The trouble with Japanese nationalism
Posted by Matt Dioguardi on March 28th, 2007
Francis Fukuyama has an interesting editorial on-line, The trouble with Japanese nationalism. Here is a small selection:
My exposure to the Japanese right came in the early 1990s, when I was on a couple of panels in Japan with Watanabe Soichi, who was selected by my Japanese publisher (unbeknownst to me) to translate my book “The End of History and the Last Man” into Japanese. Watanabe, a professor at Sophia University, was a collaborator of Shintaro Ishihara, the nationalist politician who wrote “The Japan That Can Say No” and is now the governor of Tokyo. In the course of a couple of encounters, I heard him explain in front of public audiences how the people of Manchuria had tears in their eyes when the occupying Kwantung Army left China, so grateful were they to Japan. According to Watanabe, the Pacific War boiled down to race, as the US was determined to keep a non-white people down. Watanabe is the equivalent of a Holocaust denier, but, unlike his German counterparts, he draws large and sympathetic audiences. (I am regularly sent books by Japanese writers that “explain” how the Nanjing Massacre was a big fraud.)
We must also not forget the following far right facts:
1. Japan had no choice in colonizing parts of Asia, but had to do so to protect the relevant countries from the evil European/American colonizers.
2. When it finally came to war, this was a result of conspiratorial maneuverings by FDR to force Japan to attack Pearl Harbor. Japan is not responsible for the attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR is.
3. Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent the most heinous war crime enacted upon humanity ever, period. All other tragedies pale in comparison. Only through such an evil act of terrorism was America able to defeat Japan.
4. The reason for increased crime in Japan today is the educational system that Japan was forced to accept under the occupational powers, which emphasizes individual rights over public morality. The result has been gradual degradation of morals. Evil men such as Takafumi Horie are primes examples of this.
5. The reason for Japan’s long economic stagnation is, in fact, the economic system forced upon Japan by American New Dealers, which though it worked at first …
etc, etc …