The proposed project aims to systematically investigate the new generation of moral education textbooks in Japan (since 2018) and their intended effects against the backdrop of a larger political agenda to renegotiate the relationship between the state and the individual in order to overcome what has been perceived by the late prime minister Abe as the “postwar regime” of liberal democracy. In contrast to ethics education in many Western European countries, moral education in Japan does not teach different views of ethics (in lieu of religious education) but disseminates concrete state-defined morals to be applied in daily life. Since the reintroduction of moral education in 1958, the subject and its textbooks have been highly controversial as their predecessors in prewar and wartime Japan had played a role in legitimizing colonial rule and disseminating militarism and extreme nationalism. As laid out in my preliminary work (Spremberg 2021), the new textbooks contain at least some highly problematic messages – namely a revisionist and one-sided view on the Asia-Pacific War – warranting a project to further investigate this highly relevant and widely disseminated material.