Playing with fire

摘要

The timing struck some as particularly unfortunate. This week, ten years after an earthquake killed 6,433 people in Kobe, a worthy international conference there drew lessons from natural disasters in Japan and elsewhere. Meanwhile in Tokyo, a rather less worthy gathering of members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (ldp) assembled to ignore the lessons of another terrible disaster—this one man-made, and the cause of far more death and destruction. In the course of approving its policy agenda for 2005, the ldp decided that it would revise the country's basic law on education. The current draft revisions include a plan to make pupils more patriotic. Because patriotic-sounding educational "reforms"-following the Imperial Rescript on Education in 1890-also preceded Japan's 20th-century descent into militarism, this is an inflammatory idea.