For more than a decade, Japanese friends of Taiwan have been advocating that the Japanese Education Ministry remove "One China" propaganda from Japanese schoolchildren's textbooks.
Mr. Hideki Nagayama, chairman of the Taiwan Research Forum based in Tokyo, has started a new petition and has recently gotten two related articles published, one in English and one in Chinese:
- ‘One China’ propaganda in Japanese textbooks (Taipei Times, 2 Sept 2021)
- 【專文】東京友台團體發起「更正日本『一中』教科書」聯署活動 (Taiwan People News, 23 August 2021)
If you scroll to the bottom of the article written in Chinese, you can see images of the disinformation being fed to Japanese schoolchildren via their textbooks.
Here is a quote from Mr. Nagayama's Taipei Times article:
"Japan and China established diplomatic relations in 1972. Ever since then, the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, known as MEXT, has been cooperating with Beijing’s “one China” propaganda by forcing publishers to present Taiwan as part of China’s territory in elementary, middle and high-school social studies textbooks and atlases, which are used by more than 3 million students each year.
For example, Taiwan is included in chapters about China and marked as Chinese territory on maps. Regrettably, after so many years, more than half of all Japanese have studied from such erroneous textbooks.
The danger of this “one China” propaganda is that it aims to legitimize aggression against and even invasion of Taiwan. For this reason, we, Japanese friends of Taiwan, have for more than a decade been denouncing MEXT’s policy, and have been using petitions and other forms of protest to tell the ministry to stop giving students the mistaken impression that “Taiwan is part of China.”"
The new petition is written in Japanese and can only be signed by residents of Japan (any nationality is ok). It must be signed and physically mailed. Here is the link:
I personally work as a teacher in Japan, and after sharing this petition with my colleagues, already more than 20 have signed.
If you live in Japan and would like to help gather signatures, or if you have any questions, you are welcome to send me a message by email: lindelll@gmail.com
Please help share the above articles and the petition.
Thank you!