Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 546, The Extreme Right in Post-Wore Japan, part two.

On December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Its end, honestly, was not very dramatic, consisting simply of the handover of government powers,

including nuclear codes, by Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev to the new Russian president, Boris Yeltsin,

the lowering of the Soviet flag, and a vote within the Supreme Soviet, the legislature, to dissolve the government.

Really, by this point, the drama had already happened, with the breakaway of many of the

Soviet republics like Latvia, Ukraine, and Georgia, the dissolution of puppet regimes in Poland,

East Germany, and elsewhere, and the failed August 1991 coup by Soviet hardliners, hoping to

take over the government and roll the clock back.

The final end of the USSR was compared to all of that, far more of a whimper than a bang,

and to be honest, that was probably a good thing.

Now, I've heard it said many times that the hardest part about understanding history is that

we know how things end.

And here in particular, that's very true.

Nobody really expected the USSR to implode as quickly as it did, and for such a long time,

Soviet power was treated by so many people outside of the communist world as an existential threat.

The notion that the USSR was planning revolution worldwide, that it was a threat to every

government around the world that wasn't already aligned to its side of the Cold War,

and that its ambitions could trigger a nuclear third world war, had been embedded into

cultural consciousness for half a century.

Now that threat was just gone, and that absence changed the world landscape in a great many

ways.

One of those changes was a dramatic remaking of Japan's ultra-right, the disparate hardline nationalists

...