Hello, and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 545, The Extreme Right in Post-War Japan, Part 1.

There's a clean narrative that I think many of us, especially those who grew up in the United States, like to tell ourselves about the Second World War.

This narrative is that at the end of the conflict, the Allies defeated the fascist powers of the

Axis utterly, and then engaged in a program of reconstruction that rebuilt Germany, Italy, and Japan

as liberal powers aligned to American-style democratic capitalism.

Those three nations are in this telling, essentially the poster children for the success

of nation-building efforts by America and its allies.

For example, this was the rhetoric employed about two decades ago by the American president,

George W. Bush, who defended American

policy in Iraq by pointing to the example, especially of the occupation of Japan, that it had

worked, and so there was no particular reason why a similar occupation of Iraq could not.

Which is a complicated subject in its own right, and far beyond the scope of this podcast,

it would involve getting into the nature of the Iraqi state today, which certainly is more

functional than I think many of us give it credit for, but also not the thriving liberal democracy

one might hope for, as well as the fundamental accuracy of a comparison between 1940s

Japan and 2000s Iraq. Much academic ink

was spilled on that subject in the wake of President Bush's various references to the

occupation. John Dower, in particular, wrote voluminously on the subject and gave a great many

talks on it, and if you're curious about it, I'd definitely recommend

giving what he had to say a read. But again, fundamentally, not what we're here to talk about

today. The reason why I am sticking my neck out by talking about something that vaguely approximates

modern politics is instead that the comparison drawn by Bush points to a way of thinking

...