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春の例大祭 ３人の女性閣僚が靖国神社参拝
日本テレビ系（NNN） 4月23日(木)17時3分配信
山谷国家公安委員長や高市総務相ら３人の女性閣僚が２３日、春の例大祭に合わせて靖国神社を参拝した。 |
日本とは何か
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http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSUuTDmy8A-V1i7osvNZgHSJ8CpTuBOxl-45i9xnnMZ6AHqigIrVgThis is what Jun Eto, a professor of English literature, means when he says that the American Occupation destroyed the continuity of Japanese culture. It is what former Education Minister Fujio means when he calls the occupation period an act of ''racial revenge.'' It is the point of Takeshi Muramatsu, a professor of French literature, when he claims that ''spiritually, the postwar identity crisis is much more serious than the anti-Western allergy of the 1930's and 40's, because our postwar identity was created by foreigners.'' And it is why Nakasone appropriated 20 million yen (about $140,000 at current rates) to build a new Japanology Institute - for now, he said, ''is the time to establish the Japanese identity once again.''
Nakasone, the articulate and dapper former naval officer, has always had a strong following among Yamatoist intellectuals, including Mishima. There are signs of strain in this alliance, however, for Nakasone tries to play contradictory roles: the well-tailored, English-speaking international statesman abroad, and the tough Yamatoist at home. Like President Reagan, Nakasone reflects the anxieties and ambiguities of his intellectual backers, and, like Reagan, he has disappointed many of his more radical supporters by sacrificing idealism for the pragmatism demanded by international statesmanship. Nakasone feels strongly about the Japanology Institute, however. It is led by Prof. Takeshi Umehara, whose peregrinations through European philosophy have led him to conclude that Western civilization is like a disease threatening the modern world. The only cure, he contends, ''is to be found in Oriental culture, especially Japanese culture'' - in short, the Japanese soul. This he traces back to its pristine state, in the Jomon earthenware culture which began about 12,000 years ago, long before Chinese civilization changed the face of Japan. The pristine Jomon spirit, according to Umehara, still exists in its purest state among such minorities as Ainus and Okinawans. (To their intense annoyance, these minorities are often scrutinized by Yamatoist scholars seeking the primitive roots of the Japanese.) ''A re-evaluation of Jomon culture,'' says Umehara, ''is vital, not only for Japan, but for the rest of the world, indeed for the sake of mankind.'' In fact, more mundane reasons also lie behind this ''re-evaluation.'' In a reference to foreign criticism of Japanese trade surpluses, Umehara said that it is ''hard for foreigners to get to the heart of the Japanese identity. . . . Unless we explain to foreigners about our way of thinking, they might get the impression that we keep making gimmicks for profit only.''
http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQHqF7Vo6kn-TntojGV_EO9UQJXR91DLvXERn3BPj0NyebwQr11NQ Umehara's colleagues at the center include the biologist Kinji Imanishi, who claims to have found proof for the unique relationship between nature and the Japanese in their alleged facility to communicate with apes. Another eminent Japanese culture expert at the institute is Shunpei Ueyama, who advanced the theory that chimpanzees, whose natural habitat is nearer Europe, take a rational approach to problems, while Oriental primates prefer something closer to Zen meditation.
http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSo9RcWG_yR--ASq42ZxYvNSDY7VuEUiEAbXAxgqxwsz8no3gilUmehara and his colleagues, known collectively as the Kyoto School, have regular discussions with Prime Minister Nakasone about national identity. Their intellectual heritage goes back to such prewar scholars as the philosopher Kitaro Nishida and the cultural historian Iwao Takayama. (Imagine, if you can, a Munich school of German scholars gathered around Helmut Kohl, inspired by the ideas of Julius Streicher or Alfred Rosenberg.) These highly respected academics propagated a mystical view of the Japanese state, in which the Japanese race congealed around the sacred Emperor into an entity known as the national polity. Individuals were mere extensions of the benevolent imperial will, hence the automatic sense of social harmony, communion with nature and so forth. Or, as Tetsuro Watsuji, a like-minded scholar who was also popular before the war and is often quoted with great approval by Nakasone, put it, ''in Him [ the Emperor ] was expressed the wholeness of the people.'' Nishida, like Umehara 40 years later, believed in exporting this idea: ''A principle for the whole world will be born from our historical spirit; the way of the Emperor must be applied to all countries.'' These theories strongly influenced such wartime leaders as Gen. Hideki Tojo.
