The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 15 | Issue 10 | Number 1 | Article ID 5035 | May 15, 2017

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The Global Rightist Turn, Nationalism and Japan

Karoline Postel-Vinay, Sciences Po, Paris

“How does the wall keep us free?

The wall keeps out the enemy

And we build the wall to keep us free

That's why we build the wall

We build the wall to keep us free.”

“Why We Build the Wall”, song by AnaïsMitchell, from her studio album Hadestown(Brooklyn Recording Studio, New York City,March 2010)

Abstract: This article looks at contemporaryJapanese nationalism in the context of growingfar-right movements within democraticsocieties around the world, notably in Europeand North America, and the general rejectionof the “happy globalization” narrative that hasshaped the international order since the end ofthe Cold War. Japan, which witnessed the birthof the “borderless world” metaphor in the1990s, is now contributing in its own way to theearly twenty-first century worldwide longingfor strong borders and an aggressive militaryposture. The rise of ultra-conservatism indemocratic societies cannot be reduced to a“Western problem”; by taking into account thepolitical transformation of a country such asJapan it is possible to consider a truly globalphenomenon with far-reaching consequences.

Keywords: Narratives of globalization, Globalfar-right, Japanese neo-nationalism,Comparative nationalism, Identity politics,Pacific War legacies

The Demise of “Happy Globalization”

Walls – old and new, disassembled orreassembled – constitute a pictorial trope ofhow governments and societies have beenmaking sense of global togetherness since theend of the Cold War. In 1989, the fall of theBerlin Wall epitomized the idea of the fall of allwalls, an idea that was central to a newWeltanschauung which was powerful enough toproduce an international and transnationalrhetoric about a world without borders thatwould be shared by very different actors, fromthe global corporation to the global NGO, andacross the planet, from Berlin to Washingtonand Tokyo. It led to a “happy globalization”vision that was all the more emotionally andpractically efficient in that it was sustained by adiscursive continuity rooted in the West’sengagement with Perestroika and embodied byAmerican president Ronald Reagan’sspectacular injunction declaimed in front of theBerlin Brandenburg Gate, in June 1987: “Mr.Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Echoing itsbombastic mood, the German tabloid Bilddeclared that it was “a speech that changed theworld”. If hardly a decisive game changer, itcaptured the dominant geopolitical spirit of thetime. That spirit inspired governments topar t i c ipate in a renewed agenda o finternational cooperation and encouraged arising transnational civil society.

Yet the limits of the globalist consensus quicklyemerged and soon after 1989, new “walls” –sometime called “barriers” or “fences” - werebeing erected: between Israel and the Gazastrip as early as 1994, between Mexico and theUnited States, following the Secure Fence Actof 2006, and in the wake of wars in Iraq,Afghanistan, Syria and throughout the Middle

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East, others soon followed throughout Europe.Thirty years after the Brandenburg speech, thepopular narrative of freedom arising from torndown walls has lost its appeal. As depicted inthe Anaïs Mitchell song (“Why We Build theWall”), the idea of freedom seems now to beintrinsically linked to a Three-Little-Pigs-liketale of construction of ever thicker andstronger barricades against a Big Bad Wolfimpersonating a myriad of perceived threats,from undocumented workers to would-beterrorists. US president Donald Trump,putative leader of this redefined “free world”entered the inter/national stage presentinghimself as a wall-builder, visualizing a newAmerica nest led in a web of real andmetaphorical borders.

The pendulum swing from one Republican USpresident’s discourse to another – from wall-demolisher Reagan to wall-builder Trump – isthe most visible, and therefore describable,part of a movement whose depth andcomplexity are still puzzling most analysts,social scientists and political commentatorsalike. How can one define Trumpism beyondthe outer features of one incessantlygesticulating larger than life character?1 Is itpopulism, ur-fascism, (neo)nationalism,paleoconservatism? And how is it related to thegeneral far-right movements of societies andgovernments that this decade has beenwitnessing, notably in the seemingly well-established democracies, not only in NorthAmerica, but throughout Europe, Latin Americaand East Asia?2 Addressing in depth the globaldimensions of this issue is beyond the scope ofthe present article; but looking at the positionof Japan in this context is a first step towardsthe necessary enterprise of connecting the dotsof what appear to be similar movements ofcounter-reaction to the post-Cold War “happyglobalization” within OECD countries andbeyond. Regional differences, and Japan’sspecificity, notably its spearhead role in latetwentieth century globalization, have to betaken into account, lest one reduces the

present situation to a “Western” problem.3 AWestern-centric approach would be particularlyparadoxical here as the general counter-reaction to globalization is as “global” as whatit is reacting to. However the manifestations ofthat trend around the world are diverse,highlighting the many-faceted movement thathas pushed forward leaders as different – yetby no means unrelated – as Donald Trump,Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, Recep TayyipErdogan, Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte, andAbe Shinzō.

Craving for the Nation?

