Abstract
"Few, if any, instruments shape national culture more powerfully than the materials used in schools. Textbooks are not only among the first books most people encounter; in many places they are, along with religious texts, almost the only books they encounter" . Textbooks are an important matter because they strongly shape the pupils' regard for history. In some cases they can also play a political role by showing one country's view on history. When two countries had a problematic relation in the past, their histories are often subject to ideological distortions. France and Germany fought no less than three times in less than a century and Germany occupied France during WWII. Japan defeated Korea and occupied the country for 35 years.
Ideological distortions were thus likely to affect the writing of German as well as Japanese history textbooks. In Germany it did not happen, whereas in Japan the government keeps allowing nowadays the publishing of textbooks whose contents are, according to South Korea, revisionists because they contain a "soft" version of Japan's imperialist past. Those textbooks have a strong political impact. After having analyzed the Japanese textbooks controversy, we will try to see why such an issue did not arise between France and Germany although the two countries also had a problematic relationship in the past.
