The Issuikai Took My Baby Away // explaining Suzuki Kunio and the New Right / watching Kaneko Yu's Belgrade 1999 / politics of futility + mental health
ONE (obituary of Suzuki Kunio, explaining the New Right to myself)
I read yesterday morning about the death of Suzuki Kunio. The English edition of the Yomiuri Shimbun described him as the head of a group called Issuikai. I’m sure I’d heard the name before, but I couldn’t tell you how he was any different from the average nationalist. Few details were given about his beliefs. The note that he was "not bound by the established right wing" was vague.
It seemed unexpected for the country’s right-leaning newspaper of record to accord a nationalist activist’s death so few column inches. I looked up the Japanese-language version of the same obituary and found that it to be the same. It deleted a line about him being a commentator for professional wrestling broadcasts, and it added one about him being the main proponent on the postwar right for disengaging with the United States. It was obvious, then, why he was being given such a brusque send-off: the postwar Yomiuri Shimbun was consistently the most pro-American media outlet in the country.
Here, I will begin to make generalizations. The average postwar nationalist group, most of which were extensions of organized crime, and kept around for their ability to provide a link between the underworld and legitimate politics. They were an outgrowth of wartime nationalist organizations that had taken part in clandestine activities at home and in occupied territories, serving the state and enriching themselves; after the war, they easily switched allegiances. Suzuki’s Issuikai attempted to move in another direction, building from the more idealist right movements that came out of radical politics in the 1960s.
He was not an organized crime-connected tough guy, but a disillusioned campus activist. After leaving Waseda in the late 1960s, he gave up politics for a while. What brought him back was the ritual suicide of his friend Morita Masakatsu alongside Mishima Yukio on November 25th, 1970. He asked himself why he had drifted out of engagement with politics, while his friend had been willing to sacrifice himself to the cause.
Issuikai was founded in 1972 as an attempt to honor the sacrifice of Morita.
Although the group was involved in the usual right-wing provocation, like protests outside of embassies, marches, and demonstrations, but they set themselves apart by absorbing fringe figures, many of whom were just getting out of prison for terrorist actions during the 1960s, reviving pre-war and wartime, nationalist thinkers, and for openly considering the ideas and methods of radical groups from outside the traditional nationalist sphere.
To describe them, at least in their earlier form, as anti-American might be misleading. Like Mishima, who they took as a martyr, they believed that the political and legal system imposed by the United States was fundamentally at odds with Japanese society. They acknowledged something that seems obvious to the outside observer, which is that there can be no Japanese nationalism without expelling the occupying foreign power.
They were christened the New Right by a sympathetic journalist.
In his later years, Suzuki seemed to become interested in building connections to the radical left. There were nationalists there, too, even if their political projects diverged; there were many more that were willing to listen to someone espousing American military expulsion as a first step. This suggested that he had realized another thing that is obvious to the outside observer: a serious Japanese nationalism would need to appeal beyond the organized crime-connected tough guys and pretenders that drive the sound trucks around on holidays. He attacked enemies to his right—not for being too extreme, but for being swept up in cultural politics imported from the West. Without compromising his foundational beliefs in expelling the Americans and restoring an essentially Japanese cultural system, he held discussions with ideological opponents. He took trips to Iraq on junkets that included former student radicals.
He supported the enactment of an effective law against hate speech (a 2016 act criminalized hate speech but under a hazy definition and with no penalty). From the beginning, he had seemed cynical about the Japanese right putting so much energy behind attacks on Korean residents, and suspicious of their function in the rightist world view as something like Jews are for white supremacists. He took trips to Pyongyang and Seoul. And right-wing rivals accused him of being a Korean plant.
He was a nationalist that seemed capable of building a project greater than suppressing local dissent, bullying Koreans, and campaigning for center-right hacks that ran on platforms of serving America more effectively. That was my impression, at least.
I found a review of a documentary called Belgrade 1999, about the later years of the Issuikai, featuring Suzuki.
TWO (suicide investigation, demonstrations against sanctions)
Although Suzuki appears briefly, the film is superficially about a trip to Belgrade by Issuikai cadre Kimura Mitsuhiro, and actually about a filmmaker trying to find out why his ex-girlfriend killed herself.
Kaneko Yu narrates his tragic love story. A child of parents that were 1960s campus radicals, he got engaged in left-wing activism himself. We see grainy footage of him waving banners demanding freedom for Palestine. He ended up in Iraq on a solidarity junket. It’s unclear precisely when this happened, but sometime in the mid-1990s. It was there that he met a young woman (her name is edited out of the voiceover), also from Japan, on some kind of cultural junket. He seems to suggest she was a failed idol, who got sucked into a gig in Baghdad. They fell in love.
