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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
It is very difficult to say anything useful about Kobayashi Yoshinori today. Not least, because it was very hard to say anything about him in the first place. The lashings of masochistic self-irony in his work have been more than well commented upon. The more the manga artist and one contemporary face of cultural fascism in Japanese popular culture is criticized, the more it seems he feeds upon that controversy; the more he is pronounced “dead” as a significant cultural force, the more he seems to bounce back into necroperformative life.
An earlier version of this paper appeared in Japanese as: Mark Winchester, “‘Shamo’ he no Koshitsu: Kobayashi Yoshinori to Gendai Haigai (Hōsetsu)-shugi” [The Persistence of Being ‘Shamo’: Kobayashi Yoshinori and Contemporary Exclusion/Inclusionism], in Impaction, No. 174, Tokyo: Impact Publishers, May 2010, pp. 103-111. I would like to thank Ukai Satoshi for giving me the opportunity to write it and Mark Selden for the opportunity to translate it. I would also like to thank Gavin Walker and the folks at Zap'em in Kunitachi for the chance to talk about it.
1 Paul Chaat Smith, Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong, Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009, p. 27.
2 Here, “cultural fascism” is not at all meant as a pejorative epithet. The ideological edifice of fascist fantasy is, according to Slavoj Žižek, “to have capitalism without its ‘excess,’ without the antagonism that causes its structural imbalance;” to strive toward, “a harmonious corporate body, where, in contrast to capitalism's constant social displacement, everybody would again occupy his own place” (Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, Durham: Duke University Press, 1993, p. 210). To imagine that certain minzoku (ethnos/nation), and sabetsu (discrimination) in and of itself, are the reason for society's structural imbalance and a barrier to achieving an organic community that transcends these divisions, rather than ideological phenomena involved in a nexus of historically contingent and immanent forces which have proved entirely useful to Capital when it confronts the instability of the supply of labor power that it can attempt to commodify (i.e. leading to the racialized fractionalization of class in the production of the so-called “relative surplus population”), seems to me to be precisely a problem of seeking capitalist society without its “excess.” The notion of “generic fascism,” as well as the reluctance to appeal to the term fascism in regard to Japan due the problem of Western exceptionalism might also be useful in thinking about this point in terms of Kobayashi's work, but these issues are far beyond the scope of this paper. Interestingly, Kobayashi has made the claim that discrimination is “incorporated into capitalism as a necessary system;” that even if discrimination toward, for instance, Burakumin were to abide, capitalist society would find some other basis for discriminating against specific populations (Kobayashi Yoshinori, Gōmanism Sengen: Sabetsuron Supesharu [Haughtiness Manifesto: Special on Discrimination], Tokyo: Gentōsha Bunko, 1998, p. 88). He refuses the solution of a “Thomas Moore”-like “socialist revolution” in favor of lessening the effects of current discrimination (p. 95).
3 Mark Driscoll, “Kobayashi Yoshinori is Dead: Imperial War/Sick Liberal Peace/Neoliberal Class War,” Mechademia, Vol. 4, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009, pp. 290303.
4 Chaat Smith, Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong, p. 27.
5 Chaat Smith, Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong, p. 6.
6 Takeuchi Yoshimi “Nashonarizumu to Shakai Kakumei” [Nationalism and Social Revolution], in Marukawa Tetsushi & Suzuki Masahisa eds., Takeuchi Yoshimi Serekushon I: Nihon no/kara no Manazashi [Takeuchi Yoshimi Selection Volume I: The Gaze of/from Japan], Tokyo: Nihonkeizaihyōronsha, 2006, pp. 166-174, p.173.