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51QAMHRVT1L.jpgAlthough these ideas concerned the Japanese soul, few were originally Japanese. Nishida borrowed many of his thoughts from Hegel and Watsuji studied in Germany with Heidegger. Emperor worship, a mystical celebration of pure blood and unique spirituality, were reactions to the confusion wrought by industrial modernization, which, in Japan, meant Westernization. Japanese thinkers in the first half of this century recognized that Germany was struggling with similar problems of cultural and political identity, and they found German Romanticism a congenial source for their ideas; it was both ''modern'' - because it was European - and a justification for using tradition as a sop to national pride. http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQsptRzeRg0lz-36gieQzPhHoNdLDmuZZiFEnMdPCnd4Mu8mIHO8gThe revival of Yamatoism today is partly a product of success. ''After the war we grew up with a negative image of ourselves,'' said Tetsuya Chikushi, senior staff writer and former editor of the liberal weekly Asahi Journal, ''but now that Japan is an economic superpower, masochism has turned to narcissism.'' The Asahi newspaper, particularly its weekly journal, is to the Yamatoists what ''the liberal East Coast press'' is to American neoconservatives. For it is the Asahi, say its opponents, not entirely without reason, that fostered the negative self-image after the war. It is also the Asahi that, almost alone, warns the Japanese about the dangers of Yamatoism. But because these warnings only concern the dangers of militarism, and not of xenophobia or racism, they miss an important point. Yamatoism is fundamentally religious. In one of the many magazines given to analyzing the Japanese soul, Yuji Kishida, a Freudian psychologist, wrote that the Japanese were able to cope with modernization not because their identity was based on firm principles, but because of the illusion that all Japanese are connected by blood. ''Moslems stop being Moslems when they lose their faith in Allah. . . . The Japanese identity is threatened when foreigners are to be assimilated in our midst. . . . The core of this belief is the Emperor, the fact that all Japanese are related by blood to the Emperor . . . as long as we believe that, the Japanese identity won't be threatened.'' Yamatoists share with other fundamentalists, from Jerry Falwell's born-again Christians to Moslem revivalists in Pakistan or Malaysia, a vaguely idealistic rebellion against the modern consumer society and its lack of spiritual values. Lacking a universal religious tradition, Japanese fundamentalists turn inwards toward Yamatoism. To Yamatoists, the world without values is a direct result of, to use a current Japanese buzz word, kokusaika, or internationalization, a concept encouraged by Nakasone himself when he is playing his alternate role of modern statesman. That the Japanese must be more ''international'' - to cope with international competition -has been a cliche for some years. But nobody knows quite how to go about it or quite what it means. Most Japanese love international products - French clothes, British pop music, American ice cream - but are suspicious of international people. Japanese thinkers of the late 19th century coined the slogan Wakon Yosai (Japanese spirit, Western techniques) to describe the state of being modern and still Japanese. This ideal, never realistic, is now hopelessly confused. Just as the craze for Zen among some Japanese hippies in the 60's was imported from California, the recent fashion for things Japanese often mimics the Western taste for Japonaiserie. Thus one finds sushi restaurants in Tokyo called Sushi Baa (sushi bars), with high-tech decor and granite counters - ''just like in L.A.'' The cultural critic Hiroshi Unno calls modern Japanese culture ''Japonesque.'' |
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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. |
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Japan's Resurgent Far Right Tinkers With History
By HOWARD W. FRENCH Published: March 25, 2001 Hironobu Kaneko, a 21-year-old college student, remembers the powerful emotions stirred in him three years ago when he read a best-selling book of cartoons that extolled, rather than denigrated, the history of Japan's former Imperial Army. http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51D0YPA7TWL.jpgThe thick cartoon book, or manga, is called ''On War'' and celebrates the old army as a noble Asian liberation force rather than a brutal colonizer. It lauds Japan's civilization as the oldest and most refined. And it dismisses as fictions well-documented atrocities, from the 1937 Nanjing massacre to the sexual enslavement of 200,000 so-called comfort women in World War II. ''This cartoon was saying exactly what we were all feeling back then,'' said Mr. Kaneko, an eager and articulate student who is spending his winter break working as an intern in the Japanese Parliament. ''The manga was addressing matters that many Japanese people have simply been avoiding, like we've been putting a lid over something smelly. I just felt it said things that needed to be said.'' Asked exactly what that message was, he said, ''That we should not be so masochistic about our history.'' Unlike such countries as Austria and France, Japan has not had a prominent political party that has been aggressively nationalistic since World War II. Ultraconservatives from right-wing intellectuals to criminal syndicates have always maintained discreet contacts with the conservative governing party, the Liberal Democrats.
