By Nadeem Shad
Voters head to the polls today, after two years that have seen a revival – of sorts – of nationalism in Japan.
“Japan is back,” according to Shinzo Abe in a 2013 speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. That assertion has been widely debated, at least in the context of Abenomics, the Abe government’s program for reviving the Japanese economy.
And Japanese nationalism: Is that back too? That question has received far less attention, and when it has been discussed, the tone tends to be either alarmist or dismissive.
For years nationalism in Japan was relegated to the sidelines. Prevalent before and during the Second World War it found intellectual and political space in the KokugakuSchool, the works of Inoue Tetsujirō; before being institutionalized by the state in the form of a corrupted version of Bushido or in Japan’s vision of a “Co-Prosperity Sphere.”
After Japan’s defeat, nationalists faced a much more difficult environment, typified by Japan’s new pacifist constitution. For decades after the war, nationalism was kept alive by a relatively small cadre of political and intellectual elites. Incidents included the 1986 school textbook controversy, 2001 textbook controversy, and the concept of nihonjinron (PDF). However, none of these small movements gained any traction in mainstream political and social imagination.
Now, under Shinzo Abe, nationalism is making a disconcerting return to the forefront of Japanese politics. This has manifest in several ways. The first example was the lightning rise of the Japan Restoration Party to become the third-largest party in the Diet in its first election in 2012, displacing the NKP in the process. The party is by perhaps Japan’s leading nationalist, former Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara, whose his controversial proposal to buy the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands prompted their nationalization by the Japanese state, a move that sparked a serious downturn in Sino-Japanese relations.
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