INTERVIEW with a RESEARCHER of JAPANESE NATIONALISTS

SERIOUSLY.

TDR: so how did you get from straight-edge hardcore punk to researching uyoku?

RESEARCHER: As a high-school punk rock kid growing up in suburban Southern California, I ran into a group of ex-skinheads turned hardcore Christians (or is that “hardcore-hardcore Christians?”) who took the New York City beat-down aesthetic to SoCal, but in the name of Jesus. And they would attempt to proselytize to wayward youth downtown at the weekly Market Night. When one of them would talk to me, instead of ignoring them I’d argue with them. “What about the dinosaurs?” But at the same time, I was interested in how they could maintain their faith and commitment to fundamentalist literal Bible readings in spite of evidence to the contrary. Of course, that was also a process of learning what was dogmatic about my own thoughts!

And then when I came to Japan as an undergraduate, I got involved in the hardcore scene here (as vocalist for Tokyo’s EXCLAIM). I would see bands that claimed straight-edge as a fashion but weren’t straight edge at all. I became attuned with how people would play with images, skateboarding, bandanna thrash, pc, and so on. It wasn’t until 2002 that my band played a show with skinhead bands, and I was shocked to see their use of SS insignia and other stuff that back home would be considered blatantly racist, and got into a discussion with one of the members. I wasn’t satisfied with his answers (“I just like the style!”), so I went to the websites of (Japanese skinhead bands) RAISE A FLAG and THE HAWKS, and posted open questions on their message boards about these symbols and how skinhead bands in Japan use foreign and/or racist imagery.

THE HAWKS, in particular, was a target of my questions since they not only used Imperial Japanese Army imagery, they also covered Skrewdriver and note their respect for them! One of the interesting exchanges that resulted was that a fan of THE HAWKS told me, “The Japanese right-wing guys, a lot of the rank-and-file are actually ethnic Koreans ( 在日 / zainichi), who are just doing it for as a part-time job. They don’t feel it’s contradictory to be zainichi and nationalist (in Japan).” So that identity puzzle helped get me interested in the Japanese right wing. Also when I first moved here, I lived in Yotsuya, which is right by the Imperial Palace. I could open my window on any given day and hear the uyoku trucks driving by playing music or screaming.

I had finished my studies at Waseda University, where I wrote a masters’ thesis on cross-cultural exchange in the hardcore punk scene. I was applying for PhD. Programs back in Anthropology the United States, and I was thinking of continuing of music-related research, but I thought that wouldn’t be so cool to still be doing that when I was 45! I thought that right-wing groups would have a longer shelf-life as an academic project for me. Also, I felt that music was “lower-case-i” important, and changing politics in Japan was “upper-case-I important.” And so that’s the reason . . .

TDR: . . . . . and he finishes his first sentence!!

RESEARCHER: ….I am hoping to be a professor one day…

TDR: So is it true that there’re lots of ethnic Koreans in the uyoku?

RESEARCHER: I don’t know. But some say that the Yakuza is 70% ethnic Koreans. And given the amount of Yakuza groups sponsoring uyoku activities, it would make sense that some of the uyoku are. I’ve seen the gaisensha ( 街宣車 ), the big sound trucks, with crossed Japanese and South Korean flags. Stuff like that.

TDR: When you first started your research, how did you win the trust of people who might be distrustful of foreigners?

RESEARCHER: To start with I needed to familiarize myself with their language. If I had just walked up to someone (in a uyoku group) and started talking, I wouldn’t have any idea of what their answer meant! I needed to get grounded in the kinds of discussions people were having and the kind of words that they would use. I was buying a lot of monthly magazines and books by the right, and trying to get a sense of what issues they were interested in, who says what when, what kind of rhetorical space they occupy. I also started searching out websites and message boards. And often those boards would list rallies and things like that, and I started to go to those. But I’d just shadow them ? walk on the opposite side of the street from the march, linger around after it was over. I’d also go to the weekly oratory sessions in front of train stations.

