Japan's Nationalist Right in the Internet Age

Online Media and Grassroots Conservative Activism

Jeffrey J. Hall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000369151
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

Japan's nationalist right have used the internet to organize offline activism in increasingly visible ways.

Hall investigates the role of internet-mediated activism in Japan's ongoing historical and territorial disputes. He explores the emergence of two right-wing activist organizations, Nihon Bunka Channel Sakura and Ganbare Nippon, which have played a significant role in pressure campaigns against Japanese media outlets, campaigns to influence historical memorials, and campaigns to assert Japan's territorial claim to the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach, he analyses how activists maintained cohesion, raised funds, held protests that regularly drew hundreds to thousands of participants, and used fishing boats to land activists on disputed islands. Detailing events that took place between 2004 and 2020, he demonstrates how skilled social actors built cohesive grassroots protest organizations through the creation of shared meaning for their organization and its supporters.

A valuable read both for scholars seeking insight into the dynamics surrounding Japan's history disputes and territorial issues, as well as those seeking to compare Japanese right-wing internet activism with its counterparts elsewhere.

1 Introduction

A 21-year-old student arrived at a classroom at Waseda University, prepared for another day of one of his favorite literature courses. He had expected a normal day of study, but the events that day would mark a turning point in his life.

The professor arrived late. With a stunned look on his face, he informed the class that Mishima Yukio had just committed suicide. The shock was so great that he could not teach the class. Instead, he sent the students home, telling them to spend the rest of the day contemplating what had just happened. ¹

It was November 25, 1970. One of Japan’s most famous novelists was dead. But it was no normal suicide. Mishima had killed himself after leading a private student militia into a military base, taking a Japanese general hostage, and calling on Japan’s Self-Defense Forces to carry out a coup d’état.

The student returned to his apartment and watched Japanese television news coverage of Mishima’s failed coup. Cameras had been present when Mishima spoke to a group of soldiers who had assembled in response to the hostage-taker’s demands. Standing on the balcony of the army headquarters building, Mishima attempted to deliver an impassioned plea for them to rise up and restore Japan’s emperor and military to its rightful place. Instead, his speech was drowned out by the jeering and shouting of annoyed and angry soldiers. Overhead, television news helicopters added to the noise. Having failed to inspire a military uprising, Mishima went back inside the building and committed ritual suicide with one of his student militiamen.

It was difficult to hear what Mishima was saying in the clips that aired on television. The noise, especially the noise of the news helicopters, was too loud. It made the student reach a conclusion about the state of postwar Japan: a patriotic man’s voice could not be heard. When the student later sought out and read one of Mishima’s last articles, the following passage deeply impacted him:

I cannot have much hope for the future of Japan. As days pass, I feel more and more deeply that if things should proceed this way, “Japan” might end up disappearing. Japan might disappear, and in its place, a large economic country, which is inorganic, vacant, neutral, medium colored, wealthy, and shrewd, would remain at one corner of the Far East. I don’t feel like conversing with those people who think that that is all right. ²

Thirty-four years later, the former literature student – Mizushima Satoru – would meet someone else whose life had been touched by Mishima. Together, they would create an alternative media outlet that would try to break through what they considered to be the noise of the mainstream media. They wanted to prevent the “disappearance” of Japan that Mishima had warned was coming. Their message would be one of nationalistic pride battling against the “anti-Japanese” forces inside and outside Japan. Anyone with an internet connection would be able to view their programs and hear their message.

I moved to Japan in August 2005, months after the founding of a website that would become globally significant as a platform for alternative media: YouTube.com. In those early years of YouTube, it was quite easy to find popular English-language content representing both the political left and the right, but my attempts to consume Japanese-language content met with different results. The most-viewed video rankings on YouTube Japan’s news category were largely dominated by the political right. When searching in Japanese for videos on historically controversial topics, the only videos with thousands of views seemed to be those expressing the nationalist viewpoints. Although some Japanese left-leaning voices have since established popular channels on YouTube, the videos of the right remain more popular today.

When I began my research in 2008, there were few studies on right-wing activism in Japan and even fewer that examined events taking place in the internet era. An important early work, the 2003 book Japanese Cybercultures, included a valuable case study of activist groups’ use of the internet during the 2001 history textbook affair, in which Isa Ducke noted that traditional methods had “only been slightly enhanced by basic internet features” such as e-mail. ³ She also observed that the fact that many of the activists were of middle or older age was a contributing factor to a lack of internet use. For most of the non-state actors studied in the volume, it could be generally stated that they lacked access to the “finance, facilities, and expertise” necessary to truly exploit the potential of the internet. ⁴

Another notable work, from 2010, explored how several small independent progressive media organizations used video sharing sites such as YouTube to expand the distribution of their news content. Gabriele Hadl observed that the emergence of these citizen media outlets created an opportunity for civic groups to create forums in which misunderstood social issues could be discussed and addressed. ⁵ Similar developments on the right remained unexplored.

