The Global Citizen and the Last Samurai: Japan’s Heisei Era Between Globalism and Nationalism, 1989-2019

By

Michael Pass

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Master in Global Affairs

University of Prince Edward Island (Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island)

Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Madrid, Spain)

6 August 2019

© Michael Pass, 2019

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Abstract

For centuries, Americans and Europeans have been making use of Japan as a conceptual foil to make a point about their own societies. During the post-Cold War period (overlapping with the

Heisei Era from 1989 to 2019), Japan was often fitted into a dichotomy of being either a model

globalist nation or the embodiment of a nationalist one. The “idea” of Japan was mobilized by both sides of this debate to justify their own ideological worldviews. This thesis will attempt to show the contours of this conflict by focusing on the careers of two individuals whose own lives

and fortunes paralleled those of their respective visions: the globally minded Japanese management consultant Kenichi Ohmae, and the right-wing French politician Bruno Gollnisch.

In doing so, it hopes to contextualize the “populist” movements which have dominated the global

political landscape since the late 2010s by showing their motivations and long historical roots.

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Acknowledgements

In many ways, this was the thesis I never expected to write. But, somewhere along the way from an MA to a PhD, it just seemed like something I needed to do. I would like to thank Dr. Doreley

Coll for beginning the Master of Global Affairs program which allowed me to write this.

Whatever its other faults, the program did allow me to meet many new people and visit many

new places that would otherwise never have been possible. I’d also like to thank Dr. Don

Desserud at UPEI and Christian E. Rieck at Universität Potsdam whose political science lectures during this program made their way into this thesis one way or the other, and to Dr. Marc Doucet at Saint Mary’s University who helped supervise this project. One again, my father must receive the credit he is due for turning a critical eye on my work and acting as a springboard for many of

my more half-baked assertions before they finally made it here.

Finally, I would like to thank every member of the Master of Global Affairs graduating class of

2019: Tracy Burton Bravo, Claire Byrne, Jonna Callback, Jocelyn Dougan, Sophia Eluyemi,

Denis Gaudet, Kieran Goodwin, Emma McDermott, Miriam Rosales Garcia, and Rosa

Wagemakers. For me it was my first trip to Europe, for others it was their last, but I could not

have asked for a better cohort of people to do this with. Though all the laughter and misery, it

was certainly something I will never forget.

Thank you everyone.

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Author’s Note

In text, Japanese names are referred to in standard Asian order (family name first), apart from

those writers who explicitly reversed it. Japanese terms, including personal and place names,

appear with standard diacritical marks apart from well known place names such as Tokyo or

Kyoto along with other words commonly known in English such as Bushido. Thus, the man

referred to as Kenichi Ohmae would, by Japanese standards, be written as Ōmae Ken’ichi.

Transliterated words in direct quotations have been silently corrected to match these standards.

Additionally, throughout the text, I will sometimes make use of the term “the West”. The idea of

Western Civilization is a grand generalization that explains as much as it omits, and its use

remains controversial by scholars. However, given the pervasive use of the term in common

conversation, and especially its abuse by the far-right nationalists discussed below, I thought it better to try and redefine it rather than ignore it entirely. For the purposes of this thesis, therefore,

“the West” is used solely as a convenient shorthand for the self-styled “Western” countries of

United States and the current European Union—especially Britain and France—for the sake of

brevity.

Another point of terminology: the use of the term “Alternative Right” or “Alt-Right” by today’s

journalists is what in previous years would have been dubbed the “far-right” or the “radical

right”. As a point of clarity, I will only use the term “Alt-Right” in reference to post-2015

manifestations of the far-right, attached to people such as Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and

Nigel Farage. Prior to this time, they will simply be called the “far-right”. v

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Acknowledgements ...... iii

Author’s Note ...... iv

Introduction: A Very Useful Country ...... 1

“Global Citizen Ken”: Kenichi Ohmae and the Promise of Globalism ...... 10

Introduction: Who Really Won the Cold War? ...... 10

Bumps on the Road to Globalization ...... 12

Postponing the End of the Nation State ...... 18

Conclusion: The End of History? ...... 24

“The Last Samurai of the FN”: Bruno Gollnisch and the Defiance of Nationalism ...... 28

Introduction: The Inspiring Moment of Gavin McInnes ...... 28

White Nationalists and Asian Studies ...... 30

Nationalists of All Countries, Unite! ...... 37

Conclusion: Anime Memes and Free Trade Deals ...... 43

Conclusion: Visions of the New Millennium ...... 46

Appendix ...... 57

Bibliography ...... 59

1

Introduction: A Very Useful Country

In 1616, the English chaplain Edward Terry travelled to India to tend to the souls of the men of that year’s English East India Company expedition. Years later after returning to England, Terry worked up a narrative of his experiences which he eventually published in 1655 as A Voyage to

East-India. But Terry would be struck by a profound intellectual conundrum as he sorted through his recollections; why were Indians possessed of so rich and prosperous a country when, as Hindu and Muslim heathens, their souls would surely be confined to hell while Protestant Englishmen of the true faith lived on a small, damp island off the coast of Europe? Why had God, in his infinite wisdom, allowed this? Terry’s conclusion, as the historian Richard Raiswell notes, was a model of Calvinist thinking. Terry’s India was clearly, “intended by God to communicate something of his munificence to his chosen people.” But the inevitable result of this thinking, as Raiswell concludes, “is to trap Indians in an insipid frame. Devoid of all agency and all meaning in and of themselves, they are reduced to figures and tropes within a hideous cosmic grammar, damned through no fault of their own so that others at the opposite ends of the world may live.”1

Terry’s conclusion, as Raiswell contends, may be informed by a Calvinist worldview, but it is also a fundamentally narcissistic one to contemporary eyes. To Terry, the country of India, its environment, its people, its culture, its political situation, and even its form of government were all designed by God, not for the needs of the people who lived there, but for the faithful of England to assure themselves of their own importance in the world, and to God’s plan for them. To someone reading Terry today there is perhaps a smug sense of superiority that modern observers of foreign countries are not so religiously blinkered and egotistic. But I would say that this is exactly what many contemporary political pundits and ideologues in both Europe and North America have done

1 See Richard Raiswell, “Edward Terry and the Calvinist Geography of India,” Études Anglaises 70, no. 2 (2017): 167-186. 2 to Japan over the last thirty years, fitting the nation into their own “hideous cosmic grammars” to prove the validity of their own pet theories. Indeed, I argue, for many Westerners both historically and presently the reality of life in Japan and the lives of its people has always been less important that what the “idea” of Japan has conceptually provided.

For many Americans and Europeans, Japan has continually served as a rhetorical device to justify pre-existing beliefs. But, far from being a recent invention of modern thinkers post-1989,

Westerners have been abusing the idea of Japan since the first Europeans encountered the country in the sixteenth century. Not long before Terry arrived in India, early Catholic missionaries to

Japan like Francis Xavier, who arrived in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, quickly crafted a narrative of Japan as a heathen country unduly willing to convert itself to the Catholic cause. “These Japanese,” Xavier reported to his superiors, “are more ready to be implanted with our holy faith than all the other nations of the world.” As the historian Diarmaid MacCulloch noted, while the Council of Trent—which belatedly organized the Church’s response to Lutheranism— never referenced hastening the world proselytizing mission of Catholicism, “this mission became one of the most distinct features of southern European Catholicism: a project of taking Christianity to every continent…”2 A Protestant fear was behind much of what the Jesuits saw in Japan, and this would lead them to find, “the ghost of Luther,” lurking behind many of their difficulties in the country, even going as far as trying to discern the Buddhist form of Lutheranism.3 Moreover, later

Western historians would massively overstress this “Christian Century” in Japan, omitting many other domestic events in the country in favour of this deeply Eurocentric narrative.4

2 Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (New York: Penguin, 2005), 427-441. For Xavier’s quote and an overview of the Japanese missions see ibid, 435-436. 3 See Jacques Proust, “Le fantôme de Luther au Japon,” Nouvelle Revue du XVIe Siècle 16, no. 1 (1998): 143-154. 4 The concept of a “Christian Century” can be largely attributed to historian C.R. Boxer from his The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1650 (Berkley: University of California Press, 1967). Another example can be found in the second book of James Murdoch’s mammoth three volume History of Japan. See Murdoch, A History of Japan: During the Century of Early Foreign Intercourse, 1542-1651, vol. 2 (Kobe: Japan Chronicle, 1903). 3

Later, in the nineteenth century when Japan did not have regular communications with

Europe, Japan was cast as a country that needed to be “opened” by brave Westerners and brought into the European-led world order in the name of progress and civilization. But as modern historians have increasingly noted, the idea that Japan was a “closed country” came more from a lack of understanding between the Japanese and Europeans on how states should interact in an international environment. The contemporary European view argued for clearly delineated international borders and the idea that trade could only be conducted reciprocally between governments—that is that trade “follows the flag”. Japan, by contrast, had come to a diplomatic consensus with its regional neighbours, especially China, that their respective borders should be left deliberately indeterminate to avoid conflict over spheres of influence and that trade be conducted on a local, informal basis. The Ryukyu islands, for example, were both nominally controlled by Japan as well as being part of the Chinese tribute system. As Mark Ravina argues, this clash of worldviews would convince the Japanese leadership that Westerners were, “dangerous barbarians to be kept away from Japan at all costs,” while in Europe, “the encounter confirmed the misapprehension that Japan was isolated and needed to be ‘opened’ by the West.”5

Still later, after Japan had joined the world order and industrialized along European lines,

Westerners became fearful of Japan and the military “warlords” which allegedly ruled it. This view—that Japan was a warrior culture, populated by soldiers who would happily die at their

Emperor’s command—would come to dominate Western views of Japan during the early twentieth century. As the historian Stewart Lone observes, “In this kind of overheated fantasy view of imperial Japan, the assumption is that the ordinary people were the inheritors of an idealized

5 See Mark Ravina, To Stand with the Nations of the World: Japan’s Meiji Restoration in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 17-82. For this quote see ibid, 57. 4 system of samurai values, giving them an almost inhuman ‘will-to-sacrifice’.”6 These views would persist through the Second World War where they were, perhaps surprisingly, accepted by both the Axis and the Allied powers irrespective of their otherwise incompatible ideologies. For example, the idea that Japan was a country of Bushido—“the way of the warrior”—was a common lodestone for both sides. Among the Allies, English speakers were already aware of the concept due to its promotion by Nitobe Inazō in his Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900), and a French translation of the book had already been completed in 1927.7 But many among the Axis powers were also well-versed in the concept. Count Karlfried Dürckheim and Albrecht von Urach would help popularize Bushido and related concepts in the Third Reich, especially in the latter’s The

Secret of Japan’s Strength (1943).8 Fascist state ideologues in Italy performed a similar service in promoting the concept, and the first Spanish translation of Nitobe’s book was actually completed in 1941 by General Millán-Astray, best known as the founder of the Spanish Foreign Legion which had played a critical role in Franco’s victory during the Spanish Civil War.9 The only difference between the two factions was whether they saw this Japanese warrior spirit as useful or dangerous.

The Germans, Spanish, and Italians mainly believed the former, the British, Americans, and

French the latter. This conceptual use of Japan continues through to the present day.

6 Stewart Lone, Provincial Life and the Military in Imperial Japan: The Phantom Samurai (New York: Routledge, 2010), 2. 7 See Nitobe Inazō, Bushido: The Soul of Japan (Philadelphia: Leeds and Biddle, 1900) and Le Bushido: L’Ame du Japon, trans. Charles Jacob (Paris: Payot, 1927). 8 See Karl Baier, “The Formation and Principles of Count Dürckheim’s Nazi Worldview and his interpretation of Japanese Spirit and Zen,” Japan Focus 11, no. 3 (December 2013): 1-34 and Albrecht Fürst von Urach, Das Geheimnis Japanischer Kraft (Berlin: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1943). For the general affinity between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan see Walter A. Skya, “Fascist Encounters: German Nazis and Japanese Shintō Ultranationalists,” in Japan in the Fascist Era, ed. E. Bruce Reynolds, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 133-154. 9 For the Italian perspective see Sergio Raimondo, Valentina De Fortuna, and Giulia Ceccarelli, “Bushido as Allied: The Japanese Warrior in the Cultural Production of Fascist Italy (1940-1943),” Revista De Artes Marciales Asiáticas 12, no. 2 (December 2017): 82-100. For the Spanish view see Florentino Rodao, “Franco’s Spain and the Japanese Empire (1937-45),” Bulletin of Portuguese - Japanese Studies 10-11 (June-December 2005): 243-262, and Allison Beeby and María Teresa Rodríguez, “Millán-Astray’s Translation of Nitobe’s Bushido: The Soul of Japan,” Meta 54, no. 2 (2009): 218-232. 5

Beginning on the 8 January 1989 with the death of Emperor Hirohito and the ascension of his son Akihito and ending on 31 April 2019 with his abdication in favour of his own son Naruhito,

Japan’s Heisei era overlaps almost exactly with the post-Cold War world as seen from Europe and the United States. Within two years of Hirohito’s death, Germany would have reunited, the

Warsaw Pact would have disbanded, and the Soviet Union itself would have dissolved without conflict. It was also during this era that the “idea” of Japan was reframed as a dichotomy to prove that Japan was either the embodiment of a nationalist country, or representative of a globalist one.

As the Heisei era wound down in the years after President Trump’s election and Britain’s vote for

Brexit, some Westerners held Japan up as an example of a nation that had retained its national identity in the face of demographic decline and mass immigration. In September 2016, shortly after Brexit but before Donald Trump’s election, the conservative Irish pundit David Quinn considered the lack of ethnic diversity he had recently seen in Poland and compared it to a television program about Japan he had watched. Japan—like Poland Quinn argued—was, “also a monoculture. It is in no way multi-cultural.” Additionally, despite its economic power, Japan was not, “part of the world that allows free, or ‘freeish’, movement of peoples. Japan is for the Japanese, even though the number of guest workers is on the increase because Japan’s population is ageing rapidly.” As he asked rhetorically, “Does every country have to sign up fully to the free movement of both goods and peoples? I don’t think they do and forcing them to do so can easily produce a backlash.”10 The strength of right-wing politicians like Trump and Marine Le Pen, Quinn concluded, were the natural result of these open policies. Other more extreme voices echoed this position. “Japan Rejected 99 Percent of Refugees Last Year,” the American far-right news site the

Daily Caller applauded in 2016. “Japan’s refusal to accept refugees,” the site said, “comes as

10 David Quinn, “If We Don’t Moderate Globalisation, Expect More Trumps, More Le Pens,” Irish Independent, 30 September 2016. https://urlzs.com/2FJTj. 6

European countries who have recently taken in thousands continue to face problems integrating them into their respective societies.”11 Breitbart News, the former haunt of Alt-Right leader Steve

Bannon, reported in 2017 that, “Japan is an ethnically homogeneous nation, with less than 2 percent of the population foreign born, and its immigration policies are designed to defend Japan’s cultural identity as well as to insure national security.”12 The article also lauded the “nationalist” policies of Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzō and its comment section was filled with profuse support for Japan. “You never hear about Race riots in Japan,” one responder ranted angrily:

You don’t have athletes kneeling for their national anthem because Japan does not have a population of entitled, whiny, ungrateful, un-Japanese morons. You never hear about Japanese tech workers training their own cheaper Chinese or Indian replacements. Why?? Because the Japanese Parliament is not filled with a bunch of political whores pushing mass immigration, welfare, entitlement, and division like America. Thank God we have President Trump to fight for lower immigration. American is a country and culture... not a damn flea market!

