An Imagined Shrinking Community: Japanese Nationalism and The Chronology of the Future

ABSTRACT

How should we understand the relationship between nationalism and discourses of national decline, and more specifically the discourses of a shrinking nation? Driven by this question, this article highlights how bleak imaginings of the future also work to construct the relationship of the individual to the putative national community, creating forms of sentimental national belonging. This article analyses an emerging genre of best-selling books in Japan, Mirai no nenpyō [The chronology of the future] series, that present a dismal vision of Japan’s national demographic future. Their goal is to provoke a sense of national urgency by encouraging Japanese nationals to feel personally the shrinking nation through imagining its coming consequences for everyday life. Such narrations of an imagined shrinking community act to create a timeless sense of national belonging, with daily lived experience in the imagined future interpreted through the lens of the contracting nation. Importantly, the future that these discourses present is nationalized within boundaries separating it from global developments and intercourse. Ultimately, this form of nationalism is constituted not by dying for the nation, but instead by people seeing the continued stability of everyday life as intricately tied to the fate of the national community.

KEYWORDS:

• Nationalism
• Japan
• demographic crisis
• future
• chronology

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Roger Goodman, Takehiko Kariya, Ruben Andersson and Todd Hall for reading the entire manuscript and giving me very helpful feedback.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ For instance, in the Minutes of the Diet 3 April 2020, 27 February 2019, 5 December 2018, 5 June 2018, 6 March 2018, and 8 February 2018, The chronology of the future was refereed by politicians to ask how the government is going to deal with those future events (for instance, Ishiba and Kawai (2020).

² As many of such works draw on the same official data sets, their predictions concerning population decline, the demise of local communities, and the increasing numbers of unoccupied houses are very similar. For instance, Japan’s chronology of future (2017), written by several experts, posits that in 2040, Japan will lose its status as a developed country; in 2045 all cars will be self-driven; in 2050, AI will surpass humans; and finally, in 2117, 600,000 people will relocate to Mars. Another book, Astonishment! Japan’s chronology of the future (2017) also outlines a very similar timeline for the future. Another book also claims that by 2100, the population of Japan will be one third of the current population (Kito 2016, also see Watanabe et al., 2017).

³ Miroslav Hroch wrote, ‘a memory of some common past, treated as a “destiny” of the group – or at least of its core constituents’ (1996 [1993]: 61) as one of the irreplaceable elements of nation-building. While memory (past) and destiny (future) are crucial, memory and history have been a priority for national movements.

⁴ Tomomi Yamaguchi (2005) also notes that timelines are not neutral products. She shows that the Women’s Action Group created a long timeline to represent their political relevance, challenging existing narratives of feminism in Japan.

⁵ Third as of 2022 (The World Bank, 2022).

⁶ Abe stated, ‘this is a dreadful situation called a national disaster’ (NHK website, 2019).

⁷ Jennifer Robertson critically read the Japanese Former Prime Minister, Abe’s futuristic vision of Japanese society and argues that his imagined future is ‘an improved and improvised version of the past’ (2018: 79, also 2014).

⁸ Yoshino, (1992) for instance argues that a genre of the literature called nihonjinron (theories of Japanese uniqueness) is an ideology, and just not simply an attempt to describe the nature of Japanese people and society. The chronology of the future is in a way a form of nihonjinron, yet one which paradoxically depends on negative images of Japan.

⁹ Educating nationals to become attuned subjects has been observable in other issues in contemporary Japan, such as ‘teaching the appropriate age for reproduction’ (Yui, 2021; Nishiyama & Tsuge, 2017), teaching the fact of ovarian ageing (Kawai 2013), educating people to change their lifestyle (Borovoy, 2017) to ultimately promote the healthy population of the nation.

¹⁰ Drawing on Joseph Masco and Michael Billig’s conception of banal nationalism (1995), Deepa Kumar argues that the ‘See Something, Say Something’ campaign in the US constitutes a daily nationalist ritual. She further claims that these routinised and repetitive performances of security practices, which generate automatic responses, constitute a cohesive image of a national community and a sense of national belonging (2018).

¹¹ See also, Jinkō genshō wo chansu ni kaeru ni wa (2022), and ‘Shrinking society is a hope: The future of us living in a mature society’ (Hiroi, 2020).

¹² Legally, the definition of child (jido) comes in several different versions with varying age categories in Japan. Most likely, the definition of child used by Kawai refers to the age stated in the Labour Standards Law. In other places, such as the Child Welfare Law, a child is defined as those under the age of 18.

¹³ Whether these narratives are actually effective in motivating Japanese people to act is an important question. To answer this, however, requires more conceptual and methodological discussion. For instance, what counts as action? Is imagining itself included (compare., Appadurai 1996)? Moreover, to answer this will require extensive ethnographic research and interviews. Accordingly, while this question is beyond the scope of this article, it is one I hope to tackle in future research.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Oxford John Fell Fund under Grant [0008250].