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Alex Lo

For those who have never visited the Yasukuni Shrine, it is located in central Tokyo and within walking distance of the Imperial Palace. It is easily accessible by subway, bus and taxi. It is beautiful, tranquil and dignified. Admission was free when I first visited it some 20 years ago.
The Shinto shrine was established by Emperor Meiji to commemorate those who died in the service of Japan. In the late 1970s, the names of more than a dozen Class A war criminals (to the rest of the world) or national heroes (to the Japanese far right) were quietly added to the commemoration.
I highly recommend making the trip, both as a Chinese tourist and student of history. Back then, it shocked me because I found it difficult to reconcile the beauty of the place with the horrors of the second world war in the Asia-Pacific.
Every Japanese leader in recent decades has paid their respects to those heroes/villains in an unofficial or semi-official capacity.
Every diehard Japanese nationalist makes the easy pilgrimage – we are, after all, not talking about trekking all the way to Mecca or Jerusalem – at least once a year.
Given the solemnity of the occasion, I can almost appreciate how it could feel like a spiritual journey of sorts. I also understand that history is written by the victors, so someone who is a far-right nationalist can easily go down a historical rabbit hole in search of Japan’s lost imperial glory and feeling a deep urge to reverse the unjust humiliation of those executed heroes who sacrificed themselves for the nation.
In my youth, I was a big fan of the far-right nationalist and novelist Yukio Mishima, who committed hara-kiri after staging a pathetically unsuccessful coup against the government.
The beauty of Mishima’s prose is like that of the Yasukuni Shrine, attracting you like a moth to the flame. I was also a devotee of the French Nazi supporter and novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Such dangerous literature gives its readers a glimpse of the extremist but all-too-human, tormented soul. And what was post-war Japan but a tormented nation?
Before becoming prime minister and leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Sanae Takaichi regularly paid her respects at the shrine.
Shinjiro Koizumi – her defence minister who is currently presiding over Japan’s rapid remilitarisation, including possible development of nuclear weapons – declared to the press last October that he visited the shrine “every year”; likewise Minoru Kihara, Takaichi’s chief cabinet secretary, who was previously defence minister.
It is no accident that Takaichi’s hawkish government and its militarised foreign policy enjoy core support from the far right much like the so-called Maga (Make America Great Again) movement of US President Donald Trump, for whom Takaichi likes to perform her kawaii Hello Kitty routine.
To the outside world, her government and her supporters say Japan needs a strong military to counter China and North Korea. They have also argued that allies can no longer rely on the security guarantee of the United States, especially in light of the disastrous and illegal joint US-Israeli war against Iran, which has led to direct withdrawal or delayed delivery of US weapon systems in the Asia-Pacific.
But among themselves, they are the same ideologues who deny Japan’s war crimes, rewrite history textbooks, and fantasise about recovering national dignity and sovereignty as a pre-eminent military power. They are two sides – war guilt denial and rearmament – of the same coin, the same ideology that underpins the far right that is now in ascendance in Japan, as it is across much of the West. The only difference is that the far right in Japan has always been lurking below the surface, unlike the long period of liberal politics in the West after the second world war.
But hasn’t Japan already apologised enough for its wartime atrocities? I was asked this question by Liu Xin, host of the current affairs programme, The Point, on CGTN, last week.
Of course, if you just look at the history of semi-official and official half-apologies and expressions of regret by successive Japanese leaders, the nation may look contrite. I won’t repeat them here as you can easily look them up online.
However, don’t just listen to what they say, but what they do.
Imagine if the Germans included the names of leading Nazi leaders, perhaps even Hitler, in a permanent memorial in the heart of Berlin to commemorate the war dead, and top officials paid their respects there every year because their political legitimacy and nationalist credentials depended on such visits.
What if the Germans kept revising history textbooks and maintaining history museums to whitewash Nazi atrocities, genocide and war crimes? Perhaps you, too, wouldn’t feel so comfortable as Germany is, in fact, substantially increasing its military budget as a key Nato member.
The reason Europeans trust post-war Germany is the same as to why Asians are suspicious of Japan. Germany has fully acknowledged its war guilt and made it part of its culture. Japan has never fully admitted it while maintaining an extremist, though increasingly mainstream, ideology out of denying it.
That same ideology also aims to revive national greatness, and that, of course, means rebuilding a strong military.
I don’t doubt most Japanese reject militarism and going nuclear, just like they oppose revising the nation’s pacifist constitution. In the same way, most Americans oppose Trump’s increasingly imperialist foreign policy.
But if there is one thing we have learned from modern democracy, it is that it degrades over time such that voters’ preferences no longer translate into actual policies. An entrenched political elite and an ideologically captured government, especially one of the far right, can simply ignore their preferences with virtual impunity.
A rearmed Japan can easily become a revanchist nation, one seeking a return to glory and greatness. It won’t remain a nation of J-pop and Hello Kitty.


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Opinion

Denying war guilt and remilitarisation are but two sides of the same ideological coin for the Japanese far right


Denying war guilt and remilitarisation are but two sides of the same ideological coin for the Japanese far right.


Tokyo

United States

China

Japan

Germany

North Korea

Sanae Takaichi

Donald Trump

Shinjiro Koizumi

Expresses the views, ideas and conclusions of the author. (Eg. Enough of Crazy Rich Asians, think of crazy poor Hongkongers.)


Column

Why a resurgent Japan should absolutely scare everyone

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Denying war guilt and remilitarisation are but two sides of the same ideological coin for the Japanese far right

Denying war guilt and remilitarisation are but two sides of the same ideological coin for the Japanese far right