They shared many things, but they did not agree on politics. Kaneko Yu was interested in leftist solidarity with the oppressed people of the world, and his girlfriend was convinced by Issuikai’s more muscular anti-Americanism and promotion of strong, nationalist movements as a buffer against Western interference.
Years later, after they had already broken things off, she killed herself. He was left with the question of what happened to her. He tells us that he worried that he had something to do with her choice. He doesn’t tell us that the documentary is an attempt to assuage his own guilt.
There is a shot of VHS tapes being fed into a machine. Kaneko tells us in voiceover that he is going to review some old tapes. This footage is mysterious to me. Some of it is labeled as being from 1999, but some must be from earlier. It seems that he shot it himself. Going by the chronology that he has given, he had already broken things off with the young woman, and she appears unacknowledged in the footage.
Kaneko makes an Issuikai cadre named Kimura Mitsuhiro the subject. He follows him on a demonstration outside the American Embassy, protesting sanctions. And we see the young woman in the crowd, holding a placard. (Is it really her? It is. It’s not clear here, but it is at the end of the film, based on how he edits these glimpses, accompanying a voiceover about her life.)
He tags along with Kimura on a trip to Yugoslavia to meet Serbian nationalists. This is not a sympathetic moment. The men he’s meeting are murderous thugs. Kaneko makes sure we realize this, with static shots of stacked bodies. Kimura seems oblivious.
In the end, nothing was accomplished. As Kimura says in a conversation with Kaneko taped in 2010, Yugoslavia no longer exists, many of the Serbian nationalists ended up meeting fitting ends, Iraq was smashed to pieces, and Saddam Hussein hanged by America.
But Kaneko is more concerned about Kimura’s connection to this ex-girlfriend’s suicide. In the 2010 conversation, he gives us a date for the death, which was in November of 2006, and gently prods Kimura to explain what he knows.
Kimura doesn’t have much to say. He doesn’t attempt to explain their choices. He doesn’t know what happened.
There is a cut to an Issuikai memorial ceremony for Mishima and Morita. A card informs us of the suicide of Issuikai activist Misawa Chiren in September of 2005.
In a voiceover, Kaneko alleges that Issuikai and its activists have created a culture that beautifies suicide. Kaneko has seized on this as an explanation. This seems to be his way of assuaging any guilt over his ex-girlfriend’s death. It seems tenuous. She had already left Issuikai. In her suicide note, she apologized to her parents. She said that she realized she could never live a normal life.
Misawa Chiren, the other victim of this nationalist romance of self-sacrifice, was a deeply troubled man, known for his penchant for self-mutilation and recreational animal abuse, who spent the 1980s in prison for a series of Molotov cocktail attacks on Western institutions. He seems clearly to be a different sort of person than the unnamed young woman.
It’s a frustrating film. Kaneko is a narcissist. At the end, discounting the Serbian nationalists and Saddam Hussein, he is the only one that inspires any revulsion. Why does he speak for her? She is right there. He is filming her. We know for sure by the end that we have been seeing her constantly. She is never allowed to speak, except in Kaneko’s paraphrasing of her suicide note.
THREE (mental health)
Since watching and re-watching Kaneko’s film, I have struggled to figure out what his intentions were. I am sure that he is intending to assuage his guilt. I am sure that he disagrees with many of the things that Issuikai stands for and wants to expose them as distasteful people. I am sure that he thinks it is horrible that Kimura supported Saddam Hussein and wants to draw a distinction between his conception of international solidarity and the one upheld by Issuikai. But I think there’s some further implication about how political beliefs should serve mental health. They should be a comfort, Kaneko seems to say. They should not be approached with the type of urgency that would encourage anybody to risk their lives. Coming from a political tradition—radical leftism in Japan—he has become accustomed to defeat, and to a program that has won no victories, so that all struggle is abstract, and usually conducted by oppressed people in foreign countries.
This puts too much stock in his idea that Issuikai’s politics had anything to do with the death of the young woman. It seems unlikely. If they did, we could look at it another way: she found a cause, she marched against sanctions and against air strikes on innocent people, and then she saw everything come to pieces, and her enemies triumph. That should be painful. But I don’t believe that’s what happened.
Suzuki Kunio died of pneumonia.