Prologue_Japan's Inflection Point 3?11

Part 1: Post-Cold War and the Gulf War

Chapter 1: Japan's Chaos in the 1990s
1 The Gulf War: 'Paid for and got slapped in the face'
2 The chaos after the bubble burst
3. Stripped bare by 'comfort women'

Chapter 2: The 'Pivot to Asia' Ends in Failure
1 Hatoyama Visits Yu Gwan-sun's Prison Cell
2 Okinawa, the 'Graveyard of the Democratic Party'
3. The short spring days of Korea-Japan relations

Chapter 3: Japan's Loss of Brakes
1 The left that failed to overcome the imperial system
2 Why Did the Socialist Party Fall?

Part 2: The Unlocked Right-Wingers

Chapter 4: How They Became 'Victims'
1 “Japanese kidnapped”, bomb thrown by Kim Jong-il
2 Collision between Coast Guard and Chinese fishing boats
3 From San Francisco to the Senkakus: The Politics of Territorial Disputes

Chapter 5: Historical Revisionism, the Internet Right, and Anti-Koreanism
1. Yoshinori Kobayashi's "Gomanimism"
2 Kono's Statement and the 'New Rebellion'
3. Net Right and Anti-Korean Rhetoric

Chapter 6: The Right-Wingers Who Shake Up Japanese Politics
1 Hashimoto, who grew up eating Kansai's frustrations
2. Right-wing signboard, "Sun Tribe" Ishihara
3 Abe, the 'neoconservative darling'

Part 3 Japan after 3/11

Chapter 7: Why Didn't 3?11 Change Japan?
1 The Great Earthquake That Destroyed the Democratic Party
2 The Unfulfilled 'Hydrangea Revolution'
3 “Let’s revive the glory of Showa”

Chapter 8: The Neocon Abe Era
1. Bureaucracy is over.
2 Japan's abandonment of the Peace Constitution
3 “No more apologies”

Chapter 9: Japan Dreams of a Strategic Nation
1. The US is tying the 'Indo-Pacific' together, followed by Japan.
2 The US-Japan Alliance, a 'national system'

Chapter 10: Where is Northeast Asia headed?
1 Japan's Rush to Become a Security State
2 Japan's 'Semiconductor Rise' and the Acheson Line

Epilogue
Search

Japan's turning point: March 11th

The author described Japan, which he observed for three years as a correspondent since 2011, as a time of political and social chaos and upheaval reminiscent of the period following World War II, with blurred vision due to the dust of upheaval.
March 11th was an event that heightened the Japanese people's anxiety to the max.
From immediately after the incident until the end of 2012, Japan was in a state of 'interregnum' (a period of absence of authority) where the substance of a new order was not clear, similar to the period after our 'December 3' civil war.
However, the tectonic shift brought about by March 11 created a space in which neoconservatives could take power.
While the Democratic Party, including the Social Democratic Party, lacked the leadership to lead it to the left, it was full of energy to lead it to the right.
Ultimately, the Democratic Party's short three-year term in power failed, and at the end of 2012, a political group with neoconservatism and historical revisionism as its identity, represented by Abe, came to the forefront.
This book, divided into three parts, begins by examining the circumstances in which Japan, faced with a crisis in the international community after the Gulf War in the 1990s, advocated for the theory of a normal nation that violated its pacifist constitution, and felt anxiety and bewilderment as it confronted issues of the past, while political forces such as the Democratic Party and the Socialist Party failed to present alternatives. It then examines the events and process in which neoconservatism emerged in earnest and Japanese society shifted to the right.

Historical Revisionism, Internet Right, and Anti-Koreanism as Psychological Mechanisms of Right-Wing Shift

It may be difficult for younger readers to grasp, but Japan's postwar prosperity reached its peak in the late 1980s.
At that time, many experts predicted that Japan would soon surpass the United States.
But the Japanese economy collapsed as soon as this prediction was made, and Japanese society, which had been dominated by cosmopolitanism until the 1980s, was suddenly engulfed in an identity crisis.
This book vividly portrays the chaos of 1990s Japan, including the anxiety and bewilderment of the Japanese people who were confronted with unsealed historical issues just as the economic bubble burst.
The political and economic turmoil has hit the younger generation hard.
The gaping gap in society is putting pressure on young people, and the number of young people turning to nationalism and the right wing is increasing.
A comic-like subculture seduced young people.
This book examines the process by which right-wing cartoonist Yoshinori Kobayashi popularized historical revisionism, the textbook war of the New History Textbook Making Association (Saeyokmo), and the rise of online right-wingers and anti-Korean sentiment.


