One would be hard pressed these days to find a student or researcher in the field of Japanese Studies who has not at least heard of Ienaga Saburō. A teacher during the war, Ienaga spent the long remaining years of his postwar adult life correcting what he felt was a misguided history education programme that had bolstered Japan's military ambitions and imperial aggression in East Asia. Yoshiko Nozaki does not spend too much time on Ienaga's early life; rather, her goal is to leap into the legal maelstrom that Ienaga helped create and shape. His legal actions against the Japanese government endured for close to three decades, and touched on two major issues: the first pertained to the legality of the state censoring or authorizing school history textbooks and their content, and the second centred on the very nature of history itself, namely, “What is historical fact? How do we verify it?” (p. xvi). That this intellectual pursuit wound up being debated as a legal issue in postwar Japanese courtrooms aptly demonstrates the existence of a gulf between views on Japanese history promoted by the progressive left and the aims of ruling Japanese political circles.

Before moving into an analysis of Nozaki's insightful book, however, there is one major stumbling block to be noted – price. The company that produced this slim volume, Routledge, apparently has lost its bearings. Excluding notes, the volume has 156 pages of text, yet it is being shamelessly retailed for US$150 – close to a dollar a page! At this price, few will be able to purchase it; one wonders what the Routledge marketers could possibly have had in mind. It is especially regrettable because in this book Nozaki enters some very exciting intellectual territory. The field would be much better served if it were made available at an affordable price. If such practices become widespread, one can imagine a time when the only readers of high-quality academic books become reviewers who receive their copy gratis.

As is well known, Japan promulgated its new constitution in 1947, a document that ensured academic freedom and provided for what was termed the Fundamental Law of Education. In practice, however, the government used the Ministry of Education (MOE) to retain a strong grip on the manner in which students received that education. By 1953 Ienaga already faced a Ministry stubbornly declaring that passages on ancient Japan from a textbook he authored left students feeling inferior in relation to China, and that sections on the Pacific War were too extensive. In 1956, with the ascension of the Hatoyama cabinet, Japanese political conservatives took aim at history textbooks they declared were too liberal. Thenceforth, on both sides of the political spectrum, the gloves came off.

What started as a pitched battle over who was the rightful custodian of the content of history textbooks escalated when Ienaga got fed up with the constant demands for alterations. In 1965 he sued the government. Nozaki occasionally allows us a personal glimpse of the man behind the furore, but a bit more insight into what he said and what kept him energized during the long legal crusade would have been appreciated. Ienaga's legal team argued primarily that textbook screening itself was an unconstitutional application of state power. By suing the government for requiring Ienaga to make so many changes to the manuscripts he had submitted to the MOE for authorization, Ienaga and his team hoped to force the state to make a full disclosure of the whole rather hazily defined vetting process. Ienaga launched a second suit in 1967, which sought to reinsert six phrases that the MOE had required him to remove, including references to how the Japanese military massed on the Soviet border when the Germans invaded and descriptions of the Kojiki and Nihon shoki as being narrations in the realm of myth.

In her zeal to describe each of the suits in their legal minutia – a welcome move to be sure – Nozaki sometimes is hard to follow. At times I was perplexed about whether she was alluding to the first, second, or later third legal suits. Regardless, the conclusion of the second suit actually preceded that of the first, and later became known as the Sugimoto decision of 1970. The judge ruled in Ienaga's favour but did not declare the state's system of textbook authorization incompatible with the Constitution. For Ienaga, it was a bittersweet legal decision, as it did aver that the process of authorization had violated his freedom of expression. The court announced that in writing textbooks authors, not the state, should decide the appropriateness of content. The 1970 decision and the government's subsequent appeals also brought the issue of textbook authorization to the attention of the media, and as a result more into public view.

By May 1974 the first suit finished. In the glacial processes of the Japanese legal system the trial crept along for close to a decade. In its verdict the court found that the MOE had abused some of its power but that the state had the right to regulate the content of education. At this point in Nozaki's narration, a more complex legal analysis rather than summary would have been appreciated, in that details of this sort could make for a longer and substantive explanation regarding why two seemingly contradictory court decisions arose within a few years of each other. Regardless of these initial decisions, both the state and Ienaga appealed and the trials moved upward to the Supreme Court.

