hankyoreh

Prominent American historians have banded together to protest efforts by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to revise American history textbooks.

On Feb. 5, 19 American historians - including Patrick Manning from the University of Pittsburgh and Alexis Dudden from the University of Connecticut - issued a statement titled, “Standing with Historians of Japan.”

“As historians, we express our dismay at recent attempts by the Japanese government to suppress statements in history textbooks both in Japan and elsewhere about the euphemistically named ‘comfort women,’ who suffered under a brutal system of sexual exploitation in the service of the Japanese imperial army during World War II,”

“We therefore oppose the efforts of states or special interests to pressure publishers or historians to alter the results of their research for political purposes.”

The statement came in response to a request made by the Japanese government at the end of last year for the author of “Traditions and Encounters,” an American history textbook, and McGraw-Hill, the book’s publisher, to remove some passages concerning the comfort women.

The textbook says that up to 200,000 women between 14 and 20 years of age were forcibly recruited and pressed into service by the Japanese army to work at military facilities referred to as “comfort stations.” In order to cover up its activities, the Japanese military slaughtered many of these women, the book goes on to say.

“It is highly irregular for a foreign government to call for the removal of already verified historical facts from a textbook,” Dudden told the Hankyoreh in a phone interview. Dudden was instrumental in preparing the statement.

Some of the professors who signed the statement are Manning, a noted historian who is being mooted as the next chair of the American Historical Association (AHA); Carol Gluck, professor at Columbia University and an authority on modern Japanese history; and Herbert Ziegler, a professor at Hawaii University and the author of the textbook in question.

“Scholars of Asia were not the only ones to sign the statement - there are also people whose specialties are Russia, the US, Europe, and Latin America,” said Dudden.

“The careful research of historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki [a professor at Chuo University in Japan] in Japanese government archives and the testimonial of survivors throughout Asia have rendered beyond dispute the essential features of a system that amounted to state-sponsored sexual slavery,” the statement said in regard to the passages in the textbook describing the comfort women.

“Some conservative Japanese politicians have deployed legalistic arguments in order to deny state responsibility, while others have slandered the survivors. Right-wing extremists threaten and intimidate journalists and scholars involved in documenting the system and the stories of its victims.”

“We support the publisher and agree with author Herbert Ziegler that no government should have the right to censor history,” the statement also said.

By Park Hyun, Washington correspondent

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