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Japan's Education Ministry on Tuesday announced the outcome of its screening of the 2005 editions of middle school history and social studies textbooks. To give Seoul's conclusions first, the new textbooks repeated most of their whitewashing of Japanese atrocities and even changed some portions for the worse.
Social studies textbooks published by three firms including, notoriously, Fusosha, added a new phrase for Korea's Dokdo islets, namely that they are "illegally occupied by Korea." The most notable thing from the textbook screening is that Japan has now started, through its textbooks, to claim as its own territory another country's land that it tried to, but couldn't, steal 100 years ago.
Japan screens history and related textbooks every four years. But it has drawn uncommon attention this year, coming as it does amid extremely strained Korea-Japan relations because the country's Shimane Prefecture just designated a "Takeshima Day," after its name for the islets.
There was ample reason, then, for Tokyo to exercise some judgment in rewriting its textbooks, but judgment it exercised none. One could feel almost sorry for the Japanese Cabinet members who stuck their neck out promising that the inspection would be fair and they would make "sincere" efforts to respond to Korean concerns.
But the biggest victim of the screening, so-called, will not be Korea but the future leaders of Japan, who are being taught a distorted version of their history from these textbooks.
It was a strange process. While the screening was underway, the Japanese education minister, the man ultimately in charge of the exercise, came out saying the guidelines for textbooks must in future state clearly that Takeshima is Japanese territory. Can the authors and the panel tasked with screening the books have been doing their job without being influenced by that?
Our government reportedly plans to separate the issues: Dokdo, it says, is one thing, and the distortions of regional history are another. But that must not mean that it concentrates all its efforts on one thing and neglects the other.
Sovereignty over Dokdo, too, is basically a historical problem, because it has its roots in Japan's occupation of Korea 100 years ago, We have to insist on righting the skewed perspective of Japanese texts that attempt to negate Korea's independent history and justify Japan's invasion. After all, the island country demonstrated on Tuesday that it is incapable of dealing with its history on its own.
Now that Japan has enshrined its avaricious designs on Dokdo in textbooks for its middle schools, our relationship with it is going to get worse long before it gets better. Seoul needs a cool head and carefully worked-out measures to fight this "diplomatic war" it has announced.
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