SNA (Tokyo) — This SNA Speakeasy features Ulv Hanssen of Soka University on the theme of “Anti-Korean Hate Books in Japan.”

Transcript

Michael Penn: Welcome to another episode of the SNA Speakeasy. Today, we have a guest, his name is Ulv Hanssen and you’re here in Tokyo, yes, Ulv.

Ulv Hanssen: Yes, that’s right.

Michael Penn: Right. And he is going to talk to us about Korean hate books in Japan, which seems like an odd topic, but we’re going to get into it and figure out what it’s about and why it’s significant. So, first of all, why don’t you tell us all a little bit about yourself?

Ulv Hanssen: Yeah. So I’m an associate professor at Soka University. So I’m currently in Hachioji, which is very close to the university. And I’m originally from Norway. I’ve been teaching here at Soka University for approximately four years. I teach Japanese politics, international relations, and a host of other topics as well. And my recent interest has been hate books, as you said because this is something that I found very curious when I went to Japanese bookstores, I would see books with very hateful and derogatory language towards Koreans and Chinese in particular. And this, I hadn’t seen anywhere else. So I wondered…

Michael Penn: Well, can I stop you there?

Ulv Hanssen: Yes, sure.

Michael Penn: Do you remember the first time you saw it and what your reaction was?

Ulv Hanssen: I don’t remember exactly the first time. I can’t say I do. But I always felt it was kind of uncomfortable to see the presence of these kinds of books on the bookshelves. And when I started getting interested in Japan, that was back in 2005, perhaps, I think the first time I came to Japan was in 2005. And then there was the whole abduction issue thing going on because this was a couple of years after Koizumi had gone to North Korea and Kim Jong-Il had admitted to the abductions. So, media was full of negative takes on North Korea. And I think back then there were many books, or very negative takes on North Korea as well, but I wouldn’t go as far as calling them hate books. So, this is a much more recent phenomenon. Yeah. And by the way, I should also mention that the talk today will be based on an article that I’ve written in the Social Science Japan Journal, and it’s forthcoming. It’s past a peer review. I wrote it together with my Korean wife, Eun Hee Woo. And she, of course, being Korean, also felt that these books in the bookstores were an uncomfortable presence.

Michael Penn: Well, I would hope that even if your wife were Japanese, she would feel bad about it. So, first of all, when this article comes out, where will people be able to read it exactly?

Ulv Hanssen: Yeah. So, it will be in the next number of Social Science Japan Journal, which comes out only two times a year. So, I think actually the next issue will be in 2023, but it will appear online before print. So yeah, hopefully, very soon.

Michael Penn: Okay. And when did you decide to make this a serious study rather than just something that made you feel uncomfortable when you went to a bookstore?

Ulv Hanssen: Yeah. So actually, I never really had any intention of writing a peer-reviewed article on this topic. I was going to do a short article and send it maybe to a newspaper or something like that. But then one thing led to another and the research got more and more… Yeah, started diving into the details. And all of a sudden, I just figured I have so much information now, I might as well turn it into a full-fledged research article. So that happened in 2019 after reading this book by Nagae Akira, who is a person who has worked in the book industry for many, many years. And this I think is the first book-length work on hate books, trying to explain the books. And the title is Watashi wa Honya ga Suki deshita. So “I used to love, or I used to like bookstores”. And he also had the same experience as me as one who actually likes bookstores, but yeah, feels that they are now tainted by these hate books. So that was a big inspiration for me. So, it really started in 2019, I’d say.

Michael Penn: I kind of know the feeling even though not exactly hate books. I remember in the United States, when I began to get seriously into history, especially world history, a lot of the bookstores that were very popular in malls and things like this, I went to their history section and I got annoyed because it was like 95% US history. And I just kind of felt like the sort of things that were in the bookstore were kind of manipulative, really pushing people to certain points of view. And you think of a bookstore as being a place where the world kind of comes to your fingertips, but in reality, if the books you find there are slanted in a certain direction or overwhelmingly of a certain point of view, then it sort of poisons the well of public debate in my view.