The emergence of Japan’s nativist right in the mid-2000s, a new collection of extreme hate groups that used the internet for recruitment and organization, has led to a new focus of academic and journalistic attention on right-wing activism in Japan. Most of this new research has centered on the largest and most infamous of the new nativist groups, the Association of Citizens against the Special Privileges of the Zainichi, commonly known as Zaitokukai, a contraction of its Japanese name. The fieldwork-based research of Higuchi Naoto, Yasuda Koichi, Asahina Yuki, and Nathaniel M. Smith has greatly contributed to a rich understanding of these xenophobic groups and their participants. While I discuss their findings in Chapter 2 of this book, the focus of this book is on less extreme conservative activists who have a larger following, have achieved more for their cause, but have been largely ignored as a subject of detailed academic research.

This book examines the phenomenon of internet-mediated grassroots conservative activism through an exploration of the activism of Nihon Bunka Channel Sakura (Japanese Culture Channel Sakura: hereafter referred to as Channel Sakura), an alternative media outlet founded by Mizushima Satoru. Since its creation in 2004, Channel Sakura and its activist wing, Ganbare Nippon, have been an influential force in the activism of Japan’s nationalist right. Mizushima and his fellow activists use their media outlet to bring together a variety of right-leaning organizations, holding some of the largest right-wing demonstrations in postwar Japanese history. While some of their campaigns have failed to achieve any of their goals, others have been remarkably successful.

Channel Sakura’s campaigns have goals that many readers would consider very far from the mainstream of Japanese society. In its discussion of historical issues, it does not trust the international consensus of historians regarding Japan’s conduct in World War II. For example, it aired many programs denying well-documented war atrocities, such as the Nanjing Massacre. It also called out media organizations that reported on those atrocities as “anti-Japanese.” In accordance with this view, its activists held demonstrations demanding the complete dissolution of NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster. Objectionable films, books, television programs, and news reports were attributed to Chinese communist infiltration of Japanese society.

In the 16 years since its founding in 2004, Channel Sakura has experienced far more setbacks than successes, yet it has remained strong and well-organized while rival organizations faded into obscurity. How do we make sense of this phenomenon? How can one explain its ability to maintain cohesion, raise funds, and regularly hold protests that draw hundreds or even thousands of participants? Why did it thrive while other organizations, such as Zaitokukai, fizzled out?

This book answers these questions by arguing that social actors within Channel Sakura (and its protest wing, Ganbare Nippon) skillfully took advantage of structural shifts to create new opportunities for activist campaigns. As a part of Japan’s assertive conservative right, Channel Sakura tapped into an existing niche of the Japanese population that found value in a worldview that treated pre-1945 history as something worthy of pride. It also distributed its videos for free on YouTube, making it easier for newcomers to discover the viewpoints of Japan’s right. Existing near the fringes of mainstream Japanese society, the activists of Channel Sakura were ever-watchful for new opportunities to challenge the existing order and advocate on behalf of their views.

Analytical framework

My analysis of Channel Sakura’s emergence and participation in several major protest campaigns is guided by Fligstein and McAdam’s general theory of Strategic Action Fields (SAFs). This theoretical approach is aimed at overcoming the “balkanization” of social scientific research on social/political activism that leads to analyses that place too much or too little emphasis on political and economic structures or on non-material culture and existential motivations. ⁶ SAFs are conceived as “mesolevel social orders” in which

actors (who can be individual or collective) are attuned to and interact with one another on the basis of shared (which is not to say consensual) understandings about the purposes of the field, relationships to others in the field (including who has power and why), and the rules governing legitimate action in the field. ⁷

All forms of collective actors, whether they are organizations, government systems, or social movements, are created from SAFs. Some fields can be inside other fields in a hierarchical manner, which Fligstein and McAdam compare to the image of Russian nesting dolls. In other cases, fields are positioned in a different manner. The connections between different fields generally indicate conditions of interdependence or the potential to effect change in one another.

Strategic Action Fields have no clear formalized boundaries, making them broader and more fluid than other sociological approaches to the organization. Actors and groups can move across and between different SAFs, positions and arrangements within and between SAFs can be created or altered, and through a range of processes, an SAF can be either stabilized or de-stabilized. Social actors and organizations place themselves within SAFs and act based on the influence of “power and culture.” ⁸

Social skill, the “ability to induce cooperation in others,” is a major element of understanding how and why events occur within Strategic Action Fields. ⁹ A skilled social actor is one that is particularly skilled at creating a positive sense of meaning for themselves and others by tailoring their actions to the current state of a given field. They create stories that appeal to the “identity and interests” of their audience, aiming to gain their cooperation. The same stories are also used to induce actions against their opponents. ¹⁰ Skilled social actors are constantly seeking to maintain or improve their position within fields.

While I employ the term skilled social actors throughout this book, this concept is not far from what Alexander Bukh has referred to as national identity entrepreneurs...