A piece thoroughly researched and written with love, and yet able to keep a distance from its subjects, by Hana and Real Japanese Aesthetics.

Some glitches around the student movements: there were two prominent trends. One related to the revision of the Japan-US Security Treaty under Nobusuke Kishi’s government, culminating in 1960. The other, late 60s to early 70s, sprang from different causes, mainly corruption in the universities and student dissatisfaction.

One thing that runs like a silent thread: Kishi was the grandfather of the assassinated Shinzō Abe. Hana mentions “even the assassination of a former prime minister” as one of the most important ruptures of the Lost Decades, but leaves him unnamed; I am naming him so as not to miss that the toppled prime minister of 1960 and the assassinated one of 2022 are the same bloodline, and that in Shinzō Abe’s own rhetoric his grandfather was ever present, so ever present that sometimes one would experience a cyberpunk-like distortion of historical presence. Shinzō Abe, as a little kid barricaded inside his grandfather’s house, heard the protests against Kishi, held after the war as a Class-A war crimes suspect, never tried, and then (as happens in some political fairy tales) rehabilitated all the way to the premiership and leadership of the postwar, perennially dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) of Japan, an ascent of almost Byzantine dexterity.

The American alt right finding ground in Japan gets a mention too, and some would read it through Kojève’s famous footnote on Japan, added to the second edition of his Hegel lectures after a 1959 visit, where post-war Japan appears as a post-historical society living by pure “snobbery,” formalized values emptied of historical content: a mirror I find inverted, and closer to Murakami and city pop than to Thiel, Yarvin, Kirk (is a poorly read and misunderstood Mishima their mirror?), but that’s a note of its own.

Haruki Murakami, city pop, Shibuya-kei: it’s a beautifully framed and written post. Hats off. Really.