Celebrating Protest

The following is a transcription of a presentation by Horio Teruhisa at the East Asia: Trans-regional Histories workshop of the University of Chicago. The following description was circulated in advance of the talk. Within eight months of this talk, the Fundamental Law of Education was indeed revised.

Horio Teruhisa, professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo, is a leading theorist of education as the human right upon which all others ultimately depend. The author of numerous books, he is also a tireless activist within the movement to contest the Japanese state's domination of the nation's public schools. He will be speaking about the school as the site of systematic censorship and the increasingly draconian imposition of the flag and anthem, part of the current assault on the Fundamental Law of Education, the Basic Law for a Gender-Equal Society, and Article 9 (the "no-war" clause) of the Constitution. Professor Horio is engaged in scholarly and legal struggles to defend these pillars of democratic society in postwar Japan.

Professor Horio's work was introduced in English in the volume Educational Thought and Ideology in Modern Japan (1988).

Professor Horio spoke in Japanese; Norma Field, E. Asian Languages & Civilizations, translated; Steven Platzer, editor and translator of Educational Thought and Ideology in Modern Japan and a scholar of Koyama Iwao and Kosaka Masaaki, philosophers of culture as the key component of total war with profound impact on postwar educational policy, provided an impromptu introduction.

The tape was transcribed by Makiko Arima and edited by Tiffany Kwak.