Nationalism is strongly resurgent in Japan, and seeking the roots of this resurgence, I could not help thinking about it Freudian terms.

Many Japanese people believe that they have forgotten something vital to their identity. They want to remember, even though doing so runs the risk of un-doing the post-war generation’s carefully constructed image of Japan as a modern capitalist nation based on individual freedoms and human rights. The will to overcome this cultural amnesia and remember an identity now deemed authentic is couched in terms that are strikingly Oedipal.

The Japanese who identify themselves as the grandchildren of the Pacific War generation are in rebellion against, and seek to replace, their own fathers -- the generation defined as the architects of Japan’s contemporary society and economy, with its accompanying emphasis on war guilt and individual liberty. A generation of “sons” thus resolves its ambivalent anger and consequent guilt toward their fathers by leapfrogging a generation and identifying with their grandfathers, the members of the war generation but also, in the view of increasing number, the last generation to be authentically and genuinely Japanese.

As Streek-Fischer writes, commenting on the rise of Hitler-worshipping skinheads in post-unification Germany: “Adolescents seek continuity and identity. If they do not find any appropriate perspectives in their family and society, they look for it in the past – in their family’s and society’s ‘past.’” The same thing can be said of contemporary Japan.