| Abstract | This essay compares three Japanese middle-school history textbooks and one officially approved textbook of the People's Republic of China. It illuminates similarities and differences among their descriptions of Japan's colonialism in Asia. The author treats these history textbooks for children as cultural documents as well as policy documents, and analyzes how each culture's story-telling convention is deployed to organize diverse subunits of the tale about the conflicts between the two countries. This study indicates that the Japanese texts tend to employ formulae for describing the nobility of failure, while the Chinese text follows more closely the conventional hero folktale with such functional units as endurance, struggle, and ultimate victory. A detailed relational analysis among subunits identifies the Chinese and Japanese cultural and ideological paradigms that underlie the production and interpretation of these historical texts for children.
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