Foreign Influence and Academic Integrity By Professor Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Emeritus Professor in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, and a past President of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, April 22, 2021, Australian Institute of International Affairs.
The risks of improper foreign influence on academic research have become a topic of growing concern in many parts of the world over the past year or so. Much of this concern has focused on efforts by China to restrict the freedom of expression of academics and students abroad as well as at home, or to obtain access to research findings. Anxiety about the role of China is very well-founded, but this issue clearly goes further than any one country. Many national governments or overseas interest groups seek in one way or another to exert their influence on research being carried out beyond the boundaries of their own nation.
Professor Morris-Suzuki uses as an example the Government of Japan's activities to influence the discussion and academic work on the Comfort Women--sex slaves to Imperial Japan's military and colonial administrators. Most of these women and girls were forced into this service. The government currently contends that no official Japanese participated in coercing anyone. This is contrary to fact.
Japan's government and its supporters have cultivated a network of history denialist groups that want to change the history narrative of aggressive industrialization and imperialism to one of innovative opportunity cut short by the victimization of the West. The war was forced upon Japan and war crimes were inventions of the Allies.
Morris-Suzuki focuses on the flawed Mark Ramseyer journal article that claims the Comfort Women were simply commercial prostitutes. She points out how this Harvard Law School professor ignored traditional scholarship and current documentation. It is alarming that he is promoted and defended by the Japanese government and well-known rightists as an example of the assault on free speech. As a result, she believes this is the "worst crisis of academic integrity" in her lifetime.
Japan's "weaponization of research" is a model followed by many. Scholars are not necessarily being paid to say something, but support is forthcoming to those who are already sympathetic. Money amplifies denier history, that she likens to Holocaust denial. What was once ignored backwater arguments are now promoted above rigorous scholarship and historical truth.
Morris-Suzuki was asked for specific examples of Japanese pressure. She could not cite any other than to say that implicit pressure is exerted by Japan. A good example of this, however, was the title and description of her presentation by the Australian Institute of International Affairs. Nowhere is there mention of Japan or Comfort Women or Ramseyer. AIIA protected itself by simply giving an anodyne title of foreign influence suggesting the talk is about China.
Only those who attended the event would know, and they were few.
Why Comfort Women Matter to the U.S.-Japan Values Summit Getting history right matters and Washington needs to hold its allies to the same moral values and standards that America and its allies claim to represent.
by Tessa Morris Suzuki, Professor Emerita of Japanese History, School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University and Mindy L. Kotler, Director of Asia Policy Point in Washington, DC.
In February 1942, after sinking the SS Vyner Brooke off the coast of Bangka Island near the Java Sea, the occupying Imperial Japanese gave the Australian and European women who survived a choice: they could starve in a prison camp on Sumatra or sign a document to provide sexual services on demand for Japanese troops.
This episode and many others like it during the war in the Pacific have reverberated over the generations. On Friday, nearly eighty years later, this history will underlie President Joe Biden’s summit meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga.
The White House apparently invited Suga to be the first foreign leader to visit the White House in order to mirror Suga’s predecessor Shinzo Abe’s pre-inauguration meeting with Donald Trump in 2017—and to cover for the impending conflict over values. Although the U.S.-Japan Alliance is heralded as rock solid, opinion writers have been quick to point out the mercurial state of American foreign policy. They try to brush aside what the President might ask of Suga by saying that Americans change course very quickly and unexpectedly. In other words, Japan does not need to take the meeting over values too seriously.
All of this is a deflection from Japan’s responsibility for the rift in the Alliance. The Suga Administration has accelerated a project started under the Abe Administration to manipulate and rewrite the history of the Pacific War, and particularly of women and girls trafficked and coerced into military brothels throughout the areas occupied by Japan during World War II—known as Comfort Women.
Despite well-established history of the many ways in which women and girls of multiple nationalities were forced into sexual slavery to Imperial Japan’s military, the Japanese government tries to present the issue simply as one between Japan and an overwrought, never satisfied South Korea. The result has eroded trust between these two major American allies, and frustrated Washington.
At the heart of the problem lies the question of whether or not the Japanese government admits that Japan’s military was responsible for the Comfort Women system, and accepts that the women and girls involved were recruited by deception or coercion. A 1993 statement issued by Japan’s then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono acknowledged the role of the military in the comfort women system, including the fact that “at the time administrative/military personnel directly took part in the recruitments,” and admitted that some women had been recruited through coercion.
The Japanese government states that they have “inherited” the Kono Statement, carefully avoiding any promise to “uphold,” “commit to” or “fulfill” the promises of the Statement. Instead, conservative governments have steadily promoted the view that there are no documents that show forcible removal of any women by military or government officials. A review of the history of the Statement, supervised by then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga in 2014, implied that Japan had caved in to pressure from the Korean government, undermining public confidence in the Statement’s content.
The Statement, in fact, has been so diminished that the government has recently announced it will no longer use the term “military comfort women” or “so-called military comfort women” (the expressions used in the Kono Statement): the word “military” has been removed from this phrase because it highlights the role of Japan’s armed forces in the comfort women system.
A recent academic article by Harvard Law Professor Mark Ramseyer has helped to fuel Japan’s development of a revisionist narrative that depicts the Comfort Women as willing prostitutes. Astonishingly, this article presents all Japanese and Korean Comfort Women as contractual workers under Japan’s prostitution system, in which (Ramseyer suggests) children as young as ten-years-old knowingly and voluntarily negotiated prostitution contracts. Some Japanese ruling party politicians have enthusiastically promoted this version of history, while the Japanese Education Minister has publicly suggested that Ramseyer’s article is part of the process by which we “approach the truth” of history.
Tokyo’s position is so antithetical to any contemporary understanding of trafficking and sexual violence in warfare that American policymakers must be stunned. The Japanese government’s blanket denial of forced recruitment of comfort women not only contradicts irrefutable evidence of force in multiple cases; it also shows a fundamental lack of understanding of sex trafficking and sexual slavery. This is because the Japanese authorities do not see the skewed power relationship nor comprehend the psychology of coercion.
The dispute itself is the tip of much larger and troubling “history wars”: part of a push to revise memories of the Asia Pacific War as a whole. Last month, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party announced that one of its main strategic objectives for 2021 was a further expansion of the government budget for telling its version of history internationally. With Tokyo demanding the removal of Comfort Women memorials from sites in America and Germany, and using pressure to have one ripped out of its foundation in sight of the Bayview Hotel in Manila where hundreds of Filipino women were gang-raped by retreating Japanese troops, this “war” is not confined to South Korea.
In releasing the 2020 Human Rights Report, Secretary of State Antony Blinken lamented that “the trend lines on human rights continue to move in the wrong direction.” A concerning part of this trend are denials in Japan and the United States of the terror that compelled women like some Vyner Brooke survivors to “choose” to join a Comfort Station. Blinken said in his remarks: “standing for people’s freedom and dignity honors America’s most sacred values.” The U.S.-Japan Alliance is said to be based on those shared values. Now Washington and Tokyo need to discuss what this means in practice. The Biden-Suga Summit will test the U.S. Administration’s ability to be fair, but firm with allies as well as with those it sees as rivals and security threats.
