Contemporary Japanese Thought

It has been six months since the National Flag and Anthem Law was enacted.¹ During this time, not a day has passed in which I have not returned, as if compulsively dwelling on a nightmare, to the question of what kind of event the 145th regular session of the National Diet had been.² Who and what kind of ideology within the government had conceived of the event? What kinds of maneuverings between political parties had made it possible? What kind of a dynamic both inside and outside the Diet had given rise to it? Moreover, what has been the nature of our society that would allow such an event to occur, and what kind of future does it foretell? We are standing in a place where we must very painfully rethink all these questions from step one. This event has awakened in us a sense of crisis so deep as to render invalid whatever understanding we had about our society and historical period. Everyone greeted the event with a certain amazement. Or rather, everyone seemed unsure how to greet this amazement.

Such clichés as “return to the dark ages” or “anachronism” are here defensive reactions to this amazement. That thinking which must reflexively spew forth such words is indelibly marked by progressivism. War, fascism, totalitarianism—these have all continued to be our objects of knowledge in the space-time of the postwar period. We are thus convinced that we are already beyond them. Or rather, we are so anxious that we need to believe this in order to maintain our emotional stability. If we remain at such a level today, however, it is clear that we can no longer render accurate historical judgments. Hence we must first relearn how to greet this amazement.

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.³

If we replace the words “twentieth century” with “twenty-first century,” this sentence will become a warning for us who today live under the National Flag and Anthem Law. Walter Benjamin is of course not recommending apathy or ataraxia in place of amazement here. Rather, what he is saying is that those who have belonged on the side of the majority, or those who believed they were in the majority and are therefore now frightened by the “state of emergency,” should turn their “amazement” into an awareness that there have always been those for whom such a state is the norm. These people should thus forge connections with the “tradition” of “oppressed” minorities. According to Benjamin, it is only in this way that we can think in real terms about a “true state of emergency,” that is, a “state of emergency” for the ruling class, and hence improve our position in the struggle against fascism.

The enactment of the National Flag and Anthem Law has forced us once again to remember just how many minds and bodies were tormented and even killed in the name of that flag and anthem in Japan, its colonies, and all the territories occupied by the Japanese military. Since this work of remembering is still weak, we must devote all our efforts to strengthening it, including confronting the forces that hinder it. Yet such indispensable remembering is not in itself “a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger,” or a “true image of the past” that “can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again,” as Benjamin says elsewhere in the same text.⁴ As premised upon the tenacious work of remembering, we must seize the moment in which the image of the past “unexpectedly appears to the historical subject.”⁵ If we do not grasp this image, the “true state of emergency” will not come into view.

There were two ways of thinking within the movement against the National Flag and Anthem Law, and at times these were in conflict within the same person. The first was that the Hinomaru and Kimigayo should be replaced by another flag and anthem; the second was that any national communality as symbolized by a flag or anthem should be rejected. The greatest common factor of the various opposition movements was the recognition that the compulsory use of any flag or anthem would be an invasion of “freedom of thought and conscience,” as putatively guaranteed by Article 19 of the Constitution.

Since the enactment of the National Flag and Anthem Law is clearly the first stage of an undesirable revision of the Constitution, the opposition movement has naturally focused on the contradictions between the present Constitution and the (compulsory use of) this flag and anthem. As this movement bears a strong affinity with essentially progressivist trends, however, any thinking of such a framework in fixed terms makes it difficult for us to seriously heed Benjamin’s warning. In order to articulate a long-term resistance against the National Flag and Anthem Law, we require another movement within this movement, one which, while sustaining the opposition to the Hinomaru and Kimigayo, would readily shake up the formalistic limits of the opposition consensus. Although we are in the midst of an unmistakable crisis, it is our urgent task to now begin “to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”

“While the Hinomaru flag might be acceptable, the Kimigayo anthem is not.” Regardless of how widely this sentiment was shared, many people sought in it a foothold for the movement in its opposition struggle. We can cite the reasons for this: the Kimigayo lyrics openly glorify the emperor, its melody is largely incompatible with contemporary music tastes, and one can easily imagine the pain of being forced to sing it. In fact, there has even appeared the ridiculous middle position of supporting the Hinomaru and opposing the Kimigayo. As Kanō Mikiyo has remarked, however, it is not the same thing to claim that the “Kimigayo is more of a problem than the Hinomaru” as it is to say that “Kimigayo is the more dangerous.” Rather the opposite is true. At ceremonies, it is the flag (and not the anthem) that panoptically determines the spatial arrangement of the participants. Above all, fans in soccer stadiums already well attest to the fact that it is possible to love the Hinomaru as an extension of postwar sensibility, provided that one is blasé about whom the kimi (or “you”) of Kimigayo refers to and that one forget Japan’s war and invasion. When we seek a point of contact with the masses as based on a sense of unease with the Kimigayo, we become absorbed by the movement’s unwitting progressivism. We thus succumb to the temptation of overcoming the situation at the mountain’s lowest point, to use an old-fashioned expression. Benjamin would certainly see here an opening for fascism.