Ulv Hanssen: Yeah. I agree.

Michael Penn: Okay. So, let’s move another step. I guess, a very important step is where are these hate books coming from?

Ulv Hanssen: Yeah. So maybe I should mention also what exactly we mean by a hate book.

Michael Penn: Exactly. Great.

Ulv Hanssen: Yeah. So, if you read Japanese literature on hate books, there are a couple of books about hate books. Then I think they use the term hate book or heitobon in Japanese. I think they use it pretty lightly without a clear definition. Not lightly, but loosely, I should say. So, a lot of books are included in the category of hate books, and I wouldn’t necessarily agree that all those books that are labelled as such necessarily are hate books. So, our definition is actually very simple. For us, a hate book is a book that contains hate speech, which brings us to another question, what exactly is hate speech. And here we rely on the UN definition, which I’m just going to briefly read. So according to the UN, hate speech is any kind of communication in speech writing or behavior that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group on the basis of who they are. In other words, based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, color, descent, gender, or other identity factors. So basically, it’s the kind of language that essentializes a whole group as something negative.

Michael Penn: I mean, let me stop you there because I want to debate that. That seems to be too loose, a definition to me. I mean, sort of the essentialization of different groups based on identity is probably about 90% of political speech, frankly. Doesn’t there have to be a little bit more of I mean like those guys standing out in front of stations calling Koreans cockroaches or something like that? Doesn’t there have to be a little bit more than denigration? Doesn’t have to be kind of almost a violent and hateful language?

Ulv Hanssen: Yeah, that too. But again, this is very subjective, I think, what exactly counts as where the limit actually goes. So, for us, we classified books as hate books if they essentialized. So, we only focused on anti-Korean books, but there are of course anti-Chinese books also. But we don’t read Chinese, so we didn’t do any research on them. But yeah, so if Koreans are essentialized in a binary manner where the Japanese are more or less glorified as doing everything right and the Koreans are the exact opposite, and if the labels used are very pejorative and derogatory, then we label them as hate books. So, these hate books are very full of binaries. So, in a sense, they are national identity constructions, or venues for national identity construction, where the Japanese are lifted up as a unique race that can do no wrong and the Koreans are very often depicted as liars. In fact, the stereotype of Koreans being liars is probably the most recurring feature of the hate books. This is something you’ll find in almost all of the hate books.

Michael Penn: Let me stop you right there because that’s kind of interesting. So, if we’re talking about the hate books and their portrayal of Koreans, you say that the number one sort of attack which they do on Koreans is to say they’re liars, what would be some of the other characteristics of Koreans according to this genre?

Ulv Hanssen: Yeah. So, there are all kinds of nasty characteristics. So, in some cases, the Koreans are depicted as incestuous that they have a long history of incest which has damaged their DNA. So, there’s something wrong with the DNA and things like that. And another recurring feature is this hwabyeong, in Korean, it means fire disease. And it’s supposed to be some kind of unique Korean temperament or personality that makes them completely irrational and impossible to argue with. So yeah, there are all kinds of negative depictions, but again, the liar… So, the honest Japanese and the dishonest Korean is probably the most frequent feature in these books.

Michael Penn: Okay.

Ulv Hanssen: And I should perhaps also mention why, I think there’s a good reason why that this distinction is important for the hate book authors because obviously if you write a hate book, the chances are that you are a pretty hard-core Japanese nationalist. And then if you can simply dismiss alternative history narratives coming from Korea based on them being liars, it makes it very easy for you. You can simply just dismiss any challenges to Japanese nationalist history narrative. So, I think it’s very useful in that sense also.

Michael Penn: It’s very reminiscent of the way that Trump uses fake news, right? Oh, just fake news, fake news, fake news, and just immediately dismisses anything negative. Right.

Ulv Hanssen: Exactly.

Michael Penn: Okay. So, go ahead, you were speaking more about the background of these books.

