Ienaga Saburo
(b. 1913), Japanese historian. Born in Aichi Prefecture in 1913, Ienaga Saburo graduated from Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo) in 1937. He began his career as a high school teacher, later moving to Tokyo University of Education and, subsequently, to Chuo University. In 1948, he was awarded the Japan Academy Prize and became professor emeritus at Tokyo University of Education.
Ienaga brought three lawsuits (1965, 1967, and 1984) against the Ministry of Education, challenging the constitutional legitimacy of the textbook-screening system to which his high school Japanese history textbooks had been subjected. These suits raised a number of fundamental issues about the powers and qualifications of government officials to make decisions on curriculum content and the extent to which those powers could be reviewed in the courts. Although Ienaga lost the first two cases in the Supreme Court, he achieved a partial victory in his third court battle in the 1997 Supreme Court decision, which ruled that government may not tamper with historical truth in textbooks. Ienaga's lawsuits have had a significant influence, not only on the administrative procedure of the textbook-screening system, but also on diplomatic relations between Japan and its neighbors as well as on human rights issues worldwide.
Further Reading
Horio Teruhisa. (1988) Textbook Control on Trial: The Sugimoto Decision and Textbook Authors on Trial: The Takatsu Decision in Educational Thought and Ideology in Modern Japan. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press.
Ienaga Saburo. (1997) Ienaga Saburo: Ichirekishi Gakusha no Ayumi (Ienaga Saburo: Autobiography of a Historian). Tokyo: Nippon Tosho Senta.
——. (2001) Japan's Past, Japan's Future: One Historian's Odyssey. Trans. by Richard H. Minear. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
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