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http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcThBGAstxzmpi1HA5GMP9J-Edi5yZPUSXjnWB8uvNXKhDWEPAOKWAA NEW JAPANESE NATIONALISM 

By IAN BURUMA; Ian Buruma is cultural editor of the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review and the author of ''Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, Drifters and Other Japanese Cultural Heroes.''
Published: April 12, 1987 

 

 

 

 

 

IN A STUDENT AREA OF Tokyo called Takadanobaba, behind a peculiar sculpture showing a nude Marilyn Monroe about to pounce on a sumo wrestler, lies the office of Kunio Suzuki, leader of a ''spiritual movement'' called the Issuikai.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/514QPRCPESL.jpgThe group produces a monthly paper called Reconquista, which aims to reconquer what Suzuki thinks has been lost: the pure Japanese spirit. On the wall of Suzuki's tiny office hang pictures of Emperor Hirohito in uniform, snapped sometime during the 1930's, and of Yukio Mishima, the ultranationalist writer who committed seppuku, a form of ritual suicide, in 1970.

Suzuki is a quiet man in his early 40's, casually dressed, more like a research fellow than a right-wing activist. He receives many fan letters from young women, who profess to admire his romantic spirit.

He explained that ''because of biased textbooks'' many people of his generation felt guilty about the Japanese role in World War II, ''and people who did better than I did at school all joined the left-wing student movement.'' He concluded that there was something wrong with Japanese education. He also worries about the spiritual state of most Japanese, ''who spend their time reading comics and watching TV,'' but he conceded they were probably quite content. A young member of the group, who had been engrossed in a book on terrorism, suddenly broke his silence to exclaim that it was all America's doing: ''They want us to be weak. That is why they rigged our education system. To stop Japan from being a major power.''

http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSlyGYub8OS3k8ayKqokh_1zHaHWk61AwDbJsrLWTifO6Sxw2KIzwSome call it neonationalism. It is manifested in many of Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone's speeches extolling the virtues of the ''monoracial state'' - including the one last September in which he suggested that the presence of racial minorities in the United States drags educational standards down. It was behind the dismissal, around the same time, of Education Minister Masayuki Fujio, who believes that Japanese textbooks are not sufficiently patriotic, that Nakasone is soft on foreigners, that Japan did ''nothing to be ashamed of'' during the war and that ''the core of our education should be to make our children Japanese again.''

When national soul becomes a tool of political propaganda in Japan, it is time for the rest of the world to take note, especially when steadily worsening trade conflicts and American threats of protectionism could easily provoke an emotional swing of the old Japanese pendulum, from emulation to rejection of the West. The more extremist ideals of right-wing nationalists may not be widespread, but the notion of Japanese uniqueness and the feeling of Japan being misunderstood and unfairly treated by the rest of the world are widely held and already impinge on international trade.

Almost no rice can be imported in Japan, for example, because, in the words of a prominent Liberal Democratic Party politician, ''rice is the core of our spiritual civilization.'' Japanese ski manufacturers tried to make the Government declare European-made skis - one of the few European successes in Japan - unsuitable for the Japanese market, because of the uniqueness of Japanese snow.

Harsh protective legislation simply confirms all the paranoid feeling of ''us against them'' disseminated through the Japanese media. If the Reagan Administration's new tariffs on imports of Japanese electronic products - imposed in retaliation for alleged Japanese ''dumping'' of semiconductors in the United States - go into effect as scheduled later this week, that paranoia will undoubtedly increase. And it will, in turn, increase Prime Minister Nakasone's domestic political difficulties as he tries to comply with American pressure to open Japanese markets, which will be high on the agenda when Nakasone arrives in Washington for a state visit on April 29.

JAPAN'S AMBIVALENCE TOWARD the West did not begin with the recent ''economic miracle.'' Just three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a young writer called Ango Sakaguchi wrote a startling essay entitled ''A Personal View of Japanese Culture.'' It began by quoting foreigners extolling the beauty of ''traditional''

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51gB7pS20kL.jpgJapan, and lamenting modern vulgarity. Jean Cocteau, on a visit to Japan, had asked why Japanese no longer wore kimonos. ''What is tradition?'' countered Ango. ''What is national character? Is there something inherent in our character that gave the Japanese a definite predisposition to invent the kimono and wear it? . . . What the hell is the kimono? We came across Western clothes a thousand years late, that is all.'' Ango further observed that he was not the only one in Japan who favored modern change. ''Most Japanese, when they see the old look of their native places destroyed and new Western-style buildings appear, are happy, not sad. . . . We wouldn't mind if all the temples in Kyoto and all the Buddhas in Nara were utterly destroyed, as long as the streetcars keep running. . . . As long as there is life, our distinctive character will remain in good shape.''

