Notes on Japan
Not the Nationalist Utopia Some Imagine

A hikikomori.

2,112 words

Japan is considered something of a utopia on the world stage today, standing among the lauded Nordic countries and wealthy microstates in terms of its civilizational level. Japan has virtually eliminated violent crime, has a high standard of living, is technologically advanced, stays out of wars, and remains a top world economy despite having seen better days. Japan even has a homogeneous population. Many on the Right therefore point to Japan as an example of the success of positive nationalism.

But beneath this veneer of a vital society lies a darker truth that we can begin to gather by observing Japan’s cultural exports: chan, anime, and nerd culture. South Korea has recently received some attention over its collapsing birthrates, and the cultural issues between these two very close nations appear to be pretty much the same. Japan, like South Korea, has become a sterile individualist society, safe but lacking in vitality and slowly running through the last of its cultural capital. While this is not surprising given that Japan was emasculated and ceased being a force of history in 1945, what is even more disturbing is the that the victorious West, especially the US, is suffering the same fate.

To better understand the situation in Japan, some historical background is necessary. Up until the 1868 Meiji Restoration, Japan was a feudal aristocratic society run by samurai warlords, the shogun and daimyo, similar to medieval Europe. This society of Zen Buddhist warrior-monks is seen by Traditionalists as perhaps the closest thing to a Golden Age society in modern times. Despite a successful centuries-long resistance to modernization by the Tokugawa Shogunate, the cycle of civilization only travels in one direction. The once-proud samurai were disarmed, and in their place a modernized but still militaristic state emerged. Through gunpowder and mass military tactics, the heavily-armed Japanese aristocracy, known even today for its martial tradition, became history.

A nostalgia for the Edo Period remained, however. The aristocratic families remained. Modernity could not kill the unique world-feeling and warrior spirit of the Japanese people. They would soon go on to conquer most of the Pacific, from New Guinea to the Aleutians in Alaska; the important port cities and capitals of Chinese civilization, from Singapore to Beijing; and the entirety of Korea. It is hard to believe that this highly civilized people were capable of such brutality. The nation that today is usually associated with manicured gardens, tea ceremonies, cherry blossoms, and meditation also raped Nanking, as well as countless other places across Asia and the Pacific.

Under different circumstances, the Japanese Empire could have counted itself among the greatest in history, alongside the Persians, Romans, Mongols, British, and other warrior peoples. This was indeed the case for a short time. But America reduced those hopes to ashes. The Emperor, the center of Japanese political and religious life, was held hostage by the barbarians who occupied the Japanese main islands, a feat not even the Mongols had been capable of achieving. The country was then transformed into a democratic puppet of the United States, with woman’s suffrage, no independent military capacity, and no intelligence agency to defend it from espionage.

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Today, this tamed and castrated nation is lauded as a miracle of human achievement. Yet in the arena of politics (and man is a political animal), Japan is essentially a failed state, a post-historical fellaheen people under American vassalage. Classical Western and Japanese cultures both saw such a state of affairs as slavery (see Herodotus, Tacitus, as well as the mass suicides on Okinawa).

A combination of geopolitical humiliation, Americanization, and peculiar aspects of post-war Japanese culture have been a potent force for cultural decline. As in the West, only a few brave souls such as Yukio Mishima and Otoya Yamaguchi ever protested.

Decades of low fertility, caused in part by Western feminism, cultural humiliation, and decadence — all familiar causes of low birthrates and the collapse of the family in the West today — has resulted in an elderly population which, as in America, calls the shots for the rest of society. Also as in America, despite older citizens’ nominal conservatism, their true priorities in politics are evident in terms of their high expenditures on healthcare and elder care, to the detriment of services for the dwindling younger population, which to this day does not enjoy free public high schools — an important reason as to why young Japanese adults at least claim that having children is too expensive.

More sinister is the fact that, while Japan has national healthcare, the overall coverage and premium social services are based on one’s prefecture. The poorer and especially rural areas are dying out, while the last few dynamic young people from these areas are attracted to the wealthier cities — where they inevitably do not propagate in any significant numbers (Japan’s birthrate is currently 1.26 births per woman). High population density, plummeting birthrates, and heavy urbanization now characterize not only the West, but increasingly, Japan as well. These factors were noted by Karl Haushofer, one of the fathers of modern geopolitics, as signs of decline.

Haushofer’s solution, lebensraum, which has made him an infamous thinker for his intellectual role in the planning of Operation Barbarossa, no longer seems applicable, however. There is no shortage of rural space in Japan, and yet there is little or no “back to the land” movement. It’s hard to see how there can be a reversal of this vicious cycle as Japan becomes more and more urbanized. Despite an abundance of cheap rural land due to low demand, Japan’s population is expected to plummet by 30% over the next 45 years. As a result, Japan is increasingly importing foreigners to fill in the gaps of their economy, and housing is becoming more unaffordable despite a shrinking population.

Sometimes culture is downstream from politics. Post-war Japan has been the epicenter of modern nerd culture. It has created a culture of low-energy, anti-social, incel men: the otaku, a phenomenon which has also spread to the West. Most extreme are the hikikomori, a type of often middle-aged man-child otaku who lives with his often elderly parents, and even refuses to leave his bedroom for literally years at a time. Fortunately, hikikomori appears to be a purely Eastern phenomenon, at least for now. Furthermore, the rising suicide rate in Japan has been a well-known problem for years, and mirrors the rising deaths of despair in the West.

