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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
Many studies of postwar Japan have emphasized that an ideology of ethnic homogeneity has been an important element in Japanese society since 1945. Oguma and others have argued that this ideology contrasts with the view of a multi-ethnic empire that was prevalent prior to 1945. It has been widely proposed, we believe correctly, that this ideology of ethnic homogeneity —the idea of the tan'itsu minzoku —has been used by political and business elites to weaken class unity and to exacerbate other divisions among working people. The term “cultural nationalism” probably best encapsulates this ideology. A vast pseudo-scientific literature known as Nihonjinron (literally “theories of Japanese(ness)”) has grown up in support of this cultural nationalism and has in turn been widely critiqued, both in Japanese and in English.
[1] Oguma Eiji, A Genealogy of ‘Japanese’ Self images (Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2002).
[2] Yoshino Kosaku, Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan: A Sociological Enquiry (London: Routledge, 1992).
[3] See Harumi Befu, Hegemony of Homogeneity: An Anthropological Analysis of Nihonjinron (Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2001); Peter N. Dale, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (London: Croom Helm, 1986); Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Re-Inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998); Ross Mouer and Yoshio Sugimoto, Images of Japanese Society (London: Kegan Paul International, 1986) and Yoshio Sugimoto and Ross Mouer, Nihonjinron ni Kansuru 12 Sho [12 Chapters on Nihonjinron] (Tokyo: Gakuyo Shobo, 1982).
[4] Yoshino, 24-25.
[5] “Aso says Japan is nation of ‘one race’“, Japan Times, October 18, 2005.
[6] Brian J. McVeigh, Japanese Higher Education as Myth (Armonk, NY.: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), 149.
[7] McVeigh, 150. See M. Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995).
[8] Ikeda Jiro, Nihonjin no kita michi [The Route Traveled by the Japanese] (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1998), 14-17.
[9] Oguma, 179.
[10] See, for example, R. Siddle, “From assimilation to indigenous rights: Ainu resistance since 1869”, in W.W. Fitzhugh and C.O. Dubreuil (eds), Ainu: Spirit of a Northern People (Washington D.C.: Arctic Studies Center, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, 1999), 108-115.
[11] Ivan P. Hall, Cartels of the Mind: Japan's Intellectual Closed Shop (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998).
[12] McVeigh, 150.
[13] McVeigh, 150.
[14] P.R. Brass, “Elite groups, symbol manipulation and ethnic identity among the Muslims of South Asia”, in D. Taylor and M. Yapp (eds.), Political Identity in South Asia (London: Curzon, 1979), 35-43.
[15] Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 20.
[16] Immanuel Wallerstein, “The construction of peoplehood: racism, nationalism, ethnicity”, in E. Balibar and I. Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), 71.
[17] A similar point is made for the Chumash of California by B.D. Haley and L.R. Wilcoxon, “How Spaniards became Chumash and other tales of ethnogenesis”, American Anthropologist 107 (2005): 432-445.
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