Description
Since its emergence as a topic of international concern in the late-1990s, the so-called “history problem” remains a key issue in East Asian international politics and in Japanese political culture. As a series of controversies – including the euphemistically known “comfort women” – it centralizes around the denial of Second World War-era atrocities committed by Japan. Taken up by various intellectuals and right-wing ideologues, this historical revisionism is considered a turning point in what critics have called Japanese conservatism’s turn towards a reactionary nationalism. This paper explores the intellectual foundations of this ideological turn through the political thought of the cultural critic Etō Jun. Writing throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Etō was a prominent literary and social critic, conservative thinker, and proponent of historical revisionism. The aims of the paper are two-fold: first, it illustrates the worldview informing the conservative understanding of post-war history, such that conservatism has embraced this movement. Second, borrowing from Nietzsche’s critique of historical thinking, the paper shows the radical nature of this historiography. It shows that conservatives consider cultural authenticity to have been politically suppressed by foreign powers after Japan’s defeat; as a result, they advocate the need to “rectify” this state of affairs through historical revisionism. The paper argues that this debate over an international history is – rather than the resuscitation of pre-war social order – a claim over its connection to the present in order to shape a nationalist future. Historical revisionism, then, is in itself a political aim toward nationalist cultural ends.