In this Japan, proud nationalists retained control of their country rather than letting the treacherous forces of mass immigration and rampant economic globalization damage the foundations of their culture and society.

But if one stepped outside this conservative media ecosystem, then the role of Japan in the world appeared very different. In this Japan, it was not nationalism but globalism which defined the country. As Brian Bremner—executive editor of Bloomberg—asserted in early 2019, despite the gloom that many Japanese had about the future of their country, “Perhaps the Heisei era wasn’t such a bust after all.” While the so-called “lost decade” of economic growth after the recession of

1991 prevented economists and the business community from lauding the impart of globalization on Japan unreservedly, business-minded journalists like Bremner still found many bright spots. “A

11 Russ Read, “Japan Rejected 99 Percent of Refugees Last Year,” Daily Caller, 23 January 2016. https://urlzs.com/nfBsP. 12 Thomas D. Williams, “Japan Confirms Its Policy of Minimal Immigration to Defend Culture, Jobs,” Breitbart News Network, 29 November 2017. https://urlzs.com/4Cwxw. 7 scorecard analysis of GDP growth misses a larger reality,” he noted, “Japan is rich, Japan works, and Japan matters.” Moreover, as he noted optimistically:

Japan looks like an island of stability among developed nations that are riven by polarized debates about unfettered capital flows, free trade, and open borders. Ordinary Japanese aren’t being torn asunder by American-scale income inequality and culture wars, grappling with a slow-motion train wreck like Brexit, or coping with French-style yellow vest [Gillet Jaunes] worker protests on the streets of Tokyo.”13

This was also a Japan that, in the words of a celebrated 2002 Foreign Policy article, while lacking in gross domestic product was possessing of a “gross national cool.” “Instead of collapsing beneath its political and economic misfortunes,” the article’s author Douglas McGray argued, “Japan’s global cultural influence has only grown.” As he concluded, “If Japan sorts out its economic mess and military angst, and if younger Japanese become secure in asserting their own values and traditions, Tokyo can regain the role it briefly assumed at the turn of the 19th century [sic], when it simultaneously sought to engage the West and to become a military and cultural power on its own terms.”14 Even the French-based news broadcaster Euronews got in on the action, running a slickly produced programme with the support of the Japanese government called “Global Japan.”15

As its first episode on the export of bullet train technology to the UK explained, this series was about, “how Japan is sharing its technological know-how around the globe.”16 Following episodes would look at how Japan was providing aid to African countries,17 pioneering new forms of architectural and design planning in Europe,18 building economic infrastructure in the disputed

West Bank,19 and even spent an episode looking at the outcome of the Japan-EU Economic

13 Brian Bremner, “Why Japan Still Matters,” Bloomberg Businessweek, 27 March 2019. https://urlzs.com/16Mb4. 14 See Douglas McGray, “Japan’s Gross National Cool,” Foreign Policy, no. 130 (May-June 2002): 44-54. 15 See https://www.euronews.com/programs/global-japan. 16 https://www.euronews.com/2017/07/27/uk-upgrades-train-fleet-with-shinkansen-technology. 17 https://www.euronews.com/2017/08/31/japan-at-the-forefront-of-assistance-to-africa. 18 https://www.euronews.com/2017/10/24/the-japanese-architects-changing-the-face-of-europe. 19 https://www.euronews.com/2018/06/21/a-japanese-initiative-for-west-bank-s-economic-activity. 8

Partnership Agreement which inaugurated free trade between the two regions.20 This Japan was a model member of the international community, well integrated economically and culturally with the nations of the world, using its resources to solve issues of global importance, and was devoid of conflict over globalization—a narrative which clashes with the “nationalist” one detailed above.

The only problem with these two very different visions is that both are, in their own ways, inherently selective and partisan stories which omit as much as they explain.

As I will argue, these debates over whether Japan is a model globalist or nationalist country were not the creations of Trump’s election, the Brexit vote, or any of the other recent “backlashes” against globalization which have occurred since 2016. Rather, they are dueling visions which date back as far as the late-1980s, having only recently come into focus by mainstream onlookers. This thesis will attempt to show the contours of this duel by focusing on the careers of two individuals whose own lives and fortunes paralleled those of their respective visions. Representing the more self-stated nationalist viewpoint is Bruno Gollnisch, a controversial French right-wing politician and current member of the European Parliament. On the other is Kenichi Ohmae, the noted

Japanese business consultant and management guru. These two men could not have been more different in background, outlook, and ideology and both would have likely despised the other if they had ever met. But both did share one thing in common; together they acted as mediators of

Japanese society and culture and attempted to frame the country to Western audiences in order to promote their respective ideological narratives. The varying fortunes of their two careers would have much to do with the broader acceptance of their worldviews. In general, at the start of the

Heisei era and the end of the Cold War, the globalist narrative was perceived to be in ascendance as Kenichi Ohmae published book after book on the topic of globalization and its benefits in a

20 https://www.euronews.com/2018/07/09/japan-eu-economic-partnership-agreement-epa-why-the-agreement-is-a- big-deal. 9

“borderless world”. By the late 1990s, however, this narrative was becoming less and less persuasive as the flaws and glib assumptions of Ohmae’s theories began to clash jarringly with contemporary realities. By the mid-2000s, Bruno Gollnisch’s vision, and that of the nationalistic and Eurosceptic political movement he represented, was gaining momentum, though it was not yet seen as much of a threat to the established economic and political order. Only in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and the 2008 recession did such views begin to win a wider audience, eventually culminating in the political movements which voted to have Britain leave the

European Union and have President Trump “Make America Great Again.” In retrospect, this trend is apparent, but its overall significance remains unknown. As the Heisei era comes to an end and the era of Reiwa begins, the questions are raised: is globalization as previously conceptualized a dying vision? Are the “populist” movements gaining support today a minor blip on the political radar or a new reality? This thesis cannot answer these questions, but it can attempt to historicize them. Globalization was by no means a done deal in 1990 when a certain version of it was casually accepted by most Western policy makers (if not citizens) as the way of the future, nor was nationalism consigned to the dust heap of history with similar ease. These ideas were, and remain, contested ground, subject to change. This thesis is an attempt to explore this debate through the

West’s understanding of Japan and two of the dueling narratives which have come to define it.

10

“Global Citizen Ken”: Kenichi Ohmae and the Promise of Globalism

Introduction: Who Really Won the Cold War?

In retrospect, it was one of the oddest claims of the 1992 presidential election. Despite success in the First Gulf War, American presidential incumbent George H.W. Bush was suffering in the polls from an economic recession, and his democratic challengers were quick to make political hay. “It’s the economy, stupid!” the campaign of former Arkansas governor Bill Clinton chose as the catchy, eventually successful, slogan of their bid. But other democratic challengers in the primary also honed their own economic messages, including a provocative one from veteran Massachusetts politician Paul Tsongas. “The Cold War is over,” Tsongas lamented, “and Japan won.”21

Coming off two decades of “Japan Bashing” during the 1970s and 1980s, Tsongas’ words tapped into rhetoric with a long history in America. Nor was he alone in his criticisms. The real victors of the four-decade long conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, one editorialist to the New York Times argued in 1990, “are West Germany and Japan. They won the cold war, simply by not wasting the resources of creative, industrious societies on the treadmills of the arms race and occasional ‘small’ wars.”22 This idea, that somehow the United States had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in the early 1990s was part of a complex post-Cold War

American debate over their nation’s continued primacy in the world. As the political scientist

William Pfaff argued in 1990, the collapse of communism had produced an unexpected political result: the end of superpower status. “Remove the [Cold War] rivalry and the category vanishes,”

Pfaff argued. “Today there is not, as some argue, a single power, the United States; there are none.”23 In this brave new world, the argument went, military power was not as important as

21 Andrew C. McKevitt, Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 21. 22 John E. Ullmann, “Who Won Cold War? Japanese and Germans,” New York Times, 3 July 1990. 23 William Pfaff, “Redefining World Power,” Foreign Affairs 70, no. 1 (1990/91): 36. 11 economic power and with a pacifist constitution, a booming economy, and internationally recognized brands like Sony, Japan had been the true benefactor of the Cold War.

In the end, of course, American confidence would be restored. As President Clinton came to office, most commentators dismissed Pfaff’s pessimism. “The most striking feature of the post-

Cold War world is its unipolarity,” the American conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer rallied the nation in 1990. While this unipolar reality would no doubt erode eventually, Krauthammer maintained that American military, political, and economic power was the world’s best chance for security in a post-Cold War world. “Our best hope for safety in such times, as in difficult times past, is in American strength and will—the strength and will to lead a unipolar world, unashamedly laying down the rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them.”24 The bursting of the

Japanese Asset Bubble of 1991 and the onset of a “last decade” of economic growth gave American triumphalism further assertions that Japan was not a serious economic challenge to the United

States. But, as the historian Andrew McKevitt has noted perceptively, this resurgence in American confidence also had much to do with the acceptance of a new concept by Americans: economic globalization. “The end of the Japan Panic,” McKevitt argued, “hinged not only on the Japanese recession of the 1990s, but also on the coming to power of policy makers unsympathetic to economic nationalism in a changed world.”25 In this view of the world, the popularity of Japanese products like cars by Toyota or VCRs by Toshiba was not an economic “invasion” by Japan, but rather simply a part of globalization as money, goods, and people crossed borders with limited impediments. And, as McKevitt notes, one man in particular “presented Japan and its corporations to U.S. audiences as part of a postnational, globalizing future”: Kenichi Ohmae.26

24 Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs 70, no. 1 (1990/91): 23-24; 33. 25 McKevitt, Consuming Japan, 46. 26 McKevitt, Consuming Japan, 41. 12

Bumps on the Road to Globalization

Kenichi Ohmae was born in Fukuoka Prefecture in February 1943, two weeks after American marines had forced the Japanese to retreat from the island of Guadalcanal. Growing up in post-war

Japan, Ohmae receive his early education on both sides of the Pacific, first at Waseda and the

Tokyo Institute of Technology before travelling to the United States to do his PhD in nuclear engineering at MIT. After a brief career at the Japanese tech firm Hitachi, Ohmae left this position to become a business consultant by joining the Tokyo branch of McKinsey & Company in 1974.

He would hold various, increasingly important positions within the firm until his retirement in

1994. It was here that Ohmae would make a name for himself as one of the most famous

“management gurus” in the world, a position he would occupy for most of the Heisei era. To justify this title Ohmae was, as one American journalist put it, “a small man possessed of large ideas, considerable charm, and mammoth self-regard.”27 Publishing prolifically in both English and

Japanese, Ohmae first came to the attention of Western readers with his 1982 book The Mind of the Strategist: The Art of Japanese Business.28 At the time of its publication, libraries worth of strategy guides were being written by Westerners to try and explain the success of the Japanese economy to their fellow American and European businessmen.29 But, penned by Japanese man who also spoke fluent English, Ohmae’s work seemed to promise its own special insight. Yet it was Ohmae’s works published in the aftermath of the Cold War, beginning in 1990 with the publication of The Borderless World, which really made his name as a promoter of economic globalization. This would be followed by two further books, The End of the Nation State (1995)

27 John Heilemann, “Making Book on China,” Business 2.0 6, no. 7 (2005): 28. 28 Kenichi Ohmae, The Mind of the Strategist: The Art of Japanese Business (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982). 29 For two examples, one American and one West German, see Friedrich Fürstenberg, Why the Japanese Have Been So Successful in Business (London: Leviathan House, 1974) and Jon P. Alston, The American Samurai: Blending American and Japanese Business Practices (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1986). For a contemporaneous analysis of these duelling theories and their respective merits see J. Bernard Keys, Luther Trey Denton, and Thomas R. Miller, “The Japanese Management Theory Jungle-Revisited,” Journal of Management 20, no. 2 (1994): 373-402. 13 and The Next Global Stage (2005), all of which came to articulate the prevailing zeitgeist of laissez-faire capitalist globalization during the Heisei era.

In many ways, Ohmae became a sort of global avatar for the promise of globalization. In a

1994 series of articles published on noted management theorists, the British business weekly the

Economist drew a telling caricature of the man it dubbed “global citizen Ken,” the only non-

Western consultant to be profiled. In the resulting image Ohmae stands with a toothy grin on his face, his arms piled high with books authored by himself as he steps across the Pacific from Japan to “the West” (looking suspiciously like the continental United States), bringing with him his expertise to the benefit of all.30 Indeed, part of Ohmae’s branding was that he was neither an apologist for Japan nor America. In the words of the Economist article, “Mr. Ohmae likes to pose as a prophet unloved in both countries, a stern critic of both America’s Japan-bashing and Japan’s trade barriers.”31 As the man himself argued in 1990, “Why does a nuclear engineer turned management consultant write about trade? It wasn’t to defend Japan. I was reacting to forces at work that were becoming very powerful and changing the way our clients operated.”32 In other words, it was because of globalization. When, a few year later, the journalist Thomas Friedman published his famous look at the ongoing story of globalization in The World Is Flat (2005),

Ohmae was easily assured a cameo. Having left McKinsey by this point, Ohmae was to be found near the port of Dalian, building Japanese call centres and using Chinese labour to perform data- entry work for Japanese housing companies; outsourcing Japanese style. This was possible, Ohmae explained to Friedman, because many of the locals were fluent in Japanese due to Japan’s former colonial influence in the region. According to Ohmae, the previous bad blood was slowly being

30 See Appendix, Image 1, page 57. 31 “Management Theorists: Global Citizen Ken,” The Economist, 22 October 1994. 32 Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), vii-viii. 14 eroded by mutual economic interest. “Chinese doing computer drawing for Japanese homes, nearly seventy years after a rapacious Japanese army occupied China, razing many homes in the process,”

Friedman marveled. “Perhaps there is hope for this flat world…”33

Ohmae corpus of work constitutes a single mantra for globalization: it is happening, it is irreversible, and those states or businesses which ignore it will suffer the economic consequences.

One of his key observations was that the defined nationality of most multinational companies was becoming harder to distinguish. As global capital was increasingly able to move across borders, debates of which nations own what companies and who is financing whom becomes academic.

