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The South Atlantic Quarterly 99.4 (2000) 819-840



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Revenge and Recapitation in Recessionary Japan

Marilyn Ivy


Rising unemployment rates, crushing debts, voided life insurance policies, bankruptcies, suicides: the stuff of recession arrests our uneasy attention. Yet the recession also stops us by its forceful disclosure of the abnormal status of the Japanese nation-state. With its U.S.-imposed constitution and its forever-symbolic emperor, postwar Japan was reconstituted as an improper nation-state, one not fully empowered to enact the prerogatives of nation-statehood except by other means. Those other means were, of course, economic, and the economic miracle would henceforth function as the stand-in for Japan. The self-identification of Japan with economic prosperity alone (and the identification by national others of Japan with that prosperity) is perhaps unprecedented. The fabled plenty of the United States, for example, has never been severed from its expansionary prospects pursued with the proper machines of diplomacy and war. In some senses residual, a forcibly dismembered empire, a monstrous remake of U.S. liberalism proferred then contained in the Cold War, the figure of Japan has produced and consumed the miracle of the economic as its very life force, and [End Page 819] it has done so with a kind of success in success that has laminated the social so tightly to its conditions of possibility that there often seems virtually no gap between life and ideology.

With the pop of the financial bubble in the early 1990s, however, a narrative of recession began to supersede that of success. The postwar dispensation allowing the impropriety of the Japanese nation-state to be hidden by the successful and success-producing routines of everyday life was revealed as unstable. The fantasia of ever-proliferating consumer signifiers could be accommodated, could be enjoyed, as long as it still signified success. When economic success could no longer stand in the position of the signified of last resort, then proliferation became increasingly unbearable. Moving away from the remarked successes of the postmodern, a latent sense of everyday desperation has found its millennialist limits in attempts, violent and otherwise, to resituate subjects within the volatilities of the market and the recapitalization of corporations.

Here we detect the limits of capital, as the recession seems finally to lay bare the Japanese Thing, with its lineup of lifetime employment, promotion by seniority, and consensus management. 1 Layoffs and downsizing expose the extent to which corporate familialism is not prepared to go, as defamilialization writ large accompanies the much-mourned fragmentation of the Japanese family writ small. Earthly disasters and cosmic ones, the Kobe earthquake and the rehearsal for meltdown at the conversion reactor in Tokaimura, the Aum Shinrikyo incidents and the serial murders of Youth A (Shonen A), all bespeak, cryptically but with insistence, the repetitive effects of an unassimilated logic of recession.

In this milieu, efforts to reestablish Japan-as-proper have focused most tellingly on what are sometimes termed neonationalisms. Hardly novel, these nationalisms have emerged as intensifications and extensions of varieties of right-wing emperorisms and militarisms of the postwar period. They also emerge as virulent critiques of consumerist hedonism and the decadence of wealth, as they desperately long for a capitalism without excess (the longing of fascism). 2 As such, they have found the recessionary moment perversely hopeful, with its renewed possibilities for the restoration of economic, ethical, and national limits.

In retrospect, then, I shouldn’t have been surprised when the plain manila envelope addressed to me (at my home) from the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform (Atarashii rekishi kyokasho o tsukuru kai) arrived. [End Page 820] Enclosed was a well-produced booklet, The Restoration of a National History: Why Was the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform Established, and What Are Its Goals. Enclosed also was a letter signed by society chairman Nishio Kanji describing the organization’s goal to “provide a clear spiritual direction for Japan’s path through the 21st century” and ending with a “sincere wish that people overseas will take an interest in our organization through this English brochure...

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