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Japan POLITICAL EXTREMISTS
According to the 1989 Asahi Nenkan, there were
14,400
activist members of the "new left" organized into five
major
"currents" (ry ) and twenty-seven or twenty-eight
different
factions. Total membership was about 35,000. New-left
activity
focused on the New Tokyo International Airport at
Narita-Sanrizuka.
In the early 1970s, radical groups and normally
conservative
farmers formed a highly unusual alliance to oppose
expropriation of
the latter's land for the airport's construction.
Confrontations at
the construction site, which pitted thousands of farmers
and
radicals against riot police, were violent but generally
nonlethal.
Although the airport was completed and began operations
during the
1980s, the resistance continues, on a reduced scale.
Radicals
attempted to halt planned expansion of the airport by
staging
guerrilla attacks on those directly or indirectly involved
in
promoting the plan. By 1990 this activity had resulted in
some
deaths. There were also attacks against places associated
with the
emperor. In January 1990, leftists fired homemade rockets
at
imperial residences in Tokyo and Kyoto.
In terms of terrorist activities, the most important
new-left
group was the Japanese Red Army (Nihon Sekigun). Formed in
1969, it
was responsible for, among other acts, the hijacking of a
Japan
Airlines jet to P'yongyang in 1970 and the murder of
twenty-six
people at Lod International Airport in Tel Aviv in 1977.
Its
activists developed close connections with international
terrorist
groups, including Palestinian extremists
(see Civil Disturbances
, ch. 8). The Japanese Red Army also had close ties with the
Kim Il
Sung regime in North Korea, where several of its hijackers
resided
in the early 1990s. The group was tightly organized, and
one
scholar has suggested that its "managerial style"
resembled that of
major Japanese corporations.
Right-wing extremists were diverse. In 1989 there were
800 such
groups with about 120,000 members altogether. By police
count,
however, only about fifty groups and 23,000 individuals
were
considered active. Right-wing extremists indulged in a
heady
romanticism with strong links to the prewar period. They
tended to
be fascinated with the macho charisma of blood, sweat, and
steel,
and they promoted (like many nonradical groups)
traditional samurai
values as the antidote to the spiritual ills of postwar
Japan.
Their preference for violent direct action rather than
words
reflected the example of the militarist extremists of the
1930s and
the heroic "men of strong will" of the late Tokugawa
period of the
1850s and 1860s. The modern right-wing extremists demanded
an end
to the postwar "system of dependence" on the United
States,
restoration of the emperor to his prewar, divine status,
and
repudiation of Article 9. Many, if not most, right-wingers
had
intimate connections with Japan's gangster underground,
the
yakuza.
The ritual suicide of one of Japan's most prominent
novelists,
Mishima Yukio, following a failed attempt to initiate a
rebellion
among Self-Defense Forces units in November 1970, shocked
and
fascinated the public. Mishima and his small private army,
the
Shield Society (Tate no Kai), hoped that a rising of the
SelfDefense Forces would inspire a nationwide affirmation of
the old
values and put an end to the postwar "age of languid
peace."
Although rightists were also responsible for the
assassination
of socialist leader Asanuma Inejiro in 1960 and an attempt
on the
life of former prime minster Ohira Masayoshi in 1978, most
of them,
unlike their prewar counterparts, largely kept to noisy
street
demonstrations, especially harassment campaigns aimed at
conventions of the leftist Japan Teachers Union. In the
early
1990s, however, there was evidence that a "new right" was
becoming
more violent. In May 1987, a reporter working for the
liberal
Asahi Shimbun was killed by a gunman belonging to
the Nippon
Minzoku Dokuritsu Giyugun Betsudo Sekihotai (Blood Revenge
Corps of
the Partisan Volunteer Corps for the Independence of the
Japanese
Race), known as Sekihotai (Blood Revenge Corps). The
Sekihotai also threatened to assassinate former Prime
Minister
Nakasone for giving in to foreign pressure on such issues
as the
revision of textbook accounts of Japan's war record. In
January
1990, a member of the Seikijuku (translatable, ironically,
as the
Sane Thinkers School) shot and seriously wounded Nagasaki
mayor
Motoshima Hitoshi. The attack may have been provoked by
the leftist
rocket attacks on imperial residences in Tokyo and Kyoto a
few days
earlier as well as by the mayor's critical remarks
concerning
Emperor Hirohito.
In early 1994, the coalition government formed by Prime
Minister Hosokawa Morohiro from small parties broken off
from the
LDP in league with the Komeito and socialist parties
following the
July 1993 House of representatives election remained in
power.
Although the LDP was still the strongest party, for the
first time
in nearly fifty years it found itself in the role of an
opposition
party.
* * *
Democratizing Japan, a collection of essays
edited by
Robert E. Ward and Sakamoto Yoshikazu, describes the
writing of the
postwar constitution and other effects of the United
States
occupation on Japan's political system. Theodore Cohen's
Remaking Japan and Otis Cary's From a Ruined
Empire
depict the occupation from participants' points of view.
Although
most of the essays in Maruyama Masao's Thought and
Behavior in
Modern Japanese Politics were composed in the late
1940s and
early 1950s, this volume still provides perhaps the best
discussion
of Japanese political values. Authority and the
Individual in
Japan, edited by J. Victor Koschmann, discusses
changes in
values from the Meiji period to the 1970s and has many
interesting
things to say about the way the Japanese view authority.
Against
the State by David Apter and Nagayo Sawa challenges
the
conventional view of the value placed on harmony
(wa) in
describing farmer and radical resistance to the
construction of the
New Tokyo International Airport. Although published in
1969,
Nathaniel B. Thayer's How the Conservatives Rule
Japan
remained relevant in the early 1990s. More recent
discussions of
the political system include Bradley M. Richardson's
The
Political Culture of Japan, Kyogoku Jun'ichi's The
Political
Dynamics of Japan, T.J. Pempel's Policy and
Politics in
Industrial States, and J.A.A. Stockwin and others'
Dynamic
and Immobilist Politics in Japan. Kent E. Calder's
Crisis
and Compensation, however, is especially illuminating
because
of its avoidance of cultural explanations (which are
typically
overused) and its abundance of comparisons with other
countries.
B.C. Koh's Japan's Administrative Elite provides a
clear and
concise discussion of the elite civil service and its
policy-making
role. Karel G. van Wolferen's controversial The Enigma
of
Japanese Power, which Japanese critics have called "a
textbook
for Japan-bashing," is filled with interesting details,
even if its
main thesis about the leaderless nature of the political
system is
questionable.
English-language journals and periodicals with useful
articles
on the political system include Journal of Japanese
Studies,
Journal of Asian Studies, Asian Survey,
Pacific
Affairs [Vancouver], Japan Quarterly [Tokyo],
Japan
Echo [Tokyo], and Far Eastern Economic Review
[Hong
Kong]. One of the best, Japan Interpreter [Tokyo],
ceased
publication in 1980, but its articles from the 1960s and
1970s are
still illuminating. (For further information and complete
citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of January 1994
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