Description
Drawing the boundaries of a national community is a contentious political practice. In opposition to an inclusive understanding of national identity, extreme right groups perform an exclusionary articulation of the nation along ethnic and racial lines. However, in addition to ethnic and religious outgroups, they also exclude those who fit their ethnic credentials but are deemed to have politically betrayed the nation. In this paper, we will explore this issue through the case of Japan’s neto uyo (common Japanese short-hand for ‘online ultranationalist’: netto uyouku). Beyond their enmity towards minorities, we will focus on the way neto uyo members performatively enforce the boundaries of Japanese identity beyond ethnicity through references to an anti-Japan conspiracy and the erosion of Japanese traditions. Using a framework combining poststructural discourse analysis with cultural pragmatics, we will analyse neto uyo forum posts and interview leaders and prominent members to explore the intersection between racial and political exclusion from the national community.
Keywords: Japan, neto uyo, exclusionary performance, national identity, far-right politics
Bio: Max Warrack is the PAIS Teaching Fellow in International Relations and Japanese Studies and a PhD candidate at the department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick. His doctoral research looks at processes of cultural militarisation and demilitarisation in Japan. Specifically, how actors have engaged with the manga industry to try and recalibrate the zeitgeist, helping them implement unpopular security reform by rehabilitating the Japan Self-Defense Forces as paragons.
Théo Aiolfi is an Early Career Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning (IATL) and Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) at the University of Warwick. His doctoral research at the intersection of politics and performance studies engaged with the interaction between form and substance through the concept of populism. Comparing the cases of Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen, he more specifically engaged with the links between populism and exclusionary nationalism.
