New Right Japan

―The Neoliberal Path to Illiberal Politics―

May 21, 2015 6:30 PM (finished)


Koichi Nakano

(Professor of Political Science, Sophia University)

Date/Time May 21, 2015 6:30 PM
Location Room 549 5th floor, Akamon Sogo Kenkyuto Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo  [map]
Abstract There is much discussion today over whether Japan is shifting to the right. Particularly since Prime Minister Abe Shinzo returned to office in December 2012, controversies surrounding the so-called “history” issues, including the Yasukuni Shrine and the comfort women (sex slaves) problems, returned to the center stage of domestic politics as well as international affairs, and combined with the territorial disputes and concerns over security, aggravated the tensions in the Northeast Asian region. While an increasing number of scholars and journalists started to express serious concerns over Abe’s historical revisionism and authoritarian politics (and their potential implications), there are also those who contend that these concerns are exaggerated, if not simply misguided —that Japan is merely (and belatedly) becoming “normal." Nakano takes the view that there has indeed been a shift to the right in Japanese politics since the 1990s, both in terms of domestic, socioeconomic policies, and in terms of foreign and security policy. He further makes the case that the rightward shift has essentially been an elite-driven process with fits and starts, and in successive waves (rather than a unilinear progression rightward in one stroke). Superficially, the political system became more pluralistic and fragmented, even though the ideological parameters have in reality been shrinking and drifting to the right. In what he calls the New Right transformation, the nature of the right went through an important transformation as a new coalition of political illiberalism (revisionist nationalism) and neoliberalism replaced the Old Right that consisted of developmentalism and clientelism.
Bio Koichi Nakano is Professor of Political Science at the Faculty of Liberal Arts at Sophia University. He specializes in the comparative politics of advanced industrial democracies, particularly Japan and Europe, and in political theory. He has a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Tokyo, a second B.A. in philosophy and politics from the University of Oxford, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in politics from Princeton University. His research has focused on a variety of issues of contemporary Japanese politics from comparative, historical, and philosophical perspectives, including neoliberal globalization and nationalism; the Yasukuni problem; language, media and politics; amakudari and administrative reform in Japan; decentralization; and the cross-national transfer of policy ideas. In English, he has published articles in The Journal of Japanese Studies, Asian Survey, The Pacific Review, West European Politics, Governance, and a single-authored book entitled Party Politics and Decentralization in Japan and France: When the Opposition Governs (Routledge, 2010) among others. He is also a frequent commentator on Japanese politics for the international and Japanese media.