Ulv Hanssen: Yeah. Yes, sure. So, we wanted to find out how big is this problem, how many hate books are there in Japan? And also, we had heard rumors that there were no anti-Japanese hate books in South Korea. So that’s also something that we found interesting and we wanted to investigate on it. So, what we did was we went to the biggest online stores in both countries. So that happens to be Amazon in Japan and Kyobo in Korea. And then we limited our search to books in politics and society. And we then did a simple word count on how many books have been published since the beginning of 2010 to the end of 2020 that contain the word Kankoku, South Korea, in the title. And we did the same thing for Korean books. So how many books have been published in this period containing the word Nippon or Japan in the title. And in both cases, we found that these past eleven years there have been approximately five hundred Korean books and five hundred Japanese books. And then we wanted to find out how many of these are actually hate books. And of course, for two researchers, it’s impossible to read a thousand books, so we couldn’t do that. We had to find some other methods, some surrogate methods. So, what we did was that we read the titles and the book descriptions on Amazon or Kyobo and if that contained hateful depictions, then we counted it as a hate book. So, it’s not an accurate representation of the actual number of hate books. But I think the number of books or the more books we identify using our surrogate method will indicate that there are more hate books in the actual bookstores. Okay. So how many hate books did we find? Let’s start with Korea because there were almost none. We only found three books that we could classify as anti-Japanese hate books.

Michael Penn: And what kind of characteristics did they have?

Ulv Hanssen: Actually, I don’t remember. Actually, it was my wife who was in charge of reading Korean because I don’t read Korean. So, I’m not exactly sure. I don’t remember what was in these books. But we only found three in South Korean bookstores. But in Japan, we found 58 hate books in this eleven-year period. And you might say that this isn’t really all that much, but if the universe of cases that we looked at is approximately five hundred, actually 531 to be exact, then 58 hate books is 11% of all the books published on Korea. So, I think it’s not insignificant. And what’s interesting here is that we basically confirmed what we had already read and heard about anecdotally, that there are no hate books in South Korea, but there are certainly hate books in Japan. So, then the question was why; there must be some difference here. There must be something that explains the existence of hate books in Japan and the absence of hate books in South Korea.

Michael Penn: Well, just to stop there. I mean, what immediately comes to my mind, I mean, of course, there are plenty of people in Korea who hate the Japanese, I mean, former colonial power, all of that. And there’s plenty of Japanese who hate Koreans. So, if I’m going to say why are there hate books here and not hate books there, it’s got to be the publishing industry and its standards.

Ulv Hanssen: Yes. And that’s exactly what we found also. So first, we looked at the demand. So why is there a demand for the hate books? And that’s pretty intuitive. It’s like you say, there are a lot of people in South Korea who hate Japan, and there’s a lot of Japanese who hate South Korea. And this really increases in times of tension. So, whenever there is some kind of trigger event, maybe if the Korean president visits the Takeshima-Dokdo Islands, then these spikes. And whenever the dislike rate towards South Korea spikes, we also see spikes in the production of hate books. So, there’s a clear correlation there. And this I think is similar in both countries. I think there is a demand for hate books also in South Korea because the underlying cost, the nationalism, the antagonism, that’s still there. So, there must be some other explanation for why there are hate books in Japan and not in South Korea. And exactly like you said, we located that explanation in the book publishing industry, which is actually different in Japan from the one in South Korea. So maybe I can start with that.

Michael Penn: Please.

