Hi. I have to agree with Tom Gill here that Japanese college students aren't so much more nationalistic or rightist as relatively ignorant and often uninterested in politics. I don't have others' long experience teaching in Japan but after teaching for one term there I have this same impression. I find this is as true of the pacifist left as it is of the new right among college students. When I asked them I found that few of them follow the news every day from any source (newspaper, television, or online), and when I did a survey of my students in a class of about 20 students (all but 1 Japanese) on US-Japan relations they had some interesting if often naive views of US bases in Okinawa. They were equally split on whether US bases there should be reduced or eliminated, but if they were, neither the pacifist left and more conservative students wanted a US base moved near them, but two-thirds thought the bases should be turned over to the SDF; all thought China and N. Korea were a threat, but only one-third thought that Japan's SDF alone could defend Japan and the other 2/3 didn't have a clue on what to do.

In short, neither the pacifist leftist students nor the more conservative students seemed to think at all rationally about the consequences of their opinions, whether for e.g., turning US bases over to the SDF would in fact in any way improve Okinawan's hazards of crime, environment, etc compared to US bases, whether Japan could build its forces up enough by itself without the US (especially given its aging population, massive debt etc) to defend itself, or whether the SDF could in fact perform the same roles in Asia as US forces on Okinawa. My overall impression is that these issues, as has always been the case in postwar Japan, are emotional, identity, and "valence" issues and that college students' views and orientations and values are already mostly formed from parents and h.s. and college teachers and have little to do with information, knowledge, or rational analysis. Whether left or right there is a streak of anti-American feeling about things like the basis and a desire to not have them in Japan, but no real hard thinking about the consequences of that for Japan. The pacifist left students are certainly not the "Ampo" generations of the 60s and 70s ready to go out in the streets to demonstrate; neither are the new generation of conservatives rightist nationalists fully supportive of Abe and ready to pay the taxes and join the military to defend Japan.

Too often in the postwar, and I think today, the alternatives are presented to Japanese, young and old, as one of two emotional extremes without rational analysis and thought about realistic consequences of the alternatives. And this prevents a practical discourse of what Japan's choices really are. This is as true of college students as adults.

Best,
Ellis Krauss