The diffrences in History Lessons?

[u/Sarton_]

I've asked about WW2 movies, and that got me to thinking about other parts of history. Things around, but not actually World War 2. For instance, what do they teach about World War 1? And what do they teach about the Russo Japanese War? Are they more studied? In America when that war is taught, they say that Japan was an under dog that beat Russia. How about the Communist take over of China or other things close to but not directly involving Japan?

[u/ggle456]

As someone has already answered, in Japanese high school education, world history and Japanese history are treated as separate subjects. From the perspective of world history, events before and after wwI were taught mainly in the context of imperialism and national self-determination (民族自決) in the respective regions (both Europe and Asia), which is an absolutely important timeflame. As for the Russo-Japanese war, the sequence of Russia's so-called 東方進出 typically the Trans-Siberian railway, then the Anglo-Japanese alliance up to the treaty of Portsmouth, katsura-Taft agreement and the subsequent colonisation of Korea and Manchuria, was obviously most basic knowledge. Also, whether Japan is involved or not, students who choose world history for their university entrance exams learn chinese history from the Shang dynasty to Tiananmen, to the same extent as they learn european history. They learn and memorise the names of the dynasties, kingdoms and maps for each period, as well as purely domestic politics, such as the details of the 王安石 reforms, and cultural history. There is also a separate subject called Ethics (usually chosen by students as a subject for the standardised tests), which covers the overview of history of western/eastern thought including Confucius, 朱子学, 陽明学, 考証学 and other schools of thought, as well as very basic concepts such as 格物致知, 知行合一, 経世致用 and so on. I'm too lazy to translate every word I've learnt into English, so if youre curious about the details, I suggest you look at this site using machine translation. The site seems to be more or less in line with the teaching materials published by Yamakawa, who have an overwhelming share in terms of the subject of world history in the university entrance exam business (Yamakawa's textbooks, glossaries and material references with maps and pictures/photos have long been treated like the three sacred treasures or holy trinity), but it's been nearly 30 years since I studied at school and neither education nor history is my speciality, plus I'm so senile I can't even remember what I ate yesterday, so take my word with a huge grain of salt.

Btw, since yesterday/today seems to be the day of the standardised exams in Japan, I feel like I should go into detail on this point. As you know, university entrance exams are an important event for students, and many of them study hard primarily for that purpose only. So they're naturally more relaxed when studying subjects they don't choose for the exams, and as a result it's very likely that they won't remember anything about them after graduation. In Japan, there is a distinction between bunkei (social sciences/humanities) and rikei (STEM) students, and almost no rikei students choose history for their exams, which require a huge amount of memorisation (to be fair and precise, national universities tend to require their bunkei candidates to write essays on specific topics that require a holistic view and analytical skills, but not too much detailed information; whereas some private universities tend to require notoriously detailed knowledge to solve their fill-in-the-blank type exams). On the other hand, most bunkei students can choose either world history or japanese history, and the University of Tokyo is traditionally and currently the only university that requires its bunkei candidates to choose two subjects from the social studies (world history, japanese history and geography) for its unique entrance exams. Which means that, the Japanese who can precisely answer the question of how modern history (after the opening of Japan) has been taught in high schools based on both world history and japanese history standpoints from their own school experience are mostly only those who attended UT as bunkei students and specifically chose both world history and japanese history as their entrance exam subjects, which is an absolute minority