Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

by Jared Diamond

Every year, my undergraduate classes at the University of California in Los Angeles include students from Japan, who talk to me about their schooling there and about their experiences on coming to California. They tell me that their history classes in Japanese schools devoted little time to World War Two (“because that war lasted just a few years in the thousands of years of Japanese history”), said little or nothing about Japan’s role as aggressor, stressed the role of Japanese as victims (of the two atomic bombs that killed about 120,000 Japanese) rather than as responsible for the deaths of millions of other people plus several million Japanese soldiers and civilians, and blamed the U.S. for somehow tricking Japan into launching the war. (In all fairness, Korean, Chinese, and American schoolbooks present their own skewed accounts of World War Two.) My Japanese students are shocked when they join Asian student associations in Los Angeles, meet Korean and Chinese students, and hear for the first time about Japan’s wartime deeds that still arouse hatred of Japan by students from those other countries.