After her initial presentation of the trials Nozaki walks us through some familiar territory: the rise of progressive historians and the opposition expressed by the growing conservatism in government and education. She reviews the well-known “anti-masochistic” school, headed by the usually cited Fujioka Nobukatsu, a group which by now has had a disproportionate amount of academic ink spilled in its name, in contrast to its diminishing share of the textbook market (pp. 137–40).

By the later 1970s Ienaga already was poised to launch his third lawsuit, but he and his team decided to change their legal tactics. Here Nozaki shines – this section readers will not want to miss. Ienaga felt the MOE's increasing demands for alterations had grown unbearable and required him to take a clear stand. His suit called for compensatory damages. Instead of arguing the constitutional issue, however, this time Ienaga's team chose several historical truths over which they disputed the government's historical assessment. The tactic changed the parameters of the debate completely and also cunningly enabled sympathetic historians to contribute their specialized knowledge. Finally, in the mid 1980s, Japanese history itself was put on trial.

These sections, in which Nozaki analyzes the trials that focused on the legal definition of historical fact, are true gems. Yet I would have preferred less of a straightforward narration of the chronology and more analysis of these profound implications the debates had regarding historical certainty. The question that became crucial to Ienaga's third lawsuit pivoted on epistemology and methodology as relating to historical truth. The state's view of textbooks was that descriptions in history texts should be acceptable to the largest number of scholars and as such not leave room for further discussion. The bureaucracy, according to the author, regarded facts as self-evident. “History is a series of facts, and the best way to present it is to list all such facts, without choosing – or making judgements for – one over the other”, the state declared in court (p. 97). Based on such a rationale, Ienaga and the state came to blows over subtle interpretations of Japanese aggression and the opportune imperialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Nozaki does not reduce the state to an unknown quantity; rather, she names and quotes officials from the trial itself, a welcome act of scholarship. She reminds us to always remember that it is individual officials who implement policy, not a blind, monolithic entity. Specific actors represent the state and they are key. Even so, it would be equally helpful to consider why liberals or progressives do not seem to get jobs as bureaucrats in the MOE. Perhaps the conservative nature of the Japanese bureaucracy itself says something significant about Japanese education – aren't educators more likely to be liberal, and don't conservatives aspire to judgeships or a seat as an MOE official? Why in Japan is this consistently the case?

An example of an issue where both sides vehemently disagreed was the Nanjing Massacre. The state did not so much deny the atrocity but instead opined that historical scholarship as of then had not yet been able to determine whether the event was a systemic slaughter or something else. The state also claimed that scholarship continued to vacillate on the scale and numbers killed. Similar disputes erupted over the history of Unit 731. The government stated that scholarly research on the activities of Unit 731 remained at the level of data collection, and therefore could not be considered definitive. But as Nozaki notes, in the logic of the government “what counts as ‘scholarly work’ was a moving target”, (p. 101). One thinks that this short book might have been lengthened by the inclusion of interviews with MOE officials concerning their views because, in their testimony, they often came across as cartoon cut-outs. Could they really have believed the naïve viewpoints they peddled during the trials? If so, how and why? Are there no problems with Ienaga's historical views or is he truly a St. Jude fighting for the lost cause of historical veracity against the powerful state?

Ienaga's team countered the state's view of historical fact with the testimony of retired Tokyo University Professor Yuge Tōru, a scholar of Roman history. Yuge asserted that even complex historical research could never fully restore the true nature of an event. Instead, historical research of high quality strove to express a kind of truth “by looking at the past from specific positions for the social good…” (p. 104). Yuge further asserted that historical facts were always inherently value laden, and he was critical of the state view that history could be properly written following common and established views. Ienaga's team referred to the state's position as shiryō-shugi, data-ism, the conviction that good history need only show data and sources to reveal the true past. The clash of the two opinions concerning historical fact produced a very jarring conclusion: the MOE's historical epistemology and methodology were decidedly unsophisticated, and the state ill-prepared to competently defend its own positions in reply to the Ienaga team's new change in strategy.