For decades after Japan's defeat in the war, the most visible sign of the survival of hard-core nationalists here was just as powerful a reminder of their fringe group status: the black sound trucks, mostly regarded as public nuisances, that blasted imperial hymns and xenophobic speeches on crowded streets. But as attested by the huge sales of the nationalistic manga -- drawn and written by a best-selling author, Yoshinori Kobayashi -- Japan's far right has been elbowing its way into the mainstream, at a time when the country is increasingly distressed about its political and economic decline. http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/517QVYEHJAL.jpgMr. Kobayashi's latest manga, ''On Taiwan,'' has sold more than 250,000 copies since it was published in November and has created sharp tensions with Japan's neighbors for its depiction of the war. One frame, for example, says that Taiwanese women volunteered to become the sexual servants of Japanese soldiers and that the role even offered the women social advancement. The government has remained silent. But the ambitions of Japan's new right-wing activists go beyond incendiary characterizations of the war, or mere provocation. Although their movement is still somewhat amorphous, its wide-ranging agenda includes returning to the stricter, more conservative values of the past, rewriting the Constitution to allow Japan to make war, and re-arming so that Japan would be prepared to go it alone in a world they depict as full of threats to its survival. ''We have become like a timid monkey that cannot even raise the possibility of war,'' Mr. Kobayashi wrote in ''On War,'' which has sold nearly a million copies. Later, he picked up on the same theme: ''Only Japan refuses to recognize its own justness. Is this because its people have turned into mice with electrodes stuck into their head? Remove the electrodes, Japan! There was justice in Japan's war! We must protect our grand fathers' legacy!'' Mr. Kobayashi, who is a young-looking 47, has become an omnipresent media star here. He wears his hair in a feathery, parted style reminiscent of Oscar Wilde; he dresses in dark, stylish European suits -- no ties -- and wears designer glasses. In a lengthy interview, he spoke softly, but in much the same unapologetic vein. ''Whenever history is discussed, Nanjing massacre, comfort women and Unit 731 are always raised as if Japanese history consists of only these things,'' he said. ''Everyone focuses only on these points to the extent I feel like bringing forth a counterargument, asking them why.'' Unit 731 of the Japanese Army experimented with chemical weapons on live prisoners. ''These issues have become the fumie for our historical perceptions,'' Mr. Kobayashi said. Fumie were brass tablets, typically bearing a cross, on which suspected followers of outlawed Christianity were ordered to walk under the assumption that a Christian would refuse to trample a sacred image. ''But there are a vast number of historical facts that make up Japan,'' he went on. ''We are just thinking of what to choose out of them in order to explain the present.'' Akimasa Miyake, a historian at Chiba University, disagrees, and has helped organize seminars for students to address what opponents of Mr. Kobayashi say are misperceptions that the students have picked up from his work. ''Since the mid-1990's, revisionism, or some would say nationalism, has been surging in Japan,'' he said. ''There is a feeling of emergency here, and we are very worried. But fortunately, so far this sort of reactionary movement hasn't reached the core of the society.'' Many of these themes have already been picked up by mainstream politicians, however, particularly those in the Liberal Democratic Party. The last two prime ministers, both Liberal Democrats, have enacted measures aimed at pleasing this constituency, from making the Japanese flag and anthem legally recognized symbols of the nation for the first time, to creating a national youth service, which critics complain is really aimed at preaching traditional conservative values. http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31nbUQatQKL.jpgShintaro Ishihara, the strongly conservative governor of Tokyo, has become one of the country's most popular politicians in part by sounding a xenophobic alarm about crime by foreigners, and by proposing that the United States surrender control over a major air base it maintains here under a bilateral defense treaty. The new nationalists' most ringing success, though, has been at rewriting history, taking advantage of a textbook reform won by liberal intellectuals in the 1980's after two decades of hard battle. The reforms limit the staunchly conservative Education Ministry to screening books for factual accuracy instead of writing history. But now the far right is rushing to put out histories that many academics say will whitewash the past. A nationalist group known as the Association to Create New History Textbooks has written a secondary school book that is in the final stages of government screening. http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Cy32SzadL.jpg''Why should Japan be the only country that should teach kids -- 12- to 15-year-old kids -- bad things about itself?'' said Kanji Nishio, a leader of the Create New History group. ''I think it is ridiculous, and very sad and tragic that Japan cannot write its own patriotic history. We lost the war, and a fantasy was born that by talking bad about yourself, you can strengthen your position. I call that masochistic.'' Mr. Nishio, a professor of history at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo, has long been active in right-wing intellectual circles, but he never had much impact until his movement associated itself with Mr. Kobayashi and younger popular authors and celebrities. Now he has become their guru, saying for example that China fabricated the Nanjing massacre to stir nationalist sentiment and that the United States deliberately snared Japan into war. The efforts to rewrite Japanese history have seriously heightened tensions with Japan's neighbors. South Korea, which only recently reconciled with Japan after years of hatred for its harsh imperial occupation, has sent numerous officials here to warn of serious consequences if the whitewashed histories are approved. ''Despite Japan's claim that Korea's and China's protests were amply taken into consideration, the next history text, whose entirety will come to light at the end of this month, will be like a time bomb in Korean-Japanese relations,'' said a recent editorial in Joong Ang Ilbo, a leading South Korean newspaper. In a Japan where the last embers of major social activism seem to have died out a generation ago, leading intellectuals and other public figures have slowly begun to rally over the textbook issue. One group, led by the 1994 Nobel literature laureate, Kenzaboro Oe, denounced what it called ''watering down the infliction of damage on other nations and the justification of Japan's invasion and colonial rule.'' ''The voice of criticism has been raised from Korea and China, but of course the textbook issue is our own problem,'' the group said in statement. ''Can we raise the Japanese of the future who must live in international society by such textbooks?'' Photos: A cartoon by Yoshinori Kobayashi, below, hails the Japanese Army, which, the artist says, ''sent a shock to the eyes of white people from racist Western powers who only regarded colored people as monkeys.'' (Kaku Kurita for The New York Times) |
