In Germany the Second World War and the Third Reich are covered at length but the focus is more on how it happened and the crimes which were commited by the Germans during war. The actual war is only given as overview. The most time for this subject is used for teaching how Hitler was able to become the dictator, which steps he took and what mistakes the Weimarer Republic commited to enable Hitler and the NSDAP. The second part is the Holocaust. German crimes are explained very graphic and the lesson tries to show the pupils the scope of these crimes. AFAIK it is mandatory for every class to visit a KZ ( apparently incorrect not every school does it), these KZs are now museums and the pupils see what happened with their own eyes. Iam not entirely sure if every class does that since the German system is federal and the state have some self determination in regards to education. I did visit a KZ so did everybody else i know. As you maybe know the Germans tried to come to terms with the past. The history class is very blunt and the crimes are pretty tough to process for 14 year olds. The KZ visit is even harder obviously.

When in comes to the actual war it is not explained as you might imagine. The first campaigns are mostly described as "Überfall" on the other countries like Poland. The military aspects are not really important. AFAIK there is no "boasting" about the short campaigns. The attack on Poland for instance was mainly described as unprovoked devious attack. The Gleiwitz incident was discussed to show how the NSDAP/Hitler tried to put the blame on poles and how propaganda worked.

The next hours are about when which country was invaded by us and how the Wehrmacht was driven back until the end of the war. The course of the war was done in a few hours. The destruction of Germany was also only shortly mentioned and more like "that were the results of the mistakes" i guess to avoid that pupils get the feeling that we were victims.

As someone who grew up in America, the idea of learning about a war in which people who may have been your parents or grandparents were horribly defeated, your homeland destroyed, government forcibly abolished, and leaders publicly tried and put to death seems utterly foreign to me

Well i just can give you my own view. It didn't feel weird since you know already this happened and school only gives you a deeper understanding. You grandparents took part in the war and your grandparents likely lost relatives. Just in my family alone my grandparents lost at least 5 brothers. When you take history classes its not like you hear this the first time. German TV is also full with World War 2, many educational channels have a lot of programms about World War 2. The depiction for the Nazis/Hitler is extremly negative. Same for school.

I should mention again that the German curriculum varies from state to state.

Well i can comment on how it's taught in Japan. To answer this question fully, I'm going to have to break the 20 year rule.

If I go too far, please let me know and I'll edit/delete my comment as appropriate!

There have been various times throughout the years when Japanese textbook controversies have made the news, especially in Asia where feelings are still raw for many parts of the population about Japanese imperialism, partly because of racism, partly because of nationalism/political reasons, and partly because it is still a personal thing for some people and/or their immediate family, friends, etc.

These revisionist textbook news controversies coupled with some hardliner historically revisionist politicians are some of the main reasons why Japan still has tensions with its neighbors over a war that happened almost a century ago.

That being said, the majority of Japanese textbooks today and recent history teach the history of World War II in a fairly objective light. While one could argue whether or not the Japanese textbooks are 'apologetic' enough or 'graphic' enough to showcase the horrors of the war, there is no argument in the objective historical content.

Japanese mainstream textbooks that are approved by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) for national curriculum in the public Japanese education system covers all the fundamentals of WWII, including Japanese war crimes as well as Japanese aggression against various Asian countries, colonial holdings, and Allied nations.

Revisionist textbooks are, as far as I could tell in my research, not used at all in the public sector (as they have not received MEXT approval) and is used in fewer than 20 schools in the private sector.

But it has not always been this way in Japan.

Back in the 1950s, Japan was just really beginning to come back from the destruction of the war. Meanwhile, the Cold War is blowing up. The Korean War had just happened and Western troops had fought toe to toe with the PRC and North Korea, seemingly the vanguard of a rising red tide that was threatening to swallow Asia.

Japan was feeling a lot of pressure from the US to crack down on any kind of 'red' sentiment. Japanese people themselves were slowly building up to their own 'red scare'. The government subsequently started a large scale campaign to suppress freedom of speech, freedom of press and control information and political dialogue.

I'll mainly focus on education. The Japanese government began a campaign of banning books, especially textbooks that seemed to support communist viewpoints, which included content that showed the Japanese working class as suffering or oppressed, lack of political freedom, encouraging questioning central authority, as well as any books that even remotely supported anything related to the Soviet Union or the PRC.

