Monday, October 31, 2005

1) ▼ Sixty years ago, an elementary schoolboy in the fifth grade in Tokyo wrote in a diary, “Since the Allied Forces advanced into Tokyo today, U.S. airplanes flew over at a very low altitude freely. I feel chagrin but I can do nothing. All I can do is to study hard.”

2) ▼ In due course of time, the occupation troops mandated that all the unfavorable expressions used in their textbooks be painted in black. Emperor-centered Japanese history, which he believed to be eternal, was renounced. The boy was made aware that history could be rewritten depending on the results of war.

3) ▼ Later the boy became the first Japanese to have served as president of the American Historical Association. He is Irie Akira, 71, a professor at the Harvard University. In his memoirs, “Learning from History” newly published by Kodan-sha’s Gendai-shinsho, he says that painting textbooks in black was the starting point of his career as a historian.

4) ▼ It is not so simple as to say that history is written by a winner. As history can be altered by state power and political expectations, he firmly resolved that historians should pursue historical facts with his own will and efforts.

5) ▼ His work is featured in drawing a whole picture of a global community not from a narrow viewpoint of one nation but from the viewpoint of interrelation of economy and culture across the border. He is sustained by the idea that study should be free from nationalism.

6) ▼ According to EH Carr, a British historian, “History is a dialogue between the past and the present,” but it is undesirable to interpret history as he likes with a personal awareness of the present. Expressions in school textbooks can be erased in black but history itself cannot be done. What is important is to interact objectively with the past erased in black. Prof. Irie’s life, beginning as a nationalistic boy, indicates that.