“Most companies are still nationalistic deep down,” Ohmae noted in 1990. “But sooner than most people think, our belief in the ‘nationality’ of most corporations will seem quaint.”34 As the 1990s progressed, many Western observers came to support Ohmae claims, repeatedly noting that the coordination of business and government in Japan—so-called “Japan Inc.”—was breaking down as their interests diverged.35 Besides, Ohmae forecast, most consumers’ sense of patriotism falls flat in the face of having money in their pocket. As he explained to a Japanese audience in 1987:

Americans are eager to buy Sony Walkmans and wear Benetton sweaters. Like other cosmopolitan consumers in advanced industrial countries, they acknowledge the value of good products and buy them, regardless of their country of origin. […] Because consumer tastes are becoming so quickly and thoroughly cosmopolitan, they thwart efforts by governments and politicians to enhance sales by national companies.36

The price of a product was the real importance, not its nationality. As this process of consumers price-checking continued, Ohmae argued, the result would be the decline of certain national

33 Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 32-33. 34 Ohmae, Borderless World, 10. 35 See Leonard Silk and Tom Kono, “Sayonara, Japan Inc.” Foreign Policy, no. 93 (Winter 1993-1994): 115-131; Michael Hirsh and E. Keith Henry, “The Unraveling of Japan Inc.: Multinationals as Agents of Change,” Foreign Affairs 76, no. 2 (March-April 1997): 11-16. 36 Kenichi Ohmae, Beyond National Borders: Reflections on Japan and the World (Homewood: Dow Jones-Irwin, 1987), 13. 15 industries to international competition, which could very well provoke a nationalist backlash. But as he argued in a celebrated 1995 quote:

If patriotism is, as Dr. Johnson used to remark, the last refuge of the scoundrel, wrapping outdated industry in the mantle of national interest is the last refuge of the economically dispossessed. In economic terms, pleading national interest is the declining cottage industry of those who have been bypassed by the global economy.”37

This dismissive remark would have key implications for critics of Ohmae’s theories.

As Ohmae was translating his latest book Beyond National Borders into English in 1987, its paean to globalization in Japan was being dwarfed by a work of decidedly more nationalistic caliber. This was the Yale historian Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers. Exploring the historical shift in international power dynamics since the sixteenth century, the book was, as

Andrew McKevitt put it, “a lengthy allegory for American power in the late twentieth century.”38

The image on the cover told the story. Next to a tiered podium, John Bull stands off to the side with the Union Jack, denoting the end of the British Empire. In the centre, Uncle Sam climbs down to join him, toting the Stars and Stripes. Climbing up from behind to replace him, meanwhile, was the suited and bespectacled figure of a Japanese salaryman holding the flag of the rising sun. As

Kennedy argued within the text, Japan was now able to wield massive economic, if not yet military power.39 The book was a runaway success in both the U.S. and Japan. In America it sold 225,000 copies in 1988 alone and quickly jumped to second place on the New York Times non-fiction best seller list. But it is telling which book in 1987 was popular enough to top even Kennedy’s tour-de- force on the Times list; it was Donald Trump’s autobiography, Trump: The Art of the Deal.40

37 Kenichi Ohmae, The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 62. Ohmae makes a similar if less succinctly phrased observation in The Borderless World, 165-166. 38 McKevitt, Consuming Japan, 35. 39 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), 458-471. 40 McKevitt, Consuming Japan, 35; Charlie Laderman and Brendan Simms, Donald Trump: The Making of a World View (London: I.B Tarsus & Co., 2017), 20. 16

I would argue this is not coincidental. Prior to the bankruptcies and exposed prevaricating which would tarnish his claims to business-savviness, the Donald Trump of the 1980s appeared a genuine case of American business success at a time when many Americans were doubting their nation’s fiscal clout. To these Americans, I argue, Trump’s quixotic business style demonstrated a home-grown substitute to the technocratic and imported Japanese business theories that men like

Ohmae were presenting. Trump, as the New York Times review of his book argued, “arouses one’s sense of wonder,” and his success, “makes one believe for a moment in the American dream again.

It’s like a fairy tale.”41 Not only this, but throughout his book Trump belittles and scorns the reasoned judgement of the experts he meets. Academics, analysts, lawyers, and accountants are all denounced in their turn. Even Ohmae’s colleagues at McKinsey & Co. comes in for ridicule as

Trump notes that while they may be “the best in the business,” he still liked the consultants, “even less than I like committees.”42 But as business professor John Paul Rollert argues, Trump’s brash

“go-with-your-gut” style of business deeply mischaracterizes how deal making actually works:

Rather than an elaborate phenomenon characterized by collective action, analytical diligence, and bouts of serendipity, commercial success is presented as a stirring tribute to self-reliance, individual will, and superhuman feats of strength overcoming the dark forces of smug complacency and conventional thinking. […] Whether or not by design, [Trump’s] self-described struggle in The Art of the Deal is a microcosm of the story told today about how capitalism works.43

The result, as Rollert notes, is a vision of capitalism that is less an economic system than a morality play worthy of Ayn Rand. In short, while Ohmae paints consumers as economic animals who will seek out the best deals regardless of their nationality, American responses to Trump’s own life of nationalistic, expert-spurning business shows that such branding remained potent during the Heisei era, and that Trump has been able to parley this fact into support for his own political career.

41 Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Books of The Times,” New York Times, 7 December 1987. 42 Donald Trump and Tony Schwartz, Trump: The Art of the Deal (New York: Random House, 1987), 187. 43 John Paul Rollert, “An Ethicist Reads The Art of the Deal,” The Atlantic, 30 March 2016. https://urlzs.com/ongq3. 17

Furthermore, Trump’s experiences call into question Ohmae’s theory about declining national interests. His line that “wrapping outdated industry in the mantle of national interest is the last refuge of the economically dispossessed,” may appear to foreshadow Trump’s 2016 campaign with uncanny precision. But this too is no coincidence, and Trump again shows the flaws of Ohmae claims. As the historians Charlie Laderman and Brendan Simms note, during the 2016 election and at times, since the conventional wisdom about Donald Trump has made much of his alleged

“contrarian reflexes.” Trump, the argument went, was “a mere pied piper whose ‘deplorable’ followers suffer from false consciousness about their true economic interest.” This view, they argue, is wrong insomuch as the views Trump expressed were sincerely held. Indeed, contrary to expectation, Trump “has articulated a set of basic stances on foreign policy. And he has clung to them with remarkable consistency.”44 These policies have always included a strong economic protectionist argument to them. In 1987, for example, Trump took out full-page ads in three

American newspaper with “An Open Letter from Donald J. Trump,” and it was Japan which received much of the criticism. “For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States,” it began, continuing that, “Now that the tides are turning and the yen is becoming strong against the dollar, the Japanese are openly complaining and, in typical fashion, our politicians are reacting to these unjustified claims. It’s time for us to end our vast deficits by making Japan, and others who can afford it, pay.”45 This was the same protectionist language that

Trump would continue to articulate for the next 30 years even as the threat of Japan receded into its globalization-interpreted inanity. Take Trump’s claim in 2011 that countries like China and

Mexico, “view our leaders as weak an ineffective and have repeatedly taken advantage of them to

44 Laderman and Simms, Trump: The Making of a World View, 7-8. For a similar conclusion see David Greenberg, “An Intellectual History of Trumpism,” Politico Magazine, 11 December 2016. https://urlzs.com/1Mwds. 45 Laderman and Simms, Trump: The Making of a World View, 32-33. See also Trump, “An Open Letter from Donald Trump,” New York Times, 2 September 1987. 18 the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year.”46 Trump views are thus not a “revival” of protectionist rhetoric after three decades of globalization, it is that Trump has been saying the same thing since the 1980s and that only since the 2010s has he achieved a mass audience powerful enough to elevate him to the Oval Office. Ohmae’s key overestimation was that appeals to national interest were “a declining cottage industry” that was never very big in the first place and would soon die out. Trump’s victory demonstrates that his optimism has not been rewarded.

Postponing the End of the Nation State

A second assertion made by Ohmae was regarding the future of the nation-state, or rather its lack thereof. “The uncomfortable truth is that, in terms of the global economy; nation states have become little more than bit actors,” Ohmae argued in his 1995 book The End of the Nation State,

“they have become—first and foremost—remarkably inefficient engines of wealth distribution.”47

In the future, he predicted, business will be conducted by what he defined as “region states,” urbanized areas which could straddle national borders, would attract international financial capital, and would produce goods for global, not only domestic markets. These included regions as diverse as Fukuoka and northern Kyushu in Ohmae’s home Japan, Silicon Valley with the San Francisco

Bay area in California, Chinese Guangzhou with British Hong Kong, and the Languedoc-

Roussillon region of France with Catalonia in Spain.48 The result of these pressures would be the shift of power from national governments to multinational corporations and financial institutions.

This was a good thing, Ohmae argued, since so many problems in the world transcend national borders and require more resources than any one state is be able to muster.49 “The nation-state has

46 Laderman and Simms, Trump: The Making of a World View, 75. 47 Ohmae, End of the Nation State, 12. 48 Ohmae, End of the Nation State, 80-81. 49 Ohmae, End of the Nation State, 117-119. 19 become firmly embedded in the intellectual, cultural and political landscape,” Ohmae argued in

The Next Global Stage, as he surveyed the history of the concept. “But it is a smooth-talking squatter rather than a rightful resident.” As he dramatically concluded, “The nation-state promised much but delivered little.”50 While Ohmae’s theories may appear to be globalization strawmen, they nevertheless were in keeping with the intellectual trends of the Heisei era.

By the early 1990s, the idea of the nation-state was being questioned from all sides. The same year that Ohmae’s The End of the Nation State was published marked the English translation of Jean-Marie Guéhenno’s similarly entitled The End of the Nation-State (1995).51 Like Ohmae,

Guéhenno also walked in transnational circles as France’s envoy to the new European Union.

“What, besides a hyphen, distinguishes these essays?” the Economist asked when it reviewed both works together that year. The answer, it argued, came from Guéhenno’s more pessimistic tone which compared to Ohmae’s partially exaggerated and “sweeping” one, which argued that the decline of the nation-state could drag down liberal democracy with it: “both from without because of the globalization of information; and from within because of the rise of ethnic movements.”52

This view was the culmination of a trend which had existed since at least the end of the Second

World War but had increased in intensity during the 1980s and ‘90s. With the creation of the atomic bomb and the Cold War in the 1950s, many thinkers began to consider whether the spectre of nuclear war was undermining the principle of national sovereignty. One of the most cogent statements of this view was made by the American political scientist John H. Herz in 1957. Herz’s key observation was that the “peculiar unity, compactness, coherence of the modern nation-state,”

50 Kenichi Ohmae, The Next Global Stage: Challenges and Opportunities in Our Borderless World (New York: Wharton School Publishing, 2005), 82; 91. 51 See Jean-Marie Guéhenno, The End of the Nation-State, trans. Victoria Eliot (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 52 “Review: The End of the Nation State and The End of the Nation-State,” The Economist, 16 December 1995. 20 had followed from the creation of central governments powerful enough to enforce rule within its borders and to defend them from without, creating a “hard shell” behind which citizens could shelter. Yet, as Hertz argued, the advance of increasingly more lethal technologies culminating in atomic weaponry had softened this shell. “Whatever remained of the impermeability of states seems to have gone for good,” as the Atomic Age began, Hertz concluded.53

This re-evaluation of the nation-state would continue over the next forty years. One somewhat oblique attack came in 1983 with the publication of two works with similar themes. In

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) and Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger’s coedited The Invention of Tradition (1983), the nation-state was subjected to post-modernist critique to highlight its inherent artificiality as a mode of governance. The title of Anderson’s book came from his observation that while citizens of a country will never meet all their fellow nationals, they still consider themselves to have some form of relationship with them, regardless of their other political, class, or religious affiliations, due solely to a shared nationality.54 Meanwhile, as

Hobsbawm noted in his work, nations will try to, “inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past” to validate their continued existence.55 National flags, anthems, rituals and symbols—all these are created and adapted to instruct a sense of shared meaning by the nationals of a country, and to set them apart from outsiders. Thus, the nation-state is an imagined community justified by invented traditions.

By the mid-1990s, many American political scientists had joined the conversation about the decline of nations. A 1996 article by John O. McGinnis, while more measured and refined than

53 John H. Herz, “Rise and Demise of The Territorial State,” World Politics 9, no. 4 (July 1957): 474; 489. 54 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections of the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006), 6-7. 55 Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: The Invention of Tradition,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1. 21

Ohmae’s brash proclamations, nevertheless concurred with many of his observations. “The nation state is in decline, at least among the Western industrialized nations,” he began tentatively. Within what Ohame himself would have called the industrialized “Triad” of industrialized states in East

Asia, North America, and Europe, McGinnis saw that the role of the nation-state in geopolitics was declining. In language reminiscent of Ohmae, McGinnis argued that while, until recently, “the world has always been to some extent economically interdependent, the nation state was, to a substantial degree, insulated from the economies of other territories.” However, “Because of regional and global trade and open financial markets, nation states no longer exercise as substantial control over their internal economic affairs as they once did.”56 In 1997, this view was further expanded by Jessica T. Mathews who argued that, “The End of the Cold War has brought no mere adjustment among states but a novel redistribution of power among states, markets, and civil society.” The “absolutes of the Westphalian system,” as she termed them, “are all dissolving.”

This would lead to the proliferation of nonstate entities at the expense of states. “In using business,

NGOs, and international organizations to address problems they cannot or do not want to take on, states will, more often than not, inadvertently weaken themselves further.”57

The collective result of this scholarship was to undermine the nation-state as the sole basis of power in the contemporary world. In an era of weapons of mass destruction, Herz argued, the nation-state cannot protect you. With the proliferation of international organizations and non-state actors, Matthews maintained, the nation-state must share its power with other players. In an era of increased financial transaction (at least among developed states), Ohmae and McGinnis concurred, the nation-state does not feed and clothe you. And anyway, Anderson and Hobsbawm seemed to

56 John O. McGinnis, “The Decline of the Western Nation State and the Rise of the Regime of International Federalism,” Cardozo Law Review 18, no. 903 (1996): 903-904. 57 Jessica T. Mathews, “Power Shift,” Foreign Affairs 76, no. 1 (January-February 1997): 50; 66. 22 imply, what do you really share your fellow countryman that it not arbitrary or invented anyway?

In this apparent confluence of ideals, Ohmae’s opinions were hardly outside the range of mainstream opinion, despite the apparent radicalness of his claims. While his views often were, as an article in the Economist phrased it, “essentially futurology, an idea of how things should and perhaps will be” as well as, “a rallying cry, exaggerated for effect,” it was a prediction with a good amount of contemporary academic, business, and political support behind it.58

It is the confluence of agreement which makes criticisms of Ohmae particularly interesting.

