TeaThat climax was a single blow from a seventeenth-century sword, delivered by her lover, who was playing her kaishakunin– The person who ends the suffering of the samurai who has chosen ritual suicide. This past performance The script was not gone by the famous writer Yukio Mishima. Soldiers at the Ichigaya military base mocked his call for a coup. The noise of helicopters drowned out the rest of the speech, which Mishima had hoped would be broadcast live. Even the rebuttal was poor: It took three clumsy slashes before the blade cut through the writer’s spine.
For many in Japan, the philosopher Hide Ishiguro wroteMishima’s 1970 suicide appears to be an act of attention-seeking ostentation, not the lofty patriotism of the warrior who chose death over humiliation.
A few days earlier, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida returned to office after the assassination of his predecessor, Shinzo Abe, promise to amend Japan’s pacifist constitution and increasing its military power. The constitution, long claimed by nationalists such as Mishima, was a charter for the disgrace, having been forced upon after its defeat in World War II.
Like many democracies across Asia, Japan is embracing a powerful new nationalism to meet the challenges of a dangerous new time. The problem is that nationalism is surrounded by an extraordinarily ugly history that has intimidated not only Japan’s enemies but its allies as well.
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new nationalism
Last year—the anniversary of the morning of December 1941 when Imperial Japanese forces launched an offensive in the Pacific against the United States, Great Britain, and Holland—about a hundred Members of Parliament Yasukuni gathered at the temple To honor those killed in the war in Tokyo. The legislators came from the ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), but also had opponents from the ideological right, the Japan Innovation Party and the National Democratic Party of Japan.
The assembly represented, which scholar Naoto Higuchi said, “The mainstream of the far-right.” For decades, figures such as the Japanese far-right—Mishima—who called for a new imperialism, fascists with links to organized crime, and xenophobes hostile to Korean immigrants—had existed on the fringes of society.
Former Prime Minister Abe—was assassinated by a man earlier this month obvious personal hatred– helped bring some of these ideas to center stage. After his resignation in 2020, Abe Yasukuni. stood in1,600 convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity bow their heads to honor the souls of men, including war criminals.
Ishaar angrily protests from China, where the Japanese army civilians were killed tens of thousands in cities like Nanjing, and held biological warfare experiment Which rivaled Auschwitz in his horrors. There was uproar in Korea, where the Japanese army forced thousands of women in sexual slavery,
Modern Japan historian Alexis Duden has noted that Abeo played a key role In Japan’s efforts to wash away the historical war blame. Abe credits revisionist efforts to shed light on the sexual slavery of women and the force of the Russo-Japanese War, which turned Korea into a colony. Abe suggested removing the guilt of war in his book, to a beautiful countryA key element in enabling Japan’s re-emergence as a real power.
The Yasukuni Shrine’s Museum describes the 1937 massacre in Nanjing – where 200,000 civilians were massacred and 20,000 women raped – as “an event”. It claims that Japan’s wars inspired national liberation movements across Asia. Abe was among a generation of Japanese politicians who gave public legitimacy to the language.
India can be chose to forget The horrors of the Imperial Japanese conquest, as it sanctified the memory of Subhas Chandra Bose. But in countries from Taiwan to Australia, Malaysia and Indonesia, however, the memories of those years have not faded away.
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patriotic crisis
A little imagination is needed to see why many in Japan have come to embrace nationalism that, five decades ago, was seen as an aesthetic effect – a dark fringe-kitsch that had no political significance. Dragon rising across the East China Sea set on fire, Threatening the Senkaku Islands. North Korea’s nuclear-missile program has revived the fear of destruction Japan faced in 1945. fast growing population, and low birth rates. For some, Japan is on the verge of national destruction.
Abe’s maternal grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi—considered a war criminal in the early years of the post-war United States occupation but pardoned along with thousands of others—was as head of the LDP government in 1957. Ministers were elected. He helped Japan become more deeply involved in the United States-led Cold War strategic partnership, signing a security treaty that allowed Washington to establish military bases on the island nation.
To Abe, it seemed that Japan now needed to move from a position of real equality with the United States to a state of real equality. Their stated constitutional purpose was limited. Article 9 of the Constitution Orders that the people of Japan “should forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation.” Abe sought an amendment that explicitly acknowledged Japan’s right to maintain its own military, self-defense forces.
A constitutional amendment would not only require a two-thirds majority in parliament, but a 51 percent majority in a referendum. In a society deeply divided on this issue, the amendment remained out of reach of abe, Prime Minister Kishida holds close to the legislative strength needed to fulfill his promise to amend the constitution—but public opinion is hostile.
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odd Future
Exactly what a constitutional amendment will change in the short term, even if Kishida is able to make the numbers rustle, is not entirely clear. The current constitution has not prevented Japan from investing long range missile development Or retaliation against attacks by North Korea and China. Although the country’s spending has been low, as a percentage of its GDP, it is made significant investments In devices with offensive capabilities.
The constitutional debate is not explicitly about military modernization, but something deeper: What cultural norms does Japan need to survive in a period of dramatic new challenges?
Within Japan’s military, Yukio Mishima’s hyper-nationalism clearly has some appeal. In 2008, the country’s top soldier, General Toshio Tamogami, was sacked. wrote an essay Defending Japanese colonialism as morally just, humane and beneficial to Asia. in South Korea and China Fear-well established or otherwise – that these seeds will flower into a new Japanese militarism. These fears can be overcome, but experience invariably shapes historical perceptions.
The strategic landscape in Asia will almost certainly force fateful choices on Japan. Even though it allows the deployment of United States troops on its soil, there is a red line that Japan is unwilling to cross. Japan considers itself protected from a nuclear attack by the extended-deterrence umbrella of the United States, but unlike Germany, it has not deployed strategic weapons on its soil.
For decades, however, Japan’s strategic community has quietly discussed what it should do if the worst-case scenario strikes—and the United States has been unwilling to sacrifice its cities to protect the islands. Japan has a stockpile of nine tons of plutonium at home, and another 35 are kept in the United Kingdom and Germany – a resource that has no use other than a nuclear-weapon arsenal.
In 1970, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan Committed to the country secretly “To maintain the economic and technological capacity for the production of nuclear weapons.” Since then, a group of influential voices have called on Japan to consider whether the moment may come where it has to make this choice.
Like other democracies in the Indo-Pacific region, India believes that the best chances of overcoming the threat from China lie in forming alliances and increasing its military might. The debate in Japan shows how difficult the process will be.
The author is ThePrint’s National Security Editor. He tweeted @praveenswami. Thoughts are personal.
(Edited by Srinjoy Dey)