On April 6, Japan's impressively monikered Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) gave the go-ahead for a new set of textbooks on history, civics and geography to be adopted by junior high schools next year. The books name the Diaoyu Islands as Japanese territory. Moreover, some describe the Nanjing Massacre using passive constructions such as "captives and civilians were involved" and "casualties were exposed," in contrast to the previous phrasing that the Japanese Imperial Army "killed many captives and civilians." Such terminology absolves the responsible parties of culpability. It betrays historical facts and represents an affront to Chinese people who suffered wartime atrocities.

Ever since 1989, the majority of significant changes made to Japanese textbooks have occurred on the Shinzo Abe administration's watch. Shortly after he took office for the first time in 2006, the prime minister pushed through legislation requiring Japanese schools to encourage "patriotism" in the classroom. In April 2013, only several months into his second term, he proposed to the National Diet, Japan's equivalent of the U.S. Congress, that textbook review standards be changed. MEXT overhauled these standards in January 2014, requiring educators to adopt a unified government perspective when addressing historical and territorial issues.

For a long time, the sole available avenue for certain elements of the Japanese right wing to promulgate their version of events was through textbooks they themselves compiled. These textbooks, however, comprised only a small proportion of the total employed in Japanese classrooms, and the influence they exerted upon students was thus limited. The popularization of these revised works in Japanese public education marks the first time in the past decades that revisionist elements have been successful in subsuming their opinions within the mainstream historical narrative. This gives what is already a highly slanted historical view the outward appearance of an objective fact and may serve to distort Japanese young people's view toward history.

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