As I suggest, Ohmae’s views were idealistic, but not far from mainstream opinion. Yet, while reviewers criticized his work, there was little contemporary navel gazing about the broader implications of the things Ohmae was said to have got wrong. As a result, from the publication of

The Borderless World in 1990 through to The End of the Nation State in 1995, and on to The Next

Global Stage in 2005, there is a slow, but apparently unconscious disenchantment with Ohmae’s work. Yet, this was not followed by any real understanding as to what the broader implications of this might mean. In 1990, the New York Times noted the work’s “broad brushstrokes,” but still stated that, “Mr. Ohmae's virtues clearly outweigh his shortcomings.”59 By 1995, Ohmae’s work was part of a growing post-Cold War trend and was receiving both a larger readership as well as more academic scrutiny. Patrick Gallagher at the University of Iowa offered a typical criticism when he dubbed it a, “rather commonplace laissez-faire economic tract is being peddled as an insightful geo-economic revelation.”60 In the press The New York Times reviewer called it, by turns, “stimulating, informative, irritating and frustrating.”61 The Wall Street Journal, however,

58 Management Focus, “Porter v. Ohmae,” The Economist, 4 August 1990. 59 Harvey H. Segal, “We, the Rich,” New York Times, 2 September 1990. 60 Patrick L. Gallagher, “Review: The End of the Nation State,” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 29, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 87-90. For a similar critical review see R.J. Barry Jones, “Review: The End of the Nation State and The Evolving Global Economy,” International Affairs 73, no.1 (January 1997): 170-171. 61 Richard N. Cooper, “The Rise of the Region-State,” New York Times, 16 July 1995. 23 continued the praise, lauding the book’s “wisdom and insight” and noting Ohmae’s “importantly crucial insight” about the transnational nature of the global economy.62

By 2005, the business press was not laudatory so much as it was dismissive, as the

Economist exemplified. “Kenichi Ohmae’s The Borderless World (1990) seemed a fresh take on the cross-border opportunities provided by the combination of IT, the spread of English and the downfall to alternatives to the capitalist system.” Yet, despite his claim to now be offering a new vision he instead, “goes on to write pretty much the same one, proclaiming the end of the nation state, and of economics as well know it, with a heavy injection of China—or more precisely with the Liaoning province, where he has been an adviser since 2002.” The work was, in the end, “rather trite.”63 Moreover, few in the business world thought there was much which needed to change about globalization. “Whether we like it or not, globalisation is here to stay,” the Indian journal

Business Today observed in its own review. “Despite the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) slow crawl, companies and consumers will increasingly and inexorably cross their own borders to do business. One man who foresaw this long before most others is Kenichi Ohmae.”64 Yet, despite mounting criticism against globalization outside the business world, there was little apparent worry. By 2005, economists like Joseph Stiglitz had already sounded the alarm that all was not right with globalization. “International bureaucrats—the faceless symbols of the world economic order—are under attack everywhere,” were the farsighted first words of his 2002 critique,

Globalization and Its Discontents.65 Protests were erupting across both the developing and the developed world as the benefits of globalization accrued to the advantage of a privileged few while unintended consequences, like climate change, were exacerbated. During the 1990s, Stiglitz

62 Charles Wolf, “Who Really Needs a Country Anymore,” Wall Street Journal, 7 July 1995. 63 “The Heart of Business,” The Economist, 11 June 2005. 64 R. Sridharan, “What After Globalisation?” Business Today, 12 February 2006. 65 Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents (New York: Norton, 2002), 3. 24 argued, globalization had been “greeted with euphoria” and its success was taken for granted. Yet, while the power of the nation-state had declined, men like Ohmae had failed to see the necessity of creating inclusive and authoritative global institutions capable of addressing potential concerns while at the same time ignoring the lack of a global “imagined community” which could elicit sympathy for people of one nation towards other nationalities.66 As Stiglitz concluded:

Some say globalization is inevitable, that one has to simply accept it with its flaws. […] [People] can, for a while, believe stories that, while the pain is here today, the gain is around the corner—but after a quarter century or more, such stories lose their credibility. There have been reversals of globalization before—the degree of economic integration, by most measures, fell after World War I; and it can happen again.67

By claiming that “globalisation is here to stay,” reviewers treated the phenomenon described by

Ohmae as if it was a force of nature rather than a conscious economic policy. His views were so self-evidently obvious that they were “trite,” but the criticism they provoked was not enough to merit introspection. Thus, economic globalization with limited state involvement sailed forward as the only self-perceived option as controversy continued to build.

Conclusion: The End of History?

In the end, the idea which came to define the post-Cold War world was not Ohmae’s globalization from The Borderless World, it was Francis Fukuyama’s concept of the “end of history.” Initially offered tentatively as a journal article with a question mark at the end of it title before being stated more categorically without it as a book, Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) offered an optimistic and triumphalist vision of the future.68 The book proved to be a best seller.

Fukuyama’s main argument was that at the end of the twentieth century only liberal democracy

66 Joseph Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work (New York: Norton, 2005), 19-22. 67 Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work, 23. 68 See Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest no. 16 (Summer 1989): 3-18 and The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992). 25 had survived and adapted to become “the final form of government” for the new millennium.69 As the historian Daniel T. Rogers observes, the “extraordinary media hyping” around the book appeared because, much like Trump’s Art of the Deal, it argued for a much more optimistic vision of the American future than the pessimism of Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers.

Fukuyama, “promised a great leap forward across institutions and inertia into a ‘universal homogeneous state’ of markets, property, science, personal liberties, and democracy,” a view not to dissimilar from Ohmae’s position in his works.70 In the end, the failings of Fukuyama are the failings of Ohmae. Despite criticizing Fukuyama in his The End of the Nation State, “the differences between Ohmae and Fukuyama are, in fact, superficial,” as the political scientist

Robert Kaplan noted when he reviewed the work next to another of Fukuyama’s books, Trust, in

1995.71 Both were based on a teleological vision of history, and both proved to be wrong.

The main problem with Ohmae’s (and Fukuyama’s) theories were that they ignored the provisional nature of much of the public support for each of their proposed policies. As noted at the start of this section, Paul Tsongas’ view that Japan had won the Cold War reflected a nationalist and economic protectionist argument against globalization that, between Clinton’s victory and the

1990s reinterpretation of globalization to place the U.S. at its centre, had fallen out of favour. But acceptance of globalization was never, despite the assumptions of Ohmae and his supporters, a done deal. By the early twentieth century, Stiglitz’s “discontents” to globalization had begun to chip away at this consensus. “For the last three decades, globalization was shored up by a set of meta-assumptions (partly a myth, partly a prospect), all of which are currently being contested,”

Roopinder Oberoi and Jamie P. Halsall noted in 2018. “The catchphrase of globalization in [the]

69 Fukuyama, End of History, xi. 70 Daniel T. Rogers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 246-247. 71 Ohmae, End of the Nation State, 1; Robert Kaplan, “The Economics of Family and Faith: Why World Democracy Is Not Around the Corner,” Los Angeles Times, 30 July 1995. 26

1990s with its promise of immense possibilities appears like a Trojan horse in retrospect.” As a result, “The uncertainties and disruption generated by globalization and the perceived failure of

[this] developmental model has produced new vigour in the idea of nationalism.”72 This does not necessarily mean, as the authors note, that globalism is dying. But it does mean that the idea of globalization is finally being forced to justify itself. It can no longer be promoted, as Ohmae and his reviewers asserted, with glib assumptions that, “globalisation is here to stay.” While internationalization is likely inevitable, the precise form of the economic globalization that will help usher it in is not. This implicit conflation help explains today’s “resurgence” of nationalism.

In the end, Ohmae’s own career mirrored the fate of the globalization he championed. In

1992, after years of disparaging Japanese and American policy makers for not accepting modern economic realities, he started his own political organization, The Reform of Heisei (Heisei Ishin), to incite change. Structured more like a lobbying organization than a real political party, Ohmae made good use of the internet to connect with people (a novelty in 1993) and his group soon grew to nearly 50,000 members. “Its language is market-driven populism,” the Economist noted, as the group demanded reductions to state subsidies and trade barriers in the interests of consumers, and in decentralization to cut Tokyo’s bureaucracy.73 “For the first time in post-war Japan,” Ohmae predicted, “there will be a major political restructuring after the election this year.”74 He was right.

With upheaval over the bursting of Japan’s Asset Bubble in 1991, that year’s elections saw Japan’s

Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) removed from office after governing Japan since the first post- war elections of 1955. But the triumph did not last long. Over the next three years, Ohmae and

Reform of Heisei would face defeat after defeat. In 1995, Ohmae would stand for election to both

72 Roopinder Oberoi and Jamie P. Halsall, Revisiting Globalization: From a Borderless to a Gated Globe (Geneva: Springer, 2018), 3; 5. 73 “Japan Logs on To Reform,” The Economist, 15 May 1993. 74 Louise do Rosario, “Consultant Turned Politician in Japan,” Far Eastern Economic Review, 11 March 1993. 27 the upper house of the Diet, Japan’s parliament, as well as for the mayor of Tokyo. Both bids failed

(he lost as mayor to TV personality Aoshima Yukio) and Ohmae returned to writing his books, lamenting Japan’s likely return to the status quo.75

As the twenty-first century dawned, Ohmae’s star had clearly faded. When the London

Times published its biannual poll of the world’s top management gurus in 2005, Ohmae was still ranked at number 16.76 When the poll was run again in 2007, Ohmae had fallen to 27, well behind the top three of Indian thinker C.K. Prahalad, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and former U.S.

Federal Reserve head, Alan Greenspan. It was also behind Donald Trump, listed at number 20 for his role as host of The Apprentice.77 But, despite Ohmae’s prediction, politics in Japan remained fractious. Having won the Tokyo mayor’s office in 1995, Aoshima Yukio’s tenure was received as a chaotic disaster, and he was voted out in 1999 in favour of Ishihara Shintarō. A populist politician best known in the English-speaking world for the 1989 translation of his book The Japan

That Can Say No, which called on Japan to push back forcefully against U.S. hegemony. Ishihara bemoaned the decline of Japanese society and blamed foreigners for bringing crime to Japan.78

One Japanese politician dubbed Ishihara, “Japan’s answer to Jean-Marie Le Pen,” then the far- right French leader of the Front National. This made the second-in-command of the Front very happy. “Japan is tired of the politics of apology and compromise,” Bruno Gollnisch told a Japanese journalist in 2002. “It’s only natural that it wants to become an ordinary country.”79

75 “Is It Back to Monopoly Power?” The Economist, 30 September 1995. In 2013, for example, Ohmae wrote Japan’s Key Points (Nihon no ronten) reiterating most of his previous criticisms about Japanese government and business. See Stephen Harner, “How Kenichi Ohmae Would Fix Japan,” Forbes, 6 November 2013. https://urlzs.com/B8hWy. 76 “The Top 50 Business Brains,” The Times, 1 December 2005. 77 Des Dearlove and Stuart Crainer, “Business on the Brain,” The Times, 8 November 2007. 78 See Ishihara Shintarō, The Japan That Can Say No, trans. Frank Baldwin (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989). 79 “Recession Makes Japan Ripe for Populism,” Nikkei Weekly, 28 October 2002. 28

“The Last Samurai of the FN”: Bruno Gollnisch and the Defiance of Nationalism

Introduction: The Inspiring Moment of Gavin McInnes

In October 2018, a major incident occurred at the Metropolitan Republican Club in New York. In a contentious move, the club had decided to host Gavin McInnes, a conservative provocateur and leader of an Alt-Right group called The Proud Boys. The event drew an energized crowd of pro-

Trump supporters and ended with a fight between McInnes’s followers and counter protesters. The event was widely covered in the mainstream press with most journalists fitting the incident into the wider argument over polarization in America and Trump’s populist movement.80 What most of the press downplayed, however, was the ostensible purpose of McInnes’ visit to the Republican

Club. Lost in the noise over the event, McInnes was there in fact to restage what he dubbed on

Instagram, an “inspiring moment.” This was the action of the Japanese far-right ultranationalist

Yamaguchi Otoya. McInnes, dressed as Yamaguchi and wielding a fake samurai sword, did his re-enactment and then delivered his Aesop for the evening: “Never let evil take root.” The “evil”

McInnes had in mind was America’s rising socialist movement, embodied by politicians like

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “The DNC now believes socialism is better than the free market!” he noted incredulously during his performance.81 The incident McInnes was recreating took place in 1960 when, as the Japanese socialist politician Asanuma Inejirō was partaking in a televised election debate in Tokyo, Yamaguchi suddenly rushed on stage, tackled

Asanuma, and stabbed him to death on live TV before bystanders could eventually subdue him.82

Yamaguchi later took his own life in prison by hanging himself.

80 See Shane Goldmacher, “Fight Breaks Out Near Republican Club After Visit by Gavin McInnes, Police Say,” New York Times, 12 October 2018. https://urlzs.com/gntWP and Avi Selk, “Political Violence Goes Coast to Coast as Proud Boys and antifa activists clash in New York, Portland,” Washington Post, 14 October 2018. https://urlzs.com/UK9ED. 81 Carol Schaeffer, “Inside the Proud Boy Event That Sparked Violence Outside of Uptown GOP Club,” Bedford and Bowery, 13 October 2018. https://urlzs.com/GSRd7. 82 For this incident and the wider context of the 1960 election see Frank Langdon, Japan’s Foreign Policy (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1974), 17-18. 29

McInnes’ stunt was not an aberration. As the press has increasingly noted since 2016, many members of the Alt-Right have made their like of Asian countries, and Japan in particular, well known.83 These include American Alt-Right leader Jared Taylor, the son of missionaries born in

Kobe and raised in Japan until high school; William Johnson, fluent Japanese speaker and the chairman of the white supremacist American Freedom Party; and Anders Behring Breivik, the

Norwegian neo-Nazi who infamously killed 69 people at an island youth retreat in 2011 who claimed Japan was a “model country” in contrast to the multicultural West.84 Even Steve Bannon,

President Trump’s former strategist, claimed that Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzō was

“Trump before Trump,” and further enthused that he was, “a great hero to the grassroots, the populist and the nationalist movement throughout the world.” Elsewhere, Bannon would claim that, “This entire [populist] movement throughout the world,” including the careers of men like

Hungary’s Victor Orban and Italy’s Matteo Salvini were, “really based upon people like Prime

Minister Abe.”85 While other countries, such as Russia, also inspire the Alt-Right,86 in the words of the British advocacy group Hope not Hate, “Japanese culture has also influenced and inspired the Alternative Right, perhaps to a degree that no other non-Western nation has.”87 Yet, mainly focused with the rise of the Alt-Right of the twenty-first century, many observers miss the long links between far-right groups in Europe and America and those of Japan which stretch back well into the early years of the Heisei era. It is here that the long and controversial career of Bruno

Gollnisch provides us with a link between the last generation of far-right populists and the next.