By Tessa Morris-Suzuki, an ARC Laureate Fellow based at the School of Culture, History and Language, at the College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University and an APP member.
On 16 February, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida signed a ‘Strategy for Co-operation in the Pacific’, in which both countries emphasised their shared values of ‘democracy, human rights and the rule of law’.
As they were doing so, Japanese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Shinsuke Sugiyama was in Geneva addressing a meeting of the UN committee which oversees the implementation of one of the world’s key human rights accords: the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). On the agenda was the Japanese government’s treatment of the problems of memory, justice and redress arising from the imperial military’s mass recruitment of women (the so-called ‘comfort women’) to military brothels during the Pacific War.
It was a great opportunity for the Abe administration to follow up its 28 December 2015 joint statement with South Korea on ‘comfort women’. In the December statement Foreign Minister Kishida acknowledged ‘an involvement of the Japanese military authorities at that time’ and passed on Prime Minister Abe’s ‘sincere apologies and remorse to all the women who underwent immeasurable and painful experiences and suffered incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women’.
The December statement committed the Japanese government to contributing to a fund to assist surviving South Korean former ‘comfort women’, but its rather curious wording left some observers unsure just what Japan had apologised for.
Since coming to power the Abe administration has told the world that it is continuing to uphold — or (in the Japanese version) to ‘inherit’ (keisho suru) — the 1993 Kono Declaration. In that declaration, issued after an extensive study by the Japanese government, Japan acknowledged that ‘in many cases [‘comfort women’] were recruited against their own will, through coaxing, coercion, etc., and that, at times, administrative/military personnel directly took part in the recruitments’. The Japanese government also promised to ‘face squarely the historical facts as described above instead of evading them, and take them to heart as lessons of history’.
If the Abe administration has indeed ‘inherited’ the Kono Declaration, one would assume that Abe’s December ‘sincere apologies and remorse’ were apologising for the historical fact that many ‘comfort women’ were recruited and held against their will, and a reaffirmation of Japan’s determination to take the lessons of history to heart.
But oddly, neither Abe nor any of his ministers or spokespeople has ever been heard to echo the key words of the Kono Declaration. Instead, when challenged on the question of state responsibility for the ‘comfort women’ issue, they repeatedly respond with a formula developed during the first Abe administration of 2006–2007: ‘in the documents discovered by the Japanese government, none confirmed the forcible taking away of comfort women’.
This statement is extremely significant. It treats official Japanese government and military documents (the most incriminating of which were deliberately burnt in the closing days of the war) as the only reliable source of information on the topic. It entirely discounts the testimony of surviving former ‘comfort women’. This includes testimony collected and taken into account by the Japanese government at the time of the Kono Declaration. By implication, this formula says to the survivors that their testimony is at best unreliable evidence and at worst lies.
So the key question about the 28 December deal was this: when Foreign Minister Kishida referred to ‘an involvement of the Japanese military authorities at that time’, was he speaking about the involvement of the military in recruiting, transporting and holding women against their will? Was he upholding the promises of the Kono Declaration? If so, then the December accord was indeed a major step forward in Japan–South Korea relations. If not, it starts to look uncomfortably like a move that was motivated less by a desire to bring justice and redress to the victims than to buy their silence.
Foreign Ministry official Sugiyama’s response to the CEDAW committee on 16 February made the answer to these questions disturbingly plain. Pressed on the comfort women issue, he replied ‘in the documents discovered by the Japanese government, none confirmed the forcible taking away of comfort women’. He added that the notion that comfort women had been forcibly recruited was a misconception based on fabricated testimony by a former Japanese labour recruiter named Yoshida Seiji, and that this misinformation had been disseminated by the liberal newspaper Asahi Shimbun, which later retracted the claims.
This statement by Sugiyama is entirely misleading. The Yoshida testimony (which was reported in the early 1990s by almost all the Japanese mainstream media, not just Asahi Shimbun) has been known to be unreliable for more than a decade. And it has had no significant influence on the ‘comfort women’ debate in recent years. More importantly, it is far from the only evidence. The evidence that women were recruited against their will comes from a mass of testimonies from survivors and other eyewitnesses as well as evidence given to war crimes trials and court cases, alongside other historical material.
Australian survivor Jan Ruff-O’Herne, who was marched out of an internment camp and into a military brothel at gunpoint during the war, has never received an apology. Nor have many others forcibly recruited in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
It is time for Japan’s friends and allies, particularly those like Australia who plan to cooperate with Japan in protecting human rights around the region, to ask the hard questions. Will Prime Minister Abe and his cabinet repeat the words of the Kono Declaration loud and clear? Or will they admit that they have abandoned the declaration? They cannot have it both ways. Sugiyama insisted to the CEDAW committee that the Japanese government is not ‘denying history’. Now we need an answer to the follow-up question: which history are they not denying?
In September 2015, several hundred mainly foreign academics and journalists received unsolicited copies of two poorly written books from Japan, accompanied by a signed letter from politician Inoguchi Kuniko. "In East Asia, the regional history of the 20th century has been incorrectly distorted (sic) by some individuals due to their current domestic political ambitions,” said the letter. “I believe it is important for you, as a highly esteemed member of the academic and policy circles (sic), to look into the books which I am enclosing with this letter."
The first of the books, “History Wars,” published by the Sankei Shimbun, a conservative newspaper, said records of Japanese misconduct during World War II were exaggerated or false. China and South Korea have used these claims to wage a long battle in America to distort views of the war, with the goal of “weakening the US-Japan alliance,” it said. “Japan’s postwar governments have not only failed to wage an effective rebuttal against the propaganda maneuvers of Japan’s adversaries, but have also fallen witlessly into their…traps.”
In “Getting Over it! Why Korea Needs to Stop Bashing Japan,” Sonfa Oh, a naturalized Japanese academic originally from South Korea, argues that successive generations of Korean leaders have resorted to historical fabrication, and “capricious, opportunistic egoism” to damage Japan and its reputation around the world. Japanese rule of Korea from 1910–1945 was essentially benign, writes Oh. The Japan in both publications is cast as well meaning, stoic and endlessly forbearing in its dealings with its mendacious, two-faced neighbors.
The mass mail-shot is part of an occasionally clumsy but well-funded attempt to transform international perceptions of Japan. A campaign of “strategic communications,” with a budget of over half-a-billion dollars, has been launched to counter negative PR and cultivate a generation of pro-Japanese foreign commentators. Japanese embassies and consulates have been instructed to be more proactive in challenging perceived slights, such as foreign textbooks that stir the history pot. Brookings, Carnegie, CSIS and other think tanks have been given millions of dollars to promote Japan; millions more has gone to support chairs at Columbia, Georgetown and MIT universities.
At the same time, an informal list of friends and foes appears to have emerged. Outside Japan, those considered allies include a small group of mainly US-based academics, journalists and rightwing bloggers. The foreign enemies list is topped by The New York Times, which neoconservatives have long seen as leftwing and anti-Japanese. The hundreds of foreign scholars who signed the 2015 Open Letter in Support of Historians in Japan, an attempt to counter the revisionist drift under the Abe administration, are also under suspicion. It is the letter that appears to have prompted the mailing.
