A Wave of Patriotism

With his spiky hair and skinny suits, Yoshinobu Tomiyama is on a quest to change Japan. In a country where politics is often the preserve of older folk, Tomiyama is a relatively youthful 41-year-old running in the country’s Dec. 16 parliamentary elections. His biography brims with unorthodox choices, like moonlighting as a comedian and self-financing his studies in the U.S. and Britain — unusual for the average Japanese. Tomiyama’s childhood hero was a roving samurai who helped overthrow the ruling shogun and propel a long-isolated nation into the modern age — a political revolution known as the Meiji Restoration. Now Tomiyama has joined a new political bloc called the Japan Restoration Party (JRP) for his inaugural electoral run. One of his solutions for reinvigorating his stagnating homeland is to rebuild a Japan that draws succor from its past, despite the country’s reflexive self-flagellation for its defeat in World War II. “For years, our government has had no vision,” he says, downing coffee on a break from campaigning. “We need to be proud of what Japan is and where it came from. We need to show the world we can stand up and lead.”

In November, Toru Hashimoto, Osaka’s young rebel mayor, joined forces with Shintaro Ishihara, the reactionary ex-governor of Tokyo, to form the JRP that Tomiyama belongs to. With its maverick, nationalist message, the JRP has jolted the political establishment. Hashimoto and Ishihara seem to delight in lobbing political grenades. The Osaka mayor, for instance, has asserted that there’s no proof the Japanese imperial army sexually enslaved women in Asia. Ishihara, for his part, maintains that the 1937 Nanjing Massacre — in which Japanese soldiers went on a killing and raping spree in the war-torn Chinese city — never happened.

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That the JRP, a popular political party, is sounding extreme shows how Japanese nationalism is no longer the domain of fringe activists. More to the point, the rhetoric of the JRP, which by some estimates is running second in the polls, is being echoed by the likely winner, the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which controlled power for most of the postwar era. Its leader Shinzo Abe is now poised to become Japan’s next Prime Minister, replacing current PM Yoshihiko Noda of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). (Japan has endured six Prime Ministers in as many years.) “We are going to win back Japan and build a strong country, a prosperous country,” says Abe, whose party has chosen “Restoring Japan” as its campaign slogan. (Sound familiar, Hashimoto- and Ishihara-san?)

On Dec. 3, Abe, who served as Prime Minister for precisely a year from September 2006 to September 2007, vowed that one of his missions would be “to protect our territory and beautiful waters.” Abe was referring to a long-simmering dispute with China over a handful of islands in the East China Sea that in recent months has erupted into a potential flash point, with increasing brinkmanship by both sides. “The trend of nationalism is inevitable in Japan,” says Ryuji Yoneda, a member of Zaitokukai, a radical Internet-based group with about 12,500 members, ranging from housewives to part-time workers, that organizes jingoistic protests across the country. The rise of a New Right has the potential not only to transform the way a long-pacifist Japan sees itself but also to unsettle Asia’s security landscape. “Japan’s shift to the right didn’t happen overnight,” says Koichi Nakano, director of the Institute of Global Concern at Sophia University in Tokyo. “But we may be witnessing how this move in Japan will change regional geopolitics.”

The Nationalist Card Japan once prided itself on being prosperously middle class, but it has been in an economic slump for two decades. Outwardly, many citizens still lead comfortable lives. Yet national debt stands at twice the size of the economy, exports have dropped dramatically, and Japan teeters on the edge of another recession. More than a third of Japanese cannot find full-time jobs. Last year’s triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis was supposed to shake the country out of its paralyzing placidity. But little has happened since besides a flurry of civil-society activity and some well-attended antinuclear protests. If the Japanese seem uniformly passionate about anything, it’s antipathy toward a rising neighbor to the west. More than 80% of Japanese say they harbor unfriendly sentiments about China, up nearly 10% from last year, according to a survey by Japan’s Cabinet Office. “Ten years ago, I was considered an ultra-nationalist,” says Yoshiko Sakurai, a former TV anchor who has written books with titles like The Determination to Stand Up to China. “But now these are ordinary thoughts in Japan.”

