Nationalist revival plays in Japan

By REESE ERLICH

© St. Petersburg Times,
published June 2, 2001

TOKYO -- Every other Saturday, Kousaku Hino parks a huge RV in front of a Tokyo subway station, sets up microphones on the roof and harangues passers-by with acerbic, right-wing speeches.

Hino, head of the right-wing group Issui-Kai, is riding a new wave of nationalism in Japan. He wants to significantly beef up Japan's military forces and sees conservative Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi as the man to do it.

"Since Koizumi became prime minister, we came a step toward being a whole nation," said Hino. "We would like to see Japan lead the world."

Recently, groups such as Issui-Kai have tried to expand their base among alienated youth. Japan's right-wing nationalists are not just grumpy old men anymore. They now offer book-length comics, punk bands and orange hair. Karin Amamiya, who leads a right-wing punk rock group, performs in a mini-skirt with a samurai sword strapped to her waist. She croons such tunes as Get Japan Out of the U.N. and Japan is Becoming Too Peaceful.

While still occupying the Japanese political fringe, nationalists are growing in numbers and influence, according to retired professor Shinichi Arai, who heads a group fighting to stop distribution of right-wing school textbooks. "We're feeling the effect of globalization," said Arai. "It's not a good economy. So, in response, people turn to nationalism."

Yoshinori Kobayashi has penned several very popular manga, or cartoon books, glorifying Japan's role in World War II. His latest manga maintains that Taiwanese women forced into sexual slavery as "comfort women" by the Japanese military did so voluntarily and for financial gain.

Punk singer Amamiya said right-wingers widely admire Kobayashi's philosophy of "Gomanism," which roughly translates as being politically obnoxious. "For me Kobayashi's Gomanism was the bible," said Amamiya. "I saw the value in being obnoxious and playing the devil's advocate."

Extreme right-wingers don't have much organized support in Japan, but some of the issues they raise are taken up by Japan's mainstream, conservative politicians. Recently, the Ministry of Education approved junior high history and civics textbooks that contain many right-wing interpretations of recent history.

The history textbook removes all mention of the comfort women, although the issue appears in previous junior high texts.

It justifies Japan's colonization of Korea "as necessary for Japanese security."

It downplays the Nanjing Massacre in which Japanese soldiers killed an estimated 300,000 Chinese civilians during a six-week period in 1937-38.

It claims that during World War II, "Japanese victories fostered dreams of independence among many people in Southeast Asia and India."

The textbooks are historically accurate, says Akinori Takamori, director of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, the main group promoting the nationalist texts. He says that as an Asian country winning battles against Western colonial powers Japan helped inspire independence struggles after the war.

People in Asia "witnessed the Japanese victories, and they felt it was possible for them," said Takamori.

Nonsense, said Tokushi Kasahara, a history professor at Tsuru University. The textbooks parrot the old Japanese government and military justification for aggression, he said.

Kiichi Fujiwara, a professor of international politics at the University of Tokyo, said many countries don't put embarrassing information about their history in school textbooks. He notes that K-12 history books in the United States don't detail the U.S.-government atrocities against civilians during the Vietnam War.

In both the United States and Japan, politicians want people to feel proud of their history. The textbook "is about Japan as the good guy," said Fujiwara. "It touches the nationalist ego."

And that landscape is shifting rightward, according to textbook crusader Arai. While new Prime Minister Koizumi has the image of a dynamic reformer, said Arai, in reality he is beholden to right-wingers within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, who share the revisionist view of World War II.

A showdown over nationalist issues will come later this year. Koizumi recently announced he will allow the distribution of the right-wing junior high textbooks. But local school boards make the final choice, selecting from among eight government-approved history texts. The History Textbook Reform and other groups hope to get 10 percent of the boards to adopt their texts.

A progressive coalition of teachers and political activists has promised a grass-roots effort to stop them. School boards must decide by mid August.

South Korea and China have already strongly denounced the right-wing texts, and a group of South Korean legislators has filed a court suit in Tokyo to stop their distribution.

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