Japan’s Quiet Trumpism—Globalism Takes Big Hits in Land of the Rising Sun
For the past 8 years, Japan has undergone a quiet revolution. For many Japanese, the old system of alliances centered around the US security treaties is a dead letter. This realization of the ending of the American era has led to a fundamental rethinking of Japan’s place in the world. This shift also foreshadowed the rejection of “Globalism”—the now-broken code for honey-phrased international socialism—that occurred last November in the US and over the summer in the UK.
Here’s how the American century was squandered. Under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, foreign policy isolated and angered America's allies while coddling, or in some cases overtly funding and enabling, America's enemies. For many nations in Asia, such as Thailand, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines, US foreign policy from 2009 to 2017 made it painfully obvious that, despite "Pacific Pivot" platitudes and other nostrums, the United States was no longer a trusted ally. These nations saw little choice but to appease the rising hegemon of Asia, the People’s Republic of China.
But now an entirely new Asian dynamic is at play. The US presidential vote was a resounding rejection of the globalist vision, and a ringing reassurance to US allies in the region that Americans do, indeed, share the values that many Asian nations have come to embrace.
The globalist American press has worked with unprecedented fervor—and increasing desperation—to marginalize Americans’ fast-growing skepticism of the globalist agenda. Among the Asian nations, Japan has had its version of the Reagan revolution/Trump revolt in Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. For daring to proclaim that the people of a given nation have rights that must be protected, Abe—and Trump—have come under a withering globalist media and establishment attack.
Under Abe, Japan, already an indispensable American ally, has risen to an even greater level of importance to Washington’s policy in the Far East. But Abe’s rise must also be put in the context of the full-scale collapse of US-backed globalism throughout Asia.
For example, eight years of failed US diplomacy have left the once-hopeful democracy of South Korea a shambolic mess poised perfectly for a hard-left takeover. President Park Geun-hye, the first female South Korean president, sought to turn the comfort woman issue to her advantage, but, with her impeachment and recent arrest, has now learned that feminist outrage is even more dangerous for women than for men.
Park’s potential replacements are all openly vowing to abrogate the agreement to base the US THAAD (Theater High-Altitude Area Defense) missile warning and defense system in South Korea. Many of Park’s candidate successors express sympathies with China and North Korea. The depth of South Korea’s leftist plunge was revealed in part last year when US ambassador Mark Lippert was slashed in the face by a fanatic subsequently hailed as a hero.
It has therefore suddenly become a distinct possibility that the United States will lose South Korea as a key ally, and will no longer be able to base critical defence systems against North Korean nuclear aggression anywhere on the Korean peninsula. This makes Japan all the more important. The heightened prominence of Japan in the US alliance system does much to explain why Japan’s prime minister has been so viciously attacked by the globalist press.
Fortunately, as in America, Japan has a wave of popular conservative intellectual opinion makers. Surprisingly, they are mostly young and female. To this we turn in the second part of this two-part essay.
Japan's Enlightened Women Lead the Charge against Leftist Globalism
As Jonathan Bethune noted in his August 2016 Japan Today essay “Japanese politics and new media: Lessons from the recent election,” Prime Minister Abe’s re-election bid was successful in large part because 18 and 19 year olds were allowed to vote in the last elections. Many of these young, new voters are anti-globalist, just as their American counterparts were in the US presidential election held a few months later.
Much of this disaffection with globalism is driven by new-wave Japanese conservative women. These young women reject the corporate media (also seeing it as "fake news"), and tend to analyze the issues in depth from multiple sources, thus rejecting the globalist narrative imposed by the left-wing establishment.
Interestingly, these Japanese conservatives are attacked mostly by Americans in English-language publications—the same Americans who have been attacking conservatives and populists in the Western hemisphere from Reagan and Thatcher to Farage and Trump. Many older conservative Americans have long since adopted the liberal narrative perfected by Franklin Roosevelt—usually through ignorance of Japan carefully cultivated by selective translation and American “scholarship”—but younger conservatives are waking up to the decades of globalist lies. These long years of blind acceptance of the globalist line by the majority of American conservatives are what confuse Japanese conservatives the most.
Conservative men on both sides of the Pacific have been largely silent in the face of the leftist hijacking of the history of Japan-American relations. But Japanese conservative women seem to thrive on these attempts at repression. With each new insult against their intelligence, these women only grow bolder.
Nor is this phenomenon limited to ethnically Japanese females. Korean and Taiwanese women living in Japan have also joined the ranks in support of Abe and in rejection of globalism. A diverse coalition including journalist Yoshiko Sakurai, South Korea-born professor Oh Sonfa, Taiwanese Birei Kin, former North Korean abduction issue minister Kyoko Nakayama, former Diet member Mio Sugita, non-fiction author Keiko Kawasoe, journalists Miki Ootaka and Kaori Arimoto, and the irrepressible critic and opinion-leader Yoko Mada has risen up in opposition to entrenched academic establishment hate-mongers like University of Connecticut professor Alexis Dudden, Temple Japan professor Jeff Kingston, Japan-bashing clearinghouse manager Columbia professor Carol Gluck, and a host of other political activists ensconced in hard-left academia.
Yoko Mada is a good example of the grass-roots movement of young enlightened women now canvassing the Internet. Under her YouTube handle "Random Yoko," Mada uses both English and Japanese to address a growing number of followers on issues regarding the Japan-US relationship. Long before Trump had even won the Republican nomination, Mada was leading the "Make America Great Again" movement in Japan. In some of her recent videos, Mada has spotlighted the amateur politicking of anti-Japan activist Alexis Dudden, just one of many leftist "experts" whom the majority of voters in Japan and the US are now ignoring. Mada's videos show just how desperate American leftists are to cripple the Abe administration, which has consistently proven itself to be one of America's most critical allies.
Mada’s work serves as a warning to Americans: the left is anxious to vilify the Japanese conservative movement because that movement threatens to undermine what the left has been working to achieve since gaining ascendancy in the American media and academe—the downfall of the United States and the abandonment of Japan to the Maoist heritage state on the Chinese mainland.
The globalist elite—a male-dominated congeries of effectively stateless profiteers—has wreaked havoc on communities worldwide. The most truly global aspect of the globalists’ activities has been their ability to destroy livelihoods and undermine the ability of men to earn an honest paycheck. Men have largely tolerated this, perhaps afraid of being labelled a racist and therefore barred from any kind of employment in the future. But women have seen what is happening to their hometowns, and they have had enough. Globalism is breaking on the shoals of a thousand hardscrabble towns, but it is taking a real pounding in Japan, where fearless women are uniting to stop the globalists from undermining the alliance system which keeps their families safe.
