Made for People Who Think "Oh No, the War Again"
If you are born in Japan you get peace education. As the anniversary of the end of the war comes around, content about the war gets served up to you. And you end up thinking, the war again? I am fairly much an all-right-that's-enough type myself, and I think there are people who find the whole thing dark and unpleasant.
Still, it is fine to have one day a year for thinking about peace, so I made a peace education site for the people who think, not this again.
How This Peace Education Is Designed
Learning, and not only peace education, is designed like this.
- Decide the conclusion you want people to reach
- Work backwards from it to select the information and fix the order and placement
- The order produces the movement of feeling that arrives at the conclusion
This is the first time I have made teaching material, and on top of that I have not had much experience of being properly educated by anyone, so I am writing on guesswork, but I think this is the standard procedure of instructional design.
Here I do not take that approach. This is made so that you can relive what I was thinking as I read the materials and pulled them together.
- This particular person is doing this, but wasn't this the year that such-and-such happened.
- Science keeps turning up all over the place, what is this?
- Given that this piece of information and this piece of information both exist, you can guess something like this.
For me to reach that kind of thinking, I had to process and arrange a huge quantity of material and do all sorts of fiddly work, but here the troublesome part is skipped over and you get to play in the thinking part. Even if you relive it, you will not reach the same conclusion I did. Your background knowledge and tastes, and the way you have spent your life, are different.
I have not attached anything like a comprehension quiz either. Even if I made a comprehension quiz, you might read something out of the sources that is better than what I read.
The aim of this peace education is that when you look at or think about the defeat, you become able to think, oh right, there was a guy eating dango (dumplings) in that period, or, there was somebody who was absolutely furious — and I think that thinking about things with this kind of noise attached lets you think about them more enjoyably.
What I Think Peace Education Ought to Be
I have a belief that anyone with an ethical sense who can think scientifically ought to avoid conflict and war. So I think peace education should be something that contributes to acquiring the liberal arts.
Designed on this idea, receiving peace education means raising the precision of your thinking, and in theory, if you do peace education, you become able to solve exam problems more accurately.
Learning about a particular event matters, and going to the place matters, but given the amount of time that can be spent on peace education, connecting it to acquiring the liberal arts is hard. With badly designed learning, I think there is even the possibility of ending up treating one particular event as absolute evil while your judgment wobbles once a different situation comes along.
So what can you learn on this site? It comes to the following three points.
Something like source criticism
Looking at a large quantity of material laid out side by side, you get a taste of the atmosphere of analyzing what these things were written on the assumption of, and what is not written in them. Whether you can actually acquire it is a mystery.
The part where you judge whether a document is a lie or the truth is done by me, so you do not get a taste of that atmosphere.
Concept and abstraction get blurry
I have put individual actions and statements side by side with big events. Doing this, when you hear "the defeat", you become able to think, ah, this is the situation where somebody loses at this point and makes excuses at top speed... probably.
Strange education
It is designed so that you learn in an unusual way, so when you come across proper education, explanatory articles, the news and so on, you might become able to think, huh, so this is the intention behind arranging it this way.
You come to see that all sorts of people were alive in the past
You get as far as thinking, all sorts of people were alive.
I think I am contributing to the liberal arts if I say so myself, but in reality people who have acquired the liberal arts start wars and conflicts too, and nobody has ever raised their grades through peace education and got into a famous university. In other words what I am thinking is wrong, but because I have a desire to believe in human beings I am leaving it wrong.
How My Peace Education Came About
Originally I began peace education on my own, with no intention of making anything like this. As for why I began peace education, there is a somewhat tiresome chain of events.
I have never told anyone about it and it has produced no results, but I am working for world peace. As part of that, I wanted to reprint Tomizuka Kiyoshi's 『Our Practical Science』.
『Our Practical Science』 is a book from which children and adults alike can learn scientific ways of thinking, a classic on a par with "The Chemical History of a Candle". That is, the intention was to provide, free of charge, teaching material for peace education that contributes to acquiring the liberal arts.
This classic does have a weak point, though. Because it was written a few years after the defeat, something like resentment toward Japan is mixed into it. Tomizuka was an abnormally clever and rational man, but he seems not to have been able to avoid the influence of the great event that was the war, and there are passages that lack objectivity.
To explain that, it became necessary to analyze why Tomizuka wrote out these grudges. If possible I also wanted to make it multilingual, to contribute more to world peace. Once you do that, cultural translation work becomes necessary too. Quite a difficult job.
The plan I drew up in order to do this was as follows.
Collecting 365 Days of Human Behavior, from Any Era
I am rather on Tomizuka's side of things, and I dislike behavior with no rationality to it. There is much in Tomizuka's abuse that I sympathize with. Like this, I cannot write good annotations.
So, to widen the range of my knowledge, I decided to collect 365 days' worth of human behavior. To grasp what human beings were doing in each era. Behavior is thought, so I could learn the thought of all sorts of people from every stratum. Like Tomizuka, I have the dogma of my own era. This is work to strip that off and acquire a neutral sense.
As a result, it appears I have become reasonably neutral.
This work is interesting enough in itself, but there were many cases where I simply could not find anything for a particular date, and there were some fairly painful stretches, so to raise my motivation I decided to turn what I had gathered into content, publish it online, and make money from it.
What People of the Past Were Doing Today
I wanted to take time off work and concentrate on this, and I had the idea that turning culture into money is a good thing, but it did not make much money.
Reading Every Preface and Afterword of the Books Published Within a Year of the Defeat.
Next, to get to know the postwar mood, I decided to read all the prefaces and afterwords of the books published within a year of the defeat.
The theory is presumably that you learn the broad flow from prewar through wartime to the defeat and use it to interpret Tomizuka's words and deeds, but I do not like that way of doing things so I did not do it. Also, the abuse Tomizuka writes is one individual's fixed idea. Intuitively I thought that learning the broad flow would be useless. Now that the work is done, I think that intuition was right.
I read without prejudgment, simply. The number of books was around 6000, and the notes I extracted from the prefaces and afterwords came to around 900. The reason I do not give exact figures is that I still read some now and then. There is no clear end to work like this.
I intended to put this work into some form as well and make a by-product of it, but I had no clear plan. I thought I would come up with something while reading. Even if I came up with nothing, I was prepared to accept that.
For several years now I had been thinking of reading all the prefaces and afterwords to check whether the Japanese reflected on the war of aggression right after the defeat. Knowing that would be enough, and doing it together with the reprint work on Tomizuka's book would be efficient. The by-product was a kind of extra.
The long work ended, and I came to understand Tomizuka's feelings a little. I learned a great deal from the prefaces and afterwords.
Whether they reflected on the war of aggression, and what I learned — I have decided on my own that you will understand it if you do the peace education on this site.
The Reprint Fell Through, but This Came Out of It
With this work finished, I had duly acquired the ability to annotate. But once I had the ability I noticed that Tomizuka Kiyoshi died in 1988, so the copyright was still in force. That was the end of the reprint. Normally you would look that up first, but he had been 45 at the time of the defeat, so I got careless. Tomizuka at 89 was still going on being angry in his writing, tremendous stamina.
In the sense of reprinting it, the work was wasted, but the whole run of it made good peace education for me. So I decided to make a site where you can relive my peace education, and made it. It ought to be built so that it contributes to acquiring the liberal arts, but how it actually is I do not know.