What Japanese history lessons leave out

From Homo erectus to the present day - 300,000 years of history in just one year of lessons. That is how, at the age of 14, I first learned of Japan's relations with the outside world.
For three hours a week - 105 hours over the year - we edged towards the 20th Century.
It's hardly surprising that some classes, in some schools, never get there, and are told by teachers to finish the book in their spare time.

Just think how much one can learn about the complex world we live in through 105 hours  of instruction over a single year.  Obviously each era can be condensed in a few paragraphs and you'll be an expert.  

When we did finally get there, it turned out only 19 of the book's 357 pages dealt with events between 1931 and 1945.There was one page on what is known as the Mukden incident, when Japanese soldiers blew up a railway in Manchuria in China in 1931.
There was one page on other events leading up to the Sino-Japanese war in 1937 - including one line, in a footnote, about the massacre that took place when Japanese forces invaded Nanjing - the Nanjing Massacre, or Rape of Nanjing.

The Nanjing Massacre is a seminal moment in 20 century and Japanese history and there you have the whole thing white washed over because it might reveal the atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese army.

 Nobukatsu Fujioka an historian like many conservatives completely deny that the Japanese Imperial army committed any crimes against humanity

"It was a battlefield so people were killed but there was no systematic massacre or rape," he says, when I meet him in Tokyo.
"The Chinese government hired actors and actresses, pretending to be the victims when they invited some Japanese journalists to write about them.
"All of the photographs that China uses as evidence of the massacre are fabricated because the same picture of decapitated heads, for example, has emerged as a photograph from the civil war between Kuomintang and Communist parties."

Equally, Japanese people often find it hard to grasp why politicians' visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine - which honours war criminals among other Japanese soldiers - cause quite so much anger.

Having been to Yasukuni Shrine its quite evident that the displays portray Japan and its war time activities in a positive light.  Even outside the Shrine you'll find trucks belonging to right wing parked on the street broadcasting messages extolling that period in history.