National Identity and Japanese Revisionism: Abe Shinzō’s Vision of a Beautiful Japan and Its Limits

Abstract

In order to achieve the abovementioned goal, the book is divided into four chapters. The first chapter entitled “National identity and the study of contemporary Japan” will provide the theoretical part of this book. Since my aim is to connect the societal with the political, the theory of national identity serves as the best guidance for appraising the dynamics and change in these two fields. The chapter will illustrate contemporary approaches to studying national identity and distinguish two schools according to their differing interpretation of Japan’s identity change: social constructivist and post-structural. Social constructivists base their understanding on norms and domestic culture, which – although influenced by international norms – in Japan’s case remain tied to the pacifist Constitution and its role in its postwar development. Post-structuralists discard this view in favor of the practice of identity undertaken by differentiating to various Others. These Others might be spatial (China, the United States, Okinawa, South Korea, Russia, Asia etc.), but also temporal (broadly defined prewar and postwar Japan), ethnical/societal (Ainus, Okinawans etc.) and others. Identity, in the eyes of post-structuralists is defined by these Others and as the narrative on Others changes, so does Japan’s national identity. My approach, as highlighted in this chapter, tries to unite these two schools by building on both relational narrative and internal, domestic culture. It does so through the concept of sedimentation and the interplay of variously sedimented, discursively created identities. Chapter 2 illustrates the development of Japan’s postwar national identity narrative and its sedimentation into political and social institutions. It shows the conflicted and problematic birth of Japan’s postwar pacifism and argues against making simplified distinctions between militaristic prewar and anti-militarist postwar Japan. It also shows, however, that due to the identity entrepreneurship of mostly 1960s and 1970s Japanese pragmatic politicians, the peaceful narrative has become sedimented in echelons of Japanese society and state. It goes on to articulate that since the 1990s, this narrative has become gradually more and more targeted by identity entrepreneurs who have possessed different visions for Japan – visions much closer to Abe’s conservative revisionism. Since the main empirical part of the book revolves around the figure of Abe Shinzō, Chapter 3 tries to understand the ideological drivers behind his revisionist narrative. Abe has indeed been one of the most prominent, if not the most prominent, Japanese policymaker since World War II. By the time of writing this book, he is the fifth longest serving prime minister in all of Japan’s history and third in Japan’s postwar era with a vision of surpassing Prime Ministers Yoshida Shigeru and Satō Eisaku if successful in the forthcoming elections.