After a slightly convoluted section where again it was hard to delineate which verdict linked with which suit and appeal, the decisions of these numerous legal suits waffled back and forth on specific issues based on how much scholarly work already existed pertaining to each specific historical event. Several judges made oblique reference to the growing conservative trends within Japanese history education and their brand of right-wing history. Nozaki assesses that after all the suits and decisions, “the game of educational truth was essentially left in a state of deadlock…” (p. 135), but later adds that Ienaga's suits have “played a central role in the struggle over the national narrative and identity in postwar Japan” (p. 152). Though aspects of this book are a recapitulation of existing knowledge in this area, its real contribution is the analytical work the author completed on the trials themselves, helping us to fathom the differing ways in which Ienaga and the Ministry of Education perceived history.

Like Nozaki's monograph, John Breen's edited volume is also brief. It has its own virtues, and provides enough exciting material to weigh it against the few over-rehearsed chapters contained therein. With both works I wish they had delved further – Nozaki could have pushed further in the analysis of the forces that lay behind the MOE's reluctance to be more progressive in its historical outlook, and Breen (or his publisher?) might have allowed his authors more space to expand. In Breen's case approximately 160 pages (minus the introduction) for an edited volume contributed to an overall impression that most authors were gearing up for their topic by the time their page limits had been reached.

Breen's volume is a collection of eight essays, preceded by a fine introduction by the editor in which he concisely summarizes the history of Yasukuni. He notes that the shrine has not always functioned as a beacon for the right wing, especially during the span of time from 1946 to 1977 while head priest Tsukuba Fujimaro was in charge. Tsukuba was instrumental in erecting a smaller wooden shrine within the main precinct intended to venerate not only those who fought against the fall of the Tokugawa but also Japan's enemies in other wars. This compound was called the Chinreisha, and was closed off for several decades. Only recently has the fence surrounding it once again been removed.

Several of the essays rehash old material that will be familiar to most who follow these events in the Asian media, but Caroline Rose's section is useful as a good summary. She notes, as many have before her, that Chinese leaders also employ Japanese political visits to the shrine for their own means, as legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is grounded in anti-Japanese resistance (p. 36). On this point, however, more evidence than just media citation would be welcome.

Kevin Doak approaches Yasukuni from a different tack than is customary by placing Yasukuni within both the prewar and postwar practice of religious freedom. He paints a rather freer picture of prewar Japanese freedom of religion than might commonly be assumed, an orientation that, truth be told, leaves me mostly unpersuaded, but his comparisons do merit further consideration. Doak reminds us that Christians were free to practice but makes no reference to other religions that did not fit into general government policy agenda, such as Omotokyō, followers of which were not as lucky as Japanese Christians. And what about socialists who were despised and destroyed? Doak makes valid points but does so within a narrow scope of reference, but he never offers a precise definition of religion within the scope of his analysis of religious belief. It furthermore is difficult to accept Yasukuni as merely the object of a theological exercise. I am not one for all-encompassing definitions, but when Doak asks, “Is it really possible for future generations to stand God-like in judgement over our predecessors, according to some absolute criteria in order to determine their good or evil?” (p. 55), we would like to know more about his starting point. On a personal level I would want to know Doak's feelings about war crimes trials – is it something akin to “Who are we to create the idea of international law, we will all be judged later in God's court?”

Doak later draws a parallel between how the US and Japan see their war dead. He queries, for example, that if the fact that Confederate soldiers are laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery bothers so few, why isn't Japan allowed to behave similarly? (p. 56). And yet here again, Doak is guilty of omission. While dead Confederate soldiers might not create a media uproar in the US, the issue of the Confederate flag above southern state capitols is the focus of contentious political debate. Doak does admit that how the Chinese see Yasukuni might differ from the US viewpoint because the Chinese are atheist, but I think he overstates their irreligiousness.

Seki Hei's essay similarly touches on the atheism question in China and whether the Chinese fail to understand the role religion plays in assuaging grief over Japan's war dead. Both authors offer valid observations though Seki's rhetoric can blow a bit too hard. The major forces in the Politburo Standing Committee are mostly scientists; about them Seki minces few words: “These strait-laced scientists and Communist devotees are nothing but a gang of materialistically-driven atheists” (p. 98).

