American film Hiroshima, is nothing but a propaganda tract against capitalism and Western imperialism. Another book, Enlightened Society, carries the picture of the "great leader" Mao Tse-tung, describes Japan as "the problem child of the Far East" and a nation that has always been inferior to China and Russia. The Russian declaration of war in 1945 is a triumph in which "the Japanese Kwangtung garrison, which had been played up as the. strongest of Japan's armies, melted away before the might of the Soviet forces."

Patriotism In. Last week conservative old (70) Education Minister To Matsunaga was in the midst of an all-out campaign to correct the faults of the occupation-planted system. Said he: "Twenty million schoolchildren taking the compulsory education course in primary and junior high schools know no Japanese history and are taught no morals. My primary aim is to implant patriotic sentiments in schoolchildren's hearts." The J.T.U. promptly protested that "Matsunaga wants to march the children back to the dark, feudal past." Even the anti-Communist Japan Federation of Teachers' Unions (20,000 members) warned against "reactionary trends and militarism." But reactionary or not, Matsunaga had powerful arguments for his campaign: Communism--and a 350% rise in juvenile delinquency since 1947.

"Most of the [J.T.U. ] teachers," says he, "are leftists who have climbed aboard the Marxist bandwagon, encouraged by the occupation. MacArthur was so worried about militarism that he forgot about Communism. I don't say that the postwar education system was deliberately intended to weaken and confuse the Japanese nation. But that has been the result."

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