Japan

JAPAN SPENT CENTURIES in geographically induced and politically enforced isolation. When it opened up to the rest of the world in the second half of the 19th century, it embarked on the race to match the Western industrialized nations. With amazing speed, in less than a generation, Japan was transformed to reach this goal, and in the early 20th century, it was able to defeat Russia in war. This economic, political, and military success story had bad side-effects, as the Japanese society became very militaristic and jingoistic. What was celebrated as Samurai ethics played out as an Asian form of fascism starting in the late 1920s. Japan engaged in colonialist expansion politics and became the only Asian player in the concert of the European and U.S. imperialistic powers. Japanese neighbors, especially Korea and China, paid dearly for the ruthless expansion of Imperial Japan. Although Japan was something like a junior partner of Nazi Germany in World War II, the propagandistic indoctrination of the Japanese people and traditional warrior ethics prolonged the Japanese resistance at the end of the war. Only the use of atomic bombs forced the Japanese Emperor to surrender.

Examining the politics of Japan of today, from a left perspective, has to start with the past, as the idealization and mystification of the past are a forming element of the Japanese society. At the end of World War II, when the Americans entered Japan, they wanted to remodel and democratize the country. But as General Douglas Macarthur kept the Tenno (Japanese emperor) in place, a symbol of the pre-1945 period was transferred into the new era. It is true that the Tenno was stripped of his role as a living god and had no real political power in the new constitution, but along with the keeping of the Tenno came tacit rehabilitation of the pre-1945 society as a whole. For example, kamikaze suicide missions of World War II are still regarded by a large percentage of the Japanese population as heroic and pure self-sacrifice, although it is by now well established by historians that brain-washing and sometimes even force induced the pilots to their brutal missions.

Democracy was never a project on which the Japanese society embarked voluntarily. The Americans forced it onto Japan after 1945, but large parts of the population stayed at least skeptical. This may have changed with the postwar generations, but it is certainly true for the period of de-facto one-party-rule from 1955 to the early 1990s (Liberal Democratic Party, LDP). Although Japan has had a democratic system since the constitution of 1946, this democracy was more formal than vivid for long periods. This led to large protest movements outside the democratically elected institutions, and both the extreme right and the extreme left use very violent measures to bring their political point to public attention. Whereby the left sometimes disturbs [Page 248]the traffic of Tokyo by attacks on transport systems, or attacks foreigners abroad (for example the assault by Japanese terrorists on an Israeli airport), the extreme right is much more powerful, because it had, at least from the 1950s to the 1970s, tacit approval of parts of the Japanese establishment.

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