Pushing paper: analysis of the official minutes of the Japanese Textbook Authorization Research Council

Abstract

The modern Japanese textbook system can be traced back to the post World War II textbook reform by the U.S. government's State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC). Their efforts to "demilitarize" and "denationalize" the textbooks through a textbook authorization and research council set the parameters by which textbooks are approved today. This initial condition of a strong centralized textbook review committee has remained for the last half century. The recent availability of the official minutes of the research council opens an opportunity to better understand how this committee operates. Using the available official minutes from 2000-2009, this paper will focus on review process of the textbooks published by Fusosha and how it was able to pass through a system initially designed to keep such books out of circulation in public education.