American Research Student Conducting Research on Japanese Education – Looking for some help

Hello there! I am an American AP research student currently conducting a project on how Japan’s history classes portray the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WWII, or WWII as a whole. If any Japanese teachers could link primary source documents, curricular worksheets, or anything else you believe is helpful to this post; I would greatly appreciate it. Feel free to ask me any questions as well to assess my credibility.

9 comments
  1. I’m not going to google for you, but a good starting point can be found in, I believe, a New York Times article from maybe 8 years ago discussing how the Japanese see the atomic bombing and, more broadly WW2.

    Interestingly, a big difference in perspective on the war is that different countries believe the beginning and ending times of the war were different.

  2. I think you have better luck in other /subs because majority, if not all the people here are not Japanese. Also, majority of the people here teach English or looking for English teaching jobs. I haven’t heard of schools putting Assistant language teachers (ALT) in history classes.

  3. would start by typing in Japan education atomic bomb into Google scholar and see what comes up. Click on the ones with free PDFs if you don’t have access to research journals

  4. >If any Japanese teachers could link primary source documents, curricular worksheets, or anything else you believe is helpful to this post;

    I would suggest you pick up some of the ministry approved textbooks for JHS / HS / ES

  5. Unfortunately I don’t know any history teachers and the Japanese guys I know are too old/don’t care to remember school lol

    But you might have a better chance trying to reach out to Japanese people directly in social media like Twitter or something. Write in both English and Japanese. Searching sources in Japanese is also much easier with Google translate so you could try that if you haven’t yet.

  6. I would contact some international peace organizations in Hiroshima directly. LOTS of people in Hiroshima are very interested in preserving their oral histories about the bomb and they would have very good access to the kinds of primary information you’d need.
    Lots of folks also speak English so they can talk about their histories, too.

    Edit: the Hiroshima for Global Peace org looks like they are about de-nuclearization and I assume that some members are either teachers or are retired teachers in Hiroshima.

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