And in the course of a summer of preliminary research, I became a familiar face to them. Of course the lone gaijin stands out! So, on a couple of occasions people would ask me what I was doing there out of curiosity, but once they found out that I could speak Japanese and was interested in studying these issues, they took me around and introduced me to their friends. Telling me I should come back on such-and-such a day for a rally, or read a book by so-and-so.

TDR: so they were flattered by the attention, moreso than, uh, suspicious that you are a spy?

RESEARCHER: Well, there were plenty of people glaring at me, too, but naturally it was the more outgoing and gregarious people that approached me. Sort of a classical anthropological dilemma?finding the right gate-keeper can be tough, but oftentimes they find you first.

Incidentally, Can you classify the uyoku groups nowadays?

RESEARCHER: These categories are pretty general, and the term “uyoku” is a sloppy one to start with, but here goes. The traditional right ? they trace their lineage back to the pre-war groups. They are often concerned with traditional culture, and so they do self-cultivation: things like writing poetry, martial arts, that they consider part of being a strong Japanese (cultural) citizen. On the religious side of that, in wartime, Nichiren was a big Buddhist force on the conservative side, and Seicho no Ie ( 成長の家 ) has incubated activists. The famous leader of the Ketsumeidan ( 血盟団 ) was a Buddhist priest, Inoue Nissho. Some groups that are associated with certain shrines, like Yasukuni, will be engaged in conservative activism and some members will participate in activities people think of as ‘uyoku’. When I visit groups outside of Tokyo, they nearly always take me to the Gokoku Jinja ( 護国神社 / national-protection shrine) for their region or city. So there are religious group connections, and some conservative religious group members will participate in activities with the ‘uyoku’ people commonly conjure up.

Other shrine-affiliated groups are active like left-leaning ‘citizens’ groups’ or shimin dantai ( 市民団体 ) are, with demonstrations, letter writing campaigns, and study groups. There are also connections via certain conservative universities and high schools.

Then there are ninkyo ( 任侠 ) “chivalrous” groups that are basically Yakuza affiliated. Whether they’re full-time yakuza who just do uyoku activities on the weekends, or uyoku that are just good friends with yakuza is a blurry line! This is by far the most popular image of uyoku, and accounts for the largest percentage of participants (some say 70%). These guys often would rather think of themselves as the part of the group I’ll describe below, and it seems that the yakuza-uyoku connection is getting less popular (with the legal changes in 1990s) and considered somewhat of a liablility for the groups and activists that are trying to reform their message for a larger audience.

The minzokuha ( 民族派 ), which means ethnic nationalist faction, are usually noted to be 20-30% of the total. They can come from all the different factions of uyoku but are more likely to be anti-establishment, criticize the U.S. more, and some try to move away from the uyoku=yakuza trap. Some paint their gaisensha white or take a more intellectual approach to their activism and oratory at train-station sessions. They tend to be more active on a day-to-day basis, unlike the ninkyo who only show up for anniversaries of important events. Part of the reason to use ‘minzokuha’ to refer to themselves is that they say the left-right distinction is a foreign concept and they do not want to saddle their activism with that dichotomy. Part of it is a response to the collapse of the left, and an attempt to take a higher ground position as “Japanese” above any political divisions. This is also because the “uyoku=yakuza strike breakers” image also meant that uyoku ideology=anti-Communist. Since the threat of Communism has faded for most, they want to shed that nomenclature too.

Then there’s the shin-uyoku ( 新右翼 ), or New Right. There are only a few groups that have been tagged shin-uyoku but they are popular, and relatively prominent in the media and tend to be intellectually engaged and charismatic. They also often get folded in to the minzokuha faction. They write books and sponsor a lot of events like study groups and symposia. They initially came to the scene from the conservative student groups that opposed the leftist students at Japanese universities in the late 1960s and early 1970s and were also inspired by Yukio Mishima’s actions. Sometimes they are referred to as kakushin-uyoku ( 革新右翼 ), or “progressive” uyoku.

