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Paper short abstract:

This paper shows the aims and activities of the Bulgarian intelligence in Japan in the Cold War as well as the achieved results. Secret services were interested in information with respect to foreign policy, military, scientific and technological development.

Paper long abstract:

Following USSR, the Bulgarian People's Republic reestablished diplomatic relations with Japan in 1959. Half a decade later a representative of the secret services was appointed in the Bulgarian embassy in Tokyo to assist his Soviet colleagues. Subsequently, the Bulgarian intelligence activity expanded significantly by sending and recruiting agents, creating connections with Japanese and foreign citizens and gathering information. Sofia was interested mainly in the Japanese foreign and military policy, especially the development of the Self-Defence Forces and the Japanese-American security cooperation. Since the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s a special attention was paid to the Sino-Japanese relations.

Japanese economic growth and technological advance was another attractive field for the Bulgarian side and particularly for the Communist leader Todor Zhivkov. The strict restrictions on technology transfer imposed on the states in Soviet block by the West turned the access to high technologies into an issue of great importance for the former. Thus, collecting scientific and technical data became a priority for the Bulgarian intelligence in Japan. As a result, its activities in this regard expanded and intensified dramatically in the 1970s - 1980s.

Unlike the other ex-socialist states, the Bulgarian archives with respect to the activities of the Bulgarian secret services in the Cold War Era are almost fully opened for the academic researchers nowadays. This is also true for the documents of the Bulgarian Communist Party's central organs - the Political Bureau and the Central Committee. Free access to the Bulgarian primary sources allows the researchers to make contributions to the history of the Cold War, especially in the field of the intelligence studies. Providing new facts and analyzing them by using the chronological and the thematic approaches, the current paper aims to reveal the purposes and scope of the Bulgarian intelligence in Japan during the Cold War and thereby to address the broad topic concerning the Japanese relations with the socialist countries in this period.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper will discuss how "East Asia" as regional concept is pushed to a fringe existence under the new curriculum and introduce strategies and methods for a meaningful teaching of "East Asia" as possible under the new framework.

Paper long abstract:

Since April of 2022, Japan's overhaul of the history subject in high schools has begun in earnest. With the introduction of "Rekishi sōgō (歷史總合) ", a bid to integrate Japanese History (former Nihonshi) and World History (former Sekaishi) into a new one-year course obligatory for all high school students, history in Japanese schools is supposed to be interesting again. With student-centered, question driven "active learning" methods, students are supposed to learn the Modern and Contemporary history of the World including Japan, in a matter that relates learned content to finding solutions for nowadays problems. The new classes are supposed to better build up on what has been learnt in Middle school, and thus skip teaching on the premordern and will only cover the Modern and Contemporary periods.

As interesting as this may sound, interviews with High School students give hints to the avail that "nothing has changed" and classes are "still boring." Furthermore, less than 10% of students show an awareness that they are part of an East Asian populace. With more content on Africa and South East Asia, content on (northern) East Asia is pushed to a minimum, and even though classes should take on problems of the "now", problems between today's East Asian Nations are absent completely.

Having a look at the curricula for the new elective classes that will accompany "Rekishi sōgō" from 2023, namely Nihonshi tankyū and Sekaishi tankyū, the tendency described above is upheld, with "East Asia" mentioned explicitly only during the study of ancient history.

Showing samples from the curriculum and textbooks, this paper aims to scrutinze the imagery and values that are taught about East Asia. Analysing these problems and the intentions behind it, this paper concludes with concrete ideas on how to improve teaching on East Asia under the new curriculum in ways that befit its design and which have been tested in real classroom settings.