The Japan/United States Textbook Study Project: Perceptions in the Textbooks of Each Country about the History of the Other

Abstract

THE Japan/United States Textbook Study Project, of which I myself was a member-participant, was funded generously by a grant from the Japan/US Friendship Commission, and it was in every sense a cooperative effort among the Japan Textook Research Center and the International Society for Educational Information in Tokyo and the National Council for the Social Studies in Washington, D.C. The overall purpose of this joint undertaking was to seek improvement in the quality of textbooks in both Japan and the United States. Specifically, however, the goal of our research was to seek improvements in the treatment each country gives the other in their respective textbooks and to do this by means of a review of certain selected, widely used history, geography and other social studies textbooks in lower and upper secondary school social studies courses in Japan and junior and senior high school courses in the United States. One statistic may be informative: 14 Japanese and 28 American social studies textbooks, Grades 7 through 12, were exchanged and reviewed by our project participants. The Japanese textbooks included civics, geography, history, world history and Japanese history books; the American textbooks included United States history, world history, geography and world culture books.