7 To offer a fairly comprehensive list of Kobayashi's Ainu-related work since 2008: Kobayashi Yoshinori, “Gōmanism Sengen extra: Nihon Kokumin toshite no Ainu” [Haughtiness Manifesto extra: Ainu as Japanese Nationals], in Kobayashi Yoshinori ed., Washi-sm: Nihon Kokumin toshite no Ainu, Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 2008, pp. 11-50; Kobayashi Yoshinori, “Gōmanism Sengen Dai-sanjūgoshō: Ainu wa Senjūminzoku na no ka?” [Haughtiness Manifesto Part Thirty Five: Are the Ainu an Indigenous People?], in Sapio, Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 12 November 2008, pp. 59-66; Kobayashi Yoshinori, “Gōmanism Sengen Dai- sanjūnanashō: Genron Fūsatsuma no Bōryaku” [Haughtiness Manifesto Part Thirty Seven: The Plot of a Devil of Suppressing Speech], in Sapio, Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 17 December 2008, pp. 59-66; Kobayashi Yoshinori, “Gekiron-ban Gōmanism Sengen: Okinawa to Ainu, ‘Dōka’ wo dō kangaeru ka?” [Haughtiness Manifesto Extreme Debate Version: Okinawa and Ainu, How should we think about “Assimilation”?], Nishimura Kōsuke ed., Gekiron Mook: Okinawa to Ainu no Shinjitsu [Extreme Debate Mook: The Truth of Okinawa and the Ainu], Tokyo: ōkura Shuppan, 2009, pp. 9-26; Kobayashi Yoshinori, “Gōmanism Sengen: Jishō Ainu wa Jitsu wa Nihonjin de aru” [Haughtiness Manifesto: Self-proclaimed Ainu are Actually Japanese], in Sapio, 9 September 2009; Kobayashi Yoshinori, “Honke Gōmanism Sengen Dai-rokuwa: Ainu ‘Minzoku no Decchi-age’ wo Yurusuna!” [Original Haughtiness Manifesto Part Six: Do not Forgive the ‘Fabrication of an Ethnic’ Ainu!], in WiLL, Tokyo: Wakku Shuppan, April 2010, pp. 197-204. For Kobayashi's meeting with anthropologist, Kōno Motomichi, and a report on their subsequent conversation which was published in Hoppō Journal, see here. A video interview for the Right-wing television Channel Sakura with another of Kobayashi's informants, Sunazawa Jin, has also been broadcast and is viewable online at YouTube. A recording of a meeting of Kobayashi's new series of Nico-Dōga internet broadcasts, his “Haughtiness Manifesto Dōjō,”on the Ainu, again featuring Sunazawa Jin (and in which Kobayashi also makes a side remark at a paper mentioning him in passing that I published in the journal Gendai Shisō), can be seen here.
8 See, Mark Winchester, “On the Dawn of a New National Ainu Policy: The ‘Ainu as a Situation’ Today,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 41-3-09, October 12, 2009.
9 See, Satomi Ishikawa, Seeking the Self: Individualism and Popular Culture in Japan, Peter Lang Pub Inc, 2007, p. 103.
10 Marylin Ivy, “Foreword: Fascism Yet?” in Alan Tansman ed., The Culture of Japanese Fascism, Durham: Duke University Press, 2009, p. x.
11 The equivalent, perhaps, of the “paranoid nationalism” Ghassan Hage has written about during the same decades in Australia. See, Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society, Annandale: Pluto Press, 2003.
12 Friedrich Nietzsche (trans. Helen Zimmern), Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, London: Prometheus Books, 2008 [1909], p. 82. See also, Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism, p. 11.
13 Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, p. 203. Commenting on some of Kobayashi's predecessors in the world of popular manga, Nagahara Yutaka's comments on how the “corporeal principles” of national polity often revolve around “a suspension between the ‘dangerous permeability’ of body boundaries and their process of ‘continual purification,’ or between the ‘imperial megalomania’ of pillage and the ‘fear of annexation’ which accompanies the anxiety of separation and castration [from nation/state/national community]” as something that directly reflects the political interplay between the constant deterritorialization and reterritorialization of national boundaries, might also be pertinent here. Nagahara Yutaka (trans. Gavin Walker), “The Corporeal Principles of the National Polity: The Rhetoric of the Body of the Nation, or the State as Memory Apparatus,” in Nina Cornyetz & J. Keith Vincent eds., Perversion in Modern Japan: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Culture, London & New York: Routledge, 2009, pp. 60-100, p. 75.