83 Audrea Lim, “The Alt-Right’s Asian Fetish,” New York Times, 6 January 2018. https://urlzs.com/WqeXp. 84 Debito Arudou, “White Supremacists and Japan: A Love Story,” Japan Times, 7 March 2018. https://urlzs.com/axWo6. 85 William Pesek, “Steven Bannon Finds His ‘Trump’ In Tokyo,” Forbes, 12 March 2019. https://urlzs.com/Mkokj. 86 See Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (New York: Penguin, 2018). 87 Simon Murdoch, “Japan and the Alternative Right,” Hope Not Hate, 20 April 2018. https://urlzs.com/wUGy2. 30

White Nationalists and Asian Studies

Born in 1950, Bruno Gollnisch came to be interested in Asia early in his career. Enrolling at the l’Université de Paris-X Nanterre in 1967, he studied Asian languages along with more typical pursuits in law and political science with the hope of perhaps becoming a diplomat. It was here that, at least according to Gollnisch’s own narrative, his profound right-wing views first manifested. “Marxism and [other] revolutionary ideas disgusted him,” according to the English biography later placed on his website. “He became aware of the fragility of our modern societies

… All this urged him to get involved in civic life.”88 He was also allegedly influenced by his uncle,

Paul-Emile Viard, a pied-noir and former law professor in Algiers who discussed with him the then ongoing Algerian War. “Throughout the seventies,” Gollnisch’s website later proclaimed, “he would follow the struggle of the national right and the intellectual debates that disturbed French society … keeping close contacts with the movement.”89 After briefly interrupting his studies to enlist in the Marine Nationale, Gollnisch was given a bursary by the French Ministry of Foreign

Affairs to work as a research assistant at Kyoto University from 1974 to 1975. Returning to France, he continued his legal career and graduated with a degree in international and comparative law with a focus on East Asia, along with a lengthy list of linguistic competencies, including Japanese,

Malay, and Indonesian. With such impressive credentials, in 1981 Gollnisch became a professor of Japanese language and civilization at the University of Lyon-III. By 1984, Gollnisch had reengaged with his friends in the French far-right, including Jean-Marie Le Pen, and began to work directly with the party. Since 1989, Gollnisch has also been a member of the European Parliament and has always sat on its Delegation for Relations with Japan (D-JP)—a bipartisan group of 24

MEPs tasked with managing the EU’s relationship with the country. As the delegation’s website

88 https://gollnisch.com/biographie/biography/. 89 https://gollnisch.com/biographie/. 31 notes, this is “one of the oldest—and one of the best established—of the Parliament’s delegations to non-EU countries,” having existed since 1979.90

Gollnisch’s background in Japanese studies has played a sizable part of his branding on the

French far-right, both nationally and at the EU. As conflict broke out between Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter Marine over control of the Front National in 2015, Gollnisch was one of the few actors within the party to stand by the elder Le Pen. This caused Le Monde to sarcastically dub

Gollnich “the last samurai of the FN.” “It has often been said but doubt is no longer possible,

Bruno Gollnisch is a samurai,” the journalist Olivier Faye quipped, building off his reputation as a Japanophile. “Behind his impassive face there hides a man whose loyalty could rival the disciples of Bushido.”91 This is not surprising as Gollnisch is known to pepper his speeches with Japanese references. In 2016, for example, as Gollnisch was asked to comment on an EU gun control measure, he stated his opposition to the idea of disarming “honest people,” but then ended on what otherwise would have seemed a non-sequitur. “There is actually a great advantage to having a number of homes with legal gun owners. As for myself, I’m satisfied with an authentic, but well sharpened, samurai sword gifted by my Japanese friend, M. Kimura.”92 The “M. Kimura” in question was a reference to Kimura Mitsuhiro, the leader of Issuikai, a noted Japanese far-right group (Uyoku dantai) originally established during the 1970s. In 2007, the Economist would paint a typical picture of Kimura with him standing atop a van draped in patriotic slogans outside

Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station, “upbraiding” passersby through a loudspeaker with his group’s anti- communist, anti-American, and ultranationalist rhetoric.93 Similar attention-seeking tactics have been employed by most other Japanese far-right groups since the end of the Second World War.

90 http://www.europarl.europa.eu/delegations/en/d-jp/about/introduction. 91 Olivier Faye, “Gollnisch, le dernier samouraï du FN,” Le Monde, 3 July 2015. https://urlzs.com/6iF4U. 92 https://gollnisch.com/2016/12/08/bruno-gollnisch-about-firearms/. 93 “Old Habits Die Hard; Japan’s Ultranationalists,” The Economist, 19 May 2007. https://urlzs.com/YQZUd. 32

Far-right activists like Bruno Gollnisch find common cause with Japan because they see it as an idealized ethnically homogenous nation-state with conservative, anti-socialist values that lacks the divisive feminism or racial activism purportedly so destructive in their own pluralistic societies. There is also the argument that these “white samurai,” as the social justice activist Debito

Arudou derisively called them, “see Japan as a viable national alternative, not only because Japan can get away with policies that embed racism and keep immigrants out, but also, more importantly, because Japan gets acceptance and respect of other rich countries regardless.”94 Japan, in this view, is admired not only for being homogenous and having cultural consensus, but also because it can get away with unabashed xenophobia. But affinity for Japan is not a recent phenomenon unique to the United States. As the Swedish journalist Tobias Hübinette observed in 2007, many far-right

Swedish activists since the early twentieth century have also held affinities for Asian nations and

Japan in particular. These included Thomas Nakaba, a leading neo-Nazi operating in Sweden whose father was Japanese.95 Yet, as Hübinette noted, this affinity in some quarters was also matched by fear in others. “There has been many a proponent for the European Union who has referred explicitly to the threat coming from East Asia and the need for the Europeans to stand together,” ironically helping to shore up a common “European” identity and the EU. As Hübinette concludes, “The fact that Asia functions as a topos of fear and desire explains why the field harbors so many Nazis and extreme rightists; because of this twofold schizophrenic process, Asian studies in Sweden largely missed the moments of decolonization and de-Nazification and continues to be fuelled by Orientalist fantasies and dreams.”96

94 Debito Arudou, “White Supremacists and Japan: A Love Story,” Japan Times, 7 March 2018. https://urlzs.com/axWo6. 95 Tobias Hübinette, “Asia as a Topos of Fear and Desire for Nazis and Extreme Rightists: The Case of Asian Studies in Sweden,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 15, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 418. 96 Hübinette, “Asia as Topos,” 421-422. 33

For Bruno Gollnisch specifically, Japan plays a useful role as a foil to all the alleged failings of French society, and those of European countries writ large. While generally more coded in his words than the open racism of other far-right activists, Gollnisch is still motivated by a clear ethno-racial worldview.97 At a 2012 meeting of the EU J-DP in Brussels, for example, Gollnisch,

“referred to the attractiveness of the EU to migrants and its difficulties in competing on equal terms with developing countries with lower labour costs,” and how, “he was interested in how Japan dealt with these challenges.” He also asked his Japanese peers, “how ancient civilisations [like

Japan and France] could preserve their national identities in a globalised world.” While the

Japanese delegates responded to many of his questions about globalization, this last one went conspicuously unanswered.98 In another example, in 2016 interview after returning from Japan with the D-JP, Gollnisch praised the anti-globalization forces he had met there and then continued:

it’s very nice to see a country where people are polite and proper, there’s no graffiti on the Tokyo subway, the seats are upholstered with velvet, there are no holes put in them, there are no metro tickets lying on the floor. So, it might not be a paradise on earth but there is a crime rate eleven times lower than our own. I know for certain it’s a country where there is a general sense of security, where the people are honest. This contrasts rather badly with some of the devolutions that you can find in France…99

For Gollnisch, Japan is an example of a cohesive society where people get along without the sorts of pluralistic divisions which mark France. There are no ethnic ghettos, less crime, and a real sense of comradery absent Western multiculturalism. Gollnisch’s France also shares with Japan the distinction of being an “ancient civilization” that risks losing their national identities in a world of

97 A good example of this can be seen when Gollnisch and Jean Marie Le Pen both made statements that were accused of Holocaust denial. While Le Pen offered the blunt claim that the presence of gas chambers at Auschwitz was a mere “detail of history,” Gollnisch offered the more amorphous response that, “As for the existence of gas chambers, it is up to historians to make up their minds.” Le Pen was charged while Gollnisch was not, though he was briefly suspended from his university. See Henry Rousso, Lucy Golsan and Richard J. Golsan, “The Political and Cultural Roots of Negationism in France,” South Central Review 23, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 68-70. 98 Minutes of the 33rd EU-Japan Interparliamentary Meeting of 30 May 2012, page 5. 99 See https://gollnisch.com/2016/06/08/voyage-parlementaire-japon-greves-inondations-melenchon-brexit-verdun- saint-ghotard/. 34 mass migration and economic globalization. Such views are implicitly chauvinistic and intolerant.

But, as the case of Gollnisch shows, Japan’s use as a model nationalist country was not a recent invention by men like McInnes in 2018, but rather are products of the whole Heisei era. There is only one problem with this viewpoint: much of it is untrue.

Despite claims, the idea of Japanese social harmony and ethnic homogeny is presently and historically false. Indeed, absorbing ethnic minorities into Japanese society was as much a goal of the modern Japanese state after the Meiji Restoration as was its political, economic, and military reforms. By the 1870s, the islands of Hokkaido, the Ryukyus, and the Bonin Islands on the northern and southern peripheries of Japan had never historically been under full Japanese control and were thus potentially open to foreign intervention. As Mark Ravina has shown, these territories were forcibly annexed, followed by attempts to assimilate their local inhabitants, particularly the indigenous people of Hokkaido known as Ainu.100 It also included the Ryukyuans themselves, who were later seen as being only partially Japanese. During the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, for example, the Japanese Army treated local civilians with purposeful cruelty, a legacy Japan would only start to discuss in the early years of the Heisei era.101 Likewise, it was only in April 2019, at the end of Heisei, that the Japanese government passed any sort of law recognizing the Ainu as an indigenous group deserving of protection.102 Furthermore, by the early twentieth century, Japan had conquered a large colonial empire in Korea, Taiwan, and China. As the heart of an empire, emigrants from the colonies would soon come to Japan to work, learn, and agitate for their independence. These émigrés were soon a source of fear for many Japanese. When a massive

100 Ravina, To Stand with the Nations of the World, 171-176. 101 This Ryukyuan reckoning was given a key place by Norma Field in her book-length polemic against Japanese wartime amnesia published shortly after the death of Emperor Hirohito in 1989. See her, In The Realm of a Dying Emperor: Japan at Century’s End (New York: Vintage, 1993), esp. 61-67. 102 “Japan Enacts Law Recognizing Ainu as Indigenous, But Activists Say It Falls Short of U.N. Declaration,” Japan Times, 19 April 2019. https://urlzs.com/XjeHa. 35 earthquake rocked Tokyo in 1923, wild rumours quickly spread that Koreans were poisoning wells, looting houses, and killing Japanese. This provoked violent riots which left thousands of Koreans dead.103 Later during the Pacific War, thousands more Koreans were brought to Japan for forced labour. As a result, by 1944, nearly a third of all the miners in Japan were Korean.104 Other

Koreans, the infamous comfort women, would be forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers during the conflict. While most Koreans returned home after the war, others remained and were joined by those who emigrated after the collapse of the empire in 1945. To them can be added the thousands of Vietnamese, Chinese, Filipino, Brazilian, and other foreign workers who have come to Japan more recently, and whose numbers are only set to grow.105 And perhaps surprisingly, one noted advocate for minority rights in Japan, and against Japanese wartime amnesia in general, has been Emperor Akihito himself.

As the new era of Heisei began under Akihito, the question became whether the new emperor would confront the legacy of his father’s amnesia. Initial impressions did not look hopeful. As Akihito was enthroned in 1990 the late British historian W.G. Beasley noted that while, “there were a number of small concessions to informality” (such as the televised nature of the ceremony), otherwise the new emperor remained, “a distant figure to the majority of Japanese, shrouded in dignity and surrounded by officialdom.”106 The historian Herbert Bix, writing at the same time, made similar comments, adding in the new Emperor’s own apparent ambivalence towards wartime guilt.107 To most Japanese conservatives, especially far-right groups like Issuikai

103 See J. Charles Schencking, The Great Kantō Earthquake and the Chimera of National Reconstruction in Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 26-29; 52-55; 73-76 and J. Michael. Allen, “The Price of Identity: The 1923 Kantō Earthquake and Its Aftermath,” Korean Studies 20 (1996): 64-93. 104 Mikiso Hane, Peasants, Rebels, and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 236-241. 105 “Japan’s Working Ranks Are Still Thinning, Despite Accelerating Growth in Foreign Population,” Japan Times, 12 April 2019. https://urlzs.com/oPbMu. 106 W.G. Beasley, The Rise of Modern Japan, 3rd ed. (London: Phoenix, 2001), 279-280. 107 Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: Harper Perennial, 2016), 687. 36 which idolize the emperor, this was the best possible outcome and, in the thirty years of Heisei which followed, Japanese apologia for the war would continue. Yet, while the new emperor was officially barred from making political statements, he would often subtly choose to undercut ultranationalist arguments. In his frequent trips abroad, Akihito repeatedly expressed contrition for the war, territory into which many Japanese politicians pointedly refused to go. Moreover, during his 68th birthday in 2001, Akihito casually noted the historical proof that his family had Korean ancestors, undercutting the ethnonationalism of far-right Japanese.108 Given the stringent visa requirements for immigrants to Japan, The Rising Wasabi—a satirical Onion-like website—later mocked this development with the headline, “Japanese Court Upholds Deportation Order For 83- year-old With Korean Heritage.”109 The result was, by the end of the Heisei era, a complete re- evaluation of the Emperor’s position. During Heisei, “Akihito nevertheless served as a check on

Japan’s far right,” the journalist Motoko Rich concluded in April 2019. “As traditionalists, they revered the monarchy. Yet they chafed at his refusal to let the nation forget its past.”110 “To put it bluntly,” as the German historian Torsten Weber argued, “Akihito was more committed to reconciliation with Japan’s neighbors than most Japanese prime ministers during the Heisei era.”111

While the Alt-Right is correct inasmuch as their claim that Japan is not a nation formed by mass-migration like the U.S. or Canada is an obvious truism, their attempts to claim that this means that there are, firstly, no ethnic minorities or immigrants worth noting and that, secondly, there is unparalleled social stability in Japan with no race riots, socialists or feminists, and violent crime, is simply absurd. As shown, while Japan might nominally have only a small share of its population

108 Jonathan Watts, “The Emperor’s New Roots,” The Guardian, 28 December 2001. https://urlzs.com/55hmT. 109 Leo McKenzie, “Japanese Court Upholds Deportation Order For 83-year-old With Korean Heritage,” The Rising Wasabi, 10 December 2016. https://urlzs.com/V6DbM. 110 Motoko Rich, “The Long Shadows of a Failed War,” New York Times, 29 April 2019. https://urlzs.com/hfbPP. 111 Martin Fritz, “Japan’s Emperor Akihito: His Life and Legacy,” DW, 30 April 2019. https://urlzs.com/jpwiz. 37 directly counted as non-Japanese, this is partly because many “non-Japanese” people, like the

Ryukyuans, have been consciously reclassified. This also ignores the long historical presence of migrants in Japan, most notably Koreans, as well as the increasing number of foreign workers allowed in more recently. While Alt-Right sites like to quote statistics about Japan’s low level of immigration, its unwillingness to accept refugees, and the fact that most of its visas offered to foreign workers are temporary, these facts ignore that the number of migrant workers in Japan, particularly for unskilled labour, have been steadily growing, and that the Japanese government— even under the conservative Abe—is implementing policies to try and ease the integration of these workers while increasing calls have been made to deal decisively with cases of discrimination against them.112 In short, the ethnically homogenous and socially harmonious Japan conjured into existence by Bruno Gollnisch and other far-right activists remains a chimera.

Nationalists of All Countries, Unite!

Perhaps one of the most seemingly paradoxical things about the Alt-Right is its transnationalism.

After all, isn’t an international movement of nationalists inherently contradictory? In fact, the internationalization of far-right ideology is simply another facet of globalization. As technological developments like the internet make it easier for people to talk with one another, it is not inevitable that this communication will always be used for good. The internet, after all, can just as easily provide you with a digital copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as it can the UN Charter of

Human Rights. Steve Bannon would realize this fact after meeting with right-wing media founder

Andrew Breitbart, the eponymous founder of Breitbart News. As Joshua Green has noted, Bannon

112 For examples see, Katō Makoto, “Sign of the Times: Japan Changes Immigration Policy to Allow Blue-Collar Workers,” Nippon.com, 14 November 2018. https://urlzs.com/3eQyJ; “How to Create a Society in Which Japanese and Foreigners Can Coexist Poses Challenges,” The Mainichi, 8 December 2018. https://urlzs.com/WdBq8; and “Half of Foreigners in Tokyo Experienced Discrimination: Survey,” The Mainichi, 17 April 2019. https://urlzs.com/aXTUH. 38 was enamoured with Breitbart, whom he idolized for taking conservative populist politics onto the internet. When Breitbart died suddenly of heart-failure in 2012, Bannon took over control of the soon-to-be launched website and helped turn it into a key transnational organ of the Alt-Right.