The risk of overreach in this project is never far away. In one case, Japanese foreign ministry officials accused Germany’s largest business newspaper, Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung, of carrying pro-Chinese propaganda. Its Tokyo-based correspondent Carsten Germis wrote a widely circulated article lamenting what he called a crude government attempt to censor views it disliked. Dispatches of diplomats to the offices of history professors and publishers, and attempts to nudge foreign journalists away from academics critical of the government, have also triggered PR blowback.
The book campaign struck some, therefore, as naïve, at best. Did Inoguchi think that a few hundred pages of thin, selectively argued academic gruel might tilt a complex debate that has waged for years in favor of Abe style conservatism? The point, she insists, is to circulate ideas that “have not been represented” in the mainstream. “I felt I was in a position to work with others in enhancing views about what we have done since the war, as a new nation state,” she said. “It is not to justify anything,” she added, citing her own credentials as a fighter for women’s rights, in Korea and elsewhere.
Inoguchi’s decision to lend her imprimatur to the books was considered surprising. A political scientist and internationalist known for work on disarmament and gender issues, she had not been previously been linked with Japanese neo-conservatism. One clue to her apparent shift is found in her association with Nippon Kaigi, or the Japan Conference. Interviewed by telephone, Inoguchi said that she is a member of the Chiba Prefectural branch of the lobby group, but insists they part company on one issue: “If they try to justify the past, that is the point on which I disagree. I don’t try to rewrite history; it cannot be undone.”
Justifying the uncomfortable past — and recasting it for 21st Century Japan is, however, precisely the mission of Nippon Kaigi. The group’s charter lists six key goals: “respect the Imperial Family as the center of Japanese life;” nurture patriotism; promote a new Constitution “based on our nation’s true characteristics;” protect the sovereignty and honor of the nation’s independence; nurture young people to grow up with pride and love for their nation; and establish a strong army and promote the nation's status abroad.
Box: Nippon Kaigi acts based on the following principles:
1) Respect the Imperial Family, the center of a unified Japan, and nurture compatriotism.
2) Promote a new Constitution based on our nation's true characteristics.
3) Protect the sovereignty and honor of our independent state and realize responsible politics that serve peace and order.
4) Revive tradition in education and nurture young people to grow up with pride and love for their nation.
5) Cultivate a spirit to protect the nation and to provide it with enough defensive power to secure its safety and contribute to world peace.
6) Widen the understanding of the world, aim to co-exist (with others) and contribute to promoting the nation's status in the global community and (to building) friendship (with other nations).
Source: Nippon Kaigi
In practice, says Tawara Yoshifumi, who heads the nonprofit group Children and Textbooks Japan Network 21, which monitors neo-conservative movements, this is a shopping list of revisionist causes: applaud Japan’s wartime campaign to “liberate” Asia from Western colonialism; rebuild the armed forces, instill patriotism among students brainwashed by “leftwing” teachers and revere the Emperor as he was worshipped before the calamity of World War II.
“They have trouble accepting the reality that Japan lost the war,” explains Kobayashi Setsu, a leading constitutional scholar and former Nippon Kaigi member. Kobayashi says the group is run by people who want to revive Japan’s prewar Meiji Constitution, which served as the basic law before it was replaced during the US-led Allied Occupation between 1945 and 1952. Indeed, some, he says, are descendants of the people who started the war and are nostalgic for Japan’s great power status.
Nippon Kaigi’s platform is rooted in profound resentment about the postwar settlement. Its supporters say the liberal Constitution, with its “masochistic” education system, has emasculated Japan. They despise the so-called victory justice meted out at the Tokyo war crimes trials and the pacifist clause that neutered the country’s armed forces. Hyakuta Naoki, Nippon Kaigi sympathizer, bestselling author and former governor of NHK, Japan’s public service broadcaster, expressed some of these core sentiments during a now infamous speech in 2014.
Campaigning for Tamogami Toshio, the ex-Air Self-Defense Force chief of staff who was running for Tokyo governor, Hyakuta called the March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo and and the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which collectively killed perhaps 300,000 people, “cruel massacres.” The Tokyo war crimes trial, he said, was “conducted to cover up those atrocities.” It wasn’t only the Japanese who committed war crimes, and there was no reason to teach such things to children, he said. “I want to first teach children what a wonderful nation Japan is.”
The drive to rewrite not just the history of World War II, but exhume the foundations laid down by the Occupation during the years after, naturally invites serious tensions with Japan’s US sponsor. In April 2015, for example, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo delivered a speech to both the US Senate and House of Representatives — the first by a Japanese leader — lauding deepening trade ties and the military alliance with America. The talk, fine-tuned for his American audience by speechwriter Taniguchi Tomohiko, cast Abe as a defender of strongdemocratic principles, a leader with “deep repentance” for the “lost dreams of young Americans” who died fighting Japan in World War II.
Conspicuously missing, noted veteran Japan watcher Gavan McCormack, were the core Abe values that Congress could hardly be expected to share: “take back Japan,” “cast off the postwar regime” and revise the U.S.-imposed Constitution; teach “correct” history to make the country’s youth proud and “revere the spirits of Japan’s war dead,” including those convicted as war criminals. Washington seems unaware of these contradictions, or is inclined to overlook them in return for Abe’s promise of greater military cooperation and support for TPP.
Much of the far-right agenda in Japan slips past American politicians, says Tessa Morris-Suzuki, a professor of modern Japanese history at Australian National University. “They don’t really see how this will play out in East Asia because they need the U.S. bases (in Japan),” she says. “The Abe administration doesn’t think Japan did anything wrong in the war — they just think it was unfortunate that they lost.”
Neoconservative values increasingly seep into the core of Japanese political life. The latest salvo comes in the form of a panel, reporting directly to Abe that will probe the verdicts of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (1946–1948). The verdicts, which condemned Japan’s six wartime leaders to death, were “based on a poorly constructed” perception of history, said Inada Tomomi, chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party’s Policy Research Council.
Abe has already partially satisfied a key demand of his supporters — that Japan end the shameful apology diplomacy of the postwar years. The nation’s gold standard mea culpa, issued by socialist prime minister Murayama Tomiichi in 1995, has been overlaid by a carefully worded but ambiguous statement in which Abe stopped short of offering his own words of remorse but said Japan “must not let…generations to come…be predestined to apologize.”
The prospect that radical conservatives might dismantle Japan’s entire postwar political architecture no longer looks far-fetched. The LDP has proposed changes to virtually all 103 articles of the 1947 constitution that would tip the balance away from individual rights and toward duties to the state. They have “reinterpreted” the Constitution to expand the nation’s military role abroad. Nationalists in the Cabinet have repeatedly suggested that much of the accepted narrative of World War II, complete with its grim catalogue of war atrocities, be wished away The education ministry has mandated this year that school textbooks must reflect the government position on history and territorial issues.
The blueprint for the next stage in the revolution was laid out to an estimated 11,000 supporters in Tokyo’s Nippon Budokan hall on November 10th, 2015. The organizers of Utsukushii Nihon no Kenpo wo Tsukuru Kokumin no Kai (People's association for creating a Constitution for beautiful Japan), claim to have collected signatures from nearly 4.5 million people, including 422 Diet members, calling for a national referendum in the summer of 2016. The declared aim is to restore traditional family values, and strengthen Japan’s defenses. Speaker after speaker warned about the rise of China and the decline of the United States. “Japan faces its worst crisis” since the war but the constitution has “hobbled” the country, said Hyakuta.
