 Generally Watanabe's perspective closely echoes the line taken by Japanese generals before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in the Tokyo War Crimes Trial of 1948.Again, with regard to the Japanese history textbook controversies, which followed on Saburo Ienaga's suit against the Japanese Education Ministry, Watanabe was almost alone in controverting the general consensus of editorialists writing for the Japanese mainstream press ("Mainichi Shimbun", "Asahi Shimbun"), and upholding the Ministry's prerogative to intervene directly in the content of textbooks used in Japanese primary and secondary schools.In Watanabe's view, the decisive incident leading to Japan's full-scale war on the Chinese mainland, namely the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937, is to be read as an underhand Chinese Communist Party plot against Japan, and the versions of history taught in pre-war Japanese school textbooks are more reliable than those available today to students.