The Chronicle of Higher Education: Japan’s Top Court Turns Down Professor’s Censorship Claim
The Japanese Supreme Court on Thursday rejected an appeal by a professor at the University of the Ryukyus, in Okinawa, seeking damages against the government for censorship of a textbook that he helped write in 1993. Observers see the ruling as upholding the education ministry’s right to screen and alter textbooks.The ministry’s screening of textbooks aroused anti-Japanese rioting in China earlier this year after Japanese education officials released a list of approved textbooks that the Chinese viewed as whitewashing Japanese war crimes and injustices before and during World War II (The Chronicle, May 27).
In last week’s case, the professor, Nobuyoshi Takashima, contended that the education ministry had trampled on his freedom of speech in ordering changes to chapters in a high-school textbook on modern Japanese society in which he suggested that Japan should have paid more attention to the feelings of its Asian neighbors. A district court agreed in 1998 that some of the changes were illegal and awarded him a monetary settlement. The Tokyo High Court overturned that ruling on appeal. The Supreme Court upheld the Tokyo court’s decision.
“I have fought 13 years and the ruling is as unacceptable as it is superficial,” Mr. Takashima said after hearing the verdict. He had asked the court for $10,000 for the mental anguish he suffered as a result of giving up his project to publish the original book.
Kazushige Yamashita, director of the division in charge of textbook screenings at the education ministry, said that the ruling was reasonable because it confirmed the legitimacy and need for the screenings.
Mr. Takashima’s case is the second prolonged case involving textbook issues to come before the Supreme Court. In 1965, Saburo Ienaga, a professor from the Tokyo University of Education, the predecessor of Tsukuba University, sued the government for censoring his textbook. That case did not reach the Supreme Court until 1997, when the court ruled against Mr. Ienaga’s assertion that the ministry’s vetting system violated the Constitution. However, the court did rule illegal the ministry’s demand for Mr. Ienaga to delete a description of the biological experiments that the Japanese army conducted on Chinese people during World War II.
Japanese courts have found government-ordered changes unlawful several times, but they have never ruled that the system itself illegal.
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