Globalization fatigue is clearly an importantvehicle for the rightist movements that havebeen increasingly visible since the beginning ofthe new millennium around the world, butother factors are also at play and vary from oneregion to another. The “anti-establishment”mood that has fed the rise to power of DonaldTrump is also present in a number of Europeancountries as well as at the continental level,where it is either directed against nationalelites or the so-called “Brussels technocrats”(an establishment of its own, whose membersare not necessarily part of the national ones).That mood is not absent in East Asia – itaccompanied Rodrigo Duterte’s trajectory inparticular4 – but it has not been a majorcomponent of the development of rightistmovements that this region has beenwitnessing since the early 2000s. At least untilthe rise and fall of Park Geun-hye, “populism”was not an accurate characterization of SouthKorean politics: new far-rightist currents werenonetheless developing, notably in the digitalpublic space as illustrated by the growingpolitical influence of the ultra-conservativewebsite Ilbe. Likewise in Japan, it was not an“anti-establishment” impetus that triggered therightist turn of the new millennium, a politicalchange that saw the establishment of NipponKaigi, the Japan Conference5, now the mainnon-party organization for the promotion ofaggressive nationalism and the most influential

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Japanese political lobby, with deep ties toPrime Minister Abe and the ruling LiberalDemocratic Party.

A book titled the Nippon Kaigi noJinmyaku published in 2016 detailing theexpansive network of the organizationthat include prominent politicians andreligious figures.

“Neo-nationalism” or the “rise of nationalism”are the terms that have been most often usedto describe the currents that have appeared inNortheast Asia after a decade or so ofconfidence in a happy globalization.6 It was inJapan that the euphoric fall-of-all-wallsnarrative, reinforced by, among others, an“end-of-history” fantasy, had the strongestecho. In South Korea, the stubborn reality ofthe national division constituted a caveat for

the reception of that narrative (while otherrealities were at play in North Korea). Andalthough China’s “reform and opening policy”,launched a decade before the official end of theCold War, contributed in very tangible ways tothe interpenetration of the world’s economies,the actual endorsement of the “fall-of-all-walls”discourse would have been clearly at odds withBeijing politics. But in Japan this was the timewhen commentators such as Kenichi Ohmaeand his “borderless world”7 vision woulddominate a mainstream public debate wherethe obsolescence of the nation-state wasactually envisioned. In the last decade of the20th century, nationalism, even its mildestexpressions — whether one calls it “banal” or“petit” nationalism8 — was not in vogue withinthe expanding group of self-defined liberaldemocratic societies, of which Japan had beena decades-old member.

The 1990s in Japan also witnessed the firstparliamentary defeat of the Jimintō, the LiberalDemocratic Party that had held power since1955 with the help of Cold War geopolitics. Theseemingly immutable conservative rules of thegame started to change. In 1995, the Socialistpr ime min is ter Murayama Tomi ich icommemorated the 50th anniversary of the endof the Pacific War with a speech that was thestrongest invitation to self-reflection onJapanese colonialism and war ever given by aJapanese head of government. Two yearsearlier, the Conservative chief cabinetsecretary Kōno Yōhei provided a statement onwartime sexual slavery that constituted amilestone in the recognition process of theJapanese state’s responsibility for crimesagainst humanity committed during the PacificWar. Yet a decade later a new mood prevailed:the openness about historical responsibility wasundermined by an increasingly affirmativenationalism conveyed both by the Japanesegovernment and the society at large. With theentry of “neo-nationalism”, gone were the dayswhen the manifestations of the Japanese farright were confined to the ugly folklore of a few

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black trucks blaring in the streets of Tokyo.What happened, and what was at stake? Thestrengthening of rightist currents and theirpervasiveness within Japanese mainstreampolitics reflected — as unfolding politicaltransformations around the world have sinceshown — a much larger, global, trend. But inJapan, as well as in China and for some time inSouth Korea, “history”, rather than the “liberalestablishment”, has been the locus of thegrowing malaise, and consequential tensions.The rejection of foreignness within NortheastAsian societies has also been more decisivelydetermined by historical controversies thanactual border-related policies.

Histories of Lost Self

Fear of the “Other” mixed with a longing for a“pure Self” is a well-known nutrient for thesteady growth of nationalism in its mostextreme forms. Anti-immigrant discourses inEurope and in the United States provide amplespace for the expression of xenophobia and,more generally, of angst towards everythingforeign including, but not limited to, the human“Other”. In Japan, the recent increase in theflux of foreigners entering the country – stillminimal compared to immigration in WesternEurope and North America9 – has also inspirednationalist rhetoric, but mainly towardshistorical “adversaries”, echoing in some waysthe development of anti-China and anti-Koreafeelings in the Meiji era. Yet the discourse ofnat ional ist trends that have becomeconspicuously visible on the Japanesemainstream political scene in the early 21st

century seems less concerned wi thcontainment of the Other than the reinventionof Self through the rewriting of nationalhistory. That appeared clearly already in 1996with the establishment of Atarashii RekishiKyōkasho Tsukuru Kai (or Tsukuru-kai) theJapanese Society for History Textbook Reform,which claimed to correct the “decline ofnational principles.”1 0 With historicalrevisionism at its core, the deployment of the

Tsukuru-kai network hinted at the strength andstructure of the burgeoning neo-nationalism.

