This presentation analyzes the use of the cryptofascist chiffre “Japan” as part of the metapolitical discursive strategy of the New Right in Germany, particularly the fiction of Japan as mono-ethnic nation, its restrictive migration policy, and the admiration for novelist Mishima Yukio.
Paper long abstract
In the past decades, “Japan” has been truly fetishized by the global New Right. The aim of a discursive strategy that proponents of the New Right themselves describe as “metapolitics”, is to disseminate extremist ideas in the so-called “pre-political” sphere of culture. The long-term goal of this strategy is to “normalize” anti-feminist and racist ideologies before they can enter public political discourse. “Japan” is used as one of many cryptofascist chiffre in this metapolitical strategy. In this presentation, I will discuss political, intellectual, and subcultural metapolitical uses of “Japan” by the German New Right, namely the appropriation of the fiction of Japan as a mono-ethnic nation and admiration for Japan’s restrictive anti-migration policy as well as for the masculinist anti-feminism and anti-democratic rebellious aspirations of Japanese literary figure Mishima Yukio.