by DAVID MCNEIL
Japanese politician and political scientist Inoguchi Kuniko PHOTO/Yahoo
In September 2015, several hundred mainly foreign academics and journalists received unsolicited copies of two poorly written books from Japan, accompanied by a signed letter from politician Inoguchi Kuniko. “In East Asia, the regional history of the 20th century has been incorrectly distorted (sic) by some individuals due to their current domestic political ambitions,” said the letter. “I believe it is important for you, as a highly esteemed member of the academic and policy circles (sic), to look into the books which I am enclosing with this letter.”
The first of the books, “History Wars,” published by the Sankei Shimbun, a conservative newspaper, said records of Japanese misconduct during World War II were exaggerated or false. China and South Korea have used these claims to wage a long battle in America to distort views of the war, with the goal of “weakening the US-Japan alliance,” it said. “Japan’s postwar governments have not only failed to wage an effective rebuttal against the propaganda maneuvers of Japan’s adversaries, but have also fallen witlessly into their…traps.”
In “Getting Over it! Why Korea Needs to Stop Bashing Japan,” Sonfa Oh, a naturalized Japanese academic originally from South Korea, argues that successive generations of Korean leaders have resorted to historical fabrication, and “capricious, opportunistic egoism” to damage Japan and its reputation around the world. Japanese rule of Korea from 1910–1945 was essentially benign, writes Oh. The Japan in both publications is cast as well meaning, stoic and endlessly forbearing in its dealings with its mendacious, two-faced neighbors.
The mass mail-shot is part of an occasionally clumsy but well-funded attempt to transform international perceptions of Japan. A campaign of “strategic communications,” with a budget of over half-a-billion dollars, has been launched to counter negative PR and cultivate a generation of pro-Japanese foreign commentators. Japanese embassies and consulates have been instructed to be more proactive in challenging perceived slights, such as foreign textbooks that stir the history pot. Brookings, Carnegie, CSIS and other think tanks have been given millions of dollars to promote Japan; millions more has gone to support chairs at Columbia, Georgetown and MIT universities.
At the same time, an informal list of friends and foes appears to have emerged. Outside Japan, those considered allies include a small group of mainly US-based academics, journalists and rightwing bloggers. The foreign enemies list is topped by The New York Times, which neoconservatives have long seen as leftwing and anti-Japanese. The hundreds of foreign scholars who signed the 2015 Open Letter in Support of Historians in Japan, an attempt to counter the revisionist drift under the Abe administration, are also under suspicion. It is the letter that appears to have prompted the mailing.
The risk of overreach in this project is never far away. In one case, Japanese foreign ministry officials accused Germany’s largest business newspaper, Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung, of carrying pro-Chinese propaganda. Its Tokyo-based correspondent Carsten Germis wrote a widely circulated article lamenting what he called a crude government attempt to censor views it disliked. Dispatches of diplomats to the offices of history professors and publishers, and attempts to nudge foreign journalists away from academics critical of the government, have also triggered PR blowback.
The book campaign struck some, therefore, as naïve, at best. Did Inoguchi think that a few hundred pages of thin, selectively argued academic gruel might tilt a complex debate that has waged for years in favor of Abe style conservatism? The point, she insists, is to circulate ideas that “have not been represented” in the mainstream. “I felt I was in a position to work with others in enhancing views about what we have done since the war, as a new nation state,” she said. “It is not to justify anything,” she added, citing her own credentials as a fighter for women’s rights, in Korea and elsewhere.
Inoguchi’s decision to lend her imprimatur to the books was considered surprising. A political scientist and internationalist known for work on disarmament and gender issues, she had not been previously been linked with Japanese neo-conservatism. One clue to her apparent shift is found in her association with Nippon Kaigi, or the Japan Conference. Interviewed by telephone, Inoguchi said that she is a member of the Chiba Prefectural branch of the lobby group, but insists they part company on one issue: “If they try to justify the past, that is the point on which I disagree. I don’t try to rewrite history; it cannot be undone.”
Justifying the uncomfortable past — and recasting it for 21st Century Japan is, however, precisely the mission of Nippon Kaigi. The group’s charter lists six key goals: “respect the Imperial Family as the center of Japanese life;” nurture patriotism; promote a new Constitution “based on our nation’s true characteristics;” protect the sovereignty and honor of the nation’s independence; nurture young people to grow up with pride and love for their nation; and establish a strong army and promote the nation’s status abroad.