We need to study Japan’s long-term history

There was a program on NHK called “100-year interview” with Tetsuo Yamaori.
It was part of a series of interviews he is conducting for Japanese people 100 years from now. In the program, he was looking back on the history of Japan since its creation.
He said that there was a long period of peace, the Heian period, which lasted 350 years, and the Edo period, which lasted 250 years. He said that this was a rare feature not found in the history of other countries. The main reason for this, he said, was the way the Japanese people managed to reconcile the indigenous religion of Shintoism with the foreign religion of Buddhism.
His point was that we are sometimes overwhelmed by the Western logic of Christianity and other monotheistic religions, but that we should develop a Japanese attitude of coexistence and co-prosperity. We need to consider such a long-term view of history from time to time.

We have a tendency to look back on our history only from the postwar period or since the Meiji era. No, even that has not really been done, and it is even taboo to question the meaning of the last war. No other people have failed to make sense of and position contemporary history, especially the postwar period, and the foreign wars that the Japanese people have waged since the Meiji era. By foreign wars, I mean the Sino-Japanese, Russo-Japanese, First, and Second World Wars.

I have been watching the news about Germany recently, and that country is eager to look back on its own history these days. Last year(2007) I think, a magazine called “Spiegel” published a special issue on the history of the Hitler era and the postwar period (the special issue on the postwar history was published not only in German but also in English). There is also a video called “Centennial History,” and recently a TV program called “Millennium History” seems to be popular among young people.

I think the confidence of the Germans comes from the fact that until recently they have been in a phase of apologizing and remorse for their neighbors for a long time, and that they have gradually reached a stage where they have moved beyond that.

We Japanese, following a similar history, have lost all confidence in ourselves. I think this is because we do not have our own view of history based on the good and the bad.
Even in universities, there are very few courses on modern history or war history.
What the Japanese lack is a long-term view of history. We need to study history in order to think about where we are going in the future.