Marxy takes a look at a Japanese nationalist bestseller
Over at Neomarxisme, Marxy has been examining the bestselling Japanese book 国家の品格 (Diginity of a Nation), written by right-wing mathematician Masahiko Fujiwara. The book has sold over 2 million copies and explores the following issues:
* The illusion of capitalism’s triumph
* Pride in a civilization based on emotion
* The importance of Japanese and kanji over English
* Knowing the limits of logic
* The revival of bushido (samurai spirit)
* Why foreign aid is unneccesary
* Love of family, love of hometown, love of the fatherland, love of humanity
* Seeking out a “true elite”
So far Marxy has written summaries of the first three chapters, and the bullshit seems to be heating up with each new chapter. Here are a couple of my favorite excerpts from his posts:
- Freedom is nothing more than “fiction” created by the West. The ultimate freedom is the natural rights of Hobbes. Locke’s idea of “freedom as long as you do not infringe on other people’s freedom or rights” would excuse enjo kosai (schoolgirl prostitution). (He ends that section with this thought and no further explanation.)
- “Is democracy that great?” The big premise to “the sovereignty of the people” is that “the populace can make mature decisions.” If this was true, democracy would be the best. But in WWI, all the nations got hot and bothered and went to war. Same with WWII – democracy gave birth to Hitler. Rather than going off and doing things by himself, Hitler was able to successfully agitate the public, and used his support to pursue his plans.
Japan was also a democracy – only seven years after the UK. WWII was “actually a war of democratic countries vs. democratic countries.”
Ah yes, World War II, the great war between democracies. When the democracies of America and the UK teamed up with the democracy of the Soviet Union to defeat the democracies of Japan, Germany & Italy.
[Read Marxy's posts on 'Dignity of a Nation' from the beginning.]
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Well, technically Japan was a democracy. I mean, there was an ‘elected’ prime minister and all that jazz. Except only males over age 25 could vote. Better then it was when Japan first started elections though, when you had to be a male, over 25, and pay I think 15 yen a year in taxes (which would be close to or perhaps over a million USD in today’s money). Something like 1% of the population met those qualifications.
The problem is the governments that were put in power by democracy in German, Italy and Japan, used that power to change away from democracy to Nazism or Fascism. He may be a loon, but he’s right that democracy just as democracy itself doesn’t mean good things will happen. And we should also be reminded to keep a watch on our own democracies so something similar doesn’t happen again. But he goes too far when he says we should just throw out democracy all together.
The case can be made that Japan was a technically a democracy, but the emperor had broad and vague powers that could be used without the consent of the diet or voters. The fact that pseudo-fascist leadership had taken over most of the government by the late 1930’s, combined with an army that seemed to act independed of central government authority didn’t help either. Many countries can be called “democracies” because some people elect representives, but that doesn’t make such countries close to the idea of a “democracy” as it is expressed in western Europe or America.
I agree that democracy can turn into dictatorship, as it did in Germany in Italy, but that doesn’t make WW2 a “war between democracies”, it makes it a war “between some democracies and their totalitarian allies against some countries that used to be democracies but transformed into undemocratic states”.
Of course, critics could always claim America was as undemocratic as Japan because Blacks couldnt vote, Japanese-americans were interned, and socialists/anti-war people were arrested in wartime.
Exactly. Was it a good democracy? Hell no, but it was technically a democracy. The author needs to be confronted in a way that doesn’t say, “you ass, Japan wasn’t a democracy, it did bad stuff, Japan was just bad” but in a way that says, “Japan was a bad democracy because of ‘these reasons’ yet democracy is still the best answer for ‘these reasons’.”