Among those listening was Eto Seiichi, a special adviser to Abe, ex-education minister Shimomura Hakubun, Takeo Hiranuma, the head of the parliamentary league of Nippon Kaigi, and lawmakers Arimura Haruko and Mihara Junko. The chair was conservative journalist Sakurai Yoshiko, a key figure in the drive to get 10 million signatures. Her status is recognition, says Tomomi Yamaguchi, an anthropologist at Montana State University, that changing the attitudes of women, many of whom admire Japan’s long-standing pacifism, will be crucial. Abe himself sent a prerecorded message in which he said the “time had come” to seek a Constitution suitable for the 21st century.”
About a third of the Diet and well over half of Abe’s 19-member Cabinet support Nippon Kaigi. All are members of its parliamentary league. Abe is its “special adviser.” The group has more than 230 local chapters, around 38,000 fee-paying members and a network that reaches deep into the government. Its members or affiliates include former heads of large corporations; university presidents, Self-Defense Force chiefs of staff,several party chiefs and at least one former chief justice, who chaired the group for several years.
Despite this impressive firepower, determining the group’s exact influence is difficult. The country’s media mostly shies away from covering them, says Sugano Tamotsu, a journalist and researcher. Sugano believes its most important achievement has been to unite right wing movements under a like-minded program. “Throughout 40 years of history,” Sugano says, “it has been sending almost the same message and focusing on the same priority: educating the young generation.”
Nippon Kaigi's signature drives have helped pass laws and implement legal changes in local councils and in the Diet, Yamaguchi says. They have helped banish much “left wing” teaching from schools and have brought back the tradition of singing the national anthem and standing for the Hinomaru flag, both associated with Japan’s wartime empire. A key supporter is former Tokyo governor Ishihara Shintaro, who mandated punishment for teachers who refuse to stand, face the flag and sing the anthem during school ceremonies.
The group was formed in 1997, in reaction to what was arguably a high point in postwar liberal education, by politicians, intellectuals and religious figures. Its small Meguro office in Tokyo still shares a building with Seicho no Ie (House of Growth), a right-wing religious cult and a key tributary of one of the two organizations that merged to form Nippon Kaigi, the Society to Protect Japan (Nihon wo Mamorukai) (the other was the People’s Conference to Protect Japan, or Nihon wo Mamoru Kokumin Kaigi). The publisher of Sonfa Oh's book is Tachibana Shuppan, which has links to the cult and the religious and political right.
A decade ago, the group collected 3.6 million signatures demanding revisions to the education law that would make it compulsory to teach children patriotism. The group wants Abe to continue to visit Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, though such pilgrimages are seen in much of Asia as an endorsement of the leaders enshrined there and their war aims. Abe triggered a major diplomatic row with South Korea and China when he last went in 2013. The group’s growing political heft is partly credited with increasingly unabashed displays of allegiance to the shrine — a record 168 Diet members visited during the spring festival of 2013.
Supporters have campaigned against anything that shows Japan’s wartime behavior in a bad light, bombarding exhibitions on war crimes, for example, with petitions and phone calls. A closely allied group is the Shinto Association of Spiritual Leadership. In the late 19th century, the country’s oldest religion, Shinto, was reinvented as a tool of state, serving as an ideology that helped mobilize Japanese to fight wars in the emperor’s name. In 2007, lobbying by the association and Nippon Kaigi helped to persuade the government to makeApril 29a national holiday in honor of wartime monarch Hirohito.
Even opponents are impressed at how radical conservatives have quietly transformed the landscape of Japanese politics. Nippon Kaigi accepts that “international and domestic events” – notably the rise of China and shifting public opinion - “have changed the national consciousness” and had a major impact onthe political beliefs of national and local politicians. “Such a change is one important factorin the light of implementing our basic principles,” it says. Another aim is to “co-exist and build friendship with other nations.” One of the contradictions of their success is that they might achieve exactly the opposite.
By Professor Tessa Morris-Suzuki, ARC Laureate Fellow based at the School of Culture, History and Language, at the College of Asia and the Pacific at The Australian National University and APP member
On 14 August, the day before the 70th anniversary of the end of the Pacific War, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe issued a long-awaited statement on Japanese memory of the war and his vision for the future. In it, he emphasised that the apologies given by previous Japanese cabinets ‘will remain unshakable into the future’. Abe’s statement received mixed responses from around the world. While some expressed concern at its account of 20th century history, the United States welcomed Abe’s ‘expression of deep remorse for the suffering caused by Japan during the World War II era, as well as his commitment to uphold past Japanese government statements on history’.
But recent events raise serious questions about the commitment of the Abe government to upholding past apologies.
For the past several weeks, prominent members of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) have sent unsolicited gifts of two books to academics, journalists and politicians in the English-speaking world (mostly in the United States). The books are accompanied by letters that draw attention to Abe’s 70th anniversary statement. They claim that history is being distorted by certain unnamed individuals and urge the recipients to read the books as a corrective.
The first book is Getting Over It! Why Korea Needs to Stop Bashing Japan, by Oh Sonfa, a naturalised Japanese citizen of Korean origin who is best known in Japan for publications disparaging her former homeland. Oh’s book urges Japan to turn its back on China and particularly on South Korea, which, she argues, suffers from incurable ‘narrow egotism and prejudice’ reflecting the nation’s ‘history and its racial characteristics’.
Echoing Japanese wartime propaganda, Oh paints Japanese colonial expansion, in opposition to Western colonialism, as essentially good. While she describes Western imperial powers as brutal and exploitative, she claims Japanese colonial control of the Korean peninsula ‘implemented no policies aimed at exploiting Korea’, ‘did not use armed suppression to govern’ and even ‘abolished restrictions on freedom of speech’. All of this will come as news to most historians of Asia.
The second book, History Wars, Japan — False Indictment of the Century, is written [by Sankei Washington reporter at large Yoshihisa Komori] and published by the right-wing Sankei newspaper. It pours vitriolic scorn on the historic 1993 Kono Statement, which apologised to former ‘comfort women’, who were sexually exploited in Japanese military brothels during the war. The Kono Statement, along with the Murayama Statement, is the most crucial of the Japanese government official statement on wartime history that Abe declared Japan’s ‘commitment to uphold’ in his statement.
History Wars claims that there is no evidence to support Japan’s 1993 admission that some ‘comfort women’ had been recruited against their own will, at times with the direct involvement of Japanese military or officials. A number of the book’s arguments echo those presented in June 2014 by a team created by the Abe government to investigate the processes that led to the Kono Statement, though the Sankei book expresses these arguments in more extreme terms.
