Nobukatsu Fujioka is a professorof education at Tokyo University who was born in Iwamizawa, Hokkaido, and raised in Shibecha, Hokkaido. He is noted for his efforts at removing from Japanese textbooks accounts of wartime atrocities committed by Japan during the Second World War. He is considered to be a conservative and a nationalist, and has been quoted as saying that he "stand for a viewpoint of history with an emphasis on national interest," and that the study of Japanese history is "subject to the ultimatemoral imperative of whether or not it serves to inculcate a sense of pride in being Japanese." He has also said that to "write based only on verified historical truths makes... insipid and dry. I had no choice but to write from my own imagination to a great extent." In the early 1990s, Fujioka founded the so-called Liberal View of History Study Group, which advocated "correcting history" by promoting a "positive view" of Japanese history, and removing all references to what he referred to as "dark history." By 1995, he had created the Association for Advancement of Unbiased View of History and the Committee to Write New History Textbooks. Among Japan's top ten bestsellers in 1997 were two volumes edited by Fujioka, History The Textbooks Do Not Teach and Shameful Modern History. By early 2000, Fujioka and his followers had joined with others to form the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform. This group authored The New History Textbook, which was one of eight junior high schoolhistory textbooks authorized by the Ministry of Education in April 2001. In December 2000, a draft textbook circulated by the Society and shown on national television elicited criticism by many Japanese historians and teachers. Fujioka's textbook revisionist movement has created considerable controversy in China, especially concerning denial of the Rape of Nanking; and in South Korea and the Philippines, especially concerning denial of Japanese responsibility for the so-called "comfort women". He is an assenter of the film The Truth about Nanjing.
