uyoku

There is no one nationalist party that can claim a monopoly of power in this constituency. Rather there is estimated to be around 1,000 separate parties, with a total of 100,000 uyoku members scattered all over Japan. Politically they wield considerable influence by having links with other mainstream parties (particularly the Liberal Democratic Party), and a clandestine network of right-thinking members of the Japanese public service and business world. With connections to both the yakuza and Sokaiya (professional blackmailers who threaten to blow the whistle on corporate corruption less they are paid off), the uyoku can effectively do the dirty work for politicians seeking to retain their squeaky clean image. Their favourite method of intimidation is to drive around in large black trucks armed with loudspeakers that blare out martial music, countless Banzais ! to the emperor and news of scandalous activities by corporate crooks (which in most other Western countries would just be a boring headline in the business section of a newspaper.). Otherwise, they may just keep the public aware of who they are by swaggering outside Yasukuni Jinja (a shrine where a number of dead soldiers are buried, the Japanese Diet or the Russian embassy (they have baggage about the Russian occupation of the Kuril Islands).

In 1992 a senior numbers man of the Liberal Democratic Party Shin Kanemaru was forced to resign after he was found trying to get one uyoku group to stop the activities of another which was whistleblowing (albeit for cash) an incident where Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita accepted a bribe from a transport company.

Yet the uyoku have other higher order objectives. They want Japan to re-arm its military and shed its pacifist constitution. They want the emperor to return to power. And in other social and economic areas of policy their ideology is essentially conservative, protectionist and undemocratic. One group, the Tatenokai ('shield society') was founded by author Yukio Mishima in 1968 in an attempt to encourage Japan's military leaders carry out a coup d'etat. All he got from a local barracks when he delivered a flowery speech was laughter, and so the dejected Mishima committed hara-kiri.

More recently in 1990 members of the uyoku shot the mayor of Nagasaki after he suggested that Japan should take responsibility for World War Two. Three years later the parents of a magazine editor who published an article criticising Empress Michiko was shot dead. One uyoku leader called Shusuke Nomura shot himself at the offices of an Asahi media outlet to demonstrate his displeasure of a satirical cartoon of him. You would think a letter to the editor would suffice.

The uyoku also feature as some kind of sub-caste in the role playing game Shadowrun. Perhaps they will swap their big black vans for big black spaceships, worshipping a cryogenically frozen Emperor Hirohito and pledging to establish a Japanese co-prosperity sphere on Mars.