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The New York Times said Sunday amid furor over historical distortions in Japanese textbooks, Korean and Chinese textbooks also wrongly describe or exclude historical incidents. The paper said Japan's textbooks do mention painful issues like the "comfort women" and forced conscription but are becoming more vague about them.
"Given the scrutiny and Japan's comparatively long record of democracy, the textbooks here [in Japan] are perhaps more balanced than others in the region," the paper's correspondent Onishi Norimitsu wrote from Tokyo.
As a typical example, the NYT said Chinese textbooks "teach that Chinese resistance, not the United States, defeated Japan in the war; they say nothing of the postwar Great Leap Forward, in which some 30 million Chinese died because of Mao Zedong's misguided agrarian policies."
In the case of Korea, the paper said textbooks had improved since democratization in the late 1980s, but subjects like collaboration with the Japanese occupation were still taboo.
"Descriptions of the colonial period used to focus only on Japanese exploitation and Korean resistance, ignoring the role of Japanese colonialism in Korea's modernization," the paper quoted Seoul National University education expert Baek Shin-ju as saying.
But Park said the textbooks now "include other issues, such as the consumer culture that developed during Japanese occupation. Our textbooks are getting better. But Japan is a problem -- it's going in the other direction."
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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