On Friday, September 26, the Japanese Supreme Court ruled 3-2 that the Ministry of Education acted illegally in 1980 and 1983 when it censored a description of Japan's World War II biological experiments from a high school textbook that Ienaga was writing. The Court ordered the Ministry to pay the historian $3,360 in damages.
The story began in the early 1960s, when Ienaga, considered by some a leftist radical, and by some a daring truth-seeker, finished a high school Japanese history school textbook which contained details of Japan's misdeeds during the war. His text included a description of the infamous Unit 731, which conducted medical experiments on Chinese prisoners of war similar to Nazi experiments. Prisoners were subject to typhoid and other various diseases, extreme cold or heat, dissection without anesthesia, and all sorts of other tortures. The Japanese government has never acknowledged it conducted the experiments, and at one point, a lower court ruled there was not enough evidence to prove Unit 731 actually existed.
The Ministry of Education, which since the war has had complete authority over the list of textbooks from which teachers can choose, decided to censor Ienaga's descriptions. The Ministry, in accordance with legal statute, simply removed the sections it found "unacceptable," and allowed the remainder to be published for high school teaching. Ienaga filed suit in 1965, questioning the constitutionality of the screening system.
The Ministry's reason for censoring Ienaga's descriptions was cited as "lack of evidence." But evidence abounded, and Ienaga wrote prolifically about it, publishing several books (that were not intended for the public education system, and thus not under threat of censorship) detailing his evidence, mostly in the form of cross-corroborating first person accounts.
In fact, Ienaga's evidence was strong enough to be a major factor in forcing the Japanese government to admit to, and apologize for, its past. The first Prime Minister to apologize for the misdeeds of the war was Hosokawa Morihiro in 1993, but this apology was seen as too little (it was a bit weak and vague), too late (48 years after the war). The current Prime Minister, Hashimoto Ryutaro, has since apologized in more forceful terms, but many activist and survivors' groups are demanding not just words of contrition, but monetary compensation. The government, although it has reached settlements with several former "comfort women" (a euphemism for "sex slave"), is unwilling to pay too readily, from the dubious fear of facing a raft of false accusations.
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