The Nation-State and Its Violence: Debates in Post-Cold War Japan

Abstract

This chapter discusses two strands of an ongoing debate in a post-cold war context and a subsequent postcolonial turn in Japan: a feminist attempt to build antimilitarist theory; and a general—not necessarily feminist—critique of the national flag, anthem, and of the state’s insistence on “love of country.” What these two debates have in common is their critique of the nation-state and the violence—both physical and symbolic—it entails. The nation-state is taken to mean a sovereign state with strictly defined spatial boundaries within which people ideally share a common language, culture, history, and identity. Since its invention in the late eighteenth-century in Europe, it has become the global model for the modern state. Japanese critics pay attention to coercion, oppression, hierarchization, and discrimination that the building and maintenance of the nation-state necessarily commands. The violence embedded in the nation-state is brought into critique not only in war making but also in its symbolic means to create and sustain a sense of national unity. An important aspect of the debates is that their critique is not particularized in the Japanese context. Rather, those engaged in debate are seeking to get at the very foundation of the nation-state as it was invented and permeated by Western colonial modernity.