For the past four decades, Saburo Ienaga has crusaded as the conscience of Japan, fighting to protect intellectual freedom and challenge the arbitrary intrusion of the state into matters of education. His battle has been marked by more setbacks than victories.
In this sense he is a tragic hero, one whose moral probity and doomed persistence against the powers that be stand as an indictment of a society that has stood by, apathetically complicit in the whittling away of constitutional freedoms and the hollowing out of democracy.
Ienaga has been motivated by the impact of pre-World War II education on the outbreak of war and how the war has been portrayed in post-WWII education. He stands for a forthright rendering of Japan's past in order to expose the role of conservatives in leading Japan into the abyss. He has challenged the constitutionality of the textbook-screening process whereby the Ministry of Education has censored and molded the historical narrative served to Japanese students in ways that gloss over inconvenient and uncomfortable aspects of Japan's wartime excesses against fellow Asians.
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