Joan of Arc and the French NationalFront- their May 1st as counter narrativeto the International May Day.

History is often invoked and reinterpretedalong romanticized lines in the making of far-right movements. The French National Frontcelebrates an iconic Joan of Arc “driving theEnglish out of France” (“boutons l’Anglais horsde France”) representing the supposed “purity”of the nation and its professed immemorial willto keep foreigners away. From the recurrentreferences to the lost British empire in the pro-Brexit campaign to the longing for a Whitemen-dominated “great America” in theTrumpist rhetoric, nostalgia for an embellishedpast is a common feature of extreme nationalistdiscourse in Western countries. But it is anelement of the scenery rather than the sceneitself. Historical controversies do exist inEurope and in North America (fed, inparticular, by the major powers’ colonial and/orimperial past), but do not constitute a politicalresource comparable to what exists today inJapan or, for that matter, in South Korea orChina, as a source of nationalist mobilization.The pledge to fight a “masochistic view of

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h i s t o r y ” – i . e . t h e “ m a s o c h i s m ” o facknowledging the war crimes committed byImperial Japan during the Pacific War – hasbeen at the heart of the movement that firstappeared on the fringe of the Japanese politicallandscape and is now taking center stage. Ithas also revealed the strength of a civil societythat is countering this trend.11 In other wordshistorical claims and controversies shaped fromthe start the very fabric of the search for a lostSelf. The “appeal” of such an agenda –reclaiming the Nation by reclaiming History – isa crucial element of the efficiency of thenetworking of Tsukuru-kai, Nippon Kaigi andother historical revisionist lobbies withinJapanese conservative political circles, notablyat the parliamentary level.12 Although our focushere has been on democratic societies ingeneral and Japan in particular, one should alsonote the centrality of reified history in the newnat iona l d i scourse among Ch inesegovernmental elites as illustrated by therepeated call to “never forget the century ofhumiliation”, a reference to the period ofsuccessive foreign invasions that stretchesfrom the first Opium War in 1839 to theestablishment of the People’s Republic of Chinain 1949.13 The PRC’s entry into globalizationand the subsequent weakening of thecommunist paradigm has transformed thepolitical resource provided by “history”, leadingto a renewed stress on China’s victimization atthe hands of Japanese invaders during the Asia-Pacific War14.

Reclaiming 1945

The Japanese nationalist circles’ combatagainst the so-called “masochistic view ofhistory” has centered on the legacy of theInternational Military Tribunal for the Far East(IMTFE) and is also presented as the “TokyoTrial view of history”. Here Japanese neo-nationalist movements converge with neo-Nazimovements in Europe but also, paradoxically,where they depart, as what 1945 meant inJapan and in Germany is comparable only up to

a point. What was supposed to be the twin trialof Nuremberg in East Asia eventually differedfrom it in many ways. Although both trials werehighly normative and set invaluable standardsfor the management of war and peace and theconduct of post-conflict actions,15 the IMTFE,because of certain of its decisions or, indeed,the non-decisions that it backed, created theconditions for an open-ended debate. At the topof the list of decisions with deep and long-termeffects, was that of not holding the emperoraccountable for war responsibility. Theterritories of the Japanese empire wereliberated from Japanese colonial rule, includingKorea and Taiwan, but crucial issues such asthe brutal treatment of colonial subjects werepushed aside – revealing a legal/politicalframework in which the Allies’ ambivalencetowards their own imperial record was at play.For these and other reasons, such as theabsence of debate about the legality of thedouble atomic bombing, the IMTFE engendereda feeling of incompleteness, defining a spacethat Japanese pursuers of an unapologeticnationalism promptly occupied.16

The sequence of events between the summer of1945, when the United States obtained totalsurrender of the Japanese Imperial Army, andthe winter of 1948, when it became clear thatthe work of the IMTFE would be constricted byCold War geopolitics, produced conflictingnarratives that continue to inform present daypolitics in the Asia-Pacific. A number ofindividuals who were arrested in 1945 forcommitting “crimes against peace” – class-Awar crimes – were eventually neither broughtto trial nor acquitted. Among and around themwere true believers in ultra-nationalism forwhom the opportunity created by the lack ofethical clarity of the late 1940s realpolitik wasnot an endgame: the rehabilitation of pre-Warideology was. Imperialism, and specificallygiven the emperor himself as the central figureprojected by that ideology, it is not surprisingthat the search for lost imperial authoritywould become a lasting pattern of the neo-

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ultranationalist trend.