My main interest is in shin-uyoku groups because they are, like zainichi in uyoku, in a pretty complicated place. They are attempting to break from their predecessors and interact with the media (and to a degree leftists, depending on the issue) but they are also firmly part of the uyoku world. One group leader said that he considers their group to be “Dejima uyoku” after the port island in Nagasaki, since they are the side of uyoku that interacts with the outside world. It is neat to see how the lines of left/right activism get drawn.

There is of course overlap in all of those categories, and during larger events and smaller actions, individuals with different affiliations cooperate and have social relations with one another. That doesn’t mean the categories are useless, but it is interesting to note how people use them to describe their activism versus others, and in what sort of contexts.

TDR: Do any of the groups have real beef with the current political system? Like, wanting to tear down the current government for being too soft, kind of thing?

RESEARCHER: The current (Liberal Democratic Party) government is quite conservative, so when the uyoku has had beef with the government, it has usually been with politicians from minor parties, or minor figures within the LDP who say something that goes against the party line. An example might be the arson attack on KATO Koichi last year for criticizing Koizumi’s Yasukuni visits and generally being perceived as pro-China.

TDR: Are there any major factional disputes between the different kinds of uyoku?

RESEARCHER: I unfortunately haven’t got much access to that yet! Everybody likes to talk about the fact that the left-wing student movement of the ‘60s and 70s was plagued with factionalism and infighting, and uchigeba ( 内ゲバ / sectarian conflict), whereas in contrast, they say uyoku is a lot more open and can fold in people who have different views for the sake of a larger cause. It helps that they have over-arching symbols like belief in the divinity of the Emperor, or at least the Imperial system, and so on ? if you believe in that, they’ll forgive you for disagreeing on such-and-such other issue and everyone can work together.

The flip side of statement is that their ideological grounding is a lot weaker than leftist groups was, and so the common denominator is big-ticket items like the emperor and day-to-day issues like social relations and friendships. But there are still all sorts of disagreements on what kinds of ways to approach the issues, what kinds of activism-- tactics, presentation, which issues to focus their attention on. People do move in and out of groups for interpersonal squabbles and for philosophical differences though.

TDR: Foreigners want to know about the noisy trucks! Are the uyoku aware that this confrontational behavior is very un-Japanese? And do they really think that by yelling and being scary that some random Japanese dude on the sidewalk is gonna say, “Hey, that makes sense to me! I did not believe this before but I do now! Wait up, guys, I want to join this yelling group of yours!”

RESEARCHER: They don’t think it’s un-Japanese to yell and be scary-looking. If anything, they might say the demure, complacent, non-screaming Japanese people are “un-Japanese” or “anti-Japanese” since they don’t love their nation or revere the emperor or something. They would say that that’s the product of brainwashing that’s happened since the occupation, which has stripped Japanese people of their true spirit, martial character, or spiritual core or what have you (which one could say was the product of brain-washing before the occupation!).

Anyway, each venue for activism - the trucks, the oratory sessions in front of the station, the private study groups - has a very specific set of rules for performance. Some groups specialize in the driving-down-the-street-yelling, and other groups specialize in speeches. So when you’re driving down the street, you’re not expecting to engage in dialogue, you are making a different kind of aural protest. That said, some groups criticize of the yelling-truck parades, and they have worked to change their activist persona. But it’s a kind of public protest, like civil disobedience.

TDR: Like hippies who want to stop the war so they lie down in the middle of a busy street?

RESEARCHER: Perhaps. The trucks drive really slow, and play martial music at the maximum level allowed. Police follow them with db meters! On August 9 th every year, there are protests near the Russian Embassy. Of course there are barricades, but the trucks always feign to ram the barricades, and pull back.

TDR: OK, so the yelling trucks are supposed to be disruptive and not to convince people, but the train station lecturers. . .

