Customer Reviews

Black Star over Japan: Rising Forces of Militarism

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It makes you feel so smart to read books that ask questions that you can answer. This happens most often when you pick up books like this one, over 30 years old, a volume that raises rather shrill warnings about increased militarism in Japan and its connections to business, politics, and the gangster world. With hindsight, you can smile very authoritatively and say, "Oh, well, he was way off the mark there !" Not so easy to do with such journalistic quickies that are still being turned out today, yet be sure that a lot of them will not turn out to be any more prophetic than Axelbank's BLACK STAR OVER JAPAN, written (in a hurry) in 1971. While Japanese expenditure on the Self-Defense Forces did rise precipitously back then, Japan has not developed nuclear weapons, it has not become a menacing power, it recognized and invested heavily in China, it definitely has not tried to invade Taiwan ( !) and it is only just now, under great pressure from Uncle Sam, deploying the first few Japanese soldiers overseas. Of course, the Soviet Union and communism have long ceased to be the threat they once were. China still figures to be Japan's chief rival---North Korea at the moment being the main threat if any. Nobody could fault Axelbank for not foreseeing the end of the Cold War. But, he seems to have combed Japan for facts and figures that would prove the rightist danger, overlooking Japan's deep conservatism and tendency towards conformity, consensus and precedent. He mentions but casts aside this extremely important aspect of Japanese culture, giving more weight to extremism and leadership of a generation that died out by the mid-80s. He spends several chapters telling about Japan's Communists, about radical students (remember the Zengakuren ?), about relations with Russia, China, and Taiwan, and in general blowing up the threat of rightist militarism far more than was necessary. The Japanese right wing was resurgent then, but breathless warnings turn out to have been overwrought. In short, this is a journalistic book dashed off in a hurry. It shows. Nobody needs to read this book in 2004 unless they are interested in what alarmists were thinking about Japan back in the early `70s.

Reads a bit rough, nothing to write home about. Very dated now, and reads sorta paranoid to boot.