Mainichi on War Memory Part II

New argument in Japan on the United States (Part B): Warped conservatism

MAINICHI (Top play and page 3) (Abridged slightly)
June 22, 2009

The decision to suspend the publication of the conservative monthly magazine Shokun was made unanimously at a Bungeishunju special board meeting on February 26. The major reason was a drop in advertising revenues. The magazine's circulation peaked at 95,000 in the early 2000s when it turned excessively anti-China, anti-South Korea and anti-North Korea. But no one positively evaluated that period in the board meeting.

The magazine was established in May 1969 when the student movement was sweeping through Japan. The aim was to present an option different from the left wing based on Japan being a U.S. ally during the Cold War era.

Masao Asao, who served as the magazine's editor in chief in the mid-1990s, indicated that conservatism takes pride in being tolerant. Every time the magazine's star critic Ikutaro Shimizu's argument swayed, its regular critic Tsuneari Fukuda chided him. The magazine also carried articles by the Asahi Shimbun's popular reporters and left-wing opinion leaders, such as Akira Asada of the "modern thought boom" of in the 1980s. Anti-U.S. writers had a certain place in the magazine.

The Berlin Wall came down in the year that marked the 20th anniversary of Shokun. The history textbook row in the 1990s in the process of finding a "new enemy" replacing the left-wing sparked strong criticism of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, and this led to the recent boom of conservative arguments.

The rejection of the Tokyo Tribunal could have resulted in the refusal of the United States, but assertions, including those of self-claimed pro-American writers, simply escalated. But as if to fill the gap with a head-on clash with the United States, criticism was directed at the question of visits to Yasukuni Shrine by the prime minister and East Asian countries in connection with the issue of abductions by North Korea.

The use of pejorative expressions against China and North Korea increased in the form of being influenced by the conservative magazine Seiron published by the Sankei Shimbun. That shift was well received by readers but the magazine became less tolerant. Historians, such as Ikuhiko Hata, were often criticized in connection with the argument by former Air Self-Defense Force Chief of Staff Toshio Tamogami, who claimed in his essay that Roosevelt tricked Japan to go to war with the United States.

Nonfiction writer Masayasu Hosaka takes this view: "The left wing's characteristic of prioritizing its interpretations of historical facts has emerged in the inner circle of the conservatives, who have lost their enemy."

Shokun's readership diminished due in part to the establishment in November 2004 of the third conservative magazine WiLL. Some writers, who disliked Shokun's radical policy course, reportedly refused to contribute their essays to the magazine in the last two years.

Many readers favored radical arguments over a wide range of arguments, and the magazine's circulation fell below 40,000 in the end.

Some think Bunshun's decision to discontinue the stigmatized Shokun was sensible, but the venue to express sensible views has now disappeared.

The suspension of the Shokun was preceded by a long road of limited arguments that caused stress for the conservative print media, which was unable to frontally discuss the United States, its true theme. Even in criticizing the historical view on the Tokyo Tribunal, the magazine could not go beyond the framework of the Japan-U.S. alliance. The magazine occasionally vented its stress as "anti-U.S. historical views."

Okazaki Institute Director Hisahiko Okazaki, a self-styled pro-American opinion leader, supervised the compilation of the new history textbook that passed the government's examination in 2005. He said: "The original text included the conspiracy theory that the United States had planned to wage a war against Japan since the Russo-Japanese War. We removed that part altogether." In 2006, Yasukuni Shrine's war museum, Yushukan, eliminated the part describing the U.S. government's strong reaction from its explanation. "We have corrected anti-U.S. thinking," Okazaki said proudly. But anti-U.S. thinking can be said to have been capped only temporarily.

The argument calling for correcting historical views that was directed at East Asia might cause a schism between the Japan-U.S. alliance if something goes wrong. The Foreign Ministry's decision to offer an apology to the former U.S. soldiers comes in part from the conservative media's inflection since the late 1990s.