Consequently, this meant that any books that condemned the Japanese Empire for its actions during World War II were heavily suppressed.

Scholars and academics were heavily targeted of course while newspapers and media outlets were co-opted into the information control scheme, for the sake of national order with the threat of violent Communist revolution and invasion feeling very real at the time.

Funnily enough, part of this is due to the fact that the US was so adamant on building up an anti-Communist ally in Asia. The Japanese government had political free reign to crack down on labor movements, political expression, and academic learning/research, all in the name of fighting the Communist threat.

Directly after World War 2, the Japanese education system went under a number of reforms, many of which were focused on cultivating critical thinking through group discussion and teaching the method of self study (teaching students how to learn instead of rote memorization).

But this changed very quickly as American strategic concerns overruled the progressive educational reforms of the late 1940s and we move into the 1950s.

Education changed very quickly, with the banning of hundreds of books and almost seeming to return to war time education. Political hardliners rejoiced at the apparent return to fundamentalist education.

Elementary schoolers curriculum required teachers to teach students to hold favorable views of the Emperor, as in pre-war years. Middle school teachers didn't need to teach World War II at all, simply that a war had occurred and post-war reconstruction, with a focus on the efforts of a patriotic, united citizenry that made rebuilding possible. Highschoolers only needed a 'recognition...of the importance of avoiding wars'.

Now, these education standards would be unthinkable today and would cause massive controversy in modern times in Asia. So why was this even considered back in the 1950s?

Because of Cold War adversarial politics.

With much of Asia seemingly falling to Communist forces, there was very little political value put in reconciliation. China was militant and aggressively pursuing a doctrine of violent Communist revolution in the region. Korea was war torn and half of it was controlled by an adversarial regime. South East Asia had swarms of Communist militias if not out right revolutions.

Japanese politicians simply didn't care. More importance was put in inspiring patriotism and convincing the people of the Communist threat while extolling the superior virtues of the capitalist system. Education was more about preparing the citizens for ideological warfare than critical thinking.

Speaking about the politicians that created this educational policy, many of these politicians were heavily conservative. Many of them had actually been purged by the American occupation but were reconciled and reintegrated because their staunch anti-Communist views made them desirable for American interests in the region.

Unfortunately, these politicians are the origins of political historical revisionism and academic repression. For example, in 1957 under the authorization system that was first installed during the US occupation, 8 middle school textbooks were banned. The contents of the books were fairly graphic and very anti-war, detailing the many atrocities and war crimes Japan had committed in the war.

They were labeled and politically dangerous and harboring Communist sentiments, and subsequently banned.

During this time period of heavy academic suppression, many gave up writing textbooks at all. Some historians even stopped publishing and working on research because they kept coming up against the government roadblock every time.

But there were those who were vehemently opposed to these restrictions. Ienaga Saburo was the most well known figure for this. He brought multiple lawsuits against the Japanese government, claiming the censorship was a violation of the Constitution.

It's also important to note that at the time (1950s), the general mood of the Japanese people was extremely anti-war, anti-establishment, and anti-military. Part of the almost ironic educational reforms of the 1950s (in some respects seemingly returning to pre-war and wartime education) was to try and reverse this public sentiment that was seen as politically conducive to Communist and revolutionary feelings.

As we move on into the 1960s and 1970s, textbooks are no longer the focus of political action. Massive movements of anarchists, communists, socialists, anti-military, anti-conservative, anti-establishment, anti-American, etc spring up. Protests and riots become common place. Most of these political movements are focused around students, particularly high school and college students.

Social issues force social reform and it was reflected in books and textbooks. Textbooks begin to broach the events of WWII and some even hint at the war crimes committed.

By the 1980s, we actually see books that detail the atrocities during the war start to be sold in stores, or rather, were allowed to be published and sold in stores. A big step from the earlier decades. Textbooks began to use more direct language such as 'military aggression' and 'invasion'.

Of course, conservative reactions were loud and intense. Cries of unpatriotic books destroying the social fabric and eroding national values, a war on the Japanese identity, demands for revisions to these books, etc. Conservative groups published their own books and textbooks.

The biggest turn around in education occurred in 1989, when Emperor Hirohito passed away. Now it was much easier and more acceptable to publish textbooks and books that were more openly critical of war time aggression and atrocities. In the early 1980s, there were finally some books that explained in more detail the suffering of civilians and victims of Japanese invasions but after the passing of the Showa Emperor, a flood gate opened.