Perhaps most Japanese feel that way, but when Ango wrote this essay, in 1942, the cult of the unique and ancient national soul had reached its hysterical peak. Western influence, officially regarded as spiritual pollution, was proscribed. And far from being in good shape, the distinctive character of the Japanese had been the focus of anguished debate and soul-searching among intellectuals for at least a century. Japan had been so quickly and successfully modernized that she could match many Western powers in military might. But the price was a kind of permanent crisis of identity manifested in wild swings between worshipful emulation and violent rejection of the West.

 

 

One wonders what Ango would think of Tokyo today. The Japanese have got more than streetcars. They have the world's fastest trains, the largest department stores, an average of two television sets per family, artificial singing birds in underground shopping malls, nouvelle cuisine, giant video screens blasting rock music over broad avenues lined with so-called fashion buildings; they have high-tech restaurants, Colonel Sanders, Haagen-Dazs and Maxim's. They have Disneyland.

According to a poll published last year in the Japanese magazine Economist, more than 80 percent of the inhabitants of two Tokyo neighborhoods (one middle- and one working-class) thought the Japanese were ''one of the greatest races in the world.'' More than 70 percent thought that Japanese society was among the best in the world. Echoing Ango's words, the cultural critic Shuichi Kato once wrote: ''The mass of people accept our hybrid culture just as it is. . . . They never think of purifying this hybrid culture. . . . It is only the intellectuals who have that ambition.''

Problems begin when these purifying efforts are politicized, when politicians join the thinkers in their quest for national identity. This has been the case during the Nakasone era. Japan's national soul - how it must be nurtured, defended, even held up as a model to the outside world - is being endlessly debated by politicians, scholars and journalists. Defining Japaneseness has grown into a huge intellectual industry, responsible for hundreds of books, thousands of articles, television programs and radio shows. There is a radio station, Radio Nippon, which does little else but discuss the issues of the Japanese soul. A neurologist made a name for himself by writing a best seller about the uniqueness of the Japanese brain.

This obsessive self-analysis is like a national neurosis - and like most neuroses, it is frequently irrational. And the trade disputes so much in the news raise a larger, and deeper, question: How long can an increasingly interdependent world live with a developed nation that still clings to 19th-century ideals of national purity?

THE PROPONENTS OF NATIONAL soul are called the Minzokuha, the National Soul School. Minzoku, unlike minshu (masses), or kokumin (national populace), is somewhat akin to the Nazi use of the word Volk. It implies blood purity and spiritual unity. It is the kind of national mysticism that appeals to people who are still deeply anxious about their place in the world, and who, periodically, seek to retreat from modern confusion into the security of the ''monoracial state.'' A Japanese playwright once likened his country to a glass dome, transparent but impenetrable to outsiders. The glass wall is the mystique that envelops the Japanese Volk, or, as the Minzokuha prefers to call it, the Yamato minzoku, after the ancient clan that unified Japan as a kingdom around the fifth century, a period associated with pristine Japanese values.

The cult of national soul, or Yamatoism, is not the same thing as militarism, though the connection was there in the past. Indeed, even pacifism can be part of the cult. Many Japanese are convinced that Japan is a nation blessed with a uniquely peaceful disposition, threatened only by belligerent foreigners. What is disturbing about this type of chauvinism is that it is racist. What is more disturbing is that only a very few Japanese are conscious of this. When I wrote about this phenomenon previously, a few Japanese agreed, but many appeared utterly baffled. ''We are not Nazis,'' said one diplomat. Of course not, but some of the nationalist ideas are awfully close.

Hiroshima offers an interesting example. Many Koreans - estimates go as high as 20,000 - died in the bombing, yet none are commemorated along with the Japanese victims. Only after endless agitation by Korean groups in Japan were Koreans allowed to have a monument of their own, outside the fence of Peace Park. Second-class status in the monoracial state persists after death.

When, some years ago, the Mayor of Hiroshima suggested building an Auschwitz Museum in his city, implying that the Japanese and the Jews were the main victims of World War II, nobody thought it inappropriate, or even in bad taste. Just as nobody seems to care about the recent Japanese best sellers explaining how the world is dominated by a Jewish conspiracy - probably an idea carried over from prewar education, which was heavily influenced by Germany.

Not, I hasten to add, that the Japanese are anti-Semitic; the point is rather that racism is only understood to be an issue when Japanese are the victims. This is precisely the case in much of the writings by Japan's new Yamatoists; the loss of Japanese soul, national identity, Yamato spirit, or whatever one wishes to call it, is blamed on foreigners, specifically Americans, who occupied Japan after the war, imposed the ''Peace Constitution,'' a new educational system and, through the Tokyo trials, a view of the recent past which condemned Japan's military adventures in Asia and the Pacific.