The head of Japanese NGO Children and Textbooks Japan Network 21, Yoko Kojiya, said in an interview with Chinese newspaper Global Times, that in July Japan released a children’s version of its 2025 Defense White Paper, which is downplaying Japan’s history of aggression. She warns that “obscuring reflection on past wars leads to preparation for the next war.”
This conforms to the statement by Rachel Clark, a Japanese-American expert on the recent expanded militarism in Japan, who made a similar warning about Japanese textbooks to a meeting of the International Peace Coalition on Dec. 26.
In the Global Times interview Kojiya said that the Japanese history textbooks have created a situation in which “Japanese children have a very poor understanding of the past war between Japan and China.”