History Wars depicts the surviving Korean ‘comfort women’ as confused old women tempted into giving false evidence by promises of money. And it claims that the Japanese government made the apology knowing it to be factually baseless, simply out of an ardent desire to appease South Korea. These bizarre claims are based on a selective misreading of the available historical evidence and have been strongly denied by former Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono, who issued the 1993 apology.
return address on package
National Press Club DC
If these books had been distributed by a fringe right-wing organisation, they might have caused minor embarrassment. But they are being distributed by leading politicians from the ruling LDP, including a key member of the party’s International Information Investigation Committee (LDP/IIIC). One of the politicians actively distributing the books in the United States has since been appointed the special advisor to the prime minister on cultural diplomacy. [Another, Lower House member, Katsuyuki KAWAI, was recently appointed special advise to the prime minister. Dr. Inoguchi has a PhD from Yale University and is on Japan's National Commission for UNESCO.]
On 19 June 2015, the LDP/IIIC presented Prime Minister Abe with an interim report on proposed measures to counter the ‘anti-Japanese propaganda of China and South Korea etc’. Abe’s reported response was to exhort the committee to ‘further strengthen its efforts’. On 19 September, the Committee passed a resolution that blamed the distortion of ‘international society’s perception of our country’s history’ on ‘lies’ disseminated by the liberal Asahi newspaper. It went on to call for a national information policy that would ‘change from the merely “neutral” or “defensive” stance to a more positive dissemination of information’. The dissemination of History Wars and Getting Over It appears to be a step in this ‘positive dissemination’ campaign.
This is deeply concerning as it suggests that the campaign has been endorsed by Abe and is being carried out by key figures in the ruling LDP party. These actions are inconsistent with Abe’s promise to the global community in his statement on 14 August. Historical revisionism that denounces the Kono Statement and whitewashes the record of Japanese colonialism is incompatible with Abe’s expressions of ‘deep remorse’ and promises to ‘engrave in our hearts the past’.
There is no evidence to suggest that the extremist views expressed in these two books are shared by most ordinary Japanese people. The actions by members of the LDP are undermining decades of hard work by many Japanese civil society groups to heal the wounds of past violence. Such factually inaccurate accounts of Japan’s war history can only damage the standing of Japan in the international community. The time has come for a more reasoned approach from all participants in these tragic and destructive ‘history wars’.
By Professor Tessa Morris-Suzuki, ARC Laureate Fellow based at the School of Culture, History and Language, at the College of Asia and the Pacific at The Australian National University and APP Member First appeared in the EastAsiaForum, 18 August 2015
As the clock ticked down to the 70th anniversary of the end of the Asia Pacific War, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe faced a dilemma. His right-wing supporters were pushing him to produce a commemorative statement that would move away from the apologetic approach of his predecessors and ‘restore Japan’s pride’. Moderates, Asian neighbours and (most importantly) the US government were pushing him to uphold the earlier apologies issued by former prime ministers Tomiichi Murayama and Junichiro Koizumi. Most of the media anticipation centred around the wording of the forthcoming Abe statement. Would it, like the Murayama Statement of 1995 and the Koizumi Statement of 2005, include the words ‘apology’ (owabi) and aggression (shinryaku)?
Abe’s response to this dilemma was clever. First, he established a committee of hand-picked ‘experts’ to provide a report locating Japan’s wartime past in the broad sweep of 20th-century history. Then, drawing heavily on their report, he produced a statement that was more than twice the length of those issued by his predecessors. His statement, to the relief of many observers, did use the words ‘apology’ and ‘aggression’. In fact, it is almost overladen with all the right words: ‘we must learn from the lessons of history’; ‘our country inflict immeasurable damage and suffering’; ‘deep repentance’; ‘deep remorse and heartfelt apology’; ‘we will engrave in our hearts the past’.
But, focusing on the vocabulary, some observers failed to notice that Abe had embedded these words in a narrative of Japanese history that was entirely different from the one that underpinned previous prime ministerial statements. That is why his statement is so much longer than theirs. So which past is the Abe statement engraving in the hearts of Japanese citizens?
The story presented in Abe’s statement goes like this. Western colonial expansionism forced Japan to modernise, which it did with remarkable success. Japan’s victory in the Russo–Japanese War gave hope to the colonised peoples of the world. After World War I, there was a move to create a peaceful world order. Japan actively participated, but following the Great Depression, the Western powers created economic blocs based on their colonial empires. This dealt a ‘major blow’ to Japan. Forced into a corner, Japan ‘attempted to overcome its diplomatic and economic deadlock through the use of force’. The result was the 1931 Manchurian Incident, Japan’s withdrawal from the League of Nations, and everything that followed. ‘Japan took the wrong course and advanced along the road to war’.
The narrative of war that Abe presents leads naturally to the lessons that he derives from history. Nations should avoid the use of force to break ‘deadlock’. They should promote free trade so that economic blocs will never again become a cause of war. And they should avoid challenging the international order.
The problem with Abe’s new narrative is that it is historically wrong. This is perhaps not surprising, since the committee of experts on whom he relied included only four historians in its 16 members. And its report, running to some 31 pages, contains less than a page about the causes and events of the Asia Pacific War.
In effect, the Abe narrative of history looks like an exam script where the student has accidentally misread the question. He has answered the question about the reasons for Japan’s invasion of Manchuria with an answer that should go with the question about the reasons for the attack on Pearl Harbor.
There is widespread consensus that the immediate cause for Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was the stranglehold on Japan created by imperial protectionism and economic blockade by the Western powers. But there is equal consensus that the reasons for the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, and for the outbreak of full-scale war in China in 1937, were different and much more complex.
Key factors at work in 1931 were the troubled relationship between the Japanese military and the civilian government; Japan’s desire for resources, transport routes and living space; rising nationalism in an economically and socially troubled Japan; and corruption and instability in Northeastern China. By the time Japan launched its full scale invasion of China in 1937, global protectionism was becoming a larger issue. But even then, other issues like Japan’s desire to protect its massive investments in China from the rising forces of Chinese nationalism were paramount.
Economic historians note that the Japanese empire was the first to take serious steps towards imperial protectionism. The slide into global protectionism had barely started at the time of the Manchurian Incident. Britain did not create its imperial preference system until 1932. The economic blockade that strangled the Japanese economy in 1940–41 was the response to Japan’s invasion of China, not its cause.
This is not academic quibbling. These things really matter, and vividly illustrate why historical knowledge is vital to any understanding of contemporary international affairs.
The Abe narrative of history fails to address the causes and nature of Japan’s colonisation of Taiwan (in 1895) and Korea (in 1910), and ignores the large presence of Japanese troops in China long before 1931. It says to China: ‘Sorry we invaded you, but those other guys painted us into a corner’. It offers an untenable explanation for Japan’s actions, and blurs the distinction between aggressive and defensive behaviour. Western media commentators who haven’t studied Japanese history may not pick up these flaws in the narrative, but Chinese and South Korean observers (who have their own, sometimes profoundly problematic, versions of this history) will instantly see them and rightly object.
Engraving a factually flawed story of the past in people’s hearts is not going to solve East Asia’s problems, and risks making them worse. Worse still, the Abe statement is generating deeply divergent responses in the countries where East Asian history is not widely taught (most notably the United States) and those where it is (South Korea, China and Japan itself), thus creating even deeper divisions in our already too divided world.
