Synergistic Nativism: Explaining Japan’s Anti-Korean Right-Wing Movement

• In Event: Partisan Politics and Policymaking in Japan

Abstract

This paper seeks to explain why Japan’s nativist right-wing movement targets a highly assimilated native-born minority group, Korean-Japanese (or Zainichi Koreans), and why this group is conflated with the “national homeland” state: the Republic of Korea (ROK). Combining outsider and insider repertoires in both the virtual and real worlds, the Japanese nativist right-wing movement has thus far failed to achieve its stated policy goals, including the termination of “special” legal status for Korean-Japanese. However, movement rhetoric has been far more successful in contributing to negative public perceptions of the ROK in Japan. As longitudinal data indicates, this public opinion shift, which has unfolded since the 2010s, largely corresponds with the movement’s focus on vilifying the ROK. I contend that this can be attributed to changes in elite nativist discourse that has laid the foundation for the conflation of Seoul’s claims with those of Korean-Japanese to resonate with the public. Drawing from the literature on discursive opportunities, frame consonance, and movement impacts on public opinion, I then conceptualize a theoretical model to explain how perceived political and cultural threats are transformed into a “synergistic nativism” that is fueled by a state-society synergy and built upon institutional structures undergirding Japan’s postwar developmental state, party system, and civil society. Distinct from a nativism that functions as a defense against the modern insecurities of post-Fordist relative deprivation, I argue that Japan’s pro-establishment “synergistic nativism” emerges from the discursive interaction between political and civil societies, mobilizes support from across socioeconomic strata, enjoys support from elite allies within the state, and produces a mainstreaming of historical revisionism in the national discourse. I find that the movement’s revisionist narratives seek to assuage Japan’s geopolitical anxiety-induced ontological insecurity even if this means scapegoating a minority group with negligible influence over ROK state policy. By attacking the perceived preferential treatment of Korean-Japanese, nativists indirectly target the ROK through its imagined proxy representatives within Japan as a response to the destabilizing threats brought about by unresolved historical issues and changing dynamics around international status.

Author

• Ken Silverman, CUNY Graduate Center