One night in 1989, I got a phone call at home from someone who claimed to belong to the right-wing terrorist organization Sekihotai, the Blood Revenge Corps. He told me the group had put me on its blacklist of “anti-Japanese elements”; I was slated for assassination. In the previous weeks, I had published two opinion articles criticizing the recently deceased Emperor Hirohito, emphasizing his responsibility for World War II and questioning the deference he was being shown by the press and the population.
I called our local police station. The officer I spoke with thought Sekihotai was a leftist group. I told him the organization seemed to have scouted out the building where I was living with my wife and two small children. All he did was dispatch two men to hook up a recorder to our phone. Within hours, our cat had destroyed the machine.
I had reason to be worried. Two years before, in May 1987, Sekihotai had carried out a series of attacks on the Asahi newspaper, whose stance it considered to be “anti-Japanese.” One reporter was murdered with a shotgun; another was seriously injured. In a statement released at the time, the group said its mission was to “punish anti-Japanese elements inside and outside Japan” and that its actions against the Asahi were “only a first step.” In 1988, it sent a threat to former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone for canceling a visit to Yasukuni Shrine out of consideration for the Chinese and Korean governments and another letter to Nakasone’s successor, Noboru Takeshita, demanding that he resume the visits.
Sekihotai disappeared in 1990. To this day, no member of the organization has ever been identified, let alone arrested.
My experience with the group – assuming the caller really was a member – was not the stuff of history books. The weeks of terror my family endured were a purely private affair: The police hardly did anything, and the newspaper that had printed my articles made clear that it did not wish to get involved. But the very privateness of that incident is telling.
Just as my decision to criticize Hirohito as an ordinary man who had made catastrophic decisions, and to do so just as the entire country was mourning his death, made me part of a very small minority, so, too, it was with Sekihotai. Its extreme positions and its willingness to use violence relegated it to an almost-invisible fringe of society. And while I made my opinions public, Sekihotai’s members not only protected their anonymity, but also acted in secret. Right-wing rhetoric was a creature of the shadows. On those rare occasions when it broke out into the public sphere, it had an aura of deviance.
Back in 1985, in the face of stiff popular opposition, the Nakasone administration had to abandon passing the State Secrets Bill, which would have made it possible to imprison people convicted of revealing information the government deemed sensitive. In 1986, Nakasone decided not to return to Yasukuni Shrine. Then he acceded to the Chinese government’s request that Japanese history textbooks be revised to reflect the aggressiveness of Japan’s colonial expansion during World War II.
Recently, however, this once-deviant discourse has moved into the light. In fact, the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been doing some of the very things Sekihotai demanded of Nakasone and Takeshita.
The government recently passed the so-called Special Secrets Protection Bill, which closely resembles the 1985 legislation. Abe recently became the first sitting prime minister since 2006 to visit Yasukuni Shrine. And he has announced his intention to disregard the protests of the Chinese and Korean governments against nationalist whitewashing in Japanese history textbooks.
The sort of violent right-wing discourse that characterized Sekihotai is now all too familiar. Just look at visitors’ comments on Abe’s Facebook page. “Forget about those primitive Chinese and Koreans. The time has come to do battle with the anti-Japanese mass media (above all Asahi types),” says one, adding, “The primitive Chinese and Koreans have no influence anyway; the Japanese mass media, which go on brainwashing so many of the nation’s citizens, are infinitely worse. They’re a dauntless, hardy enemy, but this is a fight-or-die moment. Fight for us, Prime Minister Abe!!”
The language’s virulence doesn’t quite come across in English. But the sentiment is clear enough. And the extent to which it resonates beyond the fringes of Japanese society is apparent from the large number of “likes” such comments garner, and on the Japanese prime minister’s Facebook page, of all places.
A decade or so ago – some 12 years after the disappearance of Sekihotai – the leader of another Japanese right-wing organization speculated that the group had vanished because it had achieved its goals. That was giving it too much credit. Instead, a shift in the national mood has made such secret, shadowy groups unnecessary. Japan has taken a great turn to the right, and the descendants of Sekihotai are coming out into the open.
Norihiro Kato is a literary scholar and a professor at Waseda University. This article was translated by Michael Emmerich from the Japanese.
© 2014 The New York Times
