Talk:Saburo Ienaga
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[edit] One-sided
This is possibly the most bigoted and one-sided portrayal of Saburo Ienaga, thanks to this edit [1] by . Other than poor English - what one earth is a "radical establishmentarian"? - it alleges he became a radical dissident (what does this mean?) and then goes on to trash what he has done. Needs a complete rewrite.
See [2] for a much fairer and more accurate write-up of the man. Mandel 22:47, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)
- I am working on it right now. Hermeneus 23:04, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)
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- Well, half a year on and it's still POV. You sure take a long time to do your writing . Mandel 17:59, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
This article could use some more work. So far, just from the article, I'm not really sure what he did. It mainly seems like a list of lawsuits. That's not helpful information about the man. I had to use Mendel's link to actually find out more about him. Moogleii 02:05, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Oscar's basics of the Ienaga story
I agree that this article needs some more work. But I have to throw in my two cents that this is actually a very difficult topic to work on. People on both the left and the right have been pretty shrill on this topic and some of the articles published in Japanese on Ienaga veer far from the original issues.
The bare bones of this story is that Ienaga Saburo, an historian, believed that the excesses of the Japanese military during WWII should be recorded and passed down in official history. (I don't think you could argue with that, but that is what a lot of people seem to be upset about.)
He chose highschool history textbooks as his medium. (His choice of mediums is, I think, what was debatable, and was the central issue of the contraversy.) The Ministry of Education allowed his textbook to be published but censored his books on what they said were factual errors and matters of POV. Ienaga sued the Ministry for violation of his freedom of speech, although had he not chosen a textbook as his medium he never would have been censored. Ienaga stuck to his position on a series of lawsuits.
Assuming that we all agree with Ienaga that excesses of the Japanese military should be written down, the contraversy is 1) whether he should have chosen a textbook when his views could have been more freely expressed in other mediums, 2) whether the Ministry was right in censoring his work in the way that they did, and 3) whether it was a violation of freedom of speech for the Ministry to decide what could be taught to children in schools. It is not the purpose of Wikipedia to provide "answers" to these questions, I believe, but to provide enough information on the issues so that the readers could decide for themselves.
So the information we need is 1) What were the facts and views that Ienaga wanted to convey? 2) What were the passages that the Ministry decided to cut out and on what grounds? 3) What were the other options at Ienaga's disposal other than a textbook to express his views and why did he choose the medium that he did?
To be honest, I have never read the "deleted passages" of Ienaga's history book. I would very much like to know what was such a big deal that the Ministry had to delete it and Ienaga had to fight in court to have it installed. 219.163.12.72 11:03, 19 December 2006 (UTC)Oscar_the_Grouch