Tunneling Through Nationalism: The Phenomenology of a Certain Nationalist

Abstract

Throughout the modern era, issues of nationalism and national identity have lain at the heart of intellectual debate in Japan, but the contours of the debate have repeatedly changed over time. From the 1950s onward, as Japan rose from the ashes of defeat to become an economic superpower, visions of ethnic homogeneity and unique culture were widely propagated by the Japanese state and media, and were embraced by a number of commentators in the US and Europe as well as in Japan itself. During the 1990s, this economic and cultural nationalism came under sustained criticism, triggered in part by the collapse of the economic bubble. Yet, far from hastening the demise of nationalism, the two decades of relative economic stagnation from the early 1990s onward were marked by the rise of new and more overtly politicized nationalist ideologies, and by impassioned debates over the nation and its destiny.1 More recently, some commentators have suggested that a rightward shift is occurring in Japanese intellectual life, bringing together people from opposite ends of the political spectrum into a new nationalist consensus Show more