In recent years, much has been said about the rise of the far right in Japanese society. Yet at least in the rural community where I grew up, many adults had long embraced ultranationalist ideology. My elementary school teachers unhesitatingly taught us that the Japanese Empire had not been a colonial empire but a liberator of Asia, that Japanese technology had far surpassed that of the United States and that Japan had "simply happened" to lose the Second World War, and that China and South Korea would never surpass Japan economically. Rather than encouraging us to study the past critically, confront present realities, or imagine the future through the exercise of reason, they demanded that we believe in the myths of the nation.
Looking back, I also recognize that the reason I did not become a believer in such narratives was ultimately not due to my own efforts, but because of the cultural capital I inherited from my family.
The US really is an idiocracy.
This Republican Congress member boasts of how much she hates China by crushing fortune cookies with her hands.
By the way, fortune cookies were invented by Japanese immigrants in the US. They don't eat them in China.
And the gong at the end... 😵💫
Japan gave America bases, obedience, money, silence, and its postwar spine.
America gave Japan a new name:
“The Islamic Republic of Japan.”
Client-state dignity in one sentence.