Goyo gakusha: Welcome to Japan’s new cancel culture |
On May 2, demonstrators opposed to amending Japan’s “peace” Constitution gathered outside the prime minister’s official residence in Tokyo. Most were opposed to any revision of the Constitution’s pacifist clause, Article 9, which, of course, was well within their rights of free speech and assembly.
But they also carried placards listing the names of professors, including prominent international relations scholars at major Japanese universities, whom they condemned as compromised. Their sin? Serving on government advisory committees. The placards read — and the protestors chanted — the slogan: Goyo gakusha, haji o shire! (Court scholar, shame on you!)
That’s a direct translation. But the true meaning of Goyo gakusha is closer to government lapdog or lackey. The label has a long and useful history in Japan. It is a way of declaring an entire body of research illegitimate without engaging with any of it. The scholars named are not obscure figures who have escaped scrutiny. Their work appears in peer-reviewed journals, in books from major university presses and in international forums. What was being denounced was not the quality of their scholarship but their advisory roles — the rooms they had agreed to sit in.
All of which reminds me of a loyalty test called fumi-e (trampling image) under the Tokugawa shogunate, common during the early 17th century. Suspected Christians were ordered to trample on bronze images of Jesus or the Virgin Mary. The ritual used in villages across Japan until it faded in the late 19th century was not designed to discover what one believed in private. It was a public performance — visible proof of compliance that displaced the question of inner conviction with the question of outward conformity. To refuse to step on the image of Jesus was an admission of........