RESEARCHER: Yeah, the lectures at the train stations are one of the primary tools for recruitment. In the group I’m close to, all but one of the people who have come into the group in the last 6 months? came in from listening to these in-front-of-the-station oratory sessions.

TDR: To foreigners, a lot of the uyoku issues seem really symbolic: the divinity of the emperor, the tiny-ass islands in the middle of nowhere they’re arguing with Russia about, the Yasukuni shrine. Do they have any concrete plans at all? Like if they were to get in power tomorrow, would they be like, “Lower the interest rate on that! Raise taxes on this! Quotas for the other!”

RESEARCHER: In the territorial disputes, both with Russia, China, and South Korea, the issue is not entirely symbolic. It is also economic sinceJapan can’t claim an EEZ (exclusive economic zone).-- so,Russia can also take fish from those waters (around the disputed islands).

For instance, for one set of islands in between Okinawa and Taiwan, Japan is calling them “Islands”, and China has started calling them “rocks”. If it’s a rock, it doesn’t get EEZ status which gives Japan access within a 2oo km radius of the area. I’m trying to think of other issues that have real importance. Certain groups take stands on particular issues, but the overarching issues are the ones above, and the constitution. Most of them want Article 9 to be scrapped. Most will say the whole constitution should be scrapped.

TDR: Whoa! That is some real shit!! What’s article 9?

RESEARCHER: The ninth article of the constitution that renounces war-making potential for Japan.

TDR: The constitution was made by MacArthur, so it’s no good. I can see the reasoning there. But what kind of new constitution do they ? I mean, specifically which laws would they change besides the no-army one?

RESEARCHER: Some people say that the current constitution is invalid because it was forced on them during the occupation, so it is technically illegal under international law. So by that token the true constitution is the last legally ratified constitution, which is the Meiji Constitution. So first it should go back to the Meiji constitution and then have changes made to it to fit the modern age. Other people say that going all the way back is stupid, so we should draft a whole new constitution now, without reverting.

TDR: So they are really angry about American occupation, but they are puppets of the Americans. How weird is that? What I mean is, at the same time as MacArthur and the OSS were messing with the constitution, they recovered some of the Emperor’s war gold and set up the umpteen-billion-dollar “M-fund” to secretly fund uyoku and gangsters, to smash communism in Japan. So are the modern uyoku aware of their pro-American origins?

RESEARCHER: Yes, if they read. There is a wide range of uyoku-lit out there. But many groups prefer to trace their lineage to pre-war groups like kokuryuukai and genyousha. Most of the people’s disdain for the U.S. is the atomic bombing, and even more than that, the constitution! “Ok, fine we got beat in the war! But then you foisted this constitution on us!” There are uyoku groups that talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but not many. The constitution is a much more popular vessel for anti-American sentiment.

TDR: But isn’t that just a symbolic issue again?

RESEARCHER: Women were given equality under the U.S. imposed Constitution. Land was redistributed under the U.S. imposed Constitution. The military was disbanded and disallowed, and the emperor was removed as head of state and put into a symbolic cultural role. There’re all sorts of things they don’t like about it.

TDR: You said something last time that shocked me a bit ? that some of the uyoku were criticizing the Emperor?

RESEARCHER: Most groups don’t do that. Even the ones that do have to do it very carefully. They’ll say that the mistakes that happened in the war were because the emperor was not obeyed by the military. Or that the emperor, as a cultural symbol of the unity of the Japanese state and its people, should not be misused for political purposes, etc. In order to prevent this, he should move back to the cultural heart of Japan, the Kyoto / Nara area. (A long time ago) the Emperor originally moved to the Tokyo area from the Kyoto area for political reasons, they’ll say, so we should go back to the earlier era.

TDR: But doesn’t this contradict the idea that the U.S. ?drafted Constitution is bad because it removed the Emperor as head of state?

