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South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States, focusing on the period from the begin- ning of the Sino-Japanese war in 1931 until the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951. This will be followed by a second comparative study of popular cinema dealing with historical subjects from roughly the same period. Designed in parallel with these two comparative studies is a comprehensive survey of elite opinion-makers. Researchers have translated in full all writing and graphic materials in the text- books. How do the textbook versions of history compare to contemporary scholar- ship on the same period and events? How do the textbooks compare to one other, both in accuracy and in presentation? How do these distinct versions of history relate to current widely held views in those countries on historical events? These are key issues examined in this project. Participants of the May conference received a positive impression about the approach and mechanism employed to bring about in an objective light high-school textbooks based on those common criteria, although they have not had the time to consult the published results. Given the complexity of the historical memory issue, choosing Taiwan and the United States in addition to Japan, China, and South Korea received positive comments. The explanation of this project was a nice introduction to the two presentations on textbooks by Hiroshi Mitani and Mikyoung Kim. The Stanford textbook project is well underway, and the first part of this project has been published.1 Ryoichi Hamamoto, a visiting lecturer from the Yomiuri Shinbun and the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, made the third pre- sentation on a past project aiming at reconciliation. Hamamoto explained in detail how Tsuneo Watanabe, editor-in-chief of the Yomiuri Shinbun, took the initiative of embarking on a two-year research regarding ‘‘responsibility for war (senso sekinin).’’ Watanabe was strongly motivated by the fact that Japanese themselves never drew their own conclusions and identified those who were responsible for the events that took place between 1931 and 1945. The Yomiuri project examined the structure of the Imperial Armed Forces and the relationship among the Imperial Armed Forces, the government, and the Emperor. It analyzed how the Japanese leadership perceived the world affairs at that time. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) was critically examined. The book singled out 15 individuals, whom the Yomiuri Shinbun concluded were responsible for the war. The outcome of the research was published in 2006, first in Japanese in two volumes in July and October, and then in English in December. Together with the Yomiuri Shinbun, James Auer coedited the English version, entitled, Who Was Responsible? From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbor. Individual circumstances and the extent of respective responsibility are debatable. But the overall efforts to come up with concrete names for war responsibility by the Japanese themselves 60 years after World War II are commendable.2 PART I: OVERVIEW OF JAPAN’S HISTORICAL MEMORY Three chapters in this section by Thomas Berger, Gilbert Rozman, and Kazuhiko Togo give a broad perspective on the Japanese historical memory issue.3 In Chapter 1, INTRODUCTION 5