Peinture de guerre, musée des JSDF, Hokkaido
Le Professeur Jeff Kingston de l'Université TUJ de Tokyo explique dans un récit et commentaire lumineux paru dans le Japan Times en date du 8 Novembre 2014 comment la droite nationaliste japonaise libérée sous Shinzo Abe harcèle les enseignants et les universités ainsi que les médias, japonais et étrangers.
Exemple de menaces et violences à Hokusei Gakuen University à Sapporo sur Takashi Uemura, ancien journaliste de l'Asahi Shimbun. J'espère que des publications comme Courrier International, Express, Nouvel Obs, Le Figaro ou Le Monde vont enfin s'y intéresser, et ouvrir le volet nauséabond de ces tristes héritiers des sectes nationalistes japonaises d'avant guerre qui avaient impliqué le Japon dans une guerre d'invasion en Asie, profitant en particulier aux grandes firmes d'alors. (voir: Zaibatsu, "Tanaka Mémos")
Le New York Times y a consacré de nombreux articles. "Pressure in Japan to Forget Sins of War", "Conservative Group Urges Changes at Japanese War Shrine", "Japan's Illiberal Secrecy Law", en présentant l'exemple de groupuscules xénophobes japonais violents: les Net Right (netto uyoku), complètement "tombés dans le fanatisme" selon des résidents français de longue date installés au Japon. Ces groupes, ce sont souvent les mêmes que l'on retrouve au sanctuaire Yasukuni le 15 août, "se cachent derrière: des pseudonymes qui crachent leur vitriol de désinformation sur l'Internet, érodent les libertés démocratiques, censurent la vérité qui dérange, dégradant la dignité du Japon." (NYT)
Je les ai vus et approchés il y a quelques années lors de la rédaction d'ouvrages ou d'articles sur le Japon d'après la seconde guerre mondiale et la guerre du Pacifique. Ils voulaient que l'on parle de leur engagement, tout en masquant leurs méthodes violentes, critiquées par les japonais "ordinaires" qui leur tournent le dos. Sauf que depuis ces dernières années, depuis le livre le "Japon qui peut dire Non" de Ishihara et Morita, précédant une politique débridée niant les responsabilités japonaises durant les terribles années de colonisation et de guerre, depuis le soutien de Junichiro Koizumi aux conflits des années Bush, depuis la catastrophe de 2011, Fukushima et Tsunami, et aussi parce que depuis 1945, les japonais n'ont jamais eu le temps ou le loisir de revisiter librement leur passé indépendamment sans que les Etats Unis leur tiennent le porte plume, on assiste avec stupeur au sursaut, au retour du nationalisme ethnique japonais et de la xénophobie.
Je me suis aperçu que certains de ces extrémistes japonais sont désormais infiltrés sur ma page Facebook, sur mon compte Twitter, et sur LinkedIn. Ils surveillent mon blog, mes questions au press club, je reçois des emails menaçants. Bon ce n'est pas Isis et quoi qu'il en soit je m'exprime ici, encore et toujours, plus longuement que dans mes papiers d'actualités. Certains de mes collègues, américains britanniques ou français et moi-même avons présenté ces cas devant nos ambassadeurs au Japon et je l'ai fait devant des ambassadeurs étrangers dont le prédécesseur de l'actuelle ambassadeur des Etats-Unis d'Amérique Caroline Kennedy, devant un ancien ambassadeur de France occupant aujourd'hui de hautes fonctions au Quai d'Orsay, ou lors de rendez-vous de presse avec le conseiller politique de notre Ambassade car ces mouvements nationalistes xénophobes japonais n'hésitent pas à "cracher leur vitriol de désinformation" dans les rédactions en chefs et les mouvements associatifs au Japon et outre-mer. Afin de critiquer insidieusement le journaliste, le professeur, le diplomate, voire aussi l'entrepreneur.
Les médias japonais se refusent généralement à évoquer ces cas, en particulier la NHK dont son nouveau président et son conseil d'administration qui est placé, via des filtres bureaucratiques, directement sous contrôle de l'administration de Shinzo Abe et ses communicants. Mais pire encore, ceux qui perpétuent ces idées d'une résurgence d'un Japon aligné sur de semblables ambitions dévastatrices des années 1940-1945, sont aussi devenus aujourd'hui des extrémistes, liés volontairement par les herbages familiaux, enfants et petits enfants, neveux ou nièces, cousins qui en 2014 épousent dorénavant les thèses des criminels de guerre condamnés jadis devant les tribunaux. Criminels condamnés dirait on aujourd'hui pour terrorisme ou meurtres politiques. Nous savons souvent mais pas toujours qui se cache derrière cet homme politique, Shinzo Abe, un peu à l'étroit dans ses habits de premier ministre. Nous avons évoqué les actes de la Nippon Kaigi, d'Issuikai, des Uyoku dantai (右翼団体) ils doivent être pris très au sérieux, tant leurs forces demeurent très actives, près de 100.000 personnes au Japon, en 2013.