In 2005 the Nobel Literature Prize laureate ŌeKenzaburō was sued for libel on the ground ofan essay he had published decades earlier, in1970, in which he supported the well-documented assessment that the Imperial Armyhad coerced hundreds of civilians on theislands of Okinawa to commit suicide at the endof the Pacific War.17 The plaintiffs were twoformer soldiers posted in Okinawa in 1945, whoquickly received the support of JiyūshugiShikan Kenkyūkai, the Study Group for aLiberal View of History, another revisionistassociation, as well as that of the writer SonoAyako. The latter had written an essay a fewyears after Ōe’s publication, denouncing the“myth” of the forced mass suicides of Okinawancivilians during the Battle of Okinawa,asserting that those deaths had in fact beenvoluntary acts of “love” towards the emperorand the Japanese nation.18 Noteworthy here isnot only the striking obsession with pre-warimperial thinking, but also the timing of thejudicial attack on Ōe. Although the search forlost imperial authority has been on from thevery moment Hirohito was de-sanctified duringthe US occupation, and that search had neverceased in the following decades as indicated bySono’s publication, it is only since thebeginning of the new millennium that theaggressive historical revisionism it generateshas found the space in the Japanese politicallandscape to fully express itself . Theappointment, in August 2016 of a hardlinenationalist such as Inada Tomomi – who openlysupported the lawsuit against Oe ten yearsearlier - as Abe Shinzô’s new defense minister,illustrates how powerful that movement hadbecome.

Datsu-A / “Leaving Asia”

Political wrangling and the magical-realist-likeoccurrences brought about by the complexitiesof geopolitics such as those of Northeast Asia inthe late 1940s can be abundantly illustrated by

the mutations that took place in Japan duringthat decade. Consider the emperor’s change ofapparel, from uniformed head of a belligerentpower to a suit symbolic of a peace-lovingcountry, a change as instantaneous andstupefying as a clever hikinuki, the onstagecostume change technique in the kabukitheater. Along with this transformation camethat of Japan’s geo-cultural location that movedovernight from being the “roof of Asia” – i.e.the imperial power on the Asian continent,according to the hakkō ichiu / “all the worldunder one roof” wartime vision – to becoming amember of the rising Pacific Community, defacto cut off from its continental neighbors,whose main, and for sometime only, partnerwas the occupying power, the United States.One lasting legacy of that transformation is thecontrast between the roughly consensualdiscourse shared – despite increasing points offriction19 – by Japan and the US on the PacificWar, on the one hand, and the sheer lack ofcommon narrative on this period among theNortheast Asian nations, on the other.

The debate over Japan’s position within theregion is a recurring one and the questionwhether the Japanese government was “leavingAsia” has been addressed more than once byconservative leaders, especially since KoizumiJunichirō’s premiership at the start of the2000s20. The reference to the late 19th centuryDatsu-A Nyū-Ō/”Leave Asia and Join the West”slogan is anachronistic yet significant. Thisslogan was coined by one of the leading figuresof the Westernization movement of the Meijiera, Fukuzawa Yukichi, at a time whensomething like an East Asian system ofinternational relations did exist. As historianHamashita Takeshi has pointed out, theorganizational structure centered aroundChina, the Sino-centric system that theEuropean imperial powers encountered in theearly 19th century, was embattled yet retained acertain coherence across East Asia, beingunderstand by contemporary elites not just as“their” world, but “the” world21. Today the

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region toward which Japan is turning its back isdeeply divided. The violent turn that the Meijigovernment took in the later part of the 19th

century, in the spirit of Fukuzawa’s famousslogan, created indeed a disruption from whichthe region, along with other traumas, neverfully recovered as political cooperation withinNortheast Asia has been weak at best – the firstand most brutal sign of this disruption beingthe 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War, when Chinanot only was defeated by its former vassal butforced to renounce its suzerainty over Korea.

Yet regionalism and, more to the point, aconception of East Asian solidarity in the formof Pan-Asianism did emerge from the shamblesof the Sinocentric system at the end of the 19th

century.2 2 That idea was supported byreformers including Okakura Tenshin in Japan,Kim Okkyun in Korea and Sun Yat-sen in China,and expressed the vision of a common/regionalresponse to the challenge of modernization thatderived from European domination. The idea ofthe nation-state and of nationalism, that waspart and parcel of the Western challenge,eventually became the main template fortransformation, and as it grew stronger, itovershadowed the discourse and hopesconveyed by the regional vision (a trend notdissimilar, albeit in a different socio-historicalcontext, to the rise of modern nationalism inEurope at the turn of the 20th century and theexhaustion of the late 19th century Europeanideal.23)

The spirit of regional solidarity was re-inventedand was briefly alive during the decade thatfollowed the end of the Cold War. Or rather,one should say, the crumbling of theinternational bipolar order but not the end ofthe Cold War everywhere in the world, asimportant divisions in East Asia – North-SouthKorea, PRC-Taiwan – were not eliminated bythe fall of the Berlin Wall and disintegration ofthe Soviet Union. It was precisely Kim Dae-jung, former dissident and president of SouthKorea who championed the idea of an East Asia

Summit in 1999, hoping to create a vehicle forthe end of the Korean War and normalization ofrelations between the two Koreas. The EastAsia Summit eventually materialized in 2005:but by this time the mood for regionalfriendship was turning sour again andhistorical controversies in Northeast Asia soonflared up.