“Wherever he could,” Green reported, “he aligned himself with politicians and causes committed to tearing down [modernity’s] globalist edifice.” Nigel Farage, the former leader of UKIP, would praise the work of the London branch of Breitbart claiming that without it, “I’m not sure we would have had Brexit.”113 In his own way, Bruno Gollnisch represents the same process of right-wing globalization, though within the political as opposed to the media sphere.

“In the 21st-century Europe, there is no shortage of political parties and movements motivated by the desire to protect their nations from forces reputed to be corruptive of their integrity,” the researcher José Pedro Zúquete noted in 2015. “Whether against globalism, market forces, supranational bodies, immigration or Islamization, these groups perceive themselves to be the only reliable defenders of their national communities.”114 One of the early promoters of the idea of transnational protection of European society was Jean-Marie Le Pen, and through him the

Front National. While tentative steps were first made in the 1990s, it was only in 2005 that the FN helped create the Union of European Nationalists (or EuroNat) to try and rally European right- wingers, though the group would collapse in the late 2000s.115 These early experiments, however, were influential on Bruno Gollnisch, and in 2007 he was a driving force at the European Parliament in creating the group Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty (ITS). With Gollnisch as its official head, the ITS included both Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen, as well as other noted right-wing politicians

113 Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steven Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency (New York: Penguin, 2017), 89-91; 207. 114 José Pedro Zúquete, “The New Frontlines of Right-Wing Nationalism,” Journal of Political Ideologies 20 no. 1 (2015): 69. 115 Zúquete, “The New Frontlines,” 75. 39 such as Italian Alessandra Mussolini, the grand-daughter of Benito Mussolini.116 Gollnisch would claim the party represented 23 million Europeans, “who would not be represented without us.” As he stated at the group’s inauguration in January 2007, “We are in favour of upholding European identity, the identities of our individual countries. We want to uphold European tradition and yet remain modern.”117 This use of the word “modern” highlights Gollnisch’s belief that he was on the cutting edge with his global-minded thinking. After all, he argued, “Communists, socialists,

Christian-democrats, liberals, they all had their organizations, and received money. Why not nationalists?”118 It was in this role as a global promoter of nationalism that Gollnisch would forge closer links with his friend “M. Kimura” and Issuikai.

In 2010, Gollnisch and the FN attempted its most ambitious globalization project yet when he travelled to Tokyo with other right-wing European politicians—including fellow FN member

Jean-Marie Le Pen and Adam Walker119 of the British National Party—for a conference hosted by

Kimura Mitsuhiro, “a long-time friend of French patriots.” The ostensible objective was a, “better common understanding between the defenders of national identities,” and it was also billed as a time to, “reflect and debate the future of national movements, [and] the conditions for the coming to power of a patriotic alternative to globalism...” “Confronted with the Moloch of globalism,”

Gollnisch concluded, “the slogan popularized by Jean-Marie Le Pen remains as true as ever,

‘Nationalists of all countries, unite!’”120 The highlight of the trip was a visit to Yasukuni Shrine, the main graveyard for Japanese killed in war which carries controversy by containing the remains of war criminals from the Pacific War. This makes it a site of pilgrimage for Japan’s far-right. This

116 Nicholas Startin, “Where to For the Radical Right in the European Parliament? The Rise and Fall of Transnational Political Cooperation,” Perspectives on European Politics and Society 11 no. 4 (2010): 435-436. 117 Startin, “Where to For the Radical Right,” 437. 118 Zúquete, “The New Frontlines,” 77. 119 Walker is another far-right Western Japanophile; he lived in Japan for six years in the 1990s teaching martial arts. 120 https://gollnisch.com/2010/08/30/le-fn-et-ses-amis-au-japon-un-retentissement-mondial/. 40 was the most widely reported event of the conference, deliberately intended to be provocative. “I do not mind honoring the veterans of an adversary or ex-enemy country,” Le Pen stated defiantly to reporters after the event, asking whether the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki constituted war crimes. Le Pen’s claims were taken directly from the Japanese ultranationalist playbook. Stripped of its pretenses, the visit was widely recognized as an attempt for right-wing nationalists from Europe and Japan to break each other’s social taboos.121

Yet, while the idea of transnational nationalism may not be a paradox, that is not to say that it is without contradictions. This is most readily seen in the far-right’s treatment of Japanese

Prime Minister Abe Shinzō. As shown above, Abe is something of an idol to Steve Bannon and a prime bogeyman to the political left. As the rather melodramatic title of an article in the left- wing periodical Jacobin would have it: “Abe’s Japan Is a Racist, Patriarchal Dream.” As its author

Lisa Torio argued, Abe’s Japan is “reaching for empire” and Abe himself, “has become America’s ultimate sidekick.”122 Abe is certainly a conservative and comes with a questionable family history

(his grandfather, Kishi Nobusuke, was a member of the Second World War cabinet of Tōjō Hideki and was later classed as a Class-A war criminal). Moreover, Abe himself has shown sympathy for ultranationalist causes, such as his refusal to acknowledge Japan’s treatment of comfort women during the Pacific War, and he has repeatedly attempted to revise Japan’s constitution to allow the creation of a real armed forces in place of the “self-defence forces” to which it is now limited.123

But for all his nationalist rhetoric at home, Abe has also tried to better his image with conciliation abroad. In 2015, he convened an advisory panel to consider the 70th anniversary of the end of the

121 Phillipe Mesmer, “Visite Polémique du FN au Japon,” Le Monde, 14 August 2010. https://urlzs.com/Tf7a9. 122 Lisa Torio, “Abe’s Japan Is a Racist, Patriarchal Dream,” Jacobin, 28 March 2017. https://urlzs.com/CoSxb. 123 For a general overview of Abe’s right-wing connections see Karoline Postel-Vinay, “The Global Rightist Turn, Nationalism in Japan,” Japan Focus, 15, no. 1 (May 2017): 1-14. See also, Yamaguchi Tomomi, “Revisionism, Ultranationalism, Sexism: Relations Between the Far Right and the Establishment Over the ‘Comfort Women’ Issue,” Social Science Japan Journal 21, no. 2 (2018): 219-238. For a look at the controversy/necessity of Abe’s attempts to revise the constitution see Michael Auslin, “Japan’s New Realism,” Foreign Affairs 95, no. 2 (March 2016): 125-134. 41

Second World War, asking the assembled expects to look at the history of Japanese relations with its wartime victims and how Japan envisioned its place in the world going forward.124 In December

2016, Abe was also the first Japanese leader ever to visit Pearl Harbor where he offered, “sincere and everlasting condolences to the souls of those who lost their lives here.”125 Both events were, in their own way, political stunts. But both highlight the delicate path Abe must tread between his own conservatism and domestic and foreign opinion. He is, then, hardly the precursor to the impulsive and purposely provocative populism of Donald Trump or Nigel Farage. Furthermore,

Abe has done everything in his power to appeal to Trump’s ego to bring him around to Japan’s position on matters ranging from North Korean missile tests to a rising China. But despite criticism from some quarters that Abe is “sucking up” to Trump, most Japanese applauded this policy with domestic polls registering widespread support.126 Given that most Japanese populists and ultranationalists, like Ishihara Shintarō and Kimura Mitsuhiro, are famed for their anti-

Americanism, Abe hardly seems to be their embodiment of a “nationalist.” As the journalist

William Pesek memorably put it, Trump’s demands on Tokyo—such as for them to pay more for the stationing of American troops in Japan—is, “the stuff of mafia dons, and it puts Abe’s nationalist street cred at risk.” And anyway, he concludes, most Japanese outside the far-right want

Abe to fix Japan’s still sluggish economy, not revise the constitution.127

These contradictions are mirrored by Bruno Gollnisch and his fellow European right- wingers. This can be seen in their interactions with their Japanese hosts in 2010, as one reporter

124 See Towards the Abe Statement on the 70th Anniversary of the End of World War II, trans. Tara Cannon (Tokyo: Japan Library, 2017). 125 Abe Shinzō, “We Must Never Repeat the Horrors of War Again,” Vital Speeches of The Day 83, no. 2 (February 2017): 47-48. 126 See Hikotani, Takako, “Trump’s Gift to Japan: Time for Tokyo to Invest in the Liberal Order,” Foreign Affairs 96, no. 5 (September 2017): 24-25 and Motoko Rich, “Relief in Japan After Shinzo Abe’s Visit with Trump,” New York Times, 13 February 2017. https://urlzs.com/qrzCp. 127 William Pesek, “Steven Bannon Finds His ‘Trump’ In Tokyo,” Forbes, 12 March 2019. https://urlzs.com/Mkokj. 42 for the Economist who followed the delegates gleefully reported. In order to foster communication, the Austrian Dietmar Holzfeind suggested, without apparent irony, that Issuikai should, “translate its newsletter into English thus denying it its native language, and his.” He then went on to lambast the Kyoto Accord on climate change as “globalization run amuck,” even though it was negotiated in Japan and most Japanese were proud of the deal. The Issuikai members, for their part, completely misread the racial underpinning of the Europeans ultranationalism. One member of the

Issuikai, apparently in all sincerity, inquired about their anti-Semitism:

I don’t know too much about the history and culture of Europe, so my question may be very primitive. If so, I apologise. I’d like to ask about the very strong hatred against the Jewish people that was put forward by Hitler. Listening to you yesterday and today, there doesn’t seem to be too many concerns about the Jews. But I sense that there is a strong fear of Muslims. However, when we the Japanese look at it, the Catholics, Jews and Muslims all respect one god, they derive from the same origin, and they all come from the same geographic region. So why do you hate each other so much? That is something that I don’t understand. And how about the Jews? What happened? Don’t you hate them anymore?128

This comedy of errors continued upon the visit to Yasukuni. Led by Gollnisch, incongruously wearing a blue sash representing his position at the European Parliament, the party of 15 Europeans and 10 members of Issuikai entered the shrine for their publicity stunt:

Mr. Le Pen, unsure of protocol, bowed his head and shoulders once, then twice, and then a third time. A few other Westerners, equally uncertain, bobbed their heads as well. But this was premature. After a few words, one of the priests orchestrated the whole group to bow low, and all did. They held their position for about 65 seconds, as a melodious prayer was chanted across the courtyard. A Spanish delegate popped his head up after about 20 seconds, but then returned to form […] When the delegates exited some 20 minutes later, Mr. Gollnisch carried the blue sash of the European Parliament folded in his hand. Only a few journalists remained and most of the television cameras had gone. The show was over.129

Such is the potential and the paradox of the globalization of right-wing nationalism between Japan and Europe begun during the Heisei era which will no doubt continue into the foreseeable future.

128 “Wacky Ideas and Dark Thoughts: Correspondent’s Diary, Day Two,” The Economist, 13 August 2010. https://urlzs.com/Ada6n. 129 “How Le Pen Honours Japan’s War Dead: Correspondent’s Diary, Day Three,” The Economist, 15 August 2010. https://urlzs.com/kLxG2. 43

Conclusion: Anime Memes and Free Trade Deals

The Republican strategist Rick Wilson was getting infuriated during the later stages of the 2016 election cycle. Faced with the role of the Alt-Right in the modern Republican Party, Wilson lashed out. “I think there is definitely still a significant proportion of the party that is a limited government conservatism-based faction of the coalition,” he responded defensively while a panellist on

MSNBC in 2016. The “screamers and the crazy people” of the Alt-Right, he scoffed, were simply,

“childless single men who masturbate to anime.”130 Like many other critics of Trump and the Alt-

Right during the election, Wilson misjudged the power of his rivals and was proven wrong. But his line, glib as it was, nevertheless recognized the role that the Japanese far-right had had on their

American counterparts during the election. In American internet chatrooms and on message boards inspired by their Japanese counterparts, the American Alt-Right mobilized its forces in the same way as the Japanese far-right. Memes of Donald Trump surrounded by anime girls telling the viewer to “Make American Great Again” quickly proliferated.131 Another member of the American

Alt-Right in love with Japan is neo-Nazi Richard Spencer. “I’ve always admired Japan and found it a fascinating place,” he once told BuzzFeed News. “The aesthetics of the alt-right, I would say, could involve anime.” This was because, he argued, as a visual medium, screenshots from anime work well on the internet. “That’s how you communicate,” he argued. “That’s the kind of meme culture on Twitter and 4chan.”132 Appealing to bored young men on the internet who are drawn to unusual things, the typical Alt-Right recruit and general anime fan are both overlapping circles on the same Venn-diagram, both in Japan and America. By reading manga, watching anime, making memes, and taking pleasure in a pastime that—as Wilson proved—is derided by mainstream

130 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tj-Hp7AYlk. 131 See Appendix, Image 2, page 58. 132 Ryan Broderick, “Here's Why There’s Anime Fan Art of President Trump All Over Your Facebook,” BuzzFeed News, 21 February 2017. https://urlzs.com/BquMe. 44 society, the Alt-Right built a powerful sense of comradery and purpose among its members, creating organizations which could help propel Donald Trump into the White House.

One of the keys to understanding the appeal of anime and Japanese culture on the far-right is the simple realization that our casual assumption that a worldly perspective must be a tolerant one is incorrect. As the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah once observed, a cosmopolitan worldview does not somehow inoculate a person against bigotry. Taking the case of the Victorian

British traveller Sir Richard Francis Burton as illustrative, Appiah notes that while well-travelled and well-versed in Islamic culture and poetry, Burton was still a typical Victorian racist and thus,

“an odd mélange of cosmopolitanism and misanthrope.” “Burton,” he concludes, “is a standing refutation, then, to those who imagine that prejudice derives only from ignorance, that intimacy must breed amity.”133 The Alt-Right’s admiration of Japan is drawn from a similar well-spring of belief. Both the modern members of the Alt-Right who watch anime or read manga and members of the “old-guard” of right-wing Japanophiles like Bruno Gollnisch who study Japanese history and culture can readily combine a knowledge of Japan with ethnonationalist viewpoints.

Yet, despite his bluster about the evils of globalization and of Japan’s role as a nationalistic alternative for France, Gollnisch himself has been remarkably ineffective in achieving his political ambitions at the same time his country of emulation has repeatedly contradicted him. Along with the short-lived nature of groups like EuroNat or the ITS, it is possible to add Gollnisch’s role in the signing of the Economic Partnership Agreement and Strategic Partnership Agreement (EPA and SPA) between Japan and the EU in 2018 as a case in point. As the joint statement issued by the D-JP and their Japanese counterparts just prior to their signing in May 2018 stated,

“protectionism and inward-looking tendencies appear to be on the rise even among some countries

133 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2006), 6-8. 45 that had once led free trade,” thus making their agreement all the more important.134 Moreover, as

Edward Danks notes, both agreements aid Abe’s own political and economic aspirations for Japan.