In other words, the “true image of the past” that we require will not appear if we refuse the difficulty of confronting the Hinomaru. I would thus like to begin by seeking out images of the Hinomaru that were discussed and put into print precisely because of this moment of crisis.

In Shōwa 14 [1939] I lived in China’s Shandong Province. One summer day my two younger brothers and I explored a barbed wire enclosure on the outskirts of town. There I saw a huge black mass in a large hole that seemed to be about ten meters in diameter. It was a mountain of corpses. I also realized that the black color was really a swarm of flies. Upon raising my head, I saw the Hinomaru waving in the breeze. Even after sixty years, I still remember how frighteningly beautiful the flag was against the dazzling sky. Since then I can no longer simply believe in anything that appears beautiful. This year I visited Shandong and learned that the site was an execution ground.⁶

During the continuing struggle over the National Flag and Anthem Law, it was this sixty-nine-year-old man’s letter to the editor that left the greatest impression on me. Until then I had foolishly believed that only poetry and songs spoke of the Hinomaru as beautiful. I had been caught up in the schematic belief that ethical judgments tend to become paralyzed through the intervention of aesthetic experience. These calmly written lines told me that there are moments when the Hinomaru is truly “frighteningly” beautiful, and that, nonetheless, or rather precisely because of this—for the flag can be so beautiful only under such conditions—the memory of this beauty had not so much rendered one’s sense of ethics dormant as instead become the core of an absolutely indelible mistrust of aesthetic experience in general. Understood literally and in a very strict sense, the inability to simply believe in “anything that appears beautiful” must be extremely saddening. The Hinomaru, which caused someone such loss, is after all no arbitrary sign. It is a flag that is cursed in its very design. Something in this letter can convince one of this. From that point onward I began to pay attention to those aesthetic judgments regarding the Hinomaru as expressed by the wartime generation.

Next I will present the remarks of three intellectuals. Born in the 1920s, these men all oppose the National Flag and Anthem Law. Their intellectual and literary work continues to furnish us with a rich legacy for thinking about future forms of resistance. The following quotations are not intended critically, but are presented merely as an index.

In a sense, these remarks can be considered exemplary of intellectuals in their sharp distinction between aesthetic and political judgment. Nevertheless, I could not but feel ambivalent in learning that these thinkers, who are otherwise so different in their thought and sensibilities, shared the same “personal” (Yoshimoto seemed especially aware of this point) and affirmative opinion regarding the Hinomaru design. Despite the fact that these intellectuals do not, to say the least, support the political order, their remarks could nonetheless be read by bureaucrats and establishment politicians as a guarantee that the “excellence” of the flag’s design would be fully exploited so as to suppress resistance against the National Flag and Anthem Law. Herein lies an unavoidable task for us. Is it not the case that the ruling class’s “state of emergency” will appear in Japan only when we break through, rather than avoid, that which is seen as the flag’s “excellent” design?

It is true that the Hinomaru is more easily accepted than the Kimigayo because it is an icon, and thus, as Ōshiro says, open to any number of meanings and interpretations. Yet there is a limit to such interpretations. Or rather, there exists an immutable core here without which the flag’s “excellence” would not emerge, regardless of its “excellence” as an icon in general. In a word, this core is the implicit notion or belief that no better icon exists as an embodiment of the name Japan. A historical concatenation has been formed according to which any change in the national flag would have to be accompanied by a change in the nation’s name. This is what the establishment calls “fixity.” The movement to disobey the National Flag and Anthem Law must thus embrace two poles: the minimal plan to oppose coercion in the name of “freedom of conscience” and the maximum plan to rethink Japan’s very name. It seems to me that a communality that cannot be symbolized by any flag or anthem can go beyond idealism and gain concreteness only by enduring the tension between these two poles while concurrently staging guerilla warfare against this flag (and this anthem) at the level of sensibility.