After 1989 the Northeast Asian version of the“Iron Curtain” did not disappear: there remainsa dividing line running from the Taiwan Strait,to the 38th parallel on the Korean peninsula, upto the sea stretch between Hokkaido and theKuril islands (Japan and Russia being stilltechnically at war in the absence of a peacetreaty following the Pacific War). Walls,whether made of water or of empty land, arenow stronger and more contentious than ever,maintaining fault lines to which the territorialfights around the islets in the South China Sea,East China Sea and Sea of Japan/East Sea addcomplications. Less than two decades after KimDae-jung formulated his vision for regionalcooperation, Northeast Asia looks dangerouslyfractured. The new “leaving Asia” mood inJapan shares with the late 19th century one, adeep uneasiness in Sino-Japanese relations andthe illusion on Tokyo’s side that such a closeand important neighbor as China can somehowbe ignored. The nationalistic revival withinwhich this mood is resurfacing is, however, farfrom being limited to Japan; the whole ofNortheast Asia seems indeed to be engulfed bya particularly pernicious form of nationalism,with tangible negative impact on transnationalexchanges, and leaving little, if any, room forregional cooperation.

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Map of the Kuril Island chain detailingpre-and post-WWII boundaries.

The Assault of Nationalisms on Humanity

“Nationalism in East Asia is on a collisioncourse”, remarked historian HasegawaTsuyoshi and political scientist Togo Kazuhikoin their edited volume on the “specter ofmemories of the past” that is presentlyhaunting the region.24 The authors argue thatthe nationalistic trends that have appeared inNortheast Asia are the result of the end of theCold War and the subsequent search for a newsource of political legitimacy in the PRC, SouthKorea and Japan – an argument that isconvincing enough, although it is oblivious tothe fact that the divisions that have beenattributed to the Cold War (inter-Korean, inter-Chinese and Russo-Japanese) have not beenresolved. It does not explain either why duringthe first decade following the fall of the BerlinWall and the collapse of communist regimesacross Eastern Europe, regional dialogue wasmore common in Northeast Asia than thepresent nationalistic posturing. Here aselsewhere, a decade of optimistic, oftenzealous, globalism has been followed by a

general move towards wall-building and mind-closing, and various expressions of fear of theOther. What sets Northeast Asia apart is indeedthe weight of historical controversies that bothreflect and amplify the new nationalism. Thenegative impact of those controversies onregional cooperation is hardly debatable. Whatshould be acknowledged now is the particularlytoxic dimension of these nationalistic currentsfrom the perspective of inter-nationalcoexistence, peace, and, more deeply, that ofhumanism.

The toxicity of the present nationalism inNortheast Asia is especially clear in the case ofthe unresolved issue of the so-called “comfortwomen” (ianfu), the official name used byJapan’s Imperial Army to designate the girlsand women it used as sexual slaves during thePacific War. The fact that the problem of the“comfort women” is a moral issue of globalscope, as opposed to a local or nationalquestion, should be as indisputable as the factthat it refers to a crime against humanity. Yetthe way this problem has been tackled by neo-nationalists on all sides, tends to obscure thisfundamental dimension. The seeds of theconfusion were actually planted at the verybeginning, right after the end of the War.Although documentation on “comfort women”was available to the IMTFE in 1946, the issuewas not addressed during the Tokyo Trial. Norwere cases of mass rape raised at Nuremberg.Mass violence against women and gender-related violence were de facto not a priority ofwhat was then called international justice andconsequently not fully investigated. The Tokyoand Nuremberg Trials did put forward thenotion of crime against humanity, but as amatter of fact, only half of the actual humanpopulation was taken into account in definingthe said humanity.25

From the beginning, there was confusion as towhether the plight of “comfort women” wouldbe viewed as a crime against humanity oragainst citizens of specific nations. The only

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trial concerning “comfort women” that tookplace after the War was a local one: that of theBatavia Temporary Court Martial held by theDutch authorities in 1948 which condemnedJapanese officers for “forced prostitution” ofDutch women in Indonesia, whereas the muchlarger number of Indonesian women who werevictims of the same crime were conspicuouslyignored. This ambivalent legacy has beenfurther complicated by rising nationalisms inNortheast Asia. When the “comfort women”issue emerged in the public sphere in the early1990s, the contradiction between a globallyoriented and a national(istic) definition of theidentity of the victims was almost immediatelyat play. One the one hand, transnational citizenmovements, especially transnational feminismwith Japanese feminists such as Matsui Yayoiand the Women’s Active Museum for War andPeace (WAM) playing a leading role, offered aglobal understanding of the problem. Theyhighlighted the suffering and humiliation ofgirls and women, i.e. addressing this group ofbeings that constitutes one half of humanity.On the other hand, international state-to-statediscussion, notably that in Japan, focused onnational shame and tended to lose sight of theactual gendered victims.