In particular, the influence of Yoshinori Kobayashi's manga "On War" on the younger generation was enormous.
Young people were enthusiastic about this cartoon, which affirmed the Greater East Asia War and even argued for the need to have an army.
Now, things like peace, democracy, and high growth have become stories from another world, unrelated to their daily lives.
Democracy, civil rights, and human rights were just empty words I encountered in school, and I grew to harbor hostility toward the leftists who used such language and pretended to be cool.
Taking advantage of this gap, the right-wing movement, which argued that the pre-war history had been distorted by the US military and that Japan's modern history should be re-examined in a way that would increase national pride, gained strength as the "New Rebellion Movement."
Japan's 'mistakes' have been revealed through historical issues such as the Japanese military comfort women and the Nanjing Massacre, but the new generation in Japan has not learned about such past history in school.
Rather than seriously confronting and reflecting on past mistakes, Japanese society chose a roundabout path by mobilizing the frame of nationalism.


The Decline of the Japanese Left After the Cold War

The Democratic Party's rise to power in 2009 was merely an interlude in Japan's overall conservatism following the end of the Cold War.
In the 1990s, Japan experienced a prolonged recession and frequent conflicts over past history and territorial disputes with neighboring countries, leading to the consolidation of the conservative right wing.
The center-right Democratic Party government needed to join forces with the left to change Japan's course, but Japan's left-wing politics began to lose its presence after peaking in the late 1980s.
Although the Socialist Party had no chance of taking power, it played a role in protecting Japan's "constitutional pacifism" during the Cold War by securing a barrier to constitutional revision.
However, in the cohabitation system of the Liberal Democratic Party and the Socialist Party, which was a shortened version of the East-West conflict, the Socialist Party was complacent as a 'perennial opposition party', and in the mid-1990s, when the long-term ruling LDP system collapsed due to a money scandal, the Socialist Party also fell along with it in the political realignment.
After forming a coalition government with the Liberal Democratic Party, he lost his identity as a "constitutional pacifist" by making a 180-degree turn in his previous stance on the Japan-US Security Treaty, the Rising Sun Flag, the Kimigayo, and the Self-Defense Forces.


Even in the media, the influence of international cooperation-oriented newspapers such as the Asahi Shimbun has been steadily weakening.
When the issue of North Korea's abduction of Japanese citizens was confirmed to be true in 2002, progressive left-wing public opinion was shocked.
The second shock came in 2014 when the Asahi Shimbun, which had been active in raising the issue of Japanese military "comfort women," retracted its initial comfort women report, which unverified Yoshida Seiji's claim that military comfort women were forcibly taken from Jeju Island, calling it an incorrect article.
The overall conservative shift in the media landscape has ultimately contributed significantly to Abe's long-term monopoly.
With the total collapse of the left, the political and ideological base to counter the historical revisionism and rightward shift that began in earnest in the late 1990s disappeared.


March 11 and the Expansion of Neoconservative Power

Since the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, Japan has been mired in an identity crisis.
As the Cold War structure disintegrated, a sense of anxiety gripped the Japanese, as if they had been thrown into the middle of the international community.
As the international political front of the anti-communist alliance disappeared in East Asia, the movement to hold people accountable for the sealed past emerged with the issue of the "Japanese military comfort women," which served as an opportunity to reaffirm the hypocrisy of Japan's "closed pacifism" built without an apology, reflection, or settlement of the past.
The comfort women issue has gone beyond the level of relations between Korea and Japan and has been elevated to a common international agenda as a problem of "wartime sexual violence."
The shock brought about by the past served as an opportunity to unite the conservative right wing in Japan, and Japan's nationalistic nationalism began to grow amid this identity anxiety.
North Korea's admission of Japanese abductions in 2002 transformed Japan from a perpetrator into a victim, and in the process, Abe emerged as a key figure of neoconservatism.
It also spread the desire for a "strong Japan" by causing disputes such as the Senkaku Islands (Diaoyu Islands in Chinese) dispute between China and Japan and the territorial dispute between Korea and Dokdo.


Japan was helpless in the face of 3/11.
In the meantime, Japan's status in the international community collapsed in an instant.
A new vision of a "small and safe country" was presented, and voices criticizing the nuclear mafia and advocating for nuclear phase-out erupted, but ultimately, these voices were defeated in their confrontation with the retrograde growth-oriented policies represented by Abe.
The Democratic Party, which was in power at the time, attempted to pursue a nuclear phase-out policy, but was thwarted by US restraint, and was forced to resign after three years and three months, failing to impress during the disaster recovery process.
"The Birth of Neoconservative Japan" examines the process by which Abe, after returning to power, established a "prime ministerial dictatorship" system and nullified the Peace Constitution, as well as the significance of the declaration made on the 70th anniversary of the end of the war that "Japan will no longer apologize to other countries" from the perspective of Korea-Japan relations.
We examine how the revision of the US-Japan Defense Cooperation Guidelines, known as the 2015 Guidelines, and its subsequent measures, such as the enactment and revision of security legislation, have transformed Japan into a country capable of launching war on its own initiative.
This paper examines the process by which Abe, who sought to transform Japan into a strategic nation, created the geopolitical concept of the "Indo-Pacific," and its significance within the context of strengthening the "US-Japan alliance."
In addition, we examine Japan's recently aggressively pursued strategy to revitalize the semiconductor industry, along with its mandatory security measures, in the context of Korea-Japan relations.