Wang Zhixin's contribution was clichéd, relying more on emotion and less on insight. I am not saying his views are invalid (in fact I agree with more of his content than Doak's) but it was neither historical nor analytical; rather, it tugged at the heartstrings. Yasukuni is offensive to the people of the war-damaged nations, Wang declares. He never analyzes why it is offensive, he just claims that is the case. Perhaps Wang is correct or perhaps there is something more at work. During this Olympic summer I happened to reside in Nanjing and China's hypersensitivity was very apparent. There were a number of events that the media touted as being offensive to China and “hurting the feelings of the Chinese people” – the innocuous Hollywood movies Kung Fu Panda and Mummy 3, for example, were said to be insulting to the “Chinese people”. Not to belittle this point, but if all of these things – culturally across-the-board – are insulting to the “Chinese people”, then ultimately distinctions are lost between serious historical issues and the more mundane. Wang telling readers that the Chinese are offended offers us nothing. His vague assertions are actually frightening because they nationalize and homogenize an otherwise personal issue. “How can the Chinese people have felt affection for a Japanese Prime Minister who continued to hurt their feelings?” Wang obliquely asks. There is so much loaded into that rhetoric that one doesn't know where to begin – the need to like a Japanese politician? the need for the Japanese to understand Chinese pain? why must the Chinese like a Japanese Prime Minister?

In contrast to Wang's opinion that on this issue all Chinese have uniform feelings, Seki Hei scrutinizes the notion that the Chinese misconstrue the whole situation concerning the meaning of Yasukuni. I disagree with the author's connection that, “they [Japanese A class war criminals] must be portrayed as ‘evil demons’ in order that the Chinese ‘heroes’ can shine in their resplendent glory” (p. 100). While much Chinese television does mock wartime Japan, there are also many insightful presenters. For example, news announcer Yan Song produced a popular television series and book about contemporary Japan. It might have leaned more toward popular culture but at least it did not rehearse the same old stereotypes. As much as Wang paints an image that all Chinese are injured by Japanese historical beliefs, Seki takes the opposite view. Wartime Japan is often a caricature in China but at the same time a love/hate relationship with contemporary Japan exists. We need to account for that juxtaposition.

Takahashi Tetsuya is representative of left-wing scholarship in Japan in that he fears that Japan is regaining some of its prewar patriotic features. According to Takahashi, contemporary Japan is trying to recreate the triad of the Japanese military, patriotic education and Yasukuni. While Japanese leaders have not ignored the issue of wartime responsibility, official shrine proclamations describe World War II as a defensive war. What's more, the shrine “has always functioned as an apparatus of celebration” (p. 113). It is hard to argue with Takahashi's key point, that if the real problem with Yasukuni is relegated simply to whether to remove the Class A war criminals, then all the other responsible parties who were involved with the war – media, religion, citizenry – would be swept away and forgotten. Similar to France and its inability to deal with its own brutal past in Algeria, the author labels this the “alchemy of emotion”. Likewise, this experience in Japan through Yasukuni and the state efforts, where the “grief of the bereaved families was to be converted into feelings of joy”, has unfortunately come to mitigate the grief of the personal loss, in Takahashi's estimation (p. 120). Thus, Yasukuni helps maintain a positive attitude toward the war, glorifies death and “counterfeits history”.

In almost diametric opposition to the Takahashi school is Nitta Hitoshi and his piece “And Why Shouldn't the Japanese Prime Minister Worship at Yasukuni? A Personal View”. And it's just that. Like Wang's, this chapter is personal and emotional, not historical. You can almost feel Nitta pouting. At issue is the veneration of the Class A war criminals. Nitta believes they should not be lumped together with Nazi war criminals. I myself am not sure the ultimate standard bearer of cruelty and punishment should be confined to the Nazis. At Yasukuni, Nitta asserts, war criminals are treated merely as war dead and not as special soldiers. The author also takes issue with the notion that the attached museum to Yasukuni, Yūshūkan, glorifies the war. He cites the museum's official literature, which proclaims that “there was no avoiding the wars subsequently fought in order to achieve the establishment of the modern state….” (p. 136). The interpretation of the war as inevitable, combined with how history is supposedly taught in Japanese schools, is disturbing. “Rather than being taught the complex historical facts of the mutual relations between the two nations [Japan and Korea], it was considered more desirable to get across the selfishness and unfairness of Japan's actions for its own benefit”, he claims. Nitta sees this education as part of the “masochistic school” of thought, whereas I would argue that it actually is comparative history.