APP member Peter Ennis interviews for his Dispatch Japan APP member Professor Tessa Morris-Suzuki on Abe's forthcoming trip to the United States. It is likely thatthe prime minister will try to present himself to the world as being a compassionate and caring person, but at the same time avoid any notion of historical responsibility. Morris-Suzuki says
I am concerned that Abe and his advisors may be planning to use verbal games to send one message to the English speaking world and another to East Asian countries, including Japan itself. The terrible events of the Pacific War should be recalled with sincerity, honesty and directness, not with word games.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan will speak to a joint meeting of the US Congress on April 29, marking the first time Japan’s top political leader will address the full US national legislature. The speech will carry enormous symbolism; Abe will speak from the rostrum of the House of Representatives, from which Franklin Roosevelt declared war on Japan in 1941 in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of that year. The US and Japan have long been reconciled, of course, with a post-war bilateral security alliance that continues to form the bedrock of stability in East Asia. But Abe has a testy relationship with his leadership counterparts in China and South Korea, and both countries will be listening carefully to hear if and how he addresses lingering animosities about Japan’s historical role in the region.
Many analysts in Washington expect (and some have recommended) that Abe will model his upcoming address to Congress on the talk he delivered to the Australian parliament in capital-city Canberra in July of last year. Abe effectively referenced two incidents of severe mistreatment of Australian prisoners-of-war during World War II that had long been thorns-in-the-side of Japan-Australia relations. The Bataan ‘Death March’ of 1942, in which hundreds of American POWs died in Japan-occupied Philippines, conjures up similar emotions in the United States. In 2009, Japan officially apologized for that mistreatment of captured American soldiers. Japan’s prime minister at that time, Taro Aso, was under some pressure in part because his family’s lucrative coal mining business used US POWs as forced-laborers during World War II. (Aso is now Japan’s finance minister.)
Whether Abe really apologized to Australians on behalf of Japan, or merely commiserated about a shared bitter experience, remains a matter of contention. And his Canberra comments made no reference to China, Korea, or any other country in East Asia, leaving unanswered whether he really agrees with his predecessors Tomiichi Murayama and Junichiro Koizumi, who stated unambiguously in 1995 and 2005 respectively that Japan adopted a “mistaken national policy” that resulted in “aggression” and “colonial rule” in the first half of last century.
While stating that he agrees with his predecessors “on the whole,” Abe himself has never used the most important operative words from those past apologies that Chinese and Korean officials consider a litmus test of his views and intentions.
Unresolved history issues between Japan and Korea – key US allies – continue to complicate American diplomacy in East Asia, making Prime Minister Abe’s upcoming address to Congress, and his planned statement in August marking the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, particularly important.
To discuss Abe’s ‘Canberra Strategy,’ we turned to Tessa Morris-Suzuki, one of Australia’s top specialists on Japan. Morris-Suzuki is professor of Japanese history at Australian National University, and author of East Asia Beyond the History Wars. She is past president of the Asian Studies Association of Australia.
Morris-Suzuki: ‘Prime Minister Abe is deliberately ambiguous about apologies’
DISPATCH JAPAN: Was Prime Minister Abe’s “Canberra” speech last year well-received in Australia? MORRIS-SUZUKI: The prime minister’s speech made headline news and attracted some media debate at the time, but its long- term impact on Australian views of Japan appears to have been quite small. It is difficult to say whether this impact was positive or negative. A number of media, business, and political commentators praised Abe’s words of condolence for the Australian servicemen killed in World War II, but much of the discussion in letters-to-the-editor of major newspapers was critical. The event also attracted public criticism from Australia’s main veterans’ organization, the Returned and Services League. An interesting note is that much of the criticism focused on Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who replied by praising the skill and sense of honor shown by Japanese troops during the war. This was widely criticized by veterans and others, who argued that Japan’s wartime treatment of prisoners of war was not honorable.
DISPATCH JAPAN: Abe referred specifically to the Sandakan wartime events on Borneo, and the Kokoda events in Papua New Guinea. Remind readers why Sandakan and Kokoda resonate with Australians. MORRIS-SUZUKI: Abe began his speech by referring to Sandakan and Kokoda. Sandakan in Borneo is the site of a death march during which some 1,000 Australian soldiers were killed or died of starvation, disease, and exhaustion. The Kokoda track over the mountains of Papua New Guinea was the site of crucial and fierce battles between Australian and Japanese forces, in which some 600 Australian soldiers were killed.
It is worth noting that although Abe mentioned the place name Sandakan, he did not use the term “death march”. These two sites, and particularly Kokoda, have become key symbols of the sufferings of Australian soldiers during the Pacific War. Monuments to the Kokoda track exist in many parts of Australia, and some Australians still visit the track to reenact the march over its rugged terrain.
DISPATCH JAPAN: Did Australians receive Abe’s comments as an apology? He seemed to speak somewhat in the passive tense – “regretting” that terrible things happened, but not acknowledging responsibility on the part of Japan. MORRIS-SUZUKI:Most commentators noted that Abe expressed condolences but not apology. In fact, Abe’s speech presented the war, not as an event for which Japan should apologize, but rather as a part of history which Australia and Japan share. He spoke of “our fathers and grandfathers” -- both Japanese and Australian -- experiencing the events of Sandakan and Kokoda, and went on to speak of the Japanese naval officers killed in an attempted midget submarine attack on Sydney harbor. He recalled how Australia had invited the mother of one of the dead to visit Sydney for a memorial ceremony, and then quoted the words of former Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies: “Hostility to Japan must go. It is better to hope than always to remember.” The clear message was, “We all suffered similarly during the war. We should let bygones be bygones.”
DISPATCH JAPAN: Abe seemed perhaps more ready to reconcile with Australia than with China or Korea? MORRIS-SUZUKI: I look at this in strategic terms. Abe wishes as far as possible to avoid making any direct apologies or acknowledgments of wrongs committed by the Japanese military during the war. But at the same time his strategy is to deepen the military alliance with the United States and forge new and deep military and intelligence alliances with countries like Australia. In order to combine these two aims, he and his advisers choose words very carefully to try to smooth over concerns about memories of the war without directly addressing or apologizing for the events of the past.
DISPATCH JAPAN: Abe says he upholds the Murayama and Kono statements “as a whole.” To you, what does that mean? MORRIS-SUZUKI:This is a phrase devised to confuse and blur the meaning of Abe’s stance on the issues of war responsibility and apology. It is a deliberately ambiguous phrase which enables him to avoid saying whether he accepts words such as “aggression” and “apology” contained in the Murayama statement, and to avoid reconfirming the Kono statement’s acknowledgment that “comfort women” were recruited by coercion.
DISPATCH JAPAN: What do you anticipate the prime minister will say in his August 15 statement, marking the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in the Pacific? MORRIS-SUZUKI: I think it likely that he will use two verbal strategies in an effort to appease international (particularly US) opinion, while at the same time avoiding making a direct statement of apology about the war. First, he will express a personal sense of pain at the memory of the war. In many recent statements, including his Canberra speech, Abe has spoken of his sadness and heartache at this memory. These words present the prime minister to the world as being a compassionate and caring person, but at the same time avoid any notion of historical responsibility. The second strategy is to use the word “反省” [hansei - best translated as “reconsideration” or “self-questioning”] in his statement in Japanese, but to translate this into English as “remorse”. The word “remorse” in English has a much stronger meaning than “反省” in Japanese (and would most commonly be rendered in Japanese as 後悔 [kōkai] or 自責の念 [jiseki no nen]). In the Murayama and Koizumi statements, the word “反省” was also translated into English as “remorse”, but was followed by the words お詫びの気持ち[owabi no kimochi - a feeling of apology]. If Abe uses the word 反省 (translated as remorse) but not the word お詫び (apology), he will convey to English speaking audiences the impression that he is apologizing, but will make it clear to those who read his statement in Japanese, Korean or Chinese is that he is merely expressing 反省 and not お詫び.
