In history education, a specific region and era’s culture tends to be understood using several keywords. Japanese world history textbooks, for example, describe 19th century European and American culture with the symbolic words of romanticism, realism, naturalism, and impressionism. Understanding the characteristics of the era’s culture is important in order to have a lens for understanding the period. However, this might elicit misconceptions that culture is fixed, and therefore, that it interferes with building a foundation for multicultural education—having a flexible understanding of culture. To tackle the aforementioned issue, this research suggests design principles based on the concept of “the liquidity of culture” and illustrates history education units that support students’ flexible understanding of culture. With 19th century European and American culture as an example, the authors utilized the following three strategies to deconstruct the aforementioned symbolic words as a way of understanding culture: (a) geographical counterevidence, (b) historical counterevidence, and (c) social-class counterevidence. The details of each unit will be showcased, and the implications of this research from the perspective of multicultural history education will be discussed.