Recently, Taiwanese fishermen have demanded the government deal with the problem of sovereignty over the Diaoyutais (釣魚台) in the dispute with Japan over fishing rights. At the same time, the city council of Ishigaki, in Okinawa, last Friday voted 10-9 to allow the mayor and city councilors to land on the islands to conduct inspection tours. This is likely to increase tension between Taiwan and Japan.
Such tensions have been exacerbated by the Japanese police, who prevented independent Aboriginal Legislator May Chin (高金素梅) from staging a protest outside the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo. Right-wing groups were also there objecting to her protest. The groups have staged a number of events in the name of "protecting the Yasukuni shrine."
The importance of right-wing groups in Japanese politics can be discerned from Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's annual visits to the shrine, starting in 2001, as well as the sequence of conflict and tension between Japan and neighbors China and South Korea over the last year. These groups represent a growing political force, and exert a growing influence on the government. But right-wing groups have always been in the wings of Japanese politics, so the question is: Why has their influence grown so much in the last four or five years?
To answer this, one must first look at the changes in Japanese politics since the end of the Cold War. Right-wing groups have increased their influence as part of these changes, although they are conspicuously different from the rightists of the past. For this reason we might call them the neo-Right.
Whereas right-wing groups in the past espoused an imperial view of history -- emphasizing the superiority of the Japanese race -- the neo-Right is more interested in protecting the interests of the Japanese polity and realizing a nationalist military strategy.
The Yasukuni visits and the crisis unfolding on the Korean Peninsula are therefore major components of their armor. Their numbers may be comparatively small, but they enjoy considerable influence in the government's decision-making process, and occupy very important positions in political, economic, social, academic and cultural circles.
The second factor is change in the international scene.
In the past, Japan was constrained by its "peace" Constitution, and the issue of increasing military strength remained a taboo subject.
Rightists continued to promote the idea of an independent Japanese military force, but these ideas failed to enjoy acceptance in mainstream public opinion.
Nevertheless, following the start of the "war on terrorism" in 2001, changes appeared in the US' Far East strategy that required Japan to take on more responsibility for the region's security.
Other events strengthened the right's case for normalizing Japan's status as a country, and these arguments started to find a wider audience.
North Korea has posed quite some concern, with the increasing nuclear threat, its admission in 2002 of having abducted Japanese citizens and the appearance of its ships in Japanese waters.
Chinese submarines have also entered Japanese waters without permission on several occasions in recent times.
Finally, we can look at the situation within Japan. The Japan Socialist Party began losing support after 1996, and the right's influence was further consolidated when Koizumi, a left-leaning member of the neo-conservative faction of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), became prime minister.
Since its establishment in 1955, the LDP has been divided into two main factions, the mainstream and the non-mainstream, the former of which prioritizes the economy over defense, and the latter leaning more toward nationalism.
The non-mainstream faction included Nakusone Yasuhiro, who broke the post-war taboo on visits to the Yasukuni shrine in 1985.
Koizumi is also from this faction, and so there is no reason why his annual visits should come as any surprise.
Tsai Zheng-jia is an assistant research fellow in the Institute of International Relations, National Chengchi University.
TRANSLATED BY PAUL COOPER
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