the marvels and mysteries of Japanese 'soft' fascism

A must-read on today's edition of The Japan Times:

With Japan at a crossroads, it's instructive to recall the Hidaka affair

By ROGER PULVERS
The Japan Times

July 10, 2011

Exactly 30 years ago this month, I had an encounter with a man who became innocently involved in an international incident. That incident may be all but forgotten now, but it's worth recalling here because it highlights the struggle of an individual of conscience to have the truth revealed.

Indeed, we in Japan are currently involved with the very same issues of personal responsibility and collective falsehood.

If we remain silent in the face of injustice or criminal negligence, if we allow unelected bureaucrats and business executives to ride roughshod over our personal welfare — as we are witnessing with regard to the ongoing nuclear disaster in Fukushima — the entire nation's future could be put at risk by recklessness and prevarication.

(full text here)

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Pulvers reproduces a comment by Rokuro Hidaka—'The Japanese don't have much of a consciousness of human rights or the rights of the individual. Even the word kenri is not really the equivalent of 'rights.' The Japanese think that insisting on your kenri is an activity associated with egoism'—that is reminiscent of an earlier study by Masao Maruyama, published in the edited book Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics (London: Oxford UP, 1963). In it, Maruyama argues precisely that modern Japan, upon abandoning democratic institutions and disintegrating into an absolutist state, has never successfully established, as a nation, the primacy of individual rights or the subjectivity of a thinking and historically conscious people. 

This, in turn, has reminded me of Etsuko Yamashita's argument in her book on Itsue Takamura (1988), in which she argues that mother dominance, the cornerstone of Japan's patriarchal society (a topic I have been exploring), is the symbol of a leaderless, diffuse 'soft' fascism: a ruling system of interdependence (amae) in which no one takes responsibility as an individual person. It is no wonder, in this context, that the Japanese Emperor system has so often been perceived throughout history as one of maternal dominance.

What is truly astonishing is not so much the cogency and perceptiveness of these views, but their rarity in a society that has reached such a high level of economic affluence and that claims to be a democracy. Maybe, as Hidaka himself has pointed out, economic affluence has never really managed to translate itself into social prosperity in modern Japan. It is nothing but a shallow, empty form of wealth.

And something must be terribly amiss indeed when the intelligentsia of a (supposedly) democratic country aloofly chooses to turn its back on reality and the world at large to pursue instead its own self-interest and vanity publishing.