Superb Japan!? ― 日本礼賛の幻想
Recently there has been a boom in books and TV shows on a distinctive feature of contemporary Japan, to wit: lauding Japanese superiority.1 This type of immodest claims to superiority was popular in wartime, as the historian John W. Dower noted: “Poets, priests, and propagandists alike extolled the superiority of the ‘Yamato race’ and the sublime destiny of the Imperial Way.”2 A vivid historical example is an appendix to the monthly magazine Hinode (Sunrise) revealingly titled Here is Japan’s Greatness Shining in the World ― vaunting the world’s top military strength, indomitable spirit, etc.
This perspective gained great popularity in 1933, the very year Japan’s isolation became more pronounced when the country withdrew from the League of Nations due to international criticism in the wake of the Manchurian Incident.3 Akutagawa Prize winning author Tanabe Seiko articulates her discomfort with such peculiar self-glorification, which evokes memories of forced-fed propaganda about Japanese intelligence and might (e.g. high IQ and physical prowess as well as superior eye color) on the eve of World War II (Addendum).4 My question is simply: Where does this kind of parochial conceit or smugness come from? Is this one of “the signs society gives out cryptically”?5 What does this tell us about our society? I think it has something to do with the poverty of Japan’s democracy, however, looking elsewhere (cf. Aryan supremacy), there is reason to conclude that it is not limited to my native country.
Yet, if there is a distinctive feature, it is perhaps the lack of political breadth. Writing in Foreign Affairs (January/February, 2015), Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Gregory F. Treverton equate Japan’s “lack of political variability” with “long-term dominance by a single party” which they identify as a source of fragility.6 Taleb and Treverton address countries’ fragility as follows:
Contrary to conventional wisdom, genuinely stable countries experience moderate political changes, continually switching governments and reversing their political orientations. … It is political variability that makes democracies less fragile than autocracies.7