My historian friend Richard Minear tells me that Saburo Ienaga has been nominated for the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize. He then follows up on this news by sending me Ienaga's autobiography, which he has translated, "Japan's Past, Japan's Future: One Historian's Odyssey" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).
Most readers hardly need an introduction to Ienaga. He took the Japanese Ministry of Education to court for requiring him to change descriptions in history textbooks he wrote for high school and, when he did not comply, for not "certifying" them. Because the ministry's censorship focused on Ienaga's descriptions of Japan's military role in Asia and, I must add, because some of its attempts were aimed at obvious euphemistic spin, court decisions made headlines -- not only in Japan, but in the United States and elsewhere.
Ienaga may be "Japan's single most famous historian," as Minear says, but his autobiography may contain some surprises. Contrary to the image of a frail but dogged antagonist of the establishment that he has created from the mid-1960s onward, Ienaga was, in his earlier years, a retiring academic type who was drawn mostly to such ideas as the religio-philosophical proposition, "This world is empty; only the Buddha is true."
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