Government to respond to Okinawa’s plea?
Posted by Matt Dioguardi on October 3rd, 2007
There is an interesting article in the Yomiuri this morning about the government’s response to the big rally that took place in Okinawa last week-end. The article begins:
In an effort to soothe the feelings of the people of Okinawa Prefecture who have been outraged by an education ministry instruction that publishers remove from high school textbooks references to the Japanese military forcing civilians to commit mass suicide during the 1945 Battle of Okinawa, the government Tuesday suggested it would consider requests by publishers to “correct” textbook passages.
That’s good news. However, if you read the article which sort of leads you through the system under which the revision would takes place, it’s not that easy to follow because the system is quite convoluted. Well, it’s a bureaucracy, isn’t it?
One interesting sentence:
A correction to a screened textbook requires only the minister’s approval.
Does this imply there is a stage in this process in which the education minister (the MEXT minister) can sort of just wing it and approve anything he wants? Not sure.
Surprisingly the article ends with a quote from Bunmei Ibuki and he’s actually making sense. He says, “The education minister should not say anything that could impact on the matter. We should heed the wisdom of the private sector.”
Could he possibly mean that the consumers (the parents) in their own wisdom should decide what their children should learn. Sadly, that’s probably not what he means. Actually, I honestly don’t know what he does mean …