Thammasat University students interested in political science, history, Japan, international relations, diplomacy, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 19 November Zoom webinar on  Promise of Freedom: Rethinking Modernity through Japan.

The event, on Monday, 19 November 2024 at 1pm Bangkok time, is presented by Seoul National University, Korea.

Its website explains:

Lecture Abstract: When examining the “long twentieth century,” which began in the late 19th century and continues to this day, it becomes increasingly apparent that “freedom” is not necessarily the opposite of oppression and domination. Rather, as Michel Foucault’s writings and critiques of liberalism show, “freedom” often serves as a condition that enables the operation of power. One of the most illustrative cases of this interplay between freedom and power in modern Japanese history is Japan’s promise to liberate the peoples of the Asia-Pacific from Euro-American colonialism and racial oppression.

However, the relationship between the promise of freedom and new forms of oppression is a recurring theme throughout East Asian and global modern history, including Japan. This lecture will use examples from Japanese history to address this issue, examining the complexities of freedom alongside nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, the “Emperor system,” and various forms of social discrimination.

Speaker: Takashi Fujitani, Professor Emeritus of Asia-Pacific Studies and History at the University of Toronto, Canada.

The TU Library collection includes several books by Professor Fujitani.

Students are welcome to participate at this link without prior registration:

https://snu-ac-kr.zoom.us/j/5832898745#success

In 2018, Professor Fujitani told an interviewer:

https://meijiat150.arts.ubc.ca/episode-44-dr-takashi-fujitani-toronto/

The assessment of nationalism, I think, needs to operate in different registers, and just like history, I think, needs to be thought of in different registers. Nationalism for some, may appear to be a good thing. Nationalism for others at exactly the same moment would not seem to be a good thing and then similarly, from period to period, it would seem to be a negative thing or a positive thing depending upon the time and the position of the person speaking. So, it’s often the case that people will talk about nationalism as a “good nationalism” and often call it “patriotism,” and then sort of an “ultra-nationalism” or “nationalism gone berserk.”

But to me, there’s a kind of berserk-ness to nationalism from the onset. So, I understand the issue when a people are threatened by imperialism as Japan was in the 19th century. One response to that could be nationalism, and nationalism could be anti-colonial, but I think what we’re finding increasingly is that now, we need to come to grips with the price of nationalism, and that even in those moments where nationalism seems to be a healthy response, it carries with it certain kinds of logics that have a lot of very negative repercussions. Some of those I spoke of at the very beginning, but the limits of our imagination, the limits of the ways in which we can think beyond national borders, the ties of nationalism to racism, the present moment of “America first,” it could be “Japan first,” it could be “Canada first,” “France first,” whatever it might be. But these are all parts of nationalism whether one would regard it as healthy or not.

The other thing that I’ve sometimes been asked is: “Okay, so if you’re a critic of nationalism, what would you have done in ‘68?” And I said: “Well, in a way, it’s an obscene question, but it’s a ridiculous question as well because I’m not there in 1868. I’m here now.” What I think is most important is how we understand the history of nationalism now because that’s what we should be doing as historians, understanding history as a history of the present: What is history going to tell us for how we live now? Obviously, it’s going to tell us something about how people have lived in the past, but once, for example, Japan has avoided becoming colonized by Western powers, then it’s that same nationalism that lives on today, so even at that moment when it seems like a good idea, we need to think about: What are some of the problems that grew out of it? […]

I think some people are trying to make a strong case for the singularity of this phenomenon that we call fascism, but I think that the elements of fascism are already there in nationalism in a lot of ways. Fascism grows out in the contradictions of capitalism and the inability to deal with social and economic contradictions, and then those worst elements of nationalism come to provide a core to how to overcome those contradictions.

When we talk about the crisis of representations, it could be about how the nation becomes the centre of fascist imagination in most places that we know, including in Japan. Fascism also tends to be associated with tight control over the ways that people live, the kind of freedoms that they have, but I think that’s very much tied up with nationalism itself. There are certain ways in which, despite the rhetoric of freedom, limitations are imposed upon free subjects even in a liberal nation-state, and that continues into the period of fascism. So, I don’t see fascism so much as a completely distinct phenomenon, but an extreme version of what goes wrong with nationalism during a crisis of the economy. […]

In Europe, there is this problem of nationalism, and the way that it was seen as being largely responsible for these nations going to war with each other. There’s a spurt of scholarship on nationalism as a religion and the problems with it, and so forth. I think globally, there is something like that. I don’t know if we see the same thing in Japan partly because although it’s involved in the First World War, it doesn’t see the full effects of it domestically in the same way that European countries saw it in Europe and its dominions. 

[…]

There’s no doubt that ever since at least the 1990s, there’s been a strong element of people on the right in Japan who had been dissatisfied with the same sorts of things that people in the United States on the right were dissatisfied about. A more critical treatment of Japan’s history with what Japanese neo-nationalists call “the masochistic view of history” has been going on for some time now, and I think it has something to do with globalization and the response to it on the part of the right wing. It has something to do with the economic downturn and the way that nationalism is so often invoked to compensate for economic problems that people, often in very disprivileged positions economically, resort to nationalism and racism in order to find some kind of solace or compensation in recognition of their own economic situation.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)