Des réminiscences des Aikokusha (愛国社, "Society of Patriots”) Black Dragon Society (黑龍會 kokuryukai) Genyosha (玄洋社 "Black Ocean Society”) La société des patriotes a été réactivée en toute visibilité lors de l'arrivée temporaire aux affaires des Démocrates du Minshuto. Aujourd'hui très active, cette société dite des "patriotes" est particulièrement toxique, mélange d'une nostalgie pour le Japon Impérial du 4e siècle (sic), couplée aux réinventions du culte impérial sous l'Ere Meiji dite de modernisation (sic). Leur dernière méthode est d'approcher des médias étrangers et de les infiltrer par des méthodes habituelles de corruption et passe-droits.
Pourquoi les "décideurs" étrangers en dehors des américains ou des chinois n'y prêtent-ils aucune attention ne cesse de me surprendre? Nous voici d'ores et déjà prévenus! Reste l'espoir que le Japon et ceux qui vivent dans ce grand pays, la majorité étant éprise de paix et de liberté, au moins celle d'entreprendre, sauront contenir ses propres excès générés par l'ignorance et la colère d'un mal-être si commun aux grandes nations aux sociétés déchirées par l'égoïsme et la violence des fanatismes, le Japon n'y échappe pas.
2) Article en anglais de Jeff Kingston, director of Asian Studies, Temple University Japan.
Right-wing witch hunt signals dark days in Japan
BY JEFF KINGSTON
SPECIAL TO THE JAPAN TIMES
NOV 8, 2014
Many Japanese and long-time Japan observers have expressed dismay about the recrudescence of self-righteous nationalism under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has emboldened right-wing extremists now threatening democratic institutions and civil liberties.
“The revisionist right in Japan with the active encouragement, if not involvement, of the Abe government has succeeded in controlling NHK news, intimidating Asahi Shimbun and now academia,” says Koichi Nakano, a professor of political science at Sophia University.
Abe has presided over the mainstreaming of reactionary extremism in his quest to rewrite and rehabilitate Japan’s wartime past in Asia, and in doing so instigates widespread international criticism. Any other national leader who did the same for their nation’s egregious history would merit a similar reaction.
This past week, Hokusei Gakuen University in Sapporo moved to fire part-time lecturer Takashi Uemura, a former Asahi Shimbun journalist, because right-wing goons had threatened violence if he wasn’t removed. The university was reportedly inundated with threatening letters and phone calls demanding the teacher’s dismissal for his controversial articles in the 1990s about the comfort women system.
What started as a clash over history has morphed into a broader political battle over national identity and Japan’s democratic values. Nakano worries that “each time a university succumbs to right-wing intimidation, ‘success’ encourages more terrorist threats.”
Reactionaries maintain that the Asahi and its reporters tarnished Japan’s international reputation, but as Hokkaido University historian Philip Seaton explains, it is the “efforts by a small but powerful minority in Japan to deny atrocities that sullies Japan’s name in international eyes.”
These reactionaries are now inflicting infinitely more damage on Japan’s reputation than a handful of newspaper articles in the 1990s. It is scandalous that the so-called Net Right (netto uyoku) of extremists, lurking behind pseudonyms and spewing ill-informed vitriol on the Internet, are eroding democratic freedoms, censoring inconvenient truths and degrading Japan’s dignity.
As Martin Fackler of the New York Times recently wrote (Oct. 29), these cyberactivists “have gained an outsize influence with the rise of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s conservative government, which shares the goal of ending negative portrayal of Japan’s history, and with the acquiescence of a society too uninterested or scared to speak out.”
Fackler goes on to note several examples around Japan where the Net Right has imposed its agenda through thuggery.
Japan’s cyber-terrorists sound like religious extremists, threatening “divine retribution” in the form of gas canisters packed with nails. By stopping towns from erecting repentant war memorials, caterwauling on the Internet and scaring employers into firing “undesirables,” these vigilantes represent Japan in jackboots. It is like the 1930s, when ultranationalists hounded respected academics such as Tatsukichi Minobe and Tadao Yanaihara from their posts.
The Net Right embodies Japan’s 21st-century McCarthyism, from an era when communist hysteria in the United States unleashed a witch hunt that trampled on democratic freedoms.
“Defending academic freedom must be sacrosanct,” Seaton says. “To terminate the ex-Asahi reporter’s contract simply sends the message that ‘intimidation works.’ This incident could initiate a dangerous slide toward the muzzling and dismissal of researchers working on sensitive issues.”
