Keiichi Kawashima
Keiichi Kawashima is a world history teacher at Doshisha High School in Japan. He has been teaching world history for over 20 years. Since 2016, he has served on the steering committee of The Association for High School-University Collaboration in History Education. Currently, he is also the vice-chair of the association's Gender History Project and the high school representative for the Osaka University History Education Project.
Doshisha Junior and Senior High School in Kyoto, Japan
Session
Historical reconciliation remains a critical challenge in East Asia. This presentation analyzes an innovative pedagogical practice within "Integrated History" (Rekishi Sogo：歴史総合), a new subject introduced to high schools in the 2022 academic year. This practice utilized South Korean "Korean History" (한국사) textbooks regarding the March 1st Movement (3·1운동) as a "mirror" to foster transnational dialogue literacy. The analysis centers on three transformative stages experienced by the students.
First, Japanese high school students developed an acute awareness of "blanks" in their own history education. By confronting the overwhelming disparity in volume and detail—one page in Japanese textbooks versus ten in South Korean ones regarding the March 1st Movement—and the simplification of perpetrator narratives in Japanese history textbooks, the students recognized their education’s tendency toward "victimhood bias" and its avoidance of negative national history.
Second, the practice facilitated the diversification of history and the visualization of "the logic of the other." Rather than simply dismissing subjective descriptions in Korean textbooks as "biased," students analyzed the underlying social structures and human voices. Through a "rewriting" workshop focusing on Korean history textbooks, they practiced suppressing emotional expressions and objectifying facts, actively seeking a "common language" that enables constructive, multi-perspective dialogue between Japanese and Korean high school students.
Finally, the practice culminated in the formation of future-oriented dialogue literacy. By internalizing ethical protocols such as the "separation of fact from interpretation" and "respect for historical pain," students demonstrated a shift in perspective: transforming history from a "seed of conflict" into a "mirror for future friendship." This practice offers a replicable model for cultivating peacebuilders in regions with conflicting historical perceptions.