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A lot can be learned about a culture’s self-perception from its media. What is apparently “relatable” to Japanese young men is the male anime/manga protagonist or the pathetic worm whom women throw themselves at, yet who is too inept and low libido to react properly to their advances. This can be seen in the character Shinji in the classic action anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion, as well as any number of “slice of life” comedic anime/manga series.

A friend of mine who worked in finance in Japan confirmed these tropes, saying that his Japanese co-workers, ostensibly highly eligible young men in their early-to-mid 20s who are making good money, were more interested in his stories of courting their women than actually pursuing their women themselves. It should be noted that this is borne out by the statistics: nearly half of young men and women under the age of 34 in Japan are virgins despite easily accessible prostitution.[1] Japan is a uniquely low-libido society, which certainly plays a role in their low birthrate.

South Korea has gained some attention recently due to a BBC article on the nation’s record low birthrate, which profiles several South Korean women on why they are choosing not to have children. While Japan is not South Korea, they are quite similar societies racially and culturally, and even share history in modern times given that Korea was a Japanese colony during the first half of the twentieth, plus both have long been occupied by the United States. Thus, it’s not a stretch to cite South Korea as an approximate measure of what we are seeing in Japan as well.

Indeed, apart from national confidence, where South Korea has Japan beaten, perhaps due to its close proximity to North Korea, the issues that plague both societies are quite similar. Something that stuck out in the documentary was that the women always had some convenient excuse for not having children: “They’ll interfere with my work,” “I need government incentives,” or even “I don’t like how my husband does the dishes, ergo I can’t trust him to take care of the baby the way I like.” Even on the Right, from what I’ve seen, people seem to be taking the wrong message from this, attempting to cure the symptoms rather than the cause. Enacting pro-natal policies alone is not the answer, because we’ve already seen the lackluster performance of such policies in places such as Denmark and Hungary.

The real questions are: Why would women — and men, by the way — value a career, money, free time, and so on over the immortality of themselves, their family, and their people? Why does wealth lead to decadence and slow suicide? Why does poverty actually increase birthrates? People who are dead set on families don’t make excuses; they make babies, whatever their level of wealth is. The simplest answer is that the ultra-civilized societies of East Asia have lost their “race” — that is, their instinctual will to carry on biologically as well as culturally, no less and perhaps even more than the West.

But what does the death of the technologically-advanced societies of Asia have to do with nationalism in America, Europe, and the West generally? Japan can teach us several lessons about the West’s dystopian future, even in nations that have retained their homogeneity, unless serious change in the culture is achieved.

Lesson 1: Homogeneity means little in a society bent on slow suicide, which is a wakeup call to nationalists in homogeneous, low-fertility countries. If these trends continue unabated, China will simply colonize Japan sooner or later, with or without their permission.

Lesson 2: If you want to see the future of white masculinity, look at Japan. They are only a few decades ahead of us at best, and had an incel epidemic long before that term had even been coined.

Lesson 3: Perhaps these phenomena are accelerating in the West as it becomes apparent that we, too, are a conquered and occupied people — literally so in Europe — and that there seems to be no future for most young people.

Lesson 4: Americanization is cultural cancer. This is also evidenced in Eastern and Central Europe, where even Soviet Communism had less of a rotting effect on the local culture over the long term than American influence over Western Europe, Korea, and Japan.

Lesson 5: No amount of pro-natal policy money will turn spoiled materialist women into matriarchs.

Lesson 6: Perhaps this is the most disturbing one. These issues have plagued Japan for at least 50 years and have only accelerated. There does not appear to be any “bottleneck” in which the few who do have children pass on “pro-natal genes.” The bottleneck theory that has most notably been proposed by Edward Dutton therefore seems overly optimistic based on what we see in Japan.

There are many great things about Japan and its people which continue today, particularly in terms of their stress on quality over quantity. But the Japanese show that even between quality and quantity, there is a golden mean. What is the point of quality if the quantity is zero?

While no one has done modernity better than Japan, we should not lose sight of the fact that modernity is spiritual slavery — even in Japan, where they have perhaps adapted to it more seamlessly than in US cities. Many are enchanted by the idea that Japan represents a refutation of the third-worldism pushed by members of the global elite such as George Soros, but forget that Japan is nevertheless hardly a refutation of the Great Reset agenda, Jewish hegemony, or the Global American Empire. The nationalist Right shouldn’t tout a nation such as Japan as an exemplar, because our enemies actually want modernity to run more smoothly. Happy slaves are much easier to manage, and if you want to help them in that project, Harvard, the FBI, BlackRock, and the IRS are still hiring. I imagine they pay much better than does nationalist activism.

As for the rest of us, though, I’m afraid our kingdom is not (yet) of this world, and when it does appear will certainly not resemble the once-proud nation of Japan today.

Note

[1] 42% of the men and 44.2% of the women. See Mihuzo Aoki, “In sexless Japan, almost half of single young men and women are virgins: survey,” The Japan Times, September 16, 2016.