Japan's Resurgent Far Right Tinkers With History
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
TOKYO, March 24 - 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.
The 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.
Mr. 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.
Shintaro 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.
"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?"
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