The Supreme Court on August 29 ordered the central government to pay 400,000 yen in damages to 83-year-old historian Saburo Ienaga in the last of his three lawsuits against the Education Ministry, although it ruled that the system of screening school textbooks is constitutional.
The petty bench of the nation's top court said the government acted illegally by abusing its discretionary power when it ordered Ienaga to scrap from his textbook a reference on live human experiments conducted by the Imperial Japanese Army's Unit 731 in Northern China during World War II.
The top court said that the screening system itself does not violate the freedom of expression, academic freedom or the right to education, all guaranteed under the Constitution, as well as the ban on censorship. Ienaga, a professor emeritus at the now defunct Tokyo University of Education, currently Tsukuba University, had filed three separate suits over the ministry's screening of his book, which was designed as a high school history text.