Emily Grace Calcraft (PhD Candidate at the University of Sheffield)
As the ‘defencist’ rationale for military expenditure is on the rise in Japan, it is more important than ever to reflect on the purposes, aims, and nature of peace education. Whilst peace education in Japan has since the 1950s worked to ensure all forms of war and violence are culturally condemned, there is an increasingly grey-area whereby military measures are justified because, paradoxically, they safeguard peace. To make sense of this shift one can look to a similar change that occurred in Britain in the 1930s.
Britain had, since the end of the Great War in 1918, dedicated itself to teaching peace, through national commemorations, school lessons, and a promotion of an internationalist ethos in line with the newly established League of Nations. Schoolteachers, peace activists, Christians, and Socialists all united to reform education to ensure the promise of the Great War, as ‘the war to end all war’, was kept. However, the aftershocks of the Wall Street crash led to global destabilisation and the League of Nations’ attempts at forging a resilient collective security were compromised by its inability to solve the escalating conflict in Manchuria. Those who had once committed themselves entirely to the promotion of peace, began to disavow disarmament in favour of the old proverb that ‘the best way to ensure peace is to prepare for war.’ Britain found itself re-arming, in response to growing threats being made by dictatorial regimes across Europe and increasing global tensions, but under the claim that it was doing so to prevent war. Many recognised the hypocrisy of this, Dr. Somerville Hastings, the surgeon and Labour politician, stated in the House of Commons in 1930 that there was a rising danger in children being taught that there was ‘nothing incongruous between being armed to the teeth and universal peace.’1
Whilst in Hiroshima this summer, I have been exploring the connections between these two case studies, with the intention of expanding our understanding of how peace education can remain relevant and effective. In Hiroshima the spirit of peace education is very much still alive and forms a core basis of not only education but the wider community. Schools often take their pupils, from an elementary school age, to visit the peace memorial park, museums, memorial hall and many A-bomb sites. Hibakusha testimonies and interactions are facilitated on a local and national level. Moreover, two schools nearby to the hypocentre, Honkawa Elementary School and Fukuromachi Elementary School, have their own peace museums on site. Each school serves as a site of memory as well as a place to cultivate future peace-mindedness.
In Japan, peace education rests on the memory and afterlives of the atomic warfare used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. These catastrophes have been used to form the basis of a curriculum that teaches that all war is an unnecessary evil. Outside of the classroom, this is promoted through various museums that highlight the impact the Second World War had and its legacy in promoting a peaceful sentiment, such as the National Showa Memorial Museum (Tokyo), Yushukan Museum, and the Kyoto Museum for World Peace of Ritsumeikan University. But behind some of these institutions there remains a looming spectre of a neglected history. The museums emphasise the atrocities committed against Japanese citizens, but do not deal with the problematic imperialism and militarism that characterised the early Showa period. There remains a need for a more nuanced presentation of the conflict and multi-perspectivity. In British war museums there has been a similar lack of recognition for those stories that do not fit into a popular narrative of the First and Second World Wars.
The following preliminary comparisons can be made between the two case studies. The first difference in the two cases comes in a legal sense. Constitutionally, the post-1945 order in Japan established peace education as a broader part of democratic training, as suggested by the involvement of the UN and the United States. In Britain, this has never been the case and has been considered un-democratic to enforce teachers to teach peace. The second is related to national identity and myth-building. The Second World War was pivotal for both nations’ conception of peace. To Japan, the un-paralleled scale of violence helped to reinforce the belief that all war was a catastrophe. To the British, the war was believed to be ‘just’ as it removed the threat of Nazism and enabled democracy to triumph. Both nations battle with their own imperial legacies and attempt to reconcile this with an effort to assert leadership in the international arena, to Japan this has been achieved (though has shifted recently) through promoting anti-nuclear activism. The British have continued to engage in conflict but consistently believe that violence can be necessary to uphold democracy. British peace education then has an inherent dilemma; it cannot present all war as bad- especially the second world war- because the nation was victorious. That prompts the question of whether nations who have been built on the shoulders of ‘successful’ conflict can adopt a true peace education.
I would like to express my thanks to the Hiroshima Peace Institute and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for facilitating my stay this summer.
1British Parliamentary debate, 24th March 1930, ‘Disarmament’, column 139.