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HOME ABOUT SUBSCRIBE ARCHIVE CONTRIBUTORS SEARCH Search archive YOUR ACCOUNT BACK TO NLR 8, MAR APR 2001 PDF BERTELL OLLMAN WHY DOES THE EMPEROR NEED THE YAKUZA? Prolegomenon to a Marxist Theory of the Japanese State On june 5, 1999, a junior high school principal in Osaka was stabbed and seriously injured by a member of the yakuza, Japan’s mafia. He had refused to raise the hinomaru—the Rising Sun flag—or allow the kimigayo anthem (‘Let the Emperor Rule Forever’) to be sung at the graduation ceremony. In February, the principal of a high school near Hiroshima had been driven to suicide: conflicting pressures from the Ministry of Education, ordering the use of song and flag, and from his own teachers, urging him to stand firm, had proved unendurable. A show of respect for the national symbols was made mandatory in Japanese schools in 1989, but it is only in the last two years that it has been seriously enforced. What is going on here? And why has a seemingly minor cultural dispute b...

HOME ABOUT SUBSCRIBE ARCHIVE CONTRIBUTORS SEARCH Search archive YOUR ACCOUNT By the same author ‘Obama vs Okinawa’ ‘Koizumi’s Coup’ ‘Remilitarizing Japan’ ‘North Korea in the Vice’ ‘Breaking the Iron Triangle’ ‘Kim Country: Hard Times in North Korea’ ‘The Price of Affluence: The Political Economy of Japanese Leisure’ ‘Japan and America: Antagonistic Alliance’ ‘The Student Left in Japan’ BACK TO NLR 7, JAN FEB 2001 PDF REVIEWS Herbert Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan HarperCollins: New York 2000 GAVAN MCCORMACK JAPAN’S HOUDINI The story goes that fanatical Japanese militarists pressured the unwilling Emperor Hirohito into World War II, with a suicidal zeal that it took two atom bombs to destroy; and that American democracy reluctantly conceded the peace-loving monarch a non-political role in postwar Japan, in deference to his devoted subjects. Herbert Bix’s magisterial new biography—the first anglophone work to draw on the full array of court sources now available—proves ...

HOME ABOUT SUBSCRIBE ARCHIVE CONTRIBUTORS SEARCH Search archive YOUR ACCOUNT By the same author ‘Obama vs Okinawa’ ‘Koizumi’s Coup’ ‘Remilitarizing Japan’ ‘North Korea in the Vice’ ‘Breaking the Iron Triangle’ ‘Kim Country: Hard Times in North Korea’ ‘The Price of Affluence: The Political Economy of Japanese Leisure’ ‘Japan and America: Antagonistic Alliance’ ‘The Student Left in Japan’ BACK TO NLR 7, JAN FEB 2001 PDF REVIEWS Herbert Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan HarperCollins: New York 2000 GAVAN MCCORMACK JAPAN’S HOUDINI The story goes that fanatical Japanese militarists pressured the unwilling Emperor Hirohito into World War II, with a suicidal zeal that it took two atom bombs to destroy; and that American democracy reluctantly conceded the peace-loving monarch a non-political role in postwar Japan, in deference to his devoted subjects. Herbert Bix’s magisterial new biography—the first anglophone work to draw on the full array of court sources now available—proves ...