Japan’s High Court Rules Against Rewriting History

TOKYO — In a historic decision ending an ideologically charged 32-year legal battle, the Japanese Supreme Court on Friday ruled that it was illegal for the government to censor from textbooks unsavory facts about Japan’s wartime past.

The court ruled that the Education Ministry acted wrongly in ordering a textbook writer to delete accurate descriptions of Japanese atrocities during World War II, including a mention of the notorious Unit 731 that conducted gruesome medical experiments on human guinea pigs.

In a complex decision that ran 100 pages and split the justices 3-2, presiding Justice Masao Ono quoted one of Japan’s most famous novelists, Ryotaro Shiba: “A country whose textbooks lie . . . will inevitably collapse.”

The justices, however, upheld the government’s basic right to control textbooks, and critics assailed the court for failing to set a clear standard for what kind of discretion the government may exercise over content.

But the ruling was hailed as progress by the plaintiff, 83-year-old Saburo Ienaga, whose crusade has already succeeded in forcing sweeping rewrites of Japan’s government-approved textbooks.

The soft-spoken historian first went to court in 1965 rather than submit to what he branded “censorship” of his textbooks by a nation eager to bury the uglier aspects of its wartime past. He subsequently fought two additional lawsuits, the last of which ended in Friday’s ruling.

Among the nearly 400 items that the Education Ministry demanded that Ienaga alter or delete were his descriptions of the Imperial Army’s invasion of China, the Nanking massacre (in the Chinese city now known as Nanjing) and Korean resistance to Japanese colonial rule.

Ienaga’s refusal to compromise his visions of historical truth and academic freedom has crimped his career and brought harassment by right-wing thugs but has made the diminutive scholar a hero to intellectuals, civil libertarians and the Japanese left.

His unbending stance is considered all the more remarkable in a postwar Japan that has placed a premium on conformity, social harmony and obedience to the bureaucracies that wield most real power here.

The retired education professor has said that the primary motive behind his three lawsuits was guilt over his personal failure to oppose Japan’s militarism while he was a young schoolteacher indoctrinating his pupils with government-written propaganda texts.

In the early 1980s, Ienaga’s lawsuits were instrumental in publicizing the Education Ministry’s demand that he change a reference to the Japanese invasion of China and call it an “advance.” He was ordered not to write about Japanese soldiers’ rape of Chinese women on the grounds that “as it is common throughout the world for troops to rape women during war, it is not appropriate to refer only to the acts of the Japanese army.”

Ienaga also was ordered to delete this passage about Unit 731: “A unit specializing in bacteriological warfare called Unit 731 was stationed on the outskirts of Harbin [in China], and until the Soviet Union entered the war, this unit engaged in such atrocious acts as murdering several thousand Chinese and non-Japanese by using them in biological experiments.” The textbook screeners said there was “no credible scholarly research” on Unit 731--a claim the Supreme Court rejected Friday.

In 1982, China, South Korea and other Asian nations began vigorous protests against what they saw as a systematic campaign to whitewash Japanese aggression.

“This is no longer a domestic Japanese issue but has become an international issue, and I feel honored by this regardless of the outcome,” Ienaga said Friday.

After more than a decade of fierce criticism, Japan began revising its texts in the late 1980s. Last spring, references to Unit 731 and other wartime misdeeds were added to middle school as well as high school texts.

Japanese conservatives now claim that the government has gone too far in apologizing for its wartime sins; they say that current textbooks give Japanese schoolchildren an overly negative, masochistic view of their history.

Ironically, the textbook screening process was introduced by U.S. occupation forces after the war in order to prevent Japanese nationalists from controlling textbooks. Liberals say that as soon as the Americans left, Japanese bureaucrats began using the system to ax anything perceived as negative toward Japan or the emperor, and anything contradicting government policy.

In Friday’s decision, the Supreme Court found that the government had erred on four points, including Unit 731, and ordered $3,400 in compensation to Ienaga. But the court rejected the scholar’s basic contention that the textbook review process represents an unconstitutional infringement on freedom of expression.

The court let stand an earlier judgment that the screening process is not censorship because authors are free to publish as ordinary books any works deemed unfit for school use.

Critics still charge that the screening process continues to be used to impose government values on students.

For example, the Education Ministry recently insisted on the deletion of a textbook passage describing the increasingly common practice of men living apart from their families for years because of job transfers, NHK television reported. The passage contradicted the government’s desire to emphasize family values, NHK said.

Chiaki Kitada of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.