Coming back to the present era of heightenednationalism, the notion of human dignityappears more than ever threatened by narrowlydefined national pride. This is reflected in thedeep ambivalence of the Korean states towardsthe reality of the suffering of individual“comfort women.”26 Increasingly, the focus isput on national pride, as illustrated in April2014 when the North Korean governmentcalled South Korean president Park Geun-hyethe United States’ “dirty comfort woman” – anaccusation of “selling out” the Korean nation toAmerican interests that implicitly supportedthe Japanese revisionist argument that“comfort women” designated not victims ofsexual slavery but contemptible prostitutes. Inthe PRC, the conflation, in official discourse,between the notion of “national humiliation”

and the condemnation of the Rape of Nanking,where gendered mass violence also occurred,further illustrates how obsession with nationalpride translates into loss of sight of humanbeings, human dignity and the universalindividual that is part of humanity. Thehumiliation and suffering of individual victimsof war crimes is arguably better recognized byKorean and Chinese nationalist rhetoric thanby Japanese revisionism – which denies thereality of the crimes altogether – yet often in analarmingly superficial manner. As HasegawaTsuyoshi and Togo Kazuhiko have argued,27 theend of the international bipolar order in 1989triggered the expression of people’s memories— especially memories pertaining to crimesagainst humanity — that had previously beensilenced. But the acknowledgement of thosememories was quickly caught within theconflicting logics of transnational/global versusnational approaches.

The Tokyo Trial legacy is undeniably a mixedbag. As mentioned earlier, its contribution tothe establishment of a progressive legalinternational framework for conflict and post-conflict management is tangible. But itsshortcomings have a lasting effect that isequally tangible, maintaining a space of bothvindication and contest. The internationalsystem that was produced at the same time, inthe wake of World War Two, and centeredaround the United Nations, a lso hadlimitations, starting with the decision to give tofive victorious states, the members of theSecurity Council who enjoyed veto power, theuniversal and exclusive right to authorize orveto war. The representativeness of thisinstitution (along with others such as theexecutive board of the IMF), is increasinglycontested by countries that feel understandablyunder-represented, such as Brazil, India,Germany, Japan and South Africa. Yet theUnited Nations is the only international bodythat gathers (almost) all the countries of theworld and whose fundamental hypothesis is thepossibility of global cooperation. This

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hypothesis has always been hopeful, or asInternational Relations theory would put it, itderives from an idealist view of world order inthe face of the selfish nature of states. Butworld politics can be more or less propitious forglobal cooperation, and the worldwideheightening of nationalism, including, andespecially, within democratic societies isclearly a negative.

Japanese nationalism matters too

Japan’s participation in the general trend ofrising nationalism and far-right leaning can beinterpreted in multiple ways. Japan is among avery limited number of countries in the worldthat has taken pacifism seriously and indeedhas made a pac i f i s t contr ibut ion tointernational affairs. Therefore any break fromthis seventy year legacy could be interpreted aspatent revisionism. Prime Minister Abe Shinzō,has called for the elimination of the “anti-war”article 9 of its Constitution. Reinterpretation ofthe fundamental law was approved by theParliament in September 2015 over strongresistance from opposition parties andJapanese citizen movements that revealed thedepth of a decades-old pacifism, rooted at everylevel of society, from family and school to localcommunities. Yet what should be noted herefrom a global perspective is that the danger ofransacking this unique pacifist legacy comesboth from within and outside Japan. DonaldTrump’s East Asia policy, however volatile,even incoherent, clearly points in the directionof a militarily more robust nation makinggreater financial and military contributions toUS agendas throughout the world. In thebeginning of the millennium the mere vision ofJapanese naval vessels in the seas of Asia –whatever their actual purpose, includinglogistical support for NATO operations – waspresented in European media as a troublingresurrection of Japan’s imperial past. Fifteenyears later, pleading for Japan (and Germany)’sr i g h t t o w a g e w a r i s n o t a r a d i c a lopinion.28 This new tolerance in the West for

what politician Ozawa Ichirō famously called a“normal Japan,”29 a nation with an army of itsown unencumbered by constitutionalrestrictions, is part of US and Europeanreinterpretation of the post-1945 era, i.e. therationalization for a vision of global securitycooperation. Western advocates of a “normalJapan” are not suggesting, for instance, thatthe term “enemy state” that still defines Japanin the United Nations Charter should bedeleted. But nor are they expressing concernthat the push for rearmament within Japan isdirectly l inked with the rise of ultra-nationalism. Indeed, with internationalattention focused on China and Korea, there islittle indication in public discourse that thechanging Japanese geopolitical landscape hasany impact on the normative state of the worldor indeed that it matters at all.