DISPATCH JAPAN: How will Korea react if PM Abe omits the wording of the Murayama Statement – “aggression,” “colonial rule,” and “mistaken national policy”? MORRIS-SUZUKI: I am deeply concerned about the likely impact of Abe’s 70th anniversary statement. If he uses the verbal strategies I have mentioned, these will not only fail to ease the painful memories of many people in Korea, China and elsewhere, but also deepen misunderstandings between East Asian countries and the English-speaking world. Many Americans and others, hearing the word “remorse”, will think that Abe has issued an apology, and fail to understand why Chinese and Koreans are still dissatisfied. In short, I am concerned that Abe and his advisors may be planning to use verbal games to send one message to the English speaking world and another to East Asian countries, including Japan itself. The terrible events of the Pacific War should be recalled with sincerity, honesty and directness, not with word games.
DISPATCH JAPAN: Do you think Abe a transformational figure, leading and reflecting fundamental changes in Japan? MORRIS-SUZUKI: The Abe administration has already changed Japan in important ways through alterations to military strategy, state control of information, educational guidelines, trade and energy policy and other matters. In this sense Abe is a transformational figure; but it still too early to say whether he will succeed in carrying out the further and even more fundamental transformations, including changes to the constitution, which remain on his policy agenda.
DISPATCH JAPAN: Why does the Abe Cabinet receive high marks in public opinion polls, but low marks for its major policies? MORRIS-SUZUKI: Public opinion is still reacting to the sense of crisis and absence of leadership which followed the triple disaster of March, 2011. Many people in Japan feel a profound sense of insecurity because of the ongoing aftermath of the disaster, the continuing weakness of the Japanese economy and the rise of China. In this situation, Abe’s large and simple statements about Japan’s revival and national pride are reassuring. Many people also still pin hopes on the future effects of Abenomics, even though, after two-and-a-half years, no significant positive impact on economic fundamentals or on the lives of ordinary Japanese people has yet been seen.
DISPATCH JAPAN: Is there a thought-out, realistic national strategy underlying “revisionism,” or is it more of a romantic whim about Japan. MORRIS-SUZUKI: I believe that this is driven by emotion and ideology, not by political realism. A more realistic political strategy would positively and creatively address the concerns of China, Korea, and other Asian neighbors, since Japan’s long-term economic and security future rely on good relations with its neighbors. Revisionism is also creating deepening divisions within Japanese society itself. At a grassroots popular level, Japan has a fine history of efforts to seek reconciliation with neighboring countries and address problems of war responsibility. A more realistic national policy would build on these grassroots achievements, rather than ostracizing and marginalizing ordinary Japanese people who have worked so hard for reconciliation.
In 2010, the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) launched a highly successful TV show called The Gruen Transfer. The title refers to the disorienting psychological effects produced on consumers by the architecture of shopping malls, whose dazzle and noise are deliberately designed to mesmerize: on entering, “our eyes glaze over, our jaws slacken... we forget what we came for and become impulse buyers.” (1) The ABC’s Gruen Transfer explored the weird, wonderful and disorienting effects produced by the advertising industry. Its most popular element was a segment called “The Pitch,” in which representatives of two advertising agencies competed to sell the unsellable to the show’s audience - creating gloriously sleek videos to market bottled air, promote the virtues of banning religion, or advocate generous pay raises for politicians.
I have been reminded of The Gruen Transfer in recent months, as sections of the media in Japan, and even internationally, have gone into overdrive to sell an equally challenging message: the message that Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo is not a nationalist. (2) This particular pitch has been running for some time. It began with the inception of Abe’s first short-lived prime ministership in 2006, when Japanese Foreign Affairs Deputy Press Secretary Taniguchi Tomohiko devoted considerable energy to persuading a US audience that Abe was “almost the polar opposite” of a nationalist. (3) The right-of-centre Sankei Newspaper took up the challenge with enthusiasm: its Washington correspondent, Komori Yoshihisa, published numerous articles, including an opinion piece in the New York Times, which aimed to refute the “nationalist” tag. Far from being a hawkish nationalist, Komori argued, Abe had “merely been shaped by democracy,” and his real aim was to bring Japan back from the “post-war extreme towards the center.” (4) But these pronouncements had only limited impact on international opinion, and by early 2007 one prominent Japanese marketing consultant was lamenting, in the pages of the Yomiuri newspaper, that the government needed a far more effective foreign media strategy to rescue Abe from the “hawk” and “nationalist” labels. (5)
The issue has resurfaced with renewed vigor since the advent of the second Abe regime in December 2012. In May 2013, a US Congressional Research Service paper describing Abe as a “strong nationalist” evoked a surprisingly querulous response from pro-government media in Japan, and even from Prime Minister Abe himself. Abe hit back with a statement in parliament, expressing his unhappiness that “the ideas of our country” were being misunderstood by foreigners. He went on to call for measures to “actively collect and spread information so that we will be correctly understood.” (6)
The prime minister’s sensitivity to the “nationalist” label seems curious, since he is on record as arguing with considerable passion that there is nothing wrong with nationalism: “nationalism as I think of it is a sense of belonging to the nature, ancestors, family and the local community where one was born and brought up and with which one has become familiar. This sense of belonging is not something that we are told to have, but is completely natural and spontaneous...”(7); in which case, the label “strong nationalist” should presumably be taken as a compliment.
Georgetown University professor Kevin Doak also claims that Abe has been internationally misunderstood. Rather than denying the Japanese prime minister’s nationalism, though, Doak argues that Abe-style nationalism belongs to a brand distinct from the bad nationalisms of wartime Japan, or (apparently) of other Asian nations. Doak’s argument rests on the distinction between two quite different types of nationalism, “ethnic nationalism” and “civic nationalism.” He associates the first with the Japanese term minzoku - the equivalent of the German “Volk” - and the second with the term kokumin - which simply means “people of the nation,” and can be given a wide range of nuances depending on context (though Doak questionably chooses to translate it as “civic nation”). (8)
“Ethnic nationalism,” writes Doak, “has also been positioned as ‘Asian nationalism’ at least since the 1955 Bandung Conference; in contrast, civic nationalism has from its very beginning in modern Japan and throughout East Asia been seen as the favorite of pro-Western governments, Christian minorities and intellectuals thought to be tainted by Western ways of thinking”. The mistake of outside observers, he tells us, is that they have taken Abe to be an ethnic nationalist, whereas in fact he is “one of the leaders in the current renaissance of civic nationalism in Japan.”
