The secretive cult shaping Japan’s future
A powerful and secretive organisation with extreme views and deep roots in the country’s power structure is trying to make the nation great again
Given the reputation of the organisation he chairs, it’s hard to know what to expect before Tadae Takubo arrives – a whiff of sulphur, perhaps. Nippon Kaigi has been called an ultra-right cult and some say it wields a great deal of influence over Japan’s conservative government. As he walks unsteadily into the room however, the 83-year-old chairman of Nippon Kaigi seems less like Lucifer than a crusty old uncle with laughably out-of-date views.
The impression is reinforced when he speaks. A former journalist, Takubo wants to revive “traditional” Japanese values and restore the powers lost by the emperor after the second world war. He believes Japanese people have grown soft and complacent, especially the young: one of the few moments of light relief during a recent press conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan came when he advocated spanking naughty children.
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Known in English as “Japan Conference”, Nippon Kaigi’s charter lists six key goals, including building up the nation’s military forces, instilling patriotism in the young and revising much of the pre-war Meiji constitution. Yet, Takubo bristles at accusations that he wants to take Japan right, or worse, back to the past. “We merely want this to be a normal country,” he says. “We are pulling it from extreme left back to the centre.”
In fact, Nippon Kaigi’s charter is a shopping list of blatantly revisionist causes: applaud Japan’s wartime “liberation” of East Asia from Western colonialism; rebuild the armed forces; inculcate patriotism among students brainwashed by left-wing teachers; and revere the emperor as he was worshipped before the war. Like followers of US presidential hopeful Donald Trump, they want to “take back” their country from the liberal forces they believe are destroying it.
The group’s supporters say Japan’s constitution, written during the American-led occupation of 1945 to 1952, has emasculated the country. They despise the victor’s justice it meted out, and the famous pacifist clause, Article 9, that neutered the country’s armed forces. China’s turbocharged rise means revision can “wait no longer”, says Takubo. At a Nippon Kaigi conference last year, speaker after speaker warned China’s maritime expansion presented Japan with its worst crisis since the war.
After years of mostly flying beneath the radar, Nippon Kaigi is in the news. A book on its hold over Japanese politics has sold in excess of 130,000 copies and it is the subject of several television programmes. Takubo gave his first press conference to foreign media in Tokyo, partly to dismiss the wilder conspiratorial claims about the group.
