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How should we understand the relationship between nationalism and discourses of national decline, and more specifically the discourses of a shrinking nation? Driven by this question, this article highlights how bleak imaginings of the future also work to construct the relationship of the individual to the putative national community, creating forms of sentimental national belonging. This article analyses an emerging genre of best-selling books in Japan, Mirai no nenpyō [The chronology of the future] series, that present a dismal vision of Japan's national demographic future. Their goal is to provoke a sense of national urgency by encouraging Japanese nationals to feel personally the shrinking nation through imagining its coming consequences for everyday life. Such narrations of an imagined shrinking community act to create a timeless sense of national belonging, with daily lived experience in the imagined future interpreted through the lens of the contracting nation. Importantly, the future that these discourses present is nationalized within boundaries separating it from global developments and intercourse. Ultimately, this form of nationalism is constituted not by dying for the nation, but instead by people seeing the continued stability of everyday life as intricately tied to the fate of the national community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan has been criticised internationally for its reluctance to accept refugees. In the late 1970s, however, the Japanese government decided to implement special measures to accept refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Between 1978 and 2005, 11,319 Indo-Chinese refugees were resettled in Japan. In this article, I analyse newspaper discourses on the acceptance of Indo-Chinese refugees and the subsequent arrivals of Chinese asylum seekers in Japan. While opening Japan's borders and accepting Indo-Chinese refugees was perceived favourably as a process Japan should experience from the 1970s to the late 1980s, asylum seekers arriving by sea in Japan were perceived as a threat in 1989, when many Chinese were found to be included among them. I explore these changing newspaper discourses with reference to the concepts of national identity, kokusaika and governmental belonging. Any discussion of the acceptance of others into a nation becomes inextricably bound up with the notion of national identity. In the case of Japan in the 1970 and 1980s, the concept of kokusaika (internationalisation) was pertinent because it intersected with such discussions. A theoretical perspective is offered by Ghassan Hage's notion of 'governmental belonging', whereby those in a dominant position claim the power to position others in the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1968, the conservative Japanese government of Prime Minister Satō Eisaku mounted a year-long celebration of the 100th anniversary of the 1868 'Meiji Restoration' that had launched Japan's modern era. Although the government took pains to make the commemoration seem non-political, the centennial aroused fierce opposition among those on the left, who feared it represented an effort to revive aspects of pre-World War II militarism. The resistance was led by Japanese historians, who felt the view of the previous 100 years promoted by the government clashed with an alternative understanding of Japan's history indicated by their professional research and training. This article examines the nature and scope of the 1968 Meiji centennial, elucidates why historians in particular were so opposed to it, and investigates the real aims for the celebration on the part of the conservative Satō government, as revealed in the private minutes of the government's planning committee. Ultimately, the historians' fears were partially justified: the government did intend the centennial to revive Japanese nationalism and patriotism along pre-war lines, as shown by their close modeling of the main ceremony on an earlier fascist ceremony - the 1940 celebration of the 2600th anniversary of Imperial rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a critical appraisal of the Abe Cabinet's plans to orchestrate a national celebration of the 150th anniversary of Meiji in 2018, following the example of the Meiji Centennial celebrations of 1968. The article begins by introducing some of the criticisms voiced at the time of the 1968 Centennial by prominent Japanese historians such as Tōyama Shigeki and Yamaguchi Keiji, who saw clear links between the post-war celebration of Meiji and broader efforts to revive Japanese nationalism and promote the long-term goal of re-militarization. It goes on to consider some of the public statements that have been made by Prime Minister Abe regarding 'Meiji 150ʹ and explores the significant gap between the government's vision of the significance of Meiji and the perspectives that emerge from scholarship on the Restoration period produced in recent decades by historians in both Japan and the English-speaking world. It concludes with a brief consideration of the divide that separated Japan's post-war historians from some of their American colleagues in the 1960s, and the role that scholars today have to play in combating the manipulation of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1970s, many critical Japanese Studies scholars have problematized nihonjinron discourses, which overemphasize Japanese uniqueness and its exclusive nature, as a manifestation of cultural nationalism for establishing ethnonational identity. Similarly, Japanese journalists and online writers have also begun to criticize the recent rampant praise of Japan in mass media as cultural nationalism. The present study explores this issue through a close analysis of a television variety show entitled Bukkomi Japanīzu 3 [Sneaking in a Japanese Expert 3] aired in 2014. Recent years have witnessed increasing nationalistic tendencies in Japan, expressed in both overt hate speech and political activities and in covert cultural nationalism. This article focuses on the latter, offering a textual and discursive analysis of a television show that features non-Japanese people engaging in Japanese cultural practices outside of Japan. It examines the structure, narrations, and interactions of one episode of the show as an ‘encoding’ process, which is followed by a ‘decoding’ of the show through the analysis of online viewer comments. Thus, the present study discusses how the show constructs the essentialist view that Japanese culture belongs exclusively to Japanese people and how audience members respond in