The nation's boards of education have finished their selection of textbooks to be used at junior high schools from April 2006 for the next four years. The process gained widespread attention because among the candidate textbooks was a controversial revisionist history textbook published by Fusosha Publishing Inc. that was criticized by China and South Korea for distorting history, and by civic groups for justifying and glossing over Japan's wartime aggression.
This textbook will be used at 77 schools by 16,300 students, or 0.44 percent of the nation's junior high-school students. The penetration rate is higher than what the earlier version of the textbook achieved four years ago -- 0.04 percent -- but much lower than the 10-percent target sought by the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, a group of scholars and intellectuals who regard other history textbooks as denigrating Japan's history. Fusosha's civil-studies textbooks will be used at 43 junior high schools with some 9,300 students -- 0.25 percent of the national total.
Campaigns waged by Japanese and South Korean civic groups against the revisionist textbook may have contributed to its low adoption rate. South Korean Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Ban Ki Moon said that the result confirmed that a healthy civil society is firmly established in Japan.