Abe’s identity as a civic nationalist can be demonstrated (says Doak) by a reading of his best-selling book, Towards a Beautiful Country Utsukushii Kuni e: “throughout the book, Abe consistently renders the Japanese nation as kokumin (civic nation) not as minzoku (ethnic nation), a distinction made not only conceptually but also through his description of how democratic nationalism functions in practice.” (9) Doak’s depiction of the civic and democratic Abe is in dramatic contrast to his depiction (in a recent Sankei newspaper interview) of “emotional South Korea”, which (apparently in toto) “links Japan bashing to ethnic pride minzoku puraido.” (10)
This re-labeling of Abe’s nationalism raises several problems. First, it assumes that the phenomenon of nationalism can be neatly separated into an “ethnic” and a “civic” variant, with the second being morally superior to the first. But “the manichean view that there are two kinds of nationalism, a good, civic kind and a bad, ethnic kind” (11) has been very effectively criticized by many scholars, who point out that the notions of race, culture, tradition and citizenship bound up in nationalism are far too complex to be isolated and captured in this easy formula. (12) The identification of ethnic nationalism as “Asian” (or at least “non-Western”) and civic nationalism as “Western” or “pro-Western” has come in for particular criticism. As sociologist David McCrone puts it, the distinction “does lend itself to caricature - why can’t they be more like us?” (13) History shows that, even in nations seen as exemplars of civic nationalism (such as the US and France), the ethnic undercurrents of nationalism can all too easily surge to the surface, as they did in the US following 9/11. A second problem is that, in the context of Abe’s political rhetoric, Doak’s distinction between minzoku-based and kokumin-based nationalism simply does not stand up to scrutiny. It is not correct to state (as Doak does) that Abe “directly rejects ethnic nationalism,” or to imply that Abe does not use the term minzoku. Though the word kokumin often appears in Abe’s speeches and writings, he also uses the term minzoku, and indeed uses the two terms interchangeably - as in: “when people come from foreign countries, surely they get a sense that Japanese are a minzoku, a kokumin, of high quality; they get the impression that even if we are poor, we are a country of culture...” (14) Abe’s vision of a national identity rooted in nature and tradition is evident in statements like: “the Japanese are originally an agricultural minzoku, a minzoku who produced rice by sharing water, so I think that from the beginning we have had a sense of mutual cooperation built into our DNA”;(15) or, more recently, “in the case of Japan, in particular, we are an agricultural minzoku. This is the ‘land of rice’. We firmly retained the traditions and culture of this Japan. For Japanese to be Japanese, it is necessary that agriculture be the basis of our country.” (16)
This vision is also reflected in Abe’s central role in a range of political groups which proclaim a unique national character grounded in timeless cultural tradition. For example, as of 2012 Abe headed the liaison group of parliamentarians cooperating with the Shinto Association of Spiritual Leadership, a body that aims to restore traditional Japanese spiritual values weakened by postwar prosperity, promote the central place of the imperial house in Japanese life and create a new constitution built on Japanese national character. (17)
A third problem with the “civic nationalist” label is that “civic nationalism” is frequently associated with liberalism, particularly respect for the rights of the individual, and commitment to equality and human rights. (18) If there is one thing that Abe Shinzo definitely is not, that is a liberal in the sense of commitment to human rights. The two books in which he most clearly sets out his political credo both begin with warnings of the dangers of liberalism (indeed, the first is subtitled “The Choice for Anti-Liberalism”). (19) In the US, Abe cautions, the term “liberal” has come to refer to people whose ideas are “socialist, or close to it... Revolutionaries and left-wingers are included in this category.” (20) By contrast, Abe firmly identifies himself as a conservative. Though he intermittently expresses his admiration for the British conservative party, his conservatism is really in a distinctly Japanese mold. His political hero is his grandfather Kishi Nobusuke, a key architect of Japanese economic policy in prewar Manchuria who went on to be a profoundly controversial postwar Japanese prime minister, famous in particular for his very divisive role in ramming ratification of the 1960 Security Treaty with the US through the Japanese parliament. (21)
Abe’s core goal, inherited from Kishi, clearly set out in Towards a Beautiful Country, and echoed in the manifestos of groups like the Shinto Association of Spiritual Leadership, is to “escape from the postwar regime”: that is, to reverse the political reforms introduced to Japan during the allied occupation. In his view, these reforms undermine Japan’s traditions, which are centred on the figure of the Emperor. What Abe’s nationalist vision means in practice is best understood by examining his party’s far-reaching proposals to rewrite the postwar Japanese constitution. The proposed changes include removing the reference to “respect for the individual” and making it constitutionally impossible for foreign permanent residents to be given national or local voting rights. Freedom of expression and freedom of association would not be protected where these “have the purpose of harming the public interest or public order”. The same formula would be used to limit the right of citizens to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. The revised constitution prepared by the Liberal Democratic Party contains no guidelines as to how, and by whom, “public interest” and “public order” would be defined, leaving an alarmingly large loophole for the repression of civic freedoms by the state. A new article would also be added to the constitution to give the state sweeping powers to declare prolonged states of emergency, during which constitutional rights could be suspended. (22) With the prospect of an LDP super-majority in parliament for the next two to three years, there is a strong likelihood that the ruling party will push forward with an attempt to carry out these changes: changes so profound that they should probably be described, not as plans for constitutional revision, but rather as plans for a new constitution.
This artwork appeared in an exhibition entitled "the Constitution and Peace" which opened in a public art space in Fukui Prefecture in May. The work consists of several sections of the current constitution written out in attractive calligraphy and coloured ink on Japanese paper. Soon after the exhibition opened, it was removed on the orders of the company which manages the art space for the local government on the grounds that "its political content might offend the feelings of some viewers."
The current popularity of the Abe administration in no way reflects public enthusiasm for these grand political designs. It is, instead, a response to the government’s economic stimulus package, and to Abe’s skill in making optimistic statements, which convey a sense of leadership to a population weary of political uncertainty and economic malaise. In the end, the Abe government’s performance should and will be judged, not on any political labels, but on the impact that it has on Japanese society and on Japan’s relations with its region and the world. It is possible that Abe may yet choose to focus on the vital tasks of creating a basis for a strong Japanese economic future and improving relations with Japan’s neighbours, rather than pursuing the ideological agendas of anti-liberalism and “escape from the postwar regime.”
In the meanwhile, though, those who care about the future of Japanese society should not allow the dazzle of verbal juggling to induce a political version of the Gruen Transfer. The prime minister’s ideology may be re-branded for the global market, but the old adage remains: buyer beware.
This re-labeling of Abe’s nationalism raises several problems. First, it assumes that the phenomenon of nationalism can be neatly separated into an “ethnic” and a “civic” variant, with the second being morally superior to the first. But “the manichean view that there are two kinds of nationalism, a good, civic kind and a bad, ethnic kind” (11) has been very effectively criticized by many scholars, who point out that the notions of race, culture, tradition and citizenship bound up in nationalism are far too complex to be isolated and captured in this easy formula. (12) The identification of ethnic nationalism as “Asian” (or at least “non-Western”) and civic nationalism as “Western” or “pro-Western” has come in for particular criticism. As sociologist David McCrone puts it, the distinction “does lend itself to caricature - why can’t they be more like us?” (13) History shows that, even in nations seen as exemplars of civic nationalism (such as the US and France), the ethnic undercurrents of nationalism can all too easily surge to the surface, as they did in the US following 9/11.
