Stand by your language — but not as a nationalist icon

Last month, on May 21 to be exact, something caught my eye in the English-language IHT/Asahi Shimbun newspaper. In an article headlined "Holistic patriotic education still missing," Professor Nobukatsu Fujioka of Takushoku University in Tokyo made an impassioned plea for Japanese children to be imbued in the classroom with the love of country.

This comes as no surprise from a man who has spearheaded the movement to eliminate what he calls "the masochistic view of history" from Japan's school textbooks. According to Fujioka, Japanese children should not be taught about "comfort women" (wartime sex slaves of the Japanese military) or the Nanking Massacre that spanned December-January, 1937-38 . . . because it will just make them weak.

But what struck me most about that article was Fujioka's notion of the Japanese language. In support of his patrio-linguistic theories, he quoted author Masahiko Fujiwara: "One's motherland is one's mother tongue." Clearly, he regards the study of Japanese in schools as a patriotic duty.