Demokurashi
Nationalism and the Right °Wing in japan. By Ivan Morris. (0.U.P., 50s.) IN many ways the faint, rabble-rousing of the r,i)°st-War Japanese right locks pathetically funny. do the names of some of the factions : National Essence Mass Party, Peerless Poetry Association. And the individual membership of these factions is unimpressive; the Anti-Com- thunist News Society, for instance, is officially How to have six branches and nine members. now Petty they all look when set against the size itad cohesion of such left-wing labour and student 8roup5 as Sohyo and Zengakuren. The post-war government, itself not exactly liberal, has even Pt some right-wing leaders in prison. One might the that the force behind such incidents as _W 1936 putsch. was dead, and that if there is a threat to Japanese democracy it lies, not on the "treme right, but on the extreme left. 131% Morris's thorough and well-documented iLiclY persuades one to think otherwise. In Japan, he says, left and right 'are situated at the et,xtremities of an almost complete circle rather Share remarkably the opposite ends of a straight line': they remarkably similar views about American they rearmament, the 1947 Constitution, and e attract the tough, the authoritarian and the 1)IindlY patriotic in a similar way. But the right , t'`IS a far longer history and is much better attuned ;(1 JtiPanese tradition than Communism is. It
Part of the prevailing temper of the provincial
!pd rural areas, and is much plore readily identi- ;able with nationalism, which Dr. Morris sees
the strongest underlying force in Japan. The
°Mmunists, after all, must look towards v °seem, and Peking for guidance : the right wing need °illy be aware of kokittai-9tional polity.
The mass of Japanese are still politically im-
Mature, and many of those who are not are eYnical and apathetic. A succession of conserva- tid've'Post-war governments has paid lip-service to ,"lokurashi, 'and may continue to do so as long s, foreign commitments demand it. But Japan, Population growing by a million a year, is ''':rched---as so often in the past—on the edge of `\c,°110mic crisis: and if that crisis comes, Dr.
orris believes, such splinter groups as the Peer-
Poetry Association may find themselves—like e,!" pre-war prototypes—in the position of il'etivists in a popular cause. Less dangerous, per- 4aPs, than for Japan to go Communist—at least; bs far as the Western democracies are concerned; ut a sad blow to those who thought, in 1945, tb , 41 Western democracy itself was a wise and a eeeptableimo. .
ANTHONY THWAITE
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