Andrew Horvat, former president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, points out that Uemura “has been caught in the crossfire of a proxy war on the comfort women issue. The aim of the rightists is to undermine the reputation of the Asahi, a liberal paper, and he has become a pawn in this game.”
Tomomi Yamaguchi, a professor of anthropology at Montana State University, says Uemura has been on the right’s hit list from the mid-2000s largely due to vilification by Tsutomu Nishioka, a professor at Tokyo Christian University.
Satoko Norimatsu, director of the Vancouver-based Peace Philosophy Centre, speculates that Hokusei itself is a target because of its 1995 Peace Declaration, which goes much further than the Murayama Statement in acknowledging Japan’s war responsibility and obligation to atone. Back then, Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama condemned Japanese aggression in Asia and called for an end to “self-righteous nationalism.”
“The Abe regime has clearly abetted this mobilization of right-wing extremists against academic, media and other institutions,” asserts Andrew DeWit, a professor of public policy at Rikkyo University. “Allowing extremists to intimidate academe will not foster the learning environment that Japanese universities require in order to become the ‘super global universities’ envisioned in Abenomics. You cannot have it both ways, winking at ultra-nationalism that targets academe while at the same time actually building globally competitive institutions of critical inquiry.”
Alexis Dudden, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut, argues that post-1945 Japan has advanced because of the ability to study, learn and teach in an open atmosphere.
“Since then, Japanese society and all who engage with it have benefited and thrived because of this fundamental freedom guaranteed in the 1947 Constitution,” says Dudden, who believes that “turning away now degrades Japan’s capacities to lead and defines a ‘safe’ society as one that cowers from bullies and sanitizes history to fit contingent political demands.”
Sven Saaler, a professor of history at Sophia University, notes that “right-wingers have been pushing their agenda constantly with violence. They have actually violently attacked journalists, newspaper offices and politicians.”
Mark Mullins, a professor of Japanese studies at the University of Auckland, warns that right-wing threats must be taken seriously.
“Recall that in 1990 Nagasaki Mayor Hitoshi Motoshima was shot by rightists for expressing his views about the Emperor and war responsibility; and in 2006, Koichi Kato, a moderate (Liberal Democratic Party) politician, had his house in Yamagata burned down for his criticism of Prime Minister (Junichiro) Koizumi’s visits to Yasukuni Shrine.”
Saaler sees a broader pattern.
“In recent years, pressure by right-wing groups has led to cinemas canceling movies dealing with sensitive war-related issues; hotels canceling the reservations of conference rooms for symposia dealing with such issues; and museums canceling or revising exhibitions with sensitive contents,” he says.
The Peace Philosophy Centre’s Norimatsu thinks things are getting worse under the Abe regime.
“(There has been) widespread anti-China and anti-Korea sentiments (and) books of that kind becoming best-sellers, hate demonstrations, assaults on history by the nation’s leaders that trickle down to the general public, page-ripping of Anne Frank’s diaries, hiding of ‘Barefoot Gen’ in school libraries, assaults on protest tents in Okinawa and anti-nuclear tents in Tokyo, and public places refusing to rent space to groups that discuss issues like the Constitution and anti-nuclear power,” she says.
Amid this rightist chill, Mullins is worried that “academic freedom — and freedom of speech more broadly — is clearly threatened and is a legitimate concern for those who care about the future of democracy in Japan.”
Sophia’s Nakano laments that Abe exacerbates the situation.
“When an important principle of liberal democracy is under attack, the government should be playing an active role to condemn the attacks in strongest terms,” he says, but instead points out that it is actually fanning the fires.
Saaler’s suggests that, “The situation can be compared to Weimar Germany, where the authorities turned a blind eye to right-wing activities and let right-wing violence go largely unpunished.”
Here we remain far from descending into that Nazi abyss, but government tolerance for intolerance and hooliganism makes a mockery of the rule of law, democratic norms and the Olympic spirit.
[For readers interested in the Hokusei affair, here is a link to the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan press conference by Koichi Nakano and Jiro Yamaguchi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNjWHwCQbcE ]
Jeff Kingston is the director of Asian Studies, Temple University Japan.
EoQ
Japan Times:
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2014/11/08/commentary/japan-commentary/right-wing-witch-hunt-signals-dark-days-japan
New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/29/world/asia/japanese-village-grappling-with-wartime-sins-comes-under-attack.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/29/world/asia/japan-yasukuni-shrine-izokukai.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/30/opinion/international/japans-illiberal-secrecy-law.html
Rappel JPRI: "The 1955 System and the American Connection"
http://www.jpri.org/publications/workingpapers/wp11.html