The Nanjing Massacre, suppression of Korean independence and identity, comfort women, slave labor, POW war crimes, etc. All these things had been excluded from textbooks for decades and for the first time, were reintroduced on a national scale. From middle school to college, students learned about the realities of what happened during World War II.

Conservative reactions were just as loud and vehement as before. But they were in the minority. Progressive history teachers were in the majority and educated their students passionately. But this only intensified conservative reactions, which were becoming more and more isolated socially.

They were beginning to see the liberalization of society as a war on 'Japanese-ness' and Japanese values. They saw this large change in society, not just education, as a threat to the very fabric of fundamental Japanese values and views. So reactionary education systems, schools and books were born.

Today, historically revisionist views are decidedly in the minority, but magnified by media. Generally, education on the war in Japan is the same anywhere.

Any Qs?

Germany and Japan actually approach this issue from fundamentally different positions. In Germany, with the near-total annihilation of the country, its complete unconditional surrender to the Allies and the intensive de-nazification processes undertaken there (perhaps best epitomized by the massive Nuremberg trials post-war), contemporary Germans are accutely aware of their country's contentious past, and have mostly tried to distance themselves from it. This took different contours in East Germany (the communists tried to sever any connection to the Nazi past completely as it was ideologically problematic), but in today's Germany you don't see this difference too strongly. (Interesting sidenote - the Holocaust wasn't really discussed in any great depth at all until the 1970s, when a new generation of German/Western historians began to ask what the hell had gone on throughout the war-years. Since then, it's come to represent the single-most important part of WWII in the collective German conciousness. Just interesting to look at how historical emphasis/focus changes over time).

In Japan, the same type of regime-deconstruction was conciously avoided. This can be seen in the figure of Emperor Hirohito. There is strong, compelling evidence that Hirohito (along with fellow members of the Imperial family) played an important part in the worst excesses of Japanese forces throughout the war. However, the American occupation government did everything they could to shield the Imperial family from persecution. This was in particular the perogative of General MacArthur, who saw the Emperor as an essential part of Japanese cohesion and order (partially out of the belief that the Japanese were too 'childlike' to govern themselves democratically). Because of this shielding of the Emperor, many of the crimes of the Empire of Japan were never dealt with in the same way as in the Nazi context. There is a notable ommision of Japanese atrocities in teaching the history of WWII in the contemporary Japanese context, and there are many Japanese who are totally unaware of their contentious past. Moreover, many 'revisionists' exert a strong voice in Japan today. The Yasukuni Shrine in central Tokyo, which commemorates all the soldiers of the Empire of Japan in WWII, including those considered 'Class A war criminals,' is regularly visited by Japanese politicians and heads of state in commemorative services.

In Russia, the war is still known as the 'Great Patriotic War,' and its commemoration is a really prominent part of the Russian memorial landscape. There are an astounding number of monuments and sites of commemoration in St Petersburg and Moscow. This extends beyond the borders of Russia-proper into the wider Soviet Union. I was travelling around Central Asia this summer, and it's amazing how, even in tiny one-horse towns, you can almost always find a statue/plaque complex with the names of the war-dead, adorned by Red Stars and all.

Sorry for the length of this, I really like memory studies.

Edit: Sources

John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999.

Tony Judt, Postwar, London: Penguin Books, 2005.

Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in 20th Century Russia, New York: Penguin Books, 2000.

Robert Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

As a follow up question, are there any instances of "revisionist" theory among German, Italian, or Japanese intellectuals regarding the Fascist regimes? Something along the lines of "we weren't that bad!" If so, did it ever gain any traction in the politically extreme groups there?

You'd think OP would be more interested in hearing about the teaching of WWII in Austria. The DISCOURSE, let alone the teaching, has drastically changed in the last 5 years alone. Engelbert Dollfuss was always a unique individual in the grand scheme of things, but the public's perception, at least here in Austria, has really shifted.

As someone who grew up in America, the idea of learning about a war in which people who may have been your parents or grandparents were horribly defeated, your homeland destroyed, government forcibly abolished, and leaders publicly tried and put to death seems utterly foreign to me.

You may be an American, but you're clearly not a Southerner. Apart from executing leaders, the history of the South's defeat follows the formula you describe.

/u/marenkrausi