Paper short abstract:

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.