14 This is a term Sasaki used when explicating the consistent logic behind both the 1899 Hokkaido Former Natives Protection Act and contemporary attempts to bestow upon Ainu the chance to socially advance: “They said that ‘former natives’ were ‘the same imperial subjects’ and yet, according to the principle of ‘survival of the fittest,’ said that they had ‘lost the ability to live their lives.’ Therefore, they must be ‘protected.’ This schema overlaps exactly the schema that says they are ‘Japanese nationals’ but ‘not equal’ and therefore must be socially advanced through ‘welfare.’ The degree of moderateness within which the words are clothed matters little. The underlying idea is the same. Therefore, what we must do before anything else is utter an objection to this idea.” See, Sasaki Masao, “‘Ainu’ naru Jōkyō” [The “Ainu” Situation], in Sasaki Masao Genshi suru “Ainu” [Hallucinating “Ainu”], Tokyo: Sōfūkan, 2008, pp. 124-144, pp. 140-141.
15 Kobayashi, Gomanism Sengen: Sabetsuron Supesharu, p. 91-92. The logic here actually makes me tentatively wonder whether or not there is something of the quite radical “hunger for a world that is undivided by the petty differences we retain and inflate by calling them racial” (p. 356) in the Suiheisha Declaration that Kobayashi misses, but certainly would be understood by, for instance, Chiri Mashiho. See, Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures, and the Allure of Race, London & New York: Penguin Books, 2000.
16 Kobayashi, Gomanism Sengen: Sabetsuron Supesharu, p. 31. P. 94.
17 Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, London & New York: Routledge, 2000, p. 47.
18 Kobayashi, “Gekiron-ban Gomanism Sengen: Okinawa to Ainu, ‘Dōka’ wo dō kangaeru ka?,” p. 23.
19 Kobayashi, “Gōmanism Sengen extra: Nihon Kokumin toshite no Ainu,” p. 31.
20 Kobayashi, “Gōmanism Sengen extra: Nihon Kokumin toshite no Ainu,” p. 28.
21 Frantz Fanon (trans. Richard Philcox), The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press, 2004 [1963], p. 5.
22 Ogawa Masato, Kindai Ainu Kyōiku Seido-shi Kenkyū [Studies in the History of the Modern Ainu Education System], Sapporo: Hokkaidō Daigaku Tosho Kankōkai, 1997, p. 365. For the content of the revisions that were made to the Protection Act in 1937 that Ogawa mentions here, see Richard Siddle, Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan, London & New York: Routledge, 1996, pp. 143-146.
23 Hirota Masaki, Sabetsu no Shisen: Kindai Nihon no Ishiki Kōzō [The Gaze of Discrimination: On the Structure of Modern Japan's Consciousness], Tokyo: Yoshikawa Hiromu Bunkan, 1998, p. 223.
24 This is, of course, not a position unique to the Japanese Empire. See, for example, Ghassan Hage, White Nation. For the similarity of Kobayashi's position with a long history of seeking out a “New Deal” with the State and the familial relationship between fascism and modern liberal democracy, see the essays in Yasushi Yamanouchi, J. Victor Koschmann, and Ryūichi Narita, Total War and ‘Modernization,’ Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series, 1998. For the notion of “palingenesis” as a central trope of modernity, see Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
25 Chiri Mashiho, “Ainu (Sōsetsu)” [Ainu (Summary Review)], in Sekai Daihyakkajiten, Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1972, p. 31.
26 Chiri Mashiho, Ainu Mintanshū (Ainu Folk Stories), in Chiri Mashiho, Chiri Mashiho Chosakushū [Collected Works of Chiri Mashiho], Vol. 1, Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1973, pp. 3-151, pp. 150-151.
27 Walter Benjamin, “Paris - Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” New Left Review I-48, March-April, 1968, pp. 77-88, p. 85.
28 Fujimoto Hideo, Chiri Mashiho no Shōgai: Ainu-gaku Fukken no Tatakai [The Life of Chiri Mashiho: Struggle for the Retribution of Ainu Studies], Tokyo: Sōfūkan, 1994, 164.
29 Kobayashi, “Gōmanism Sengen extra: Nihon Kokumin toshite no Ainu,” p. 18.
30 Takeuchi Yoshimi (trans. Richard Calichman), “What is Modernity? (The Case of Japan and China),” in Takeuchi Yoshimi (trans. Richard Calichman), What is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, pp. 53-81, p. 72.
31 Ibid, p. 71.
32 Kamada Tetsuya, “Chiri Mashiho no Tōsō,” in Gunzō, April 1999, Tokyo: Kōdansha, pp. 128-156.
33 Kamada, “Chiri Mashiho no Tōsō,” p. 150.