“The EPA is widely expected to boost Japan’s long struggling economy, and whilst the SPA is more of an unknown entity, it clearly leaves scope for Japan’s security and foreign policy to become increasingly assertive.” Both these agreements, Danks concludes, are “being utilised to further Shinzō Abe’s domestic political agenda.”135 Meanwhile, despite his place on the D-JP,

Gollnisch would play little-to-no part in these talks and by the time the agreements went to the

European Parliament for approval in December 2018, it was already a done deal.136 While, during the plenary debate, Gollnisch bemoaned he was “very little, very lately, and very badly informed” on many issues and argued the agreements would not pull Japan away from its “American tank … its security umbrella” towards the EU—repeating his usual comments about how EU countries and

Japan were both “ancient civilizations” as he did so—his complaints had no role in the outcome; the agreement was passed 474 votes to 152 with 40 abstentions.137 This persistent gap between aspirations and achievements is typical of the far-right and its engagement with Japan and helps highlight the contradictory elements of nationalism and globalization which underpins it.

134 Joint Statement of the 38th EU-Japan Interparliamentary Meeting (May 2018). 135 Edward Danks, The EU-Japan EPA/SPA and the ‘Abe Doctrine’: Reinforcing Norms Globally, Changing them Domestically (Brussels: European Institute for Asian Studies, 2018), 9-10. 136 According to the typologies of Nathalie Brack, Eurosceptic MEPs take four forms. There is the “absentee” who refuses to participate, the “public orator” who uses their position as a bully pulpit, the “pragmatist” that works within the EU without compromising their principles, and the “participant” who acts like any other MEP. Gollnisch, as shown, is best considered a public orator. See Nathalie Brack, “The Roles of Eurosceptic Members of the European Parliament and Their Implications for the EU,” International Political Science Review 36, no. 3 (2015): 337-350. 137 For Gollnisch’s remarks at the plenary debate see: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=- //EP//TEXT+CRE+20181211+ITEM-014+DOC+XML+V0//EN&language=EN&query=INTERV&detail=2-561- 000. 46

Conclusion: Visions of the New Millennium

What will Japan look like in 2050? In the early years of the twenty-first century, this question independently piqued the literary curiosity of the journalist Frank B. Gibney and the historian

Matthew Penney. Writing fifteen years apart, each man sought inspiration in a different vision of

Japan and let their imaginations wander. For Gibney, the Japan of fifty years hence is well into its

“Second Era of Civilization and Reform,” so named, “after its illustrious Meiji Era prototype”:

Times are good. Trade and international investment are flourishing, to the point where it is no longer possible—or even important—to pick out which companies are Japanese and which are foreign on the burgeoning stock exchanges. […] The lingering depression of the early part of the century is only a memory […] Japanese business rebuilt itself in the chaotic free competition that came with deregulation. […] Internationally speaking, Japan’s prestige has never been higher. […] The Japan of 2050 shows us one more very basic change from its late 20th-century past: a realization by Japan’s people of the terrible harm done by the ancient Imperial Army in … the so-called China Incident, and the pillage and rapine of the Pacific War. […] One must add that the courageous visit of the young emperor to Nanjing, early in the century, to make his personal apology, did much to dissipate the widespread resentment of those deeds. […] The resignation of the emperor from his official office later in the century, with his move to Kyoto to act as a kind of guardian of Japan’s cultural heritage, formalized the end of his house as a national political symbol…138

Penney, meanwhile, painted a very different version this history:

A major cause of Japan’s continued economic malaise … was the masochistic view of history. […] When the “New History Textbook” movement overcame the discursive terrorism of anti-Japanese fascism aligned against it and Japan’s true history was finally taught to young people, the economy rapidly improved. Prime Minister Abe Shinzō played an instrumental role in this shift despite the left-wing mass media’s “Abe Bashing.” […] Robotics, together with the creativity of the Japanese people … enabled Japan to prosper without immigration. Successive governments moved to vanquish lingering threats from outsiders. Japan placed strict restrictions on the number of Chinese tourists and residents, because they increased crime and carried disease. […] Other efforts to undermine Japan’s prosperity and sovereignty by foreigners, such as abuse of the welfare system by resident Koreans, were also stopped. The concept of “human rights” posed one of the greatest threats to our country. […] The left exploited the notion of “citizens” to suggest that people can transcend concepts like nationality, and minzoku (race or ethnicity) and live together in peace. […] The ultimate triumph of this period of history was the return of the emperor to his rightful place in Japanese society. […] With the emperor as the focus for renewed national vigor, the twenty-first century truly became the Japanese century.139

138 Frank B. Gibney, “Reinventing Japan... Again,” Foreign Policy, no. 119 (Summer 2000): 74-88. 139 Matthew Penney, “A Nation Restored: The Utopian Future of Japan’s Far Right,” Mechademia 10 (2015): 98-112. 47

Both these visions were intended to encapsulate the possible futures of Japan as seen by cosmopolitan foreigners and by Japanese nationalists (and, I would argue, their far-right western counterparts), respectively. But, as both authors readily admitted, these views of the future were little more than wishful thinking. “This depiction is not a serious piece of futurology,” Gibney admitted, while Penney remarked that his own work was simply an, “exercise of analytical fiction.”

Nevertheless, as both authors argued, there was some truth to both their accounts. “If more voters take advantage of their own democracy,” Gibney argued, “the Japan of 2050 may indeed be a revivified country, fit to play the part in a globalized world that its past hard work deserves. Who knows? Some portions of my rather sweeping vision of the future may even turn out to be true.”140

Penney, meanwhile, argued that his essay, “is a fiction constructed by bringing together the most common elements of far-right myth making in Japan’s popular media [built] around the fantastic conceit that the right’s favorite assumptions and predictions have come true…”141

Gibney’s and Penney’s two alternate futures highlight perfectly the contrasting images of

Japan as a model globalist nation and as the epitome of a nationalist one. In Gibney’s narrative,

Japan had already reinvented itself during the Meiji Restoration and the American Occupation after the Second World War and could well do so again to turn away from dark legacies of the twentieth century and join with the nations of the world in global peace and open markets. Penney, meanwhile, satirized brilliantly the irrational, yet emotionally gripping aspirations of far-right nationalists like Kimura Mitsuhiro and Issuikai. But the fact that both stories are exactly that, deliberately fake and fanciful fictions, adds an element of metaphysical irony both accounts; they implicitly admit that both visions of Japan are idealized contractions that do not, and cannot exist.

140 Gibney, “Reinventing Japan,” 77; 87. 141 Penney, “A Nation Restored,” 99; 98. 48

The fictional Japans of these stories are, like Edward Terry’s India, merely a land of allegorical figures and stock tropes all held within a “hideous cosmic grammar”—an entire nation forced to dance to the whims of the ideologically driven, and to prove a point for foreigners abroad.

Meanwhile, across the Pacific, there exists a real nation of 120 million people. How then was globalization really received by Japanese citizens? In short, ambivalently. A 2018 survey found that for those Japanese with a command of English; who worked in a white-collar job; or who already had a steady well-paying job were likely to find globalization a net positive. But, its authors added, “When the perspective of the question changes from general to specific terms, and from national interests to self-interests, however, fewer respondents display favorable attitudes toward globalization regardless of whether they are workers or non-workers.”142 This selectivity can even be seen among the Japanese business community. When the Nikkei Weekly did a survey of 217 Tokyo businesspeople regarding globalization in 2000, the majority were in favour of it.

Yet even those most set to benefit from globalization had caveats. 52.1% admitted that, “they could not foresee what impact globalization would have on them over the next few years,” compared to

37.3% who did expect personal gain. 72.8% also argued that the government needed to watch widening economic inequality and growing environmental degradation. A small minority, about

10%, even argued against simple deregulation of the economy. “I guess the market will be taken over by large global companies in keeping with the law of the jungle,” one businessman shrugged.

“But I’m concerned that the current trend for globalization could be just the Americanization of

Japan.”143 This cautious reception is also backed by qualitative evidence. For instance, in 1998 the

Japanese government issued a major report on globalization. It recommended Japan help shape the

142 See Koichi Kagitani and Kozo Harimaya, “Who Fears or Favors Globalization? Evidence from Individual-Level Survey Data in Japan,” International Economics 156 (2018): 61-76. 143 Naito Minoru, “Japan Greets Changes with Cautious Optimism: Most Businesspeople See Positive Labor Changes but Fear Loss of Culture,” Nikkei Weekly, 24 July 2000. 49 creation of global rules and standards, but also find ways to deal with negative outcomes such as increased environmental destruction and the spread of globalized crime as well as recommended the establishment of a “safety net” for those Japanese who were left behind by the pace of change.

“Each country faces great challenges amid globalization. If a country deals appropriately with globalization, it will gain enormous opportunities, but its strength will decline if it improperly deals with the trend,” the report concluded with less than perfect optimism.144 This scepticism was made clear when the Japan Center for Economic Research offered its grades on the globalization of 31 countries and regions in 2002. Japan was ranked 28, and Japanese companies were rated as less globalized than their American and European counterparts.145 Japan has also been dealing with right-wing challenges to globalization for far longer that most Western nations. As Karoline

Postel-Vinay has noted, while it took Brexit and Donald Trump’s election to trigger a global debate on the rise of right-wing nationalism, “this transformation had been on full display in parts of Asia for more than a decade.”146 In other words, the Japanese in favour of globalization are the wealthy, the cosmopolitan, the entrepreneurial, and those who view it in abstract not specific terms, a reality not too different from the uncertainty of their Western counterparts.

These views force us to reconsider the standard narrative of globalization. While the claim is made that a “happy globalization” gripped most countries during the 1990s, including Japan, this thesis has shown that such a consensus, if it ever existed, was comparatively short lived.147 As receptions of Ohmae’s collective opus shows, most reviewers had continual criticism of his conception of globalization and the decline of the nation-state even as his claims were implicitly adopted by most members of the business community and policy making elite. Yet, this did not

144 “Report Lists Globalization Challenges,” Japan Times, 29 July 1998. 145 “Global Rankings Put Japan in Lower Division,” Nikkei Weekly, 21 January 2002. 146 Postel-Vinay, “The Global Rightist Turn,” 10. 147 Postel-Vinay, “The Global Rightist Turn,” 1-2. 50 provoke any self-criticism about globalization as this narrative concluded that it was inevitable, and the only real choice was whether countries chose to receive it or not. This assumption that what was good for business was good for all was not universally accepted (even Ohmae was an extreme example of this argument) but it was popular with those placed to make it a reality. While, as noted above, Ohmae was losing relevance by 2007, the fact that the Times business poll which ranked him 27 also placed Alan Greenspan—former U.S. federal reserve chairman from 1987 to

2006—at number 3 just shows just how ubiquitous Ohmae’s ideas were among American business and political elites.148 Greenspan was a believer in Randian Objectivism and the “unfettered market capitalism” which upheld it.149 “Were we to bow to the wishes of the economically uninformed and erect barriers to foreign trade, the pace of competition would surely slow,” he argued in his

2007 autobiography in words reminiscent of Ohmae. “The American standard of living would soon begin to stagnate, and even decline, as a consequence of rising prices [and] deteriorating product choice…”150 In Greenspan’s reading, the binary choice was either globalization or the disastrous protectionism of the Great Depression. While he had his worries that, “terror, global warming, or resurgent populism” could put the breaks on “life-advancing globalization,” he did not see any other reasonable alternative then what his free-market capitalism had achieved.151 At the end of his book, Greenspan too is tempted to gaze into the future to imagine the United States in the year 2030. He concluded that the U.S. would then have a larger economy, have seen the growth of IT, and would need the federal reserve to confront rising inflation.152 Yet Greenspan failed to consider that the claims of “populist politicians” (as he dubbed them), who were wont to

148 See page 27. 149 Greenspan knew Rand personally during the 1950s and ‘60s. While, according to his own testimony, he never accepted her theories without question, he still admitted she had a great influence on his economics. See Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (New York: Penguin, 2007), 40-41; 51-53. 150 Greenspan, Age of Turbulence, 395. 151 Greenspan, Age of Turbulence, 363-376. 152 Greenspan, Age of Turbulence, 498. 51 meddle in the economy, ever had a point. They were irrational, the economists were rational, and the free market, whatever its flaws, was best left alone. Published on the cusp of the 2008

Recession, Greenspan’s conclusions would look dated as soon as they were made.153

Ohmae and Greenspan’s troubles can be explained by a simple conflation. The concept of

“globalization,” as they commonly used it, is in reality best defined as “economic globalization.”

But well before the idea of globalization was coined, there was the idea of “internationalization.”

While often seen as a very recent concept, the idea that increasing transportation and communication technologies were binding the world ever closer together was not a product of the late-twentieth century. By the late-nineteenth century, as the historian Akira Iriye notes, this view was already being discussed and it was usually divided into three categories, legal internationalism, cultural internationalism, and economic internationalism—today’s globalization.154 While economics were undeniably an important facet of this internationalization, it was still only a part.

What Ohmae and other businessmen did was to state that free-market capitalist internationalism was both better than all other forms of internationalization—the Soviet bloc after all, had a competing form of socialist internationalism during the Cold War155—as well as other competing forms of liberal internationalism. Legal internationalism states that you need legal mechanisms in place to help govern the international arena; modern economic globalization subsumes it (but what about offshore tax havens?) Cultural internationalism states that knowledge of and understanding for other people and cultures is key to seeing them as worthy partners; modern economic globalization says the business ties will further such understanding by sheer necessity (but how

153 Indeed, Greenspan would write a follow-up book to try and explain how things had gone wrong. See Greenspan, The Map and the Territory: Risk Human Nature, and the Future of Forecasting (New York: Penguin, 2013). 154 Akira Iriye Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 25-27. 155 For examples of internationalism in the context of the former Eastern Bloc see Patryk Babiracki and Austin Jersild, ed. Socialist Internationalism in the Cold War (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 52 many native-born Americans can speak a language other than English and thus understand what goes on in other countries?) “Has globalization then failed its first major litmus test after three decades of shielded ideology?” Oberoi and Halsall asked in 2018. At the very least, they note,

“The world’s democracies require questioning of the accepted wisdom about how they can poise their interests and guard their values in a world that is vigorously confronted.”156 This returns us to Bruno Gollnisch.

The careers of populists like Gollnisch, Le Pen, Farage, Bannon, and Trump provide a counterpoint to the criticisms of globalization outlined above. Without further elaboration, it would seem thus far that the only reason that populist candidates have gained in strength is due to their attacks on government and financial elites for their mishandling of the economy. However, as

Gollnisch’s own career shows, far more base factors of intolerance, bigotry, xenophobia, and racism have played their role in driving far-right groups in both Europe and the United States.