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Abe, the 58-year-old scion of a conservative political family, seems perfectly bred to express these now ordinary thoughts. Six years ago, when he was first sworn in as Japan’s Prime Minister, his nationalist stance felt out of step with a Japanese public more concerned about the country’s economic woes. He resigned in tears, blaming health problems. But Abe has returned more hawkish than ever, casting himself as the kind of strong leader required in an era in which Japan is being challenged by China not only in territorial disputes but also for the ideological stewardship of the region. Despite objections from countries like China and South Korea that are still smarting from Japan’s imperialist past, Abe made a pilgrimage in October to Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, where top war criminals are enshrined along with other war dead. He has called for amending Japan’s pacifist constitution, which was enacted during the American occupation in 1947, to allow for a more clearly defined military force. He also wants to inject more patriotism into Japanese textbooks that already gloss over atrocities committed by Japanese forces in Asia.

Japan’s rightward turn has coincided with growing nationalism in China, where a new leadership helmed by Xi Jinping was installed in mid-November. Xi recently declared that “the revival of the Chinese nation is the greatest dream of the nation since modern times.” Restoring Japan, reviving China — the language is strikingly similar. “China has become more nationalistic over the past 10 years,” says Bao Xiaqin, an expert on Sino-Japanese relations at Fudan University in Shanghai. “Actually, the whole of East Asia has become more nationalistic.”

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Surface Tensions It is in this complicated and contested space that the dispute has exploded over islands that Japan calls the Senkaku and China dubs the Diaoyu. In April, Ishihara, the former Tokyo governor who now heads the JRP, announced that the Tokyo administration would buy three of the islands from their private Japanese owners — a brazen move designed to rile Beijing. In September the Japanese government figured that nationalizing the islets, which are located in waters with seabeds rich in natural gas, would defuse the issue by taking them away from the jingoistic Ishihara. But the Chinese objected, arguing that the islands had been seized in 1895 at the beginning of imperial Japan’s march through Asia. Japan counters that the islands were not officially claimed by China in 1895 and were not part of the territory it was treaty-bound to renounce after it lost World War II. Anti-Japanese protests broke out in dozens of Chinese cities later that month, and Chinese boats have made near daily forays into the contested waters.

On the campaign trail, Abe has done little to reduce maritime tensions, fueling speculation about whether Japan should build facilities on the uninhabited islands or even station government workers there. The LDP leader wants Japan to turn what is known as the nation’s Self-Defense Forces (SDF) into a more conventional military — although Japan already boasts what some figure is the world’s sixth largest defense budget. Japan’s postwar constitution precludes the country from possessing a regular army, forcing it to rely on the U.S. for most of its security concerns. But as China expands its armed forces, even the governing liberal DPJ has beefed up Japan’s defense profile by dispersing its first-ever military aid in the postwar era to Asian countries Tokyo may fear are falling into Beijing’s orbit. “We need to thank China for awakening the Japanese people to the need for a normal military force,” says Toshiyuki Shikata, a retired SDF general.

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The region’s security landscape has changed considerably since Abe was last Prime Minister. Besides China, Japan is also embroiled in a territorial spat with South Korea, itself undergoing a presidential election, over a separate set of islands. China too has clashed with other East Asian nations over yet more disputed islands in the South China Sea, a waterway that Beijing is more assertively claiming as nearly all its own.

Which brings us back to that revolutionary samurai beloved by JRP candidate Tomiyama. The warrior’s name was Ryoma Sakamoto, and he’s a folk hero in Japan. In addition to his support of the reforms that led to the Meiji Restoration, Sakamoto helped found the precursor to Japan’s modern navy. In 1905, Japan prevailed in the Russo-Japanese War, the first time since the Mongol invasion that an Asian country had vanquished a European power. The historic victory, Tomiyama learned while studying history at Boston University, helped inspire Indian nationalists who eventually won freedom from the British. “In Japanese schools, I was taught that everything Japan did was bad, that war was always bad,” says Tomiyama. “But I think we should show some gratitude to our grandfathers for their sacrifices.” Those are fighting words from Japan’s New Right.

— with reporting by Chie Kobayashi / Tokyo and Gu Yongqiang / Beijing

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