Here we should pay more attention to Amino Yoshihiko’s repeated insistence, in his remarks on the National Flag and Anthem Law, that the name Japan is not immutable.¹⁰ Of course, even Amino doesn’t believe there is any immediate opportunity to change this name. Yet it is more productive to regard his current speaking out on this issue, which no one had ever seriously discussed before, as a sign of our times rather than as reflective of his own intent. For now that the National Flag and Anthem Law has been passed, it is only the name Japan that remains to be legalized, that is, the naturalness and noninstitutionality of this name still continues to be fabricated in negative form. In fact, there is no guarantee that this name will survive beyond the clear limits of Japan’s assimilation policies and the imminent collapse of the masses’ monoethnic nation fantasy.

Of course, the structure of embodiment of the name Japan through the Hinomaru is by no means simple. There is an odd discrepancy between this name and icon, one that is premised upon supplementarity. There lies at the origin of this name the historical fact or narrative according to which Prince Umayado [Prince Shōtoku], in the year 607, at the time of the first embassy to the Sui dynasty, sent a letter to the Sui emperor, Yangdi, “from the Son of Heaven in the land where the sun rises to the Son of Heaven in the land where the sun sets.” This episode is well known, if rarely recalled. In recalling it today, however, we can sense with unusual clarity that this name originally involved seeing oneself from the perspective of the other, because of which the trace of the other forever remains. Even if in such texts as the Kojiki the name is written as Nihon and read as Yamato, the Chinese reading of Nihon or Nippon historically became the rule and the Japanese reading Hinomoto the exception. Here, too, we may note an awareness of China. As soon as this name became iconized by the Hinomaru design, however, the trace of the other, the relation with the Chinese mainland and the East Asian power structure of the early seventh century were all utterly effaced. The self-centered forgetting that this name desired but could not achieve itself was realized by the icon of the Hinomaru design.

That sensibility which regards the Hinomaru design as “excellent” is perhaps not unrelated to this unique correspondence between name and icon. The sensibility that finds the Hinomaru “refreshing” is perhaps apt to lead to one that feels “refreshed” when those regarded as “other” disappear from the horizon of historical consciousness. (Apparently some local residents thrust the flag at Aum Shinrikyō members, as if it were a charm against evil spirits). Precisely because of this, however, there can also be a sensibility that abhors the Hinomaru design. Such abhorrence can be seen in the history of Japanese expression, even if this represented a minority view.

It was in the midst of the opposition to the National Flag and Anthem Law that I came across a number of passages on the Hinomaru in the later works of Tanigawa Gan. I might not have paid so much attention to these texts had I read them at a different time. Upon examination, however, it struck me that the distaste for the flag on the part of this man, who was also born in the 1920s, was deeply rooted in his intellectual formation.

Speaking of eggs, I recall one night I complained to Saitō Yoshishige, “Why couldn’t Takiguchi Shūzō break with such round forms? He writes of boiled eggs and those white rice-flour dumplings of the Bon festival.” Saitō’s reply was as calm as ever, “Because he’s a surrealist.” Indeed, Japanese surrealists love “circles.” Nothing irritates my Japan resident¹¹ nerves so much as that vague lump that floats lightly on the scene like an island or the sun and moon. When I see it, my heart cries out that it’s the symbol of Ilbon [i.e., the Korean reading of “Japan”—Ukai]. What an unwitting display of imperialism, with as much logic as a block of tofu! The terror of the “circle,” the Hinomaru’s demon-child! The problem with this flag is that there is only a circle, which in its form is completely closed. This is not so much a question of history as one of sensibility. At least Duchamp’s urinal contained an opening. How obtuse that no artist has remarked upon this difference!¹²

This is a passage from Tanigawa’s open letter to the Korean artist Lee Ufan. The red circle, which was originally supposed to iconize the sun, merges in the Hinomaru with the “nation’s form,” i.e., the imaginary projection of equivalence between national spirit and national territory (“like an island or the sun and moon”). The periphery’s provocative speech act to the center which stated, “The sun appears from your point of view to rise near me” was translated iconographically, abstracting the complex shape of the Japanese archipelago and erasing the distance between sun and land, in keeping with the religious fiction of the emperor system. Tanigawa responds appropriately to the violence of this move. For him, the sense of “auspiciousness/foolishness” that was projected onto the Hinomaru had thoroughly permeated Japan’s avant-garde art. The flag’s relation to Japanese exclusionism could thus no longer be reduced to the historical context in which the flag had been used; rather it must be critiqued immanently or structurally at the level of “sensibility.”

