After The War Japan's New Nationalism

Neo-nationalism is a special political phenomenon in Japan after the WWII, and this dissertation tries to trace the track of Japanese neo-nationalism and contemplate on the interaction between the political thoughts and practices of this ideological trend. This paper will render a relatively systematic exploration into the evolution of Japanese postwar neo-nationalism in a chronological order. It falls into five Chapters in addition to the preface and the conclusion. The first Chapter mainly analyzes the formation and characteristics of Japanese prewar extremist nationalism and illustrates how the postwar reform put a quick end to it. Chapter two discusses about the setbacks that the Japanese rulers of the 1960's suffered while trying to return to prewar nationalistic politics, which included the resistance of the ruling party in the early stage of the postwar reform and the termination of the "reversionism" they strongly supported. Chapter three deals with the dormancy and latency of Japanese nationalism in the 60's and 70's of last century when Japanese economy soared up and surveys the development of the right-winged postwar nationalistic influence. Chapter four makes multi-perspective criticisms on the neo-nationalism advocated by Nakasone, emphasizing the relationship between neo-Kyotoism and Nakasonean neo-nationalism. Chapter five studies the expansion of Japanese neo-nationalism after the cold war in the 1900s, and makes a special effort to dig into the neo-nationalistic trend characteristic of Ozawa Ichiro's "common nationalism" and the neo-racist trend characteristic of "liberalistic historicism". This dissertation attempts to follow the two intertwined historical clues of Japanese postwar politics and the neo-nationalistic development, and research into the evolution of latter from the interacting perspective of the two. On the one hand, the development of Japanese postwar politics played a major part in determining the evolutionary course of the neo-nationalism; on the other, the development of the neo-nationalism greatly affected the contents and orientation of Japanese postwar politics. The consequences of the interaction between the two imposed a great impact on Japanese contemporary politics, namely, the neo-nationalism, where the civil integrity and democratic rights are sacrificed for the so-called Japanese national interests.