Consuming Asia, consuming Japan: The new neonationalist revisionism in Japan

Abstract

The popularity of Fujioka Nobukatsu's books and the neo-nationalist historical revisionism they represent should not simply be analyzed as the return of the old rightwing in Japan. Reacting to the threats seemingly posed by various Others—a rising Asia, illegal foreigners in Japan, women, an increasingly “alien” youth culture—Fujioka and his followers have wielded a variety of myths and popular narratives about Japan and Japanese history to make their media-publicized case to reconstruct the Japanese body politic on the basis of a “healthy nationalism.” This article shows that it is in the way such different texts as Fujioka's books and Iwai Shunji's popular film, Swallowtail Butterfly, commonly participate in a consumption of the nation linked to an erasure of the Other that one can find something as equally serious as a revival of the oldtime right: what the author calls a “consumerist nationalism.”