Japan’s nationalist right in the internet age: Online media and grassroots conservative activism

The rise of online right-wing activism is of great interest to pundits and social scientists alike in Japan and abroad. However, the research on this topic remains European-centric.¹ In his new book, Japan’s Nationalist Right in the Internet Age, Jeffrey Hall makes a timely and much-needed contribution to fill this void. The book focuses on Japanese Culture Channel Sakura (hereafter CS), a conservative media organization founded in 2004 that has been actively producing online video content since then. By refusing to rely on a single corporate donor (unlike their rival and increasingly popular DHC Television, funded by a manufacturer of cosmetics and health food products), CS calls itself a “grassroots TV channel of the Japanese people, by the Japanese people, and for the Japanese people” (p. 53). Hall carefully examines how this online-centered conservative activism emerged, exerted influence on a variety of politically sensitive issues from the memory of the Japanese colonization of Asia to territorial disputes, and survived for more than 15 years despite intensely varied political contexts and financial instability.

The primary data of this book come from online media content produced by CS. The book also makes use of secondary materials such as newspapers, and the analysis is further supplemented by the online and offline ethnography of CS’s activities. Hall relies on the theory of strategic action fields developed by influential scholars of social movements and organizations to account for both stability and changes in institutions. In this view, within a social space called fields, various social actors attempt to create and maintain social worlds by cooperating with others. Social skills – “the ability to induce cooperation in others” (p. 4) – constitutes a critical element of such collective action. By employing this framework, Hall acutely underscores the importance of political actors’ skills and resources to the broader political struggles of the Japanese online right and a wide variety of their enemies.

The book consists of eight chapters. Following the introduction, chapters 2 to 4 use different analytical lenses to examine CS’s organizational and strategic characteristics. Chapter 2 neatly summarizes the trajectory of nationalist activism in post-war Japan and introduces the existing literature on the recent rise of revisionist and nativist movements. This chapter should be useful for readers who wish to survey the brief history of Japan’s right-wing activism.

Chapter 3 chronicles the emergence of CS. The idea to establish a conservative media outlet first emerged from the collaborative project of three actors that resulted in a 2001 documentary film Kamikaze Testimony, which aimed at preserving the history of the Japanese imperial military’s kamikaze attacks. This project involved Tagata Takeo, an Imperial Japanese Army veteran; Matsuura Yoshiko, a former member of right-wing student activist groups of the 1960s backed by the religious group House of Growth (Seichō no Ie) as well as the former secretary of Mishima Yukio’s combative right-wing group Tate no Kai; and Mizushima Satoru, a freelance filmmaker. After the completion of this movie, the three nationalists successfully raised 100 million yen to launch CS in April 2004. To address financial instability, they introduced the subscription-based supporter system in which a member pays a monthly fee of 10,000 yen, and they amassed over 1,800 supporters by 2009. Later, Tamogami Toshio, a high-ranked military official turned right-wing activist, joined the group and played the leading role with his charismatic popularity among right-wing netizens.

Chapter 4 examines CS’s use of rituals and symbols where one of the “social skills” of actors like Mizushima comes to the fore. Hall reports three major findings. First, the group ties their nationalist visions to the grandiose visions of historical patriots such as Yoshida Shoin, Saigō Takamori, Mishima Yukio, among others. Second, the group tries to cultivate a sense of community among viewers by regularly hosting online drinking parties where viewers can join and ask Mizushima and program hosts questions while they have an hour-long meal. Third, the leaders use street protests that are live-streamed online as opportunities to further reinforce solidarity. For example, every August, the CS activists commemorate the war casualties in front of Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine. On such occasions, Japanese national flags, nationalistic anthems, and slogans become the symbolic source of collective identity among viewers.

Having identified major characteristics of CS’s activities, the latter half of the book turns attention to specific instances of contention. Chapter 5 examines sustained challenges CS mounted against NHK, Japan’s national broadcasting station. Conservative groups have been trying to discredit liberal media outlets, most notably the Asahi Shimbun – the leading progressive paper of the country – by claiming that their reports were biased. They have also been critical of NHK since the 1990s, but according to Hall, it was NHK’s 2009 documentary on Japan’s colonization of Taiwan titled A First-Rate Power that ignited CS’s political campaigns. Infuriated by the program’s portrayal of the dark side of Japanese colonization of Asia, such as rampant violence and severe ethnic discrimination, CS was quick to respond. As Hall notes, it was so quick “that many of the panelists hadn’t yet seen it [the program]” (p. 95). In chapter 3, Hall points out that CS actively cooperates with Pro-Taiwan independence and Uyghur activists who share grievances against the Chinese government. Their struggle against NHK is one of such instances in which CS worked together with Taiwanese independence activists to argue that NHK’s politically motivated representation of the history of Taiwan is harmful on several grounds and that NHK deceptively edited interviews with Taiwanese. Though CS employed various tactics to fight against NHK, what stands out in their action is that they brought the issue to the court. The group filed “Japan’s largest-ever class-action lawsuit” against NHK with 8,400 plaintiffs they recruited through CS’s website. Eventually, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of NHK, but Hall argues that one of the outcomes of this campaign is the increased pressure on NHK’s directors and producers to self-censor the content they create.

