Some members are descendants of the people who started the war, he notes.
Kobayashi is so vexed with his former brethren, that in May he created a new political party to promote and protect constitutional rights called, somewhat amusingly, Kokumin Ikari-no Koe aka The Angry Voice of the People. For Nippon Kaigi, he is a traitor and a nightmare. For Prime Minister Abe, he is an angry loud-mouthed headache.
And Abe is having other headaches before the election. Seicho No Ie, the spiritual forebear of Nippon Kaigi, has turned its back on the LDP and the ruling coalition as well—its first overt political action in decades.
The organization told the Weekly Post last month, “The Abe government thinks lightly of the constitution and we are opposed to their attempts to change Article 9 (the peace clause). In addition, we feel distrust in their failure to uphold policy determined by law.”
Despite Nippon Kaigi’s small numbers overall, half of the Abe Cabinet belongs to the Nippon Kaigi National Lawmakers Friendship Association, the group’s political offshoot. Prime Minister Abe himself is the special advisor.
Former Defense Minister Yuriko Koike, who is running for Governor of Tokyo, is another prominent member.
Sankei Shimbun and others have reported that Nippon Kaigi even tried to pressure the publisher, Fusosha, into dropping the book on April 28. The protest letter sent to the publisher was surprisingly under the name of the group’s secretary general, Yuzo Kabushima, not the name of the Chairman Tadae Takubo.
Kabushima is a staunch Emperor worshipper and was a key member of Seicho No Ie’s student movement. Sugano argues in his book that Kabushima is the person really running the organization.
Despite the threatening tone of the letter, the publisher didn’t budge. Originally, only 8,000 copies of the book were printed. It’s now on it’s fourth printing with over 126,000 copies sold. Five other books have now been printed on the group; magazines are running front-page stories about them.
Suddenly, Nippon Kaigi is very visible.
Sugano is surprised and relieved to see Nippon Kaigi and its influence on national policy finally getting attention. He himself is a political conservative who graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in political science before returning to Japan over a decade ago.
While he was living in Texas, where he picked up a bit of an accent, he noticed how the Christian evangelical movement exerted political influence and sees some parallels in their methods and those of Nippon Kaigi.
Sugano was still a white collar worker aka “salary-man” when he first became aware of the existence of Nippon Kaigi. Back in 2008, Sugano recalls the shift he felt in the atmosphere on the streets. “Crazy people were starting to speak out,” he says. Protests lead by groups, such as the anti-foreigner hate speech group Zaitokukai were more noticeable. He saw an ugly escalation of their activities with each passing day.
He found these hate speech movements troubling and started to infiltrate their protests, documenting the events in photos and recordings. In order to understand the motives of members and supporters, he started to dig into the conservative publications often referenced in their online comments.
The contributors that wrote for these publications puzzled him. Many were established in their field, journalists and academics, all contributing on topics unrelated to their expertise. This peculiar pattern helped him connect the dots: they all seemed to be members of one group. That realization led him down the rabbit hole, where he found the revisionist wonderland that is Nippon Kaigi.
4/6