First of all, the “circle” is a differential in the universe’s humor, it’s a mandala container. Isn’t it rude to thrust an empty red Tupperware container at someone and say, “Please take this”? Even Zen monks try to leave imperfections in the “circles” of their scroll paintings. Pure frozen humor is not humor. It is simply empty, without self-definition or other people. In the theory of surrealism, however, there are no criteria by which to critique this as art. The incontinence of humor will certainly be seen if we seek a “sublime point” at the boundary of deep consciousness between sleep and wakefulness. If someone insists that even frozen or closed humor is still humor, and that the national flag represents a kind of austere humor, then we wouldn’t know what to do with the autistic child that is the Hinomaru. Surrealism is unable to go beyond this flag.¹³

If the “circle” represents the humorously shrunken form of the universe, then it might be a container but it would belong to no one. The “auspiciousness/foolishness” of the Hinomaru lies in the conviction that someone would smile if one painted this container red and presented it with the words “This is me.” We have here the terror of that which is literally “empty.” Let us place alongside this understanding the frivolous argument of the supporters of the National Flag and Anthem Law, for they shamelessly rely on a kind of formalistic symmetry that states, “To honor one’s own national flag and anthem is to learn the international etiquette of respecting the flags and anthems of other nations.” In the context of the flag, however, such pathetic insensitivity to the other must be critiqued “as art.” Unable to find the criteria for this critique in surrealism, Tanigawa sought it instead in the “awakened work” of those anonymous artists who, on the basis of their class consciousness, gave birth to Korean Yi dynasty folk painting (“life painting”).

Japanese artists are poor at standing against any dazzling and painful brightness, for they regard anything that cannot stay consumed as deviant. Their “deconstruction” is not a form for awakening, but rather a confession of intoxication. This is the sole reason they could not understand the meaning of the Korean itinerant painters’ awakened work on dream utility.¹⁴

Tanigawa even makes reference to the Hinomaru in his last work, a series of childhood recollections titled Kita ga nakereba Nihon ha sankaku [Without the north, Japan is a triangle] (1995). In the chapter “Handmade Hinomaru Flags,” there is a depiction of a group of elementary-school students parading with flags, as took place prior to the distribution of the “red ink mimeographed Hinomaru flags” in 1931 at the time of the Manchurian Incident.¹⁵ Tanigawa recalls that this parade, in which the irregular size and colors of the red circles clearly reflected the children’s life conditions, was “a bit ethnic and anarchistic.”¹⁶ But the episode that most closely corresponds to the Hinomaru discussion in his letter to Lee Ufan is to be found in the two chapters directly related to the book’s title, “Without the north” and “A circle or triangle.”

In 1933 (Shōwa 8), when the typhus outbreak was so severe that even meals were eaten inside mosquito nets, the Tanigawa brothers encountered a “young girl.” Upon being rebuked by one of the brothers for eating a piece of fish with her hands, the girl “rolled her eyes mischievously” and in a “cheery voice” replied, “Without the north, Japan is a triangle!” These words made a strong impression on the young Gan.

The arc of the archipelago and Ryukyu islands that stretch from the northeast to the southwest. Even if Karafuto and Chishima could somehow be gathered therein, any consideration of how to simplify this territorial form (which includes both Korea and Taiwan) would iconographically run up against the Korean peninsula. Hence the circle that rolls up these contradictions into a dumpling. I imagine that this is the Japanese people’s inner Hinomaru.¹⁷

Tanigawa’s understanding of the Hinomaru was thus an extremely idiosyncratic one, bound up with the memories of particular events and people from the poet’s biography. As goes without saying, it is not easy to “revive” this thinking within the collective work being undertaken today by another generation, one that opposes the National Flag and Anthem Law. Tanigawa himself early on abandoned the possibility of translating his own oppositional dream into the logic of politics, and withdrew from the scene in the mid-1960s. In trying to put into historical perspective the significance of the 1999 passage of the National Flag and Anthem Law, however, I think it is worth recalling the shift in Tanigawa’s own understanding of the situation, which he cited at the time as the main reason behind this withdrawal, and his predictive “hypothesis of a single world power.” For it seems that Tanigawa had already largely seen through the essence of our present state of “globalism,” as can be seen for example in his text “Waga soshiki kūkan” [Our organization space] (1964).

The logic of nation-states is such as to increasingly purify them as economic units, but no matter how desperately nations fight one another this apparently radical “multipolarization” is firmly held under the control of the global market in its growing unification. What can be predicted and inferred from this fact? The first question that arises is whether it is appropriate to consider the various monopolies, which either separate or join the nation-state units, as the “moribund and highest stage” of private property. Just as one must stand atop a mountain to see even higher peaks, so too do we still hope for the highest peaks of private property. While revolutions in nations A, B and C may have displaced private property onto a kind of state monopoly, there is no sign that nation-states will now begin to die out. Instead there is a strengthening of nation-state logic and the birth of a spellbinding new world system, consisting of complementary relations between those nation-states gathered around the global market. How far will this new system expand? I suspect it will soon swallow up China and its neighbors as well as those revolutions in nations L, M and N that will take place in the crevices of the scramble for markets. It will then grow into a single world power. How can we assert that the day will not come when we realize that the world federation or government, which beginning with Einstein represented the dreams of so many, was in fact the highest form of private property?

