ONTARIO STUDENTS FIRST IN WEST TO BE TAUGHT DETAILS OF WARTIME ATROCITIES IN ASIA
By David Giddens CBCUnlocked
CBCUnlocked, Canada
Sept 26 2005
“See that?” John Stroud, Canadian Hong Kong War veteran, is pointing
a bony finger at a black-and-white picture taken 60 years ago of a
gaunt young man. “That’s me. In the Japanese slave camps.” He turns
to his audience of students, teachers and media in Toronto’s Jarvis
Collegiate auditorium. “I weighed 182 pounds when I was captured. I
was 62 pounds when I got out.”
“What we taught in the past was incomplete,” says Sarah Giddens,
history teacher and contributor to the successful effort to make
Ontario the first jurisdiction in the Western world to include a
section of history about the Second World War in Asia. “Most students,
most teachers, are shocked to learn the facts about this period and
place in history.”
Ontario’s new Grade 10 curriculum now includes specific examples of
such war atrocities as those suffered by Stroud and other prisoners
of war. They also include information on the 1937 Nanjing Massacre,
during which hundreds of thousands of Chinese were killed during
a six-week spree by Japanese troops, and the abuse of the “Comfort
Women,” Asian women forced into prostitution by the troops during
the war. Wartime history, including those incidents, is still the
subject of angry debate today between Japan and other Asian nations
including China and Korea.
Ontario’s Ministry of Education takes the position that the province
has a duty to train students to form broader perspectives on history.
Case in point: many, perhaps most, Canadians have been taught the
global conflict began in 1939 with the invasion of Poland, while many
Americans might argue the war really began at Pearl Harbor in 1941.
But for millions of Asians, the Second World War began a decade
earlier, when Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931. And that shift in
perspective is the entire point behind the new course material: The
Search for Global Citizenship: The Violation of Human Rights in Asia,
1931-1945.”
The project is due in very large part to the efforts of
Chinese-Canadian philanthropist Dr. Joseph Wong. Eight years ago,
he was instrumental in forming ALPHA, The Association for Learning &
Preserving the History of WWII in Asia-Toronto, because “very few
people in the world know about the truth. ALPHA is here to make sure
that justice finally prevails for those 35 million souls who perished
during the war in Asia.”
“I draw a parallel: postwar Germany made it a crime to deny the
Holocaust, and compensated victims of the Second World War, and truly
expressed remorse in making sure that all German children will learn
the truth about the war, but look at the aggressor Japanese nation
today. They still try to hide facts of the war. They still want to
change history in the textbooks, so that Japanese children are denied
the right to know about what happened during that particular dark
chapter of history.”
The Japanese government vehemently denies this assessment of history
and says its peacetime record since the war proves it is not an
aggressor nation. However the issue continues to sour relations
between China and Japan. Changes to Japanese textbooks this spring
led to a tense standoff between China and Japan, with Chinese crowds
attacking Japanese businesses in Beijing and other cities.
Every secondary school in Ontario now has documents, videos and web
information to support the revised curriculum. The foreword is by
Canadian journalist, author and social activist June Callwood: “If
world peace ever happens it will be built on knowledge. Young people
cannot understand the importance of defending existing protections of
human life and dignity without knowing that the wall between decency
and depravity is paper thin.”
The goal is not to isolate atrocities committed by the Japanese
Imperial Army, but to help students understand these events in the
same way they understand other crimes against humanity, such as the
Jewish Holocaust, the Armenian massacre or the Rwandan genocide. It
is not about vilifying Japan, but about enlightening a new generation
of students and leaders to the fact that humanity, in all parts of
the globe, has a history of committing human rights abuses.
Maria Y.M. Yau, project co-ordinator with the Toronto District school
board, admits that, within the Japanese community, this remains
controversial material, but adds, “As a global citizen, this is
not controversial. It is a history we should share with our younger
students … as citizens we are all entitled to know these facts.”
Yau’s regret is that recent history is still susceptible to political
manoeuvring. Among some in the Chinese communities, some of this
history is still viewed with skepticism, because students from China
have learned to distrust much of what they were taught under the
propaganda-laden Communist regime.
Linda Mowatt – president of the Ontario History, Humanities and
Social Sciences Teachers’ Association – says that distrust is part of
the reason the new curriculum is so useful: “This is history being
revealed in the time that students are learning it …. They are
getting critical skills about the act of revealing history. Students
are learning that the truth emerges slowly and methodically.”
Jack Fu, a Grade 11 student at Jarvis, had previously taken five
years of history in China. Upon moving to Canada, he says, “I was
surprised to not learn this in history classes here. I find a lot of
similarities between Nanjing and the Jewish Holocaust.”
Jasmine Li, now in Grade 12, says, “When I took Grade 10 history, I
learned about Europe … events in Germany and Austria and so forth,
but it is really important that people know what happened in the
whole world. Not just part of it.”
For his part, Dr. Wong is optimistic about the eventual impact of the
new course: “I see this as a step toward the closure of the Second
World War in Asia.”