History has become both a source and focus of rising tensions in East Asia in recent decades, revolving around controversies over ‘distorted’ interpretations of the past, most notoriously over ‘revisionist’ histories of invasion and the whitewashing or denial of atrocities. Japan has, unsurprisingly, been regarded by its neighbors as the primary perpetrator, both in history and in its retelling in revisionist textbooks, but it has by no means been the only offender, and ‘history wars’ have become increasingly common within and between other countries in the region. In this paper, Alisa Jones examines the phenomenon of ‘historical revisionism’ in East Asian textbooks and the  - primarily domestic - ideological, political and pedagogical purposes it serves. Analyzing often contradictory depictions of victims and perpetrators, heroes and villains, winners and losers, she demonstrates how textbooks convey (others’) guilt/inferiority and (our) innocence/superiority, and how they attempt to defend or legitimize present political projects and territorial claims, win hearts and minds, and shape the values and beliefs of future citizens.

Alisa Jones is the Northeast Asia History Fellow at Shorenstein APARC, Stanford University. She received her degrees from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and the University of Leeds, specializing in the history and politics of modern and contemporary China. Her research and scholarly publications focus on the politics and practice of historiography and history education in East Asia, in particular on the ways in which the past has been commemorated, revised and contested in both domestic and international arenas. She is currently working on several related projects, examining the goals and content of history and citizenship education as well as the ways in which other public and private mechanisms (such as the legal system, patriotic campaigns, the media, the internet) have been used and abused to define the parameters of acceptable debate about the past and the claims on the citizens of the present and future it represents.

Asia’s economies have been hard hit by the current global financial crisis, despite in most cases enjoying strong macroeconomic fundamentals and stable financial systems.  Early hopes were that the region might be “decoupled” from the Western world’s financial woes and even able to lend the West a hand through high growth and the investment of large foreign exchange reserves.  But that optimism has been dashed by slumping exports, plunging commodity prices, and capital outflows.  The region’s most open, advanced and globally-integrated economies—Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan—are already in severe recession, with Japan, Korea and Malaysia not far behind, and dramatic slowdowns are underway in China, India, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.  What role did Asian countries play in the genesis of the global crisis, and why have they been so severely impacted?  How is their recovery likely to be shaped by market developments and institutional changes in the West, and in Asia itself in response to the crisis?  Will the region’s embrace of accelerated globalization and marketization following the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis now be retarded or reversed?

Linda Lim is a leading authority on Asian economies, Asian business, and the impacts of the current global financial crisis on Asia, and she has published widely on these topics. Her current research is on the ASEAN countries’ growing economic linkages with China.

Forthcoming in 2009 are Globalizing State, Disappearing Nation: The Impact of Foreign Participation in the Singapore Economy (with Lee Soo Ann) and Rethinking Singapore’s Economic Growth Model. She serves on the executive committees of the Center for Chinese Studies and the Center for International Business Education at the University of Michigan, where formerly she headed the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Before coming to Michigan, she taught economic development and political economy at Swarthmore. A native of Singapore, she obtained her degrees in economics from Cambridge (BA), Yale (MA), and Michigan (PhD).

An international conference will be convened on February 11-12, 2008 at Stanford University at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center to examine the role of high school history textbooks in the formation of historical memory regarding the events of the Sino-Japanese and Pacific wars and their outcome. Shorenstein APARC researchers have looked at the treatment of those events, in the period from 1931-1951, in the most widely circulated high school history textbooks (national and world history), including those used in college preparatory course, in China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States. Translations of those textbooks into English have been prepared for use by historians and other scholars, allowing a comparative study of how historical memory is being shaped in the school systems.

The conference will have three main goals: first it will ask historians to comment and analyze the treatment of history in those textbooks, comparing it to accepted historical understanding. Second, it will look at the process of textbook writing and revision – in some cases (China and Taiwan particularly), the main textbooks have undergone significant revision recently and our data set includes the old and new versions of history textbooks in use in schools. Third, the conference will examine how the formation of divided memories impacts international relations in East Asia and between the United States and Asia and how this effort to understand this process may aid the goal of reconciliation.

The proceedings of this conference will be the basis of an edited volume, including comparative excerpts from the textbooks themselves, to be published by an academic press in the United States and hopefully in Asia as well. Participants will be asked to prepare a written paper for presentation and for publication.