diverse ways in online commentary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the end of the Allied occupation in 1952, the Japanese press reported that two hundred thousand ‘mixed-blood’ children had been fathered and abandoned by foreign (mostly American) soldiers in Japan. Japanese commentators often converged on a single solution: the expulsion of all foreign troops and all ‘mixed’ children from Japan. Although most scholars treat the 1950s sense of ‘crisis’ surrounding ‘mixed’ children as a product of concern for their welfare, the ‘crisis’ is better understood as a complexly co-authored moral panic. Opposition politicians deployed wrath and fear over ‘blood mixing’ to discredit the dominant Liberal Party and its alliance with the United States. Meanwhile, ideological activists and mass media circulated false facts to present ‘mixed’ families as doomed and dangerous. Moral panic over ‘mixed-blood children’ fostered a ‘pure-blood’ identity in Japan after World War II and helped reconstruct Japanese nationalism on a new basis: that of the ‘pure’ race rather than the failed state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article highlights the important contribution made by Kamichika Ichiko to the interwar publishing scene by providing an overview of the literary journalFujin Bungeilaunched by her and an analysis of three stories it published from leading female writers of the era, Matsuda Tokiko, Hirabayashi Eiko and Asai Hanako.Fujin Bungeiwas a rare oppositional voice within the media that questioned the narrow nationalism sanctioned and promoted by the Japanese state when others had fallen silent or been silenced. Furthermore, its focus on writing by women provided a forum for passionate and provocative works which shed new light on the downfall of the Proletarian Literature Movement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In discussions on tenkō (political re-orientation) the case of Hayashi Fusao is invariably referred to as representative of the type of writer who never recanted his political conversion, not even after Japan's war defeat and return to democracy in 1945. Hayashi officially disavowed his Marxist convictions in 1936 and would for the rest of his life reiterate his rightist political leanings, culminating in his infamous In Affirmation of the Greater East Asia War. When considering Hayashi's tenkō, critics usually rely on his various statements referring specifically to his re-orientation, coupled with an examination of his shift away from proletarian literature in serious works of fiction such as Youth (1934). In contrast, this article is an attempt to comment on Hayashi's purported conversion by focusing on samples of his rarely discussed popular writings that were published in the lowbrow youth literature magazine Shinseinen. This focus on Hayashi's predilection for adventurous storytelling aims to moderate the conventional image of him as a political thinker. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The graphic retelling of history in popular manga, particularly in the work of Kobayashi Yoshinori, has garnered attention in light of the resurgent nationalism of postbubble Japan. This article analyzes the visual-verbal language of cult manga artist Maruo Suehiro's 'Nihonjin no wakusei: Planet of the Jap' (1985). While appearing to revel in a violent depiction of an alternative outcome to World War Two, this manga spans allusions to the Emperor Meiji, the postwar Self-Defense Forces, and the suicides of General Nogi and Mishima Yukio, and aims through its portrayal to critique the links among the Japanese wartime state, contemporary nationalism, fascism and violence. Maruo's consistent use of fascist imagery consciously invites a dangerous voyeurism of traumatic historical events. This is an intentionally political move that forces the reader to realize that complicity in such violent spectacles is a necessary step to critiquing the extreme aggression Maruo attributes to Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liberalism in Japan before 1945 has been understood to be problematic because of its disposition to embrace elitism, nationalism and imperialism. These problems are often argued to have been caused by particular Japanese impediments, such as its history, customs, culture and system, and accordingly it is suggested that a ‘proper’ development of liberalism as seen in the ‘West’ did not occur in Japan. This essay argues that these problems are in fact problems inherent in the internal logic of liberalism in the modern period, and especially in the age of mass-based democracy and of empire. It argues so by expanding the thesis of Berlin on liberty of 1958, and examining the notion of ‘positive liberty’ in particular. The essay argues that the Japanese case articulates an often-neglected and problematic aspect of the discourse of liberalism, and concludes that this aspect needs to be seriously taken into account in an exploration of a critical alternative to currently dominant neo-liberal visions and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between about 1890 and 1919, the dominant discourse in Japanese nationalism emphasised Japan's status as a great modern nation, in contrast to earlier concerns about weakness and vulnerability in the face of Western imperialism, and despite continuing insecurities of various kinds. This paper revisits the ‘discourse of national greatness’, focusing on its construction, limitations and consequences. Emphasis on Japanese greatness was evident in the press, in self-presentation at industrial expositions, and in substantial written works by Japanese intellectuals. Several factors explain the rapid spread of such a discourse, including the decline of class and regional identification, the considerable expansion of the press, and the stimulus of war. The consequences of the rise of the notion of Japanese greatness for the later development of Japanese nationalism were profound. They included the further subordination of regionalism, entrenchment of the gendered nature of Japanese nationalism, the further denigration of other Asian peoples and of Japan's own past, reinforcement of the yet fragile cult of the emperor, encouragement to conflate ‘nation’ and ‘state’, and a strong tendency to associate nationalism with military conquest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deals with options for Japan in the twenty-first century. Rise of neo-nationalism; Passage of a law concerning situations occurring on the periphery; Japan's silence on major global questions of disarmament and superpower privilege; Constitutional reform option.