In our inner world, at least, there is nothing fundamental that keeps us from making such predictions and inferences. Indeed, we can already see the nude figures of men and women competing with one another under a single global rule, surrounded by the signs of ninety-four nations. This “peaceful” scene is surely the annunciation of the future cruelty that flows back to us.¹⁸

This last passage hints at the Tokyo Olympics. I was nine years old at that time, which is about the age when Tanigawa received the revelation that “without the north, Japan is a triangle.” It was then that the Hinomaru and Kimigayo most inundated my life. With the 2002 Japan-Korea World Cup two years away now, what kind of legacy is possible for Tanigawa’s remarks on national flags, and the Hinomaru in particular, as we try to organize resistance against the National Flag and Anthem Law? How can his words be connected to Benjamin’s image of the “true state of emergency”?

“The king of the instant is dead.”¹⁹ This is Tanigawa Gan’s well-known declaration of the death of modern poetry. Yet Benjamin’s “image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again” requires the intervention of the poetic, not as a genre so much as a method of cognition. This requirement must be emphasized all the more in our struggle over the flag and the anthem. But it is precisely this vein that the movements in Japan have allowed to dry up over the past thirty years. This, more than the latest public survey figures, arouses an even deeper anxiety over the future direction of our resistance. It is not difficult for the ruling class to propagate and surround us with the “legal” flag and its various partial images (red balls and circles). At such times we must see with “awakened” eyes why the Hinomaru is the Hinomaru. The only sensibility that can teach resistance how to breathe is that which extends its feelers of existence toward the others of this other-less symbol and their future image.

Moreover, the episode from Tanigawa’s childhood shows us that what he calls the “inner Hinomaru” can be ruptured and transformed by certain words. “Without the north, Japan is a triangle.” Herein lies one of the origins of his poetry. We can today feel it in our skin that the fight against the National Flag and Anthem Law not only must involve resistance against the state power of one nation, but should also potentially contain a vector of resistance against any “single world power.” Tanigawa was the first to shudder at that which is openly threatening us today. Even though his 1960s declaration of the death of poetry was closely related to his “hypothesis of a single world power,” he still did not completely abandon the dream for words. On the contrary, he seems to have retained until his death an infinite trust, bordering on religious belief, in children’s ability to invent words. Likewise, Benjamin refused until the end to abandon his “belief” in a “weak Messianic power,” the power of salvation as contained in words.²⁰

1933, 1946, 2000. The enemy has not stopped winning. Yet within this accumulation of defeat and the heaps of rubble—and only here—there must lie concealed those words and images that could disturb the stable supplementarity between name and icon, Japan and the Hinomaru. We must seek these out with the eyes and ears of children who have not yet been stained by the “auspiciousness/foolishness” of the Hinomaru.

2. This session was scheduled to run from January 19 to June 17, 1999, but was extended until August 13 of that year. During the session a coalition government was formed between the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, the Liberal Party, and the New Komeitō Party, and numerous bills were passed into law with little or no debate on the basis of the sheer numerical superiority of the coalition government. The other key laws passed dealt with the security alliance with the United States and the strengthening of Japan’s ability to participate legally in overseas military operations, an expansion of the permissible bounds of wiretapping, and the revision of the Resident Registration Law.—Trans.

10. See his “Kasai rettō no rekishi no naka ni ‘Hinomaru-Kimigayo’ wo oite miru—‘Nihon’ to iu kokumei, tennō no shōgō, soshite ‘Hinomaru-Kimigayo’” [The Hinomaru-Kimigayo as seen in the history of the Festoon Islands—The name “Japan,” the title of emperor and the Hinomaru-Kimigayo”], in Kōron yo okore! “Hinomaru-Kimigayo” [Let’s have some public debate! The Hinomaru-Kimigayo] (Tokyo: Tarōjirōsha, 1999) and “Kokki, kokkahō watakushi wa shitagawanai” [I won’t obey the National Flag and Anthem Law], in Sekai kinkyu zōkan “Stoppu! Jijikō bōsō” [Urgent special issue of World: Stop the runaway Liberal Democratic, Liberal, and New Komeito parties!], no. 688 (November, 1999), pp. 56–64.