After all, Trump’s rhetoric about starting trade wars and Brexiteers false claims that leaving the

EU would be beneficial were obviously not in the best economic interest of anyone, especially the less affluent. In such a situation, would it not make more sense for poor whites in the American rustbelt, or the English midlands, or in the French “periphery” to make common cause with more recent immigrants who happen to be non-white in order to fight for economic equality? Perhaps, but as the famous African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois noted of Reconstruction era America, while white laborers, “received a low wage, [they] were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage.” This included the fact that, “Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them.”157 As the historian Joshua Zeitz noted, “You couldn’t

156 Oberoi and Halsall, Revisiting Globalization, 15. 157 W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1935), 700-701. 53 necessarily buy groceries with these benefits, but they were palpably meaningful.” As he suggests,

Trump played on these same tropes of racial, not only economic solidarity, to win in 2016. “Trump might be increasing economic inequality, but at least the working-class whites feel like they belong in Trump’s America. He urged them to privilege race over class when they entered their polling stations.”158 This is not to say that economics were unimportant, but it was often economics defined in a bigoted way. For many American, French, or British voters, the sense that their governments were more interested in seeing to the welfare of new arrivals and foreign corporations in their own country when, as far as they were concerned, they—as “real” British/French/Americans—were more deserving of the funds. As Trump himself put it, “all of the people telling you that you can’t have the country you want, are the same people telling you that I wouldn’t be standing here tonight.”159 It was this heady brew of racism and economic inequality that also gave us things like

Brexit with its Austerity fueled rage and xenophobic fearmongering.160

This is where Japan comes into the picture. To far-right ideologues like Gollnisch, Japan is a useful foil to contrast Western countries. Over there, the argument goes, Japan is for the

Japanese and immigrants, foreigners, and other minorities are put in their place by a government willing to take the hard actions that overly sensitive Western administrations refuse to employ.

What minorities do live in Japan are, by their very nature, second-class citizens. Moreover, it is a nation that is peaceful and socially cohesive, where divisive groups like socialists and feminists are repressed or ignored. The result, as Gollnisch said, is “a country where there is a general sense

158 Joshua Zeitz, “Does the White Working Class Really Vote Against Its Own Interests?” Politico Magazine, 31 December 2017. https://urlzs.com/SDdaJ. See also John Narayan, “The Wages of Whiteness in the Absence of Wages: Racial Capitalism, Reactionary Intercommunalism and the rise of Trumpism,” Third World Quarterly 38, no. 11 (2017): 2482-2500. 159 Donald Trump, “I Am Your Voice,” Vital Speeches of The Day no. 9 (September 2016): 254-258. 160 Aditya Chakrabortty, “Britain is Trapped in the Purposeless Austerity that Gave Us Brexit,” The Guardian, 12 March 2019. https://urlzs.com/6JQyD. Robert Booth, “Racism Rising Since Brexit Vote, Nationwide Study Reveals,” The Guardian, 20 May 2019. https://urlzs.com/ug3Fr. 54 of security, where the people are honest.”161 As Peter Davies noted in his classic study of the FN, associating criminality with immigrants is a typical tactic of the group, and with little immigration and few perceived minorities, it is not surprising that Japan receives such high praise among the

French far-right. If, as Davies argued, the specter of “Lebanonization”, a formerly diverse country that succumbed to sectarian violence, was held up to demonstrate all the follies of multiculturalism, then “Japanization” has been held up for the benefits of a mono-ethnic country with peace and security.162 Even Trump himself has alluded to these arguments. After railing against rising crime rates in Europe due to immigration in a Fox News interview, talk them turned to whether countries like Japan should accept more immigrants and refugees. “There’s no chance,” Trump replied.

“Check out Japan, ask them, ‘how many have you taken in the last 20 years?’ You can count them on your fingers.”163 Yet again it is the idea of Japan which trumps its reality.

If there is one common thread running through our contemporary political troubles, it is a failure of imagination by one group, and its successful realization by another. Few who proclaimed the inevitable success of globalization stopped to consider its drawbacks or, if they did, did not rate their importance very highly. As for those who proclaimed the durability of nationalism and the desirability of homogeneity in society, they were able to successfully rally their followers to realize their, in many ways, frightening vision. We are living with the collective results of this hubris and discovery. The biggest fallacy going forward is the idea that, somewhere, there is an escape hatch or emergency exit which will return us to some point before 2015, mentally if not literally. This is not possible. As this thesis has shown, the ideals and concepts which motivated a distaste for economic globalization and a desire to retain old nationalist certainties were not made

161 See page 33. 162 Peter Davies, The National Front in France: Ideology, Discourse and Power (London: Routledge, 1999), 158-160. 163 Scott Morefield, “Trump Compares Immigration in Japan, Other ‘Successful’ Countries to United States in Tucker Interview,” Daily Caller, 17 July 2018. https://urlzs.com/JUyHB. 55 only recently, but rather have were brewing for most of the post-Cold War era of Heisei. In this fight, Japan has been employed as a rhetorical tool by both sides of the debate to make their own points. But the Japan of both the globalists and the nationalist perspectives (particularly the nationalist one) has more in common with the Atlantis of Plato or Thomas Moore’s Utopia than they do with any real country to be found on a map. This “Japan” has been created to serve a literary purpose, to contrast the realities of the United States or France against something different and perhaps better. In this, the realities and lived experiences of the average Japanese citizen are irrelevant insomuch as they serve no purpose to the larger metanarrative being told.

A final piece of futurology. Shortly after President Trump’s inauguration in March 2017, the former Republican speechwriter David Frum published an article in that month’s edition of the

Atlantic simply entitled “How to Build an Autocracy.” It is 2021, Frum informs us, and Donald

Trump is about to be sworn in for his second term as President:

Fortunately for him, he did not need to campaign hard for reelection. His has been a popular presidency: Big tax cuts, big spending, and big deficits have worked their familiar expansive magic. Wages have grown strongly in the Trump years, especially for men without a college degree, even if rising inflation is beginning to bite into the gains. […] The president’s critics, meanwhile, have found little hearing for their protests and complaints. A Senate investigation of Russian hacking during the 2016 presidential campaign sputtered into inconclusive partisan wrangling. Concerns about Trump’s purported conflicts of interest excited debate in Washington but never drew much attention from the wider American public. […] Most Americans intuit that their president and his relatives have become vastly wealthier over the past four years. But rumors of graft are easy to dismiss. Because Trump has never released his tax returns, no one really knows. Anyway, doesn’t everybody do it? […] Meanwhile, social media circulate ever-wilder rumors. Some people believe them; others don’t. It’s hard work to ascertain what is true. […] President Trump communicates with the people directly via his Twitter account, ushering his supporters toward favorable information at Fox News or Breitbart.164

After a winding tour through Trump various forms of corruption and how the democratic backsliding of our own time will differ from that which marked its twentieth century processors,

164 David Frum, “How to Build an Autocracy,” The Atlantic, March 2017. https://urlzs.com/gpf7M. 56

Frum concludes with direct appeal to the readers. “Don’t be afraid. This moment of danger can also be your finest hour as a citizen and an American.” As Frum would write in his follow up book,

Trumpocracy (2018), despite all of Trump’s attempts to take a hammer to the norms and values of the American political system, the future remains a blank page subject to change. “But this cannot be the final word—and it will not be. We can choose our futures, not merely submit to them. Will this generation be found wanting in its hour upon the stage of history? Someday the time will come to write the history of that hour.”165 This thesis is not an attempt to predict the future, only to explore the past to explain the present. When the time does come to write those future pages of history about Japan or the United States or France in the years 2021, 2030, or 2050, what will these countries look like and what decisions will have been made?

Turn the page…

165 David Frum, Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic (New York: Harper, 2018), xxx. 57

Appendix

Image 1: “Global Citizen Ken,” by the Economist, 1994.

58

Image 2: Making America Great Again, taken from Buzzfield News, 2018

59

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Frum, David. Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic. New York: Harper, 2018.

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Green, Joshua. Devil’s Bargain: Steven Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency. New York: Penguin, 2017.

Greenspan, Alan. The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World. New York: Penguin, 2007.

—. The Map and the Territory: Risk Human Nature, and the Future of Forecasting. New York Penguin, 2013.

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Kennedy, Paul. The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. New York: Random House, 1987.

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Langdon, Frank. Japan’s Foreign Policy. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1974.

Lone, Stewart. Provincial Life and the Military in Imperial Japan: The Phantom Samurai. New York: Routledge, 2010.

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Murdoch, James. A History of Japan: During the Century of Early Foreign Intercourse, 1542- 1651. vol. 2. Kobe: Japan Chronicle, 1903.

Nitobe Inazō. Bushido: The Soul of Japan. Philadelphia: Leeds and Biddle, 1900.

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Oberoi, Roopinder and Jamie P. Halsall. Revisiting Globalization: From a Borderless to a Gated Globe. Geneva: Springer, 2018.

Ohmae, Kenichi. Beyond National Borders: Reflections on Japan and the World. Homewood: Dow Jones-Irwin, 1987.

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—. The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.

—. The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

—. The Mind of the Strategist: The Art of Japanese Business. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982.

—. The Next Global Stage: Challenges and Opportunities in Our Borderless World. New York: Wharton School Publishing, 2005.

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Articles and Book Chapters:

Allen, J. Michael. “The Price of Identity: The 1923 Kantō Earthquake and Its Aftermath.” Korean Studies 20 (1996): 64-93.

Auslin, Michael. “Japan’s New Realism.” Foreign Affairs 95, no. 2 (March 2016): 125-134.

Baier, Karl. “The Formation and Principles of Count Dürckheim’s Nazi Worldview and his interpretation of Japanese Spirit and Zen.” Japan Focus 11, no. 3 (December 2013): 1-34.

Beeby, Allison and María Teresa Rodríguez. “Millán-Astray’s Translation of Nitobe’s Bushido: The Soul of Japan.” Meta 54, no. 2 (2009): 218-232.

Brack, Nathalie. “The Roles of Eurosceptic Members of the European Parliament and Their Implications for the EU.” International Political Science Review 36, no. 3 (2015): 337-350.

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Danks, Edward. The EU-Japan EPA/SPA and the ‘Abe Doctrine’: Reinforcing Norms Globally, Changing them Domestically. Brussels: European Institute for Asian Studies, 2018.

Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History?” The National Interest no. 16 (Summer 1989): 3-18.

Gallagher, Patrick L. “Review: The End of the Nation State.” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 29, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 87-90.

Gibney, Frank B. “Reinventing Japan... Again.” Foreign Policy, no. 119 (Summer 2000): 74-88.

Herz, John H. “Rise and Demise of The Territorial State.” World Politics 9, no. 4 (July 1957): 473- 493.

Hikotani, Takako. “Trump’s Gift to Japan: Time for Tokyo to Invest in the Liberal Order.” Foreign Affairs 96, no. 5 (September 2017): 21-27.

Hirsh, Michael and E. Keith Henry. “The Unraveling of Japan Inc.: Multinationals as Agents of Change.” Foreign Affairs 76, no. 2 (March-April 1997): 11-16.

Hobsbawm, Eric. “Introduction: The Invention of Tradition.” In The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 1-14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Hübinette, Tobias. “Asia as a Topos of Fear and Desire for Nazis and Extreme Rightists: The Case of Asian Studies in Sweden.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 15, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 403- 428.

Jones, R.J. Barry. “Review: The End of the Nation State and The Evolving Global Economy.” International Affairs 73, no.1 (January 1997): 170-171.

Kagitani, Koichi and Kozo Harimaya. “Who Fears or Favors Globalization? Evidence from Individual-Level Survey Data in Japan.” International Economics 156 (2018): 61-76.

Keys, J. Bernard, Luther Trey Denton and Thomas R. Miller. “The Japanese Management Theory Jungle-Revisited.” Journal of Management 20, no. 2 (1994): 373-402.

Krauthammer, Charles. “The Unipolar Moment.” Foreign Affairs 70, no. 1 (1990/91): 23-33.

Mathews, Jessica T. “Power Shift.” Foreign Affairs 76, no. 1 (January-February 1997): 50-66.

McGinnis, John O. “The Decline of the Western Nation State and the Rise of the Regime of International Federalism.” Cardozo Law Review 18, no. 903 (1996): 903-924.

McGray, Douglas. “Japan’s Gross National Cool.” Foreign Policy, no. 130 (May-June 2002): 44- 54.

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Narayan, John. “The Wages of Whiteness in the Absence of Wages: Racial Capitalism, Reactionary Intercommunalism and the rise of Trumpism.” Third World Quarterly 38, no. 11 (2017): 2482-2500.

Penney, Matthew. “A Nation Restored: The Utopian Future of Japan’s Far Right.” Mechademia 10 (2015): 98-112.

Pfaff, William. “Redefining World Power.” Foreign Affairs 70, no. 1 (1990/91): 34-48.

Postel-Vinay, Karoline. “The Global Rightist Turn, Nationalism in Japan.” Japan Focus, 15, no. 1 (May 2017): 1-14.

Proust, Jacques. “Le fantôme de Luther au Japon.” Nouvelle Revue du XVIe Siècle 16, no. 1 (1998): 143-154.

Raimondo, Sergio, Valentina De Fortuna, and Giulia Ceccarelli. “Bushido as Allied: The Japanese Warrior in the Cultural Production of Fascist Italy (1940-1943).” Revista De Artes Marciales Asiáticas 12, no. 2 (December 2017): 82-100.

Raiswell, Richard. “Edward Terry and the Calvinist Geography of India.” Études Anglaises 70, no. 2 (2017): 167-186.

Rodao, Florentino. “Franco’s Spain and the Japanese Empire (1937-45).” Bulletin of Portuguese - Japanese Studies 10-11 (June-December 2005): 243-262.

Rousso, Henry, Lucy Golsan and Richard J. Golsan. “The Political and Cultural Roots of Negationism in France.” South Central Review 23, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 67-88.

Startin, Nicholas. “Where to For the Radical Right in the European Parliament? The Rise and Fall of Transnational Political Cooperation.” Perspectives on European Politics and Society 11 no. 4 (2010): 429-449.

Silk, Leonard and Tom Kono. “Sayonara, Japan Inc.” Foreign Policy, no. 93 (Winter 1993-1994): 115-131.

Skya, Walter A. “Fascist Encounters: German Nazis and Japanese Shintō Ultranationalists.” In Japan in the Fascist Era, edited by E. Bruce Reynolds, 133-154. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Tomomi, Yamaguchi. “Revisionism, Ultranationalism, Sexism: Relations Between the Far Right and the Establishment Over the ‘Comfort Women’ Issue.” Social Science Japan Journal 21, no. 2 (2018): 219-238.

Zúquete, José Pedro. “The New Frontlines of Right-Wing Nationalism.” Journal of Political Ideologies 20 no. 1 (2015): 69-85.

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Journals and Periodicals:

British and American: The Atlantic Bedford and Bowery Bloomberg Businessweek Breitbart News Business 2.0 BuzzFeed News Daily Caller The Economist Forbes The Guardian Jacobin Los Angeles Times New York Times Politico Magazine The Rising Wasabi The Times (London) Vital Speeches of The Day Wall Street Journal Washington Post

French: Le Monde

Japanese: Nikkei Weekly Nippon.com Japan Times Mainichi Shimbun

Other: Business Today (India) DW (Germany) Far Eastern Economic Review (Hong Kong) Irish Independent (Ireland)

Websites:

Bruno Gollnisch Personal Website: https://gollnisch.com/. Euronews: https://www.euronews.com/. EP Delegation for Relations with Japan: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/delegations/en/d-jp/home. Hope Not Hate: https://hopenothate.com/. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/.