All three of my daughters attended local public elementary school in Japan from grades 1-6. I reviewed their text books. Pearl Harbor is mentioned and underemphasized, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are overemphasized but understandable as they affected Japan far more than they did us.
What I found most interesting however, was that the Japanese text book version of American history was far more pro-American and, in many cases, more detailed than ours.
“I LIVED in Japan 14 years, traveled by train more times that you could count, saw many school field trips and was never once engaged in a conversation with school children anything close to what you describe.”
Well, that is not my experience, and as luck would have it, our daughter and son-in-law ( who is half-Japanese American, and whose mother grew up in a camp here) arrived here a few minutes ago and so I posed the question I posted to them. They BOTH said that what I wrote to you was SPOT ON, and they lived and worked in Japan for several year, and are fluent Japanese speakers.
Army Brat, Japan 1951-1961.
I never heard a Japanese kid say anything like that either.
Some years ago, my wife and I visited Pearl Harbor and took the tour of the Arizona Memorial. Motoring out to the shrine with us were a dozen Japanese young people, including several English speakers.
I asked one young woman why they were visiting the Arizona and she said, “We wanted to see what our fathers and grandfathers had done. It’s not generally known in Japan.”
I am very glad you and I are both on this thread, lest readers get some posters misinformation about Japan as it is today.
I think Japan does leave off some serious questioning of it’s military-imperial past, particularly in its academic curriculum.
I also think that in most ways Japan today is not the Japan of its military-imperial era, and in it’s general relations with all its Asian neighbors is behaving as one of the most responsible and charitable nations.
Some of those who criticize Japan most have their own historical issues they too try as hard as they can to sweep under the rug. Some are even now not governed as democratically or with as peaceful intents as Japan. In some ways I’d like to say to many of them - let you who are without sin cast the first stone.