The Most Sinister Cult in Japanese Politics
Perhaps the most salient aspect of former Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s assassination in media coverage was the Japanese government’s links to the Unification Church, a controversial Christian sect. The Unification Church’s eccentric practices and the assassin’s distaste for its influence on Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) have led to much media focus on the government’s ties to the cult. However, the LDP, and by extension, the Japanese government, of which the LDP and its predecessors have been in control for all but 5.5 years since 1949, has been influenced by a different cult that has played a more significant role in Japanese governance, one that is more dangerous and significantly more deserving of scrutiny than it has received: Nippon Kaigi and other far-right ultranationalist groups.
While the Unification Church has been inexcusably detrimental, Japan’s chronic tango with genocide and war crime denial is significantly more serious and has festered for too long. One article in a student publication cannot adequately right this wrong, but it is written anyway from a place of deep frustration that many of the victims, my ancestors and compatriots, will never receive a mere apology, let alone complete justice, for their sufferings. The current Japanese government is not directly responsible for the crimes that their forebears committed during the imperial era, but they are responsible for justice and the creation of a society that rejects the hate that led to imperial crimes. In that regard, Japan and the LDP have not only abdicated responsibility, but they have actively chosen to cement the very faults that led to such atrocities.
The significant number of Nippon Kaigi (NK) members who have held or still hold significant prominent positions in the Japanese government is emblematic of this problem. The current Prime Minister, Kishida Fumio, and former PMs, Suga Yoshihide, Abe Shinzo, and Aso Taro were all members of NK. After Abe’s 2014 Cabinet reshuffle, 15 of the 19 positions were filled by NK members. 80% of the Japanese Cabinet were members of NK in 2015. The organisation influences many; it has about 38,000 members, similar to the size of England’s Green Party. But given the reach and influence that Nippon Kaigi has over the LDP 38,000 is a meaningless estimate of the number of people roughly satisfied with the organisation. The LDP has a dues paying membership base of over one million.
The size and reach of this organisation is frightening given its political positions and what its members in Japanese politics have done. NK is a group that argues that Japan’s past imperialism across East Asia ought to be celebrated. Itdenies or downplays the atrocities by the Japanese military in the rape of Nanjing. Kase Hideaki, a former NK Tokyo Branch head, has been quoted saying that “There was no massacre at all [at Nanjing]. It is an utterly false accusation.” It is in fact Mr. Kase who is lying: Over 200,000 people died at the hands of the Japanese military in Nanjing during the six week-long massacre. Nippon Kaigi claims that the prosecutions of Japanese War criminals were illegitimate, and that the Japanese military did not engage in sexual slavery of Korean women, a claim that has no basis in reality. The group has utterly regressive views on the role of women in society, even aside from their grotesque denial of military sexual slavery in WWII. The group has been abundantly clear that it views laws defending gender equality as having a “noxious influence on families.” Perhaps most concerning to Japan’s neighbours, mainly Korea and China, is NK’s insistence that Japan revoke Article 9 of its constitution, the article prohibiting the Japanese military from engaging in offensive military endeavours. These aren’t merely the views of a perverted band of powerless bigots but instead of a government that has consistently oppressed and stoked hate against East Asia’s most vulnerable. A look at the actions of NK members in government illustrates this.
Japanese ultranationalists have a deeply unsettling fascination with historical miseducation. In 2017, controversy erupted when it became known that Abe’s government had used state resources to benefit a private kindergarten that had engaged in racism against Korean and Chinese residents of Japan. There are other issues. Controversies over Japanese history textbook revisionism only started to receive attention abroad in 1982, but the issue has been ongoing for much longer than that. In 1952 Japanese historian Ienaga Saburo was ordered by the government to remove references in his textbook related to section 731, the Japanese Imperial Army unit tasked with testing biological weapons on Chinese civilians, despite the veracity of the Ienaga’s claims. Though Ienaga’s lawsuit against the Japanese government initially forced the government to publish Ienaga’s textbooks accounting Japanese war crimes, the Japanese Supreme Courtreversed its decision in 1993, allowing the government to censor details regarding the mass murder and rape by Japanese forces during the occupation and invasions of Korea. The most notorious and influential group in the textbook debates is the Tsukuru Kai, a group that has been supported by NK. Founded in the late 1990s and with notable influence with LDP politicians, Tsukuru Kai’s aims were to revise Japanese history in a more nationalistic bent, for instance by removing any reference to military sex slaves, also known as “comfort women”. Tsukuru Kai has managed to get textbooks approved by the state in 2000, 2005, and in 2009. These textbooks deny the Korean resistance movement’s existence, downplay the Nanjing massacre as “an incident,” don’t give numbers for the massacre’s victims, and don’t mention the existence of comfort women at all. This controversy did not end in 2005, when it was arguably at its most prominent but continued in2015 when Japan attempted to further remove references to war crimes, such as the massacre of Okinawans or comfort women. Again in 2022, under Kishida Fumio’s government, Japan further tried to deny war crimes. In addition to denying sexual slavery, the textbooks also deny that Japan forcibly deported Koreans to use them as forced labourers in Japanese factories with minimal compensation during WWII.