RESEARCHER: They would say that ? it’s like, should the Pope be a religious figure or do you want him to be the President? “As the cornerstone of the Japanese people, the emperor should not be taken advantage of by the political whims of the time, and should be kept sacred.” That is one line of argument that I hear pretty frequently. It is a compromise in some ways, but it also a lot more palatable than the ABSOLUTE EMPEROR-esque things some groups say.

TDR: You really know how to break it down! If you can’t get the professor gig, you could be a lobbyist for uyoku!

RESEARCHER: Sheesh. . . .That’s a problem! I get that a lot. As an anthropologist, you’re not usually forced to defend the group you’re studying. If you’re working with salarimen at a company, nobody asks you, “So are you supporting the salarimen?” And if you’re working with left-wing groups, I imagine it doesn’t come up nearly as much either. But people always ask me, “So are you an apologist for them?” That’s not my intention.

To the extent that understanding their ideological world helps me to understand their social and moral world, I want to interact with their ideas in an open-minded, nonbiased way. I think that anyone reading or discussing these issues should have the freedom to decide that’s wrong or that’s right. I am lucky enough to have relationships with some conventionally “very scary people” where I can criticize them directly and play Devil’s Advocate to feel out their positions on things. On a very large portion of the issues, my personal position is quite close to the “devil” I advocate.

But it’s a little bit troubling to me that I am asked to put my own political affiliations at the forefront. If a newspaper goes after uyoku for the things they say, that’s great! But I am not a journalist, and given the amount of trust that my informants have placed in me, to turn around and criticize them in the way some people expect me to is too cheap of a shot, and ultimately not as interesting as what I am doing now. I am not interested in writing an expose.

TDR: Double standards are bad! The organization you are close to, what are their top five issues? What do they get red in the face about on an everyday basis?

RESEARCHER: On a given day, the main issues are, American imperialism and a corollary to that, American economic imperialism which is attempting to forcibly liberalize and deregulate the Japanese economy.

TDR: What does liberalize mean?

RESEARCHER: If you liberalize an economy, you make it so it is open-access to any investors (from foreign countries), instead of protected (Japanese investors control all the Japanese companies).

TDR: Still no clue !

RESEARCHER: Well for instance, they will talk about the postal reforms that Koizumi enacted (the postal service, which is also somehow the largest bank in Japan, was privatized) They will say that those reforms were basically done at the behest of the Americans so that US companies could access massive Japanese savings that were held in the postal accounts and attempt to bring them into the private financial sector. Or they’ll talk about the deregulation of the insurance industry. Up until a point, they had barriers so that foreign companies could not come into the Japanese (insurance) market.

TDR: You mean corporations like Allstate or whatever, or individual investors?

RESEARCHER: Both! There were limits as to what percentage of a publicly traded company could come from foreign sources and other restrictions. What both the government and the guys on the right are concerned about is relatively smaller Japanese companies being bought out by larger foreign multinationals, or larger companies being taken over by foreign investment groups buying large portions of their shares. Sometimes their fears are a knee-jerk “We don’t want the foreigners!” thing, but it they would also say that foreign investment is not a good thing for the Japanese shareholders or the Japanese consumers/employees if those companies were to ultimately go bankrupt. There are many people who make precisely the opposite argument as well, Koizumi and Tanigaki being two of them, and in general the uyoku guys don’t like them.

TDR: Deeyamn! That’s a mouthful. OK, besides American imperialism, what else is a big issue for uyoku?

RESEARCHER: The other thing broadly-speaking is political intrigue and conspiracy-theory stuff. Against Soka Gakkai (a Buddhist sect that they would consider to be Japan’s sinister version of Scientology), against ethnic Koreans in Japan and North Korea, against Nikkyosou (the teachers’ union). And of course battles domestically and with China, Korea, and to a lesser degree, the U.S. over how to teach WWII history. What are some other big ones? Recently, the hub-bub around allowing a female emperor, etc. Oh, and of course, “gender-free” education…

TDR: Huh?

