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There's an interesting story by Bruce Wallace (with reporting from Hisako Ueno) in Thursday's LA Times -- which, for my money, carries the best coverage of any American daily paper on Japan -- about the proposals to revise Japan's Education Law. In essence, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, especially Chief Cabinet Secretary Abe Shinzo, has been aching for a revision of the law that would encode a stronger emphasis on "patriotism" into the curriculum. By the standards of most countries, what they're proposing is pretty small potatoes: basically, love of country, civic purpose, etc.

The article is quite good at pointing out that one of the goals is to rein in liberal teachers, especially those in the left-wing teachers' union, Nikkyoso; the LDP already eviscerated the postwar left most effectively in the late 1980s by privatizing Japan National Railways (now JR), which essentially obliterated the railworkers as members of Sohyo, the overall public sector labor union that was the electoral heart of the Socialist party. Going after Nikkyoso seems to me to be a mop-up operation to eliminate any trace of the postwar radical left, and forcing teachers to engage in more patriotic education is one way to do it.

Among the responses on the left has been the continued mobilization of images of Japanese as, in essence, collectivistic and easily controlled, two cultural claims that I reject. For some critics, patriotic education is especially dangerous in Japan because an emphatic allegiance to the state will render Japanese youth unable to resist the creeping demands for a fascist or militaristic government. I gave a lecture a couple of months ago at a Japanese university where an elderly dean said, in front of the students, that Japan isn't like the United States, because Japanese lack the capacity for critical thought; "we can be led easily, like sheep." My response was that even a year ago, a substantial number of Americans knew for a fact that Saddam Hussein was at least partly responsible for September 11th, despite the fact that virtually all evidence said that he wasn't; and even now, a substantial number of Americans aren't really sure about that whole "evolution" thing. So are Japanese really more credulous and easily led than Americans?

That said, what's fascinating about the debate about the Education Law is the set of claims regarding what the change will accomplish. Abe -- who has been described as combining the temperate and gentle manner of his father, former Foreign Minister Abe Shintaro, with the hard-right political views of his grandfather, Kishi Nobusuke, a postwar Prime Minister who had been jailed by the American Occupation as a Class-A war criminal -- generally takes the lead on this. For Abe, virtually anything that has gone wrong in Japan can be ascribed to the Education Law. Abe even suggested that the Livedoor Scandal, which is sort of hum-drum to Americans like me who are accustomed to Enron and Worldcom shenanigans, was the result of Japan's education system, presumably because the breakdown in authority, blah blah, too much individualism, blah blah, led its overly selfish young president to lie to shareholders.

This isn't new to the Japanese Right (of which Abe, possibly the next Prime Minister, is a crucial member); a few years ago, I had to listen to one lecture by a conservative Japanese scholar explain that virtually every problem in Japan was the consequence of Article IX (the "peace article") in Japan's Constitution. It was one of the most admirably nutty performances I've seen by any academic, particularly when one very polite and very smart scholar in the audience asked, "Is there any kind of logical connection between the things you're talking about?" To which he responded, basically, "This is my opinion." Which presumably elevates it to a place where it doesn't need to be empirically verified. This is part of why the Japanese Right reminds me so much of the Christian Right in the United States; I mean, if you know for a fact that a change in the constitution to give Japan a real military will solve all of its social problems because this is what the Japanese national spirit wants, or if you know for a fact that more Christian education will prevent teens from having sex because this is what the Bible sort of says, why should one be forced to engage the mundane world of cause-effect relations in which so many researchers are trapped?

The most powerful and compelling tool the would-be revisionists have at their disposal is that the Education Law was written by the US Occuption authorities and hasn't been revised since. The authors in right-wing magazines, like Seiron, invariably emphasize that the Education Law was mostly written by Americans. Even the major opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan, has proposed a revision that would emphasize a love of country, and the DPJ's chief, Ozawa Ichiro, has himself emphasized that the largely American-drafted law doesn't really fit Japan. And for the many, many voters who look at the profound and unsettling social changes taking place in Japan -- particularly, as I've argued elsewhere, involving young people and women -- and think "something has to be done," it seems like a good idea to start with an education law that, for the love of God, wasn't even primarily written by Japanese.

As much as the right-wingers want to crush Nikkyoso and other leftists for turning Japanese youth into selfish individualists, my sense is that a new Education Law isn't going to do much to get women to marry younger and have more babies or to get young men to give up their sexually ambiguous stylings and rejoin the labor market as properly disciplined salarymen from the 1960s. Nor is it going to turn young Japanese into willing martyrs for the re-establishment of the Japanese empire, as some leftists fear. But it will shift the playing field a bit more in favor of Japan's conservative political elite, even as they will be forced to recognize that they have very little control over their nation's social and demographic transformations.