The ultranationalist control over Japanese education and its revisionism is not a niche concern but has real consequences. Japanese students do not understand why tensions exist between Japan and its neighbours over events from the 1930s and 1940s. But there are also tangible consequences to generations of Japanese children being ignorant of the war crimes that the Japanese state committed. Hate crimes against Japan’s Korean residents (Zainichi Koreans), for example, have spiked will continue to do so so long as the public remains uninformed about Japan’s role in the forcible removal of Koreans to Japan.
Hate crimes against Zainichi Koreans arising from Japan’s intentional miseducation of the Japanese public is only one way, however, that the ultranationalist faction of the Japanese government has demeaned and harmed Zainichi Koreans. In a previous article for the FAR, I outlined a few examples of the Japanese government’s grotesque treatment of Zainichi Koreans. While the roots of such problems can be ascribed to Japan’s initial refusal to help the forced labourers it brought over to either adjust to Japanese society or to obtain the resources to return home, the continued hardships that the Zainichi Korean community faces are the partial responsibility of the ultranationalists in control of the Japanese government. These include issues such as the exclusion of Koreans from state pension and disability benefits and slashing funding to Korean schools.
But even aside from abdicating their moral and social responsibility to their own residents and constituents, the Japanese government’s ultranationalism has been hurtful to the international community. Visits to the Yasukuni Shrine by Japanese Prime Ministers have been met with the utmost contempt and protest by Seoul and Beijing, and understandably so. That shrine has been notorious for glorifying Class A war criminals like Tojo Hideki. A Western equivalent would be a German Chancellor paying respects to the graves of Eichmann and Mengele.Various Prime Ministers have visited this shrine since 1985, including Koizumi Junichiro, who visited anually, and Abe, whose 2013 visit sparked outrage among Japan’s neighbours. While no PM has visited the shrine since, then PM Suga Yoshihide sent offerings to the shrine in 2021, which was met woth protests from Seoul.
If glorifying some of history’s most despicable war criminals wasn’t enough, the Japan’s denial of responsibility for its previous crimes has extended beyond the purview of the merely symbolic and has extended to economics. In 2018, the Supreme Court of Korea found Mitsubishi Heavy Industries guilty of exploiting forced Korean labour during the colonial period, beyond the inherent exploitation implicit in forced labour, and ordered Mitsubishi to pay four victims the equivalent of roughly £66,530 each. The Mitsubishi case was not the only case but was the biggest in a series of legal cases involving the use of forced Korean labour by Japanese companies during the colonial period (1910-1945). Tokyo’s response, aside from denying that Mitsubishi and other Japanese companies had any responsibilities to the victims, was to start a trade war with its third largest trading partner and attempt to crash its economy. Japan’s decision has affected more than Korea; the backlash to Japan’s reactionary measures prompted a boycott of Japanese products, leading to significant losses, and the end of intelligence sharing agreements. Mitsubishi’s net profits in 2018 were £5.16 billion. It could have paid the victims what the Court ordered without any significant loss but for the precedent of Japanese companies and Japan being held accountable for their colonial crimes. Tokyo would instead choose to lose out in other ways and undermine its national security to continue to deny war crimes.
Though this article has not come close to elaborating all the intricacies of the sheer preposterousness of the Japanese ultranationalist position, it has made clear that their control over the Japanese state has been an unambiguous detriment. In the wake of Abe’s assassination, the characterisation of the Japanese government being influenced by a cult is vaguely correct, but the cult that deserves more ire than the Unification Church is the cult of Japanese ultranationalism. Significant lack of foreign attention, outside of East and Southeast Asia, regarding Tokyo’s denials is partially to blame for allowing Japan’s colonial, imperial, and genocidal legacy to rage on. It is unconscionable that this legacy has been left to fester, and it has long been time to amend this wrong.
Image courtesy of 内閣官房内閣広報室 via Wikimedia Commons, © 2014, some rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