RESEARCHER: Teaching boys and girls that they have the same opportunities and can do the same things. They are very against that because they think they won’t know who’s who and it will erode the differences between boys and girls and blah blah blah kind of thing. It isn’t a huge priority for some groups, but it is prominent for others.

TDR: Is there a difference between things they say at the train station speeches to get people on their side, vs. what they really want to accomplish?

RESEARCHER: Most groups have a certain set of issues which they are symbolically committed to, that they don’t think are really going to happen. Things like Japan’s independence from the U.S. security sphere; the Self Defense Forces returning to an imperial army, and the restoration of the Emperor as the head of state. They mostly realize that it’s not going to happen, although they would consider that as a cornerstone of their belief system. But when they talk in front of the train stations, mostly it is to put their spin on current events, to give passers-by perspective they would not ordinarily get.

TDR: So it’s like involuntary talk radio!!!!

RESEARCHER: Most people seem good at ignoring it.

TDR: Are they concerned about corrupting foreign influences, like Disney or rap music or whatever?

RESEARCHER: Not so much, although you do hear diatribes about the popularity of Korean TV dramas every once in a while. The guys that are riding on the trucks screaming, those guys are for the most part fairly pro-American, to the extent that they’re a hold-over from the cold war days. They consider the American relationship to be a bulwark against the Chinese. Or justify it as not the best but necessary for now since, “If our government is allied with the US, then we have to support that alliance.” There are guys who don’t drink coca-cola, and are anti-American, but they’re a small minority.

TDR: Do they have any concern for, or programs to help, Japanese citizens who are in trouble: the homeless, the unemployed, the NEETS and freeters (under- or part-time employed)? Does that count as patriotism to the uyoku?

RESEARCHER: I haven’t really heard much about that. Although I have had discussions with guys who say, “I want to know why so many Japanese go abroad. I want to know why so many women aren’t having babies.” Not like “We want to dominate them!” but from the perspective of, if we want to keep the nation going, we want happy people who are having babies. It might sound a little weird. But there is an honest concern, with some right-wingers, about what young people are thinking. Other ones, not so much.

LABOR: Do they have an opinion about labor issues like more pay, shorter hours, unions, workplace safety, and stuff like that? To them, is that all communist crap, or is it part of their “chivalrous dudes looking out for the little guy” routine?

In my experience most groups don’t talk about that kind of thing much at all. When labor comes up it is in the context of freeters and part-timers, and the goal is usually to point out the work that Japanese put in during the post-war years, and encourage that again to reclaim the Japanese spirit. It is a criticism of Japan “going soft.” When you hear talk that is sympathetic to labor, it is usually to defend the Japanese company (and hence its workers) from foreign investments and acquisitions. They will point out the company-as-family ideology and talk about the erosion of safety nets for workers due to the influx of foreign capital (although the foreign companies are usually thought of as being better places to work pay-, promotion-, and overtime-wise).

TDR: Do they feel like Japanese women should be more politically active or more pissed off at the current political climate?

RESEARCHER: Some of those guys make lame, 50s-style sexist jokes, or the kind of harassment you would assume an airline stewardess would get in the 60s. You do hear that sort of thing, but there are women who participate fully in some of the groups and despite those comments the women do not seem to be held to a lower standard than the rest of the people. They also don’t seem to be conflicted about it. Some groups that sponsor more mainstream rallies will they try to put women and children in the front of the marches, and they’ll ask specifically for the members to bring their wives and children. There’s an attempt to show that these kinds of conservative issues are not just the realm of scary, surly-looking guys. But it depends on the group and what the issue is!

TDR: Anthropology question! Do those guys have some kind of common childhood experiences or “Aha!” moments that predispose them to grow up and become uyoku?

