The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has announced the high school textbooks that will be used from April 2017. Textbooks have a huge influence on the way people think. For instance, many Japanese point out that anti-Japanese sentiment among Chinese and Koreans has been created by their textbooks. Textbooks are apt to reflect government policy and before World War Two the Japanese government prepared them with a view to controlling the way people think. However, bitter lessons were learned when this militarism led to war, so in 1947 a new approval system was established. In this system a committee, made up of Ministry of Education staff and scholars, judge whether textbooks made by publishers are suitable, and suggest modifications to inappropriate texts. Textbooks that meet the required criteria are certified, and many different kinds of textbooks have been published to date. However, a new requirement that the content is in line with the government’s views has been set for the first time. One example is the difference between the way history is represented and the way it is viewed by China and Korea. Some descriptions have been changed, for instance, the “comfort women” issue is now described as being “legally resolved,” and the number of victims of the Nanking Massacre, which is said to be over 200,000, has been deleted because there was no scholarly consensus on this. In addition, descriptions of territorial disputes over places such as the Senkaku Islands have increased 1.6 times compared to those in the current textbooks. In other areas there has been an increase in practical English content, such as explanations of Japanese recipes. A lot of the new content deals with new issues like the 2020 Tokyo Olympics / Paralympics, the term “LGBT” that reflects sexual diversity, and the virtual idol “HATSUNE MIKU.”