Chapter 6 deals with a campaign over a memorial of the battle of Okinawa, which resulted in numerous civilian casualties. In 2011, the Okinawan government decided to build a historical signboard on the ruins of the 32 Army headquarters, which was based around Shuri castle and responsible for the defense of the island during the Pacific War. The draft of this signboard described that Okinawa civilians, including comfort women, “were massacred by the Japanese military” (p. 136). This portrayal contradicted the nationalist narrative, which deemed the war dead as “heroes.” Backlash built up. CS quickly produced special programs attacking the Okinawan “leftists” and asked viewers to contact the Okinawa prefectural government to demand the abolishment of the signboard. Though only around 80 viewers outside of Okinawa seem to have contacted the local government, this campaign marked the victory of the conservative activists and their audience by successfully pressuring the government to erase the above sentences from the signboard.

Chapter 7 focuses on the embroiled dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands over which Japan, China, and Taiwan claim sovereignty. According to Hall, CS has been airing programs related to the dispute since its inception, as they considered the protection of marine resources for Japanese fishermen to be the duty of grassroots conservatives. The salience of this dispute suddenly surged in 2010 when boats operated by a Chinese fisherman and the Japanese Coast Guard collided near the islands. The Japanese Coast Guard captured the Chinese boat captain, but the government eventually decided to release him in the face of pressure from the Chinese government. Massive anti-Japan protests erupted in China. Many Japanese were also furious at their own government’s conciliatory stance toward China. Capitalizing on the crisis, CS and another conservative organization Ganbare Nippon, which had been founded in 2010, organized a number of protests. In November 2010, the groups drew some 4,000 participants to Tokyo’s Hibiya Park. Interestingly, CS then moved the space of contention from the street to the ocean. Between 2011 to 2020, CS organized a total of 24 fishing trips to the Senkaku islands. On some occasions, the group served the fish they caught to politicians in Tokyo as well as to ordinary citizens. Their boat was also used in the infamous 2012 incident in which Mizushima and others landed on one of the islands. Along with another crowdsourcing campaign led by the then Tokyo governor Ishihara Shintaro to purchase the land from a private owner, this act greatly irritated the Chinese government and set off waves of anti-Japan protests across major Chinese cities. Thus, taking advantage of the changes in political contexts, CS was able to provoke public debates not only in Japan but also in China. Such public results helped CS illustrate the impact of their activism.

The three cases analyzed in the previous chapters concentrate on the first few years of the 2010s. The final chapter briefly reports what has happened after 2014, such as Tamogami Toshio’s political campaign for the 2014 Tokyo gubernatorial and his eventual arrest due to the embezzlement of political funds. Though the future of organizations like CS is difficult to predict, especially now that there are many conservative YouTube-based media producers, Hall suggests that there are good reasons to suspect that the organization will thrive and continue to influence Japanese politics.

Hall’s book is the first one of its kind that sheds light on a relatively neglected aspect of online right-wing activism in Japan. The recent writings on right-wing politics in Japan tend to focus on an extreme side of the phenomenon, such as nativist groups that quickly rose to fame and then lost momentum. Moreover, studies that explicitly focus on online activities of the Japanese right are rare. Hence, a systematic analysis of relatively long-lasting – despite the fact that CS has only 15 years of history – online activities of the right are particularly worthy of reading if you are inquisitive about Japan’s ukeika or the “mainstreaming of the right” phenomenon. The book’s major strengths lie in the detailed description of CS’s history as well as three case studies of their campaigns that greatly help us understand how a fringe conservative media outlet accomplished wide-reaching outcomes, including but not limited to triggering massive reactionary protests in China.

Analyzing hundreds of hours of conservative media content is a painstaking job. Hall approached this task carefully. The resulting account is neither a single-sided critique nor an overly sympathetic portrayal of the views expressed by the actors of CS. Further, Hall’s analytical approach, primarily based on the careful readings of online and offline conservative media content, is particularly relevant to the current times. Today, social media is so deeply a part of our lives that researchers cannot ignore online content, but we often lack extensive resources to process the overwhelming amount of data accessible on the web. Furthermore, the ongoing global health crisis inhibits qualitative social scientists from conducting on-site fieldwork because of bureaucratic complications and the impossibility of ensuring the safety of researchers and participants. This book makes a good case for early-career researchers (like myself), who are trapped in their homes (especially outside of Japan) and longing for lost fieldwork opportunities or interested in a phenomenon that involves online aspects, to conduct a sound empirical analysis using the methods we are familiar with.

The rich analysis of campaigns, in turn, makes me wonder if a synthesis of the findings from chapters 5 to 7 would have provided further elucidation to the book’s illuminating findings. The three cases concerning NHK, a memorial of the battle of Okinawa, and territorial dispute were chosen “because each involved distinctly different types of targets, different types of activists, and differing outcomes” (p. 8). What such differences (or similarities) across their campaigns reveal about the overall character of CS’s trajectory, however, was not discussed at length. To this end, for example, focused comparison of the three campaigns and the constellation of associated fields might have offered a way to specifically describe the nature of different “social skills” held by CS actors and how a certain skillset is more advantageous in a particular setting but not necessarily in others. These skills range from Mizushima’s experience in filmmaking to Tamogami’s quasi-celebrity status as a military veteran. This perspective might hint at the skills that have been central to CS’s surprising survival over the years. This minor point, however, does not undermine the significance and richness of the book.

Lastly, the book is written in a coherent and accessible manner with plenty of engaging narratives. It should be appealing not only to researchers and graduate students versed in Japan Studies but also to scholars interested in varieties of right-wing online activism as well as undergraduate students.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.

Notes

¹ There are recent important works written in Japanese (e.g. Higuchi et al. 2019; Ito 2019; Oguma & Higuchi 2020), which are unfortunately not available in English at this point.