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.