It took the pro-Brexit vote in the UnitedKingdom to launch a debate in Europe aboutthe sweeping nationalist current on thecontinent: yet this current had been prosperingand growing for several years, notably inEastern Europe. It took the election of DonaldTrump in the United States to trigger a globalconversation on the deep rightist turn ofdemocratic societies around the world; yet thistransformation had been on full display in partsof Asia for more than a decade. The Trump’sadministration’s attacks on the media, asseveral NGOs have rightly pointed out,30 isindicative of declining standards of freedomthat affect not just the United States, but morebroadly the global state of democracy. The AbeShinzō government has been attacking themedia for a longer time. Even though this trendhas been well documented by scholars,31 andeven reported in the US and European press, ithas not been widely perceived as a threat todemocracy at a global level. Likewise thepressure of ultra-conservatism on universitiesin the United States and in Europe – to whicharts and humanities are particularly vulnerablebut entire institutions such as the CentralEuropean University of Budapest may be

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affected32 - is commonly understood as a threatto academic liberties around the world. Thesignificance of similar pressure on Japanese

universities is not always comprehended.33 Onecan only hope that Japan, along with other non-Western democracies will now be fully part ofthe picture.

Karoline Postel-Vinay is a Research Professor at Sciences Po, the National Foundation forPolitical Science in Paris. She lectures at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques on Japan and EastAsia, and on International Relations. Contact: karoline.postelvinay@sciencespo.fr

Notes1 As David Greenberg noted in Politico in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, for monthscommentators have focused mainly on the man himself, pictured as “a clown, a showman, anopportunist, a faux conservative, a political naïf, and an egomaniac,” but the set of ideasderived from his statements still needed to be located in the political trajectory of the UnitedStates: David Greenberg, “An Intellectual History of Trumpism”, Politico, 11 December 2016.While this might take time, at least lexicological definitions have been suggested such asthose found in the Collins English Dictionary: “1. The policies advocated by Donald Trump,especially those involving a rejection of the current political establishment and the vigorouspursuit of American national interests 2. A controversial or outrageous statement attributedto Donald Trump”2 Comparative discussion of both definition and description of these trends is just starting.See for example Carlos de la Torre (ed.), The Promise and Perils of Populism. GlobalPerspectives, Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 2015.3 See Jonathan Haidt, «How Nationalism Beats Globalism», The American Interest, vol. XII,n°.1, September/October 2016.4 For an early acknowledgement of that trend see Kosuke Mizuno and Pasuk Phongpaichit(eds.), Populism in Asia, Singapore, NUS Press with Kyoto University, 2009.5 See Uesugi Satoshi, « Nihon ni okeru 'shūkyō uyoku' no taitō to 'tsukuru kai' 'nipponkaigi' », Sensô Sekinin Kenkyû 39, 2003; David McNeill, « Nippon Kaigi and the RadicalConservative Project to Take Back Japan» , Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus, December 14,2015 (Volume 13, Issue 50, Number4) ; Mizohata Sachie, « Nippon Kaigi: Empire,Contradiction, and Japan’s Future », Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus, November 1, 2016(Volume 14, Issue 21, Number4).6 See inter alia William Callahan, «Beyond Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism: DiasporicChinese and Neo-Nationalism in China and Thailand», International Organization, Vol. 57, No.3, Summer 2003; Suh Sung, «Japanese Neo‐Nationalism and an Idea of an East AsianCommunity,» Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, volume 6, issue 4, 2006; Nicola Liscutin, ‘Surfingthe neo-nationalist wave: a case study of Manga Kenkanryū’ (2009) in Chris Berry, NicolaLiscutin, and Jonathan Mackintosh (eds) Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in NortheastAsia: What a Difference a Region Makes, 2009; Jeff Kingston (ed.), Asian NationalismsReconsidered, London, Routledge, 2015 and Jeff Kingston (ed.) Nationalism in Japan, Asia-