What I find especially interesting about Nitta and other authors of anti-masochistic essays is their inability to find any deficiencies within Japan. This singular failure to find fault with Japan mirrors my American high school textbook that half admitted that slavery was an issue but tried to push the idea that slaves enjoyed their lives. Within Japan this interpretive trend ignores the fact that the war brought Japan to ruin and that Japan is much better off postwar than prewar. This must prove to be an extremely frustrating irony. Nitta obviously has not read Fujiwara Akira's book, which Takahashi discusses, concerning the starvation rates of Japanese soldiers and the fact that most died not for their country but because of their country. Another point on which Nitta's argument comes up short is the attempt to deflect the focus away from Japan's discussion of the comfort women issue. To this end, he states that other countries also supported prostitution during war. This is really a tired and lazy response. You can almost read between the lines, “I know you are but what am I”, as children would chant when they cannot think of a more appropriate comeback.

Breen's own contribution inquires into how rituals performed at the shrine affect memory. Yasukuni priests perform rites every morning and night. Breen examines in detail the actual services and the manner in which ritual, both performed and printed, affect historical interpretation. He comments that within the museum on the shrine site images of the enemy are conspicuously absent. Shrine priests believe that the Yūshūkan is not a museum but rather a repository for relics of the wars. Breen tells us, “What the absence achieves splendidly is an amnesia of perpetration, of defeat, and above all, of the horror of war” (p. 153).

The second issue of memory is the linkage between the shrine and postwar Japanese ethics. Conservatives view Japanese youth today as having no sense of gratitude. Based on such a diagnosis, they seek to build a new Japan that re-energizes the supposedly lazy current generation into aspiring towards something great, just as, in their estimation, the previous generation supposedly did. Somehow, as Breen postulates, the shrine has become the “moral beacon” for postwar Japanese society, but the process of becoming such an icon has obliterated from social memory all traces of war and trauma. In conclusion Breen directs us toward the French critic Eric Santher, who writes of French postwar war museums that fail because they “suppress the trauma of the war experience, of defeat, of occupation and of collaboration”, p. 160.

Phillip Seaton's concluding essay on the international media frames the shrine issue as a diplomatic dispute between Japan and its neighbours. For Japan the issue is more how to remember the war. Seaton dissects how the Japanese media dealt with the issue of Koizumi's visits to the shrine. Seaton dives into fairly specific details, often laying out a blow-by-blow narration rather than general conclusions. He asserts that the local press, often ignored in such scholarship, provides a good avenue to understand the domestic situation because the “relative comfort of remembering ‘local victimhood’ rather than ‘national aggression’ all make regional war memories particularly important in Japan” (p. 168).

Seaton reveals that in October 2005 Koizumi's visit to the shrine took about five minutes and entailed the prime minister standing silent for thirty-five seconds during the ceremony. Five television news stations offered 118 minutes of coverage. Media attention notwithstanding, Seaton claims, there is eroding support for such shrine visits due to “a split among conservatives into pragmatists and hardliners caused by deteriorating relations with neighbouring countries” (p. 184). Yomiuri set a new trend for calling for investigating media complicity in the war, while the economic fallout appears to have damaged popular support as well. The oft-quoted Tomita memo published in July 2006 in a Nikkei news scoop was a shock when it showed even the Showa emperor as no longer enthusiastic about visiting Yasukuni. Seaton's conclusion could have been stronger since it does not really assess Japanese media's role in shaping social attitudes over the longer term, but as a whole it was a very informative narrative. Ultimately, Seaton seems more optimistic than Takahashi but in the end this volume, brief though it may be, demonstrates that there is much more to Yasukuni than a mere photo-op of prime ministerial news events.

Both the Nozaki and Breen books tackle difficult questions about the process of historical analysis in contemporary Japan and the manner in which the populace and bureaucracy see their role in defining the parameters of the debates. These are not simple questions but issues being raised in the courts, in religious quarters and educational battlegrounds, and remain quite contentious. Perhaps the fact that the teams are so evenly drawn between two major camps should give notice that a full-bodied democratic discussion rages in Japan. Instead of the more pessimistic view that the lingering existence of these debates signifies some larger social psychosis in need of taming, I would call it a positive development.