RESEARCHER: I don’t know at this point but I am in the process of collecting those. A lot of people went to rather conservative colleges, which makes me think they came from conservative households to begin with. The majority of founders of one particular group, all came from the same religious sect, a sect noted for being very austere and conservative. Other people, when they were in college, traveled through China and the Middle-East, and from that experience came to see Japan as a beacon for the under-developed world, rather than the West. Like the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in a sense. So then they’d hook up with the right-wing guys.

Are they pissed-off at everyday Japanese people for being too complacent?

RESEARCHER: Yeah, a lot of them. But some of them have a very populist slant ? like, they think most people would agree with them, but the people are being suppressed by the media, educational system and leftist teachers, or taken advantage of by the politicians. Especially in front of the train stations, a lot of them will say things like, “You’re the Everyman, you know what’s right and wrong, and you can see what the media and the politicians are up to!” They play that card, but that’s like right-wingers everywhere.

TDR: In the eighties when communism fell apart, did that change the uyoku’s long-term goals, or their funding or recruitment at all?

RESEARCHER: One thing that changed was, the Left in Japan had also fallen apart, and that was their big enemy. So the right-wing groups had to struggle to make themselves relevant in post-bubble Japan. For some groups this meant moving over to (or at least giving new emphasis to) this anti- U.S., anti-imperialism. As far as money, there were several legal changes made in the early ‘90s, which cracked down on organized crime and the uyoku affiliated with organized crime. I think the law was called Bouryokudan taishou houritsu. Before that law, a lot of crime groups were using political activism as a front for racketeering and extortion.

TDR: AHA! This is what everyone wants to know. How did that extortion go down? How was right-wing extortion different than the famous sokaiya-style extortion? Seems like they’d have to try harder to make a pretext! You have to have something good to yell while you’re circling your black vans around a corporate headquarters 24 hours a day. . .

RESEARCHER: I’ve never heard it myself, but I heard that the uyoku would often claim the company’s employee came to them. Saying, “Can you save me? You chivalrous guys? The company is not treating me fairly!” Now this may or may not have happened, but that’s what the uyoku would say: “You’re not treating your people right!” or, “You’re selling out to China!” Most larger companies would have a particular Yakuza group they are close to. So the company would ask the Yakuza to come in and get the uyoku to stop. The Yakuza would ask the uyoku, “How much money do you need to shut up?” The uyoku would reply, maybe, “100 man.” ($11,000 today) Then the Yakuza would tell the company, “They want 200 man,” and then the Yakuza pockets the difference. Sometimes the Yakuza and Uyoku were working together, but sometimes they were independent. At least, that is how the stories go.

TDR: So after the law cracked down, what did the uyoku groups do for money?

RESEARCHER: Well, the groups that based their activism on bothering companies, a lot of them disappeared! The fall of communism, the stricter laws, plus the recession, all hit at the same time. And there was lots of discussion about what uyoku should do. A few years later was, incidentally, when Kobayashi Yoshinori came out in his new form as a rightist agitator manga writer, and when the textbook issue began to heat up again as well. The textbook people aren’t the same as the gaisensha uyoku people, but it gave some steam to the movement and some activities for activists to direct their energy toward. And then in 2003, (governor) Ishihara changed Tokyo laws to ban older, more polluting diesel trucks. A lot of groups that had larger trucks had to sell them or let them sit, since it was too expensive to make them legal.

And the regional uyoku groups in the countryside had these huge tricked-out vans and trucks, giant and incredibly loud and just fearsome looking things. And until the legal change they’d drive to Tokyo and sleep in the vans because they couldn’t afford to sleep anywhere else. But when the law changed, they had no way to get to the city and nowhere to stay if they did! So they were forced out of ostentatious activism for a while, but quickly came in with smaller vans. Larger regional cities have since passed similar legislation. So the past fifteen years has thrown a lot of changes at the groups, but the space for conservative political activism has widened considerably too.

TDR: OK, thanks for the interview. This has been awesome! You have no idea how many people have been waiting for someone like you to come along and explain the nationalists like this. Good luck in your research!

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