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Pacific Journal Japan Focus, Special Feature, October 15, 2016 (Volume 14, Issue 20, Number3).7 Kenichi Ohmae, Borderless World, London, Harper Collins, 1990.8 Cf. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism, London, Sage, 1995; Kayama Rika, PuchiNashonarizumu Shōkōgun: Wakamono-tachi no Nipponshugi, Tokyo, Chūō kōron shinsha,2002; Yuki Honda, « Review: Focusing in on Contemporary Japan's 'Youth' Nationalism »,Social Science Japan Journal, Vol. 10, n°. 2, October 2007.9 For contextualization of the Japanese experience with immigration, see Roger Goodman,Ceri Peach, Ayumi Takenaka and Paul White (eds), Global Japan. The Experience of Japan’sNew Immigrants and Overseas Communities, London, Routledge, 2003.10 See David McNeill, «History Redux. Japan’s Textbook Battle Reignites», JPRI WorkingPaper n°107, June 2005; Yoshiko Nozaki and Mark Selden, "Japanese Textbook Controversies,Nationalism, and Historical Memory: Intra- and Inter-national Conflicts," The Asia-PacificJournal, Vol 24-5-09, June 15, 2009 and Koide Reiko, " Critical New Stage in Japan's TextbookControversy," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 12, Issue 13, No. 1, March 31, 2014.11 See for example Kamila Szczepanska, The Politics of War Memory in Japan. ProgressiveCivil Society and Contestation of Memory of the Asia-Pacific War, London, Routledge, 2014.12 For an analysis of the workings of this specific networking, see Yoojin Koo, “TheTsukurukai’s Networking with Politicians: Conservative Diet Members Groups in JapaneseInterest Group Politics”, Journal of East Asian Studies, n°12, April 2014.13 William Callahan, «National Insecurities. Humiliation, Salvation and Chinese Nationalism»,Alternatives, n°29, 2004.14 It is worth noting for example that it was only after Mao’s death that a memorial for thevictims of the Nanjing Massacre was established, in 1985. Similar memorials, linked to theSecond World War, were created much earlier – the French memorial for Jewish victims ofthe Holocaust was inaugurated in 1956.15 For an analysis of the normative legacy of the Tokyo Trial, in the management of post-warformer Yugoslavia see Neil Boister and Robert Cryer, The Tokyo International MilitaryTribunal. A Reappraisal, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008.16 The post-war exploitation of the Tokyo trial’s dissenting voices (in particular the Indianjudge Radhabinod Pal) and of scholarly works on the shortcomings of the trial (notablyRichard Minear’s Victor’s Justice) by the Japanese neo-nationalist current is significant in thatregard. See Nariaki Nakazoto, Neonationalist Mythology in Postwar Japan: Pal’s DissentingJudgment at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2016. 17 Ōe Kenzaburō Okinawa nōtō, Tokyo, Iwanami shinsho, 1970.18 Sono Ayako, Aru shinwa-no haikei, Tokyo, Bungei Shunjū, 1973.19 Whereas critical thinking about Japan’s role in the Pacific War within the Americanintellectual and academic community and civil society is decades old, the US Administrationand Congress’s expression of disapproval towards Japanese revisionism is relatively recentand became clearer as historical revisionism grew to the point of being integrated intoJapan’s official political discourse. But as a Congressional report issued in early 2017 shows,the US position has been an exercise in compromise that could again be reshaped by theTrump Administration. See Congressional Research Service, “Japan-US Relations: Issues forCongress,” February 16, 2017.

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20 See Asan Special Forum, «Introduction: Five Pivots to Asia», Asan Forum, January-February2015, vol. 3, n° 1.21 Hamashita Takeshi, Chokō shisutēmu to kindai ajia, Tokyo, Iwanami Shoten, 1997.22 See Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman, Pan-Asianism. A Documentary History, 2volumes, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2011.23 Benedict Anderson went as far as to argue that the East/West division is not relevant tocharacterize different forms of nationalism. See his “Western Nationalism and EasternNationalism. Is There a Difference that Matters?”, New Left Review, 9, May-June 2001. 24 Hasegawa Tsuyoshi and Togo Kazuhiko (eds.), East Asia’s Haunted Present. HistoricalMemories and the Resurgence of Nationalism, Westport, Praeger, 2008.25 It was not until the 1990s and the war in the former Yugoslavia that the United Nationsacknowledged the issue of war crimes against women as well as gender-related massviolence. Security Council Resolution 1325 adopted in 2000 is the first to provide a legalframework to prevent sexual violence during conflicts.26 See Yang Hyunah, “Re-membering the Korean Military Comfort Women”, in Elaine Kim &Choi Chungmoo (eds), Dangerous Women. Gender and Korean nationalism, New York,Routledge, 1998.27 Hasegawa Tsuyoshi and Togo Kazuhiko (eds.), East Asia’s Haunted Present, op. cit.28 See for example John Hemmings, « Japan-UK Ties and the Quiet Revolution in JapaneseForeign Policy, ISN ETH Zürich, 6 February 2015; Barney Frank, « It’s Time to RearmGermany and Japan », Politico. EU, 22 October 2015.29 See his best-seller: Ozawa Ichirō, Nihon Kaizō Keikaku, Tokyo, Kodansha, 1993 (translatedin English as Blueprint For a New Japan, New York, Kodansha International, 1994)30 Among others, see the report « Freedom of the Press 2017 » published by Freedom House,which states that « press freedom in the United States and across the world is at its lowestpoint in 13 years. »31 David McNeill, “False Dawn: The Decline of Watchdog Journalism in Japan », The Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus, October 15, 2016, (Volume 14, Issue 20, Number 2); JeffKingston (ed), Press Freedom in Contemporary Japan, London, Routledge, 2017.32 Valerie Strauss, « Why Americans should care that Hungary is trying to shut down a leadinguniversity, » The Washington Post, 24 April 2017.33 The Abe’s government decision in June 2015 to considerably reduce funding for humanitiesand social sciences triggered a strong protest from the Japanese academic community (seeSawa Takemitsu, the president of Shiga University’s testimony: “Humanities under attack,”The Japan Times, 23 August 2015) which in turn engendered some support abroad (see theFrench Conference of University Presidents’ declaration of support: “Les SHS, enjeux dedéveloppement économique, sociétal et culturel, » 8 October 2015) This was generallydescribed in the media as a problem confined to Japan (see among others “Alarm Over HugeCuts to Humanities and Social Sciences at Japanese Universities, » Time magazine, 16September 2015).