Ulv Hanssen: Yeah. I think most people are not familiar with the Japanese book publishing industry. So, I’ll have to just briefly explain the key institutions. And there are three key institutions that are important to be familiar with to understand the hate book phenomenon. So, the first one is the publishers, they are the ones who are producing the books. And then, of course, the bookstores, they are the ones who are selling the books. But then in Japan, there’s also a key third institution and that’s the distributors. So, they’re called “toritsugi” in Japanese and yeah, distributors who have contracts with both publishers and bookstores. And their role is, as the name implies, to distribute books from the publisher to the bookstores. So, I think many people, when they visit a Japanese bookstore, they just assume that it’s the manager or maybe the staff who have actually ordered these books and placed them in the bookshelves. But in fact, that’s not the case. In the vast majority of cases in Japan, the bookstores don’t order books themselves, they receive them automatically from the distributors who decide which bookstores get which books based on various algorithms including sales history, location and so on. So actually, this system has very important implications both for the publishers and for the bookstores. So, I already mentioned the bookstores. The key implication effect on the bookstore is that this system prevents bookstores from actually choosing books themselves. So, if they receive a hate book from the distributor, they can return it, but it’s a big hassle, it’s burdensome. And also, bookstores are in dire straits. So, there’s staff reductions everywhere. They simply don’t have time to scan the content and return problematic content. So, if they receive a batch of books from the distributor, they usually just put it in the bookshelves, regardless of what the content is. Now, they can return it as I said, and this will become important later on. Now, for the publisher, this system also has a key implication because a publisher knows that once it’s secured a contract with a distributor, then regardless of how many books it publishes, these books will be sent to the bookstores. And the publishers are paid a lump sum directly from the bookstores, even before the books have been sold to the customers. So, this incentivizes production by the publishers. The more they produce, the more money they get. But of course, if the books aren’t sold and many are not sold now, they are returned to the publisher and then the publisher has to give a full 100% refund. But at least for a couple of months before the returns start coming in, the publishers have access to money. So, a book basically functions as credit for the publishers. So, the more they publish, the more credit they get and they use this money to produce even more books. So, the hope is that they produce one best seller that can cover all their losses. And the more desperate they get, the more they produce. And this has led to this paradox…

Michael Penn: It’s some kind of Ponzi scheme or something.

Ulv Hanssen: Yes. Yeah, it’s kind of like that. And this has led to the paradoxical situation that book sales are declining rapidly in Japan. In fact, the peak year of book sales was in 1996. Every year since then, it’s gone down, but paradoxically, the number of titles has gone up. So, if you go back to the late 1990s, I’m sorry, 1960s, then you would see that every year in Japan, there was approximately 25,000 books published. Now, that number is up to 75,000. So, the more desperate the publishers get, the more they publish, the more books they produce. And this means that the quality standard is also pretty lax. And it’s easy for hate book authors to get book contracts with these publishers because they’re desperate, they publish virtually anything. So, because of the desperation in the book industry and the system where publishers are incentivized to publish as much as possible because a book functions as credit, that has very important implications for hate book production and sale. And importantly, this is different in South Korea because in South Korea, generally speaking, bookstores, they don’t use distributors. They order books directly from the publishers, so they can choose which books to display in their stores. And also, in most cases, publishers are not paid before the final sale to a customer. So there is no incentive to produce a lot because books don’t function as a credit as they do in Japan. So I think this is probably the most important difference between Japan and South Korea. And I would say the thing that most credibly explains the presence of hate books in Japan and the absence of such books in South Korea.

Michael Penn: Well, that’s fascinating. Certainly, something I had never known before. Okay. But it seems to me like even if the publishers have this incentive to publish a lot of low-quality books, and if the bookstore owners can’t really easily say, no, still, where is the regulatory or public outcry in all of this? I mean, certainly many Japanese who visit bookstores go in there and see these very horrible titles, do they just ignore them or is there any kind of pushback from the public or any sort of standards anywhere in the Japanese system?

Ulv Hanssen: Yeah. So actually, there are activist groups among us inside the publishing industry and they have taken a stand against hate books. So for example, back in 2014 and 2015, which was a year when hate books sales spiked, we got the publication of these two books.

Michael Penn: No Hate and Goodbye Hate Books. Okay.

Ulv Hanssen: Yeah. Exactly. So Saraba Heitobon. So, yeah, Farewell to Hate Books and No Hate. And these are published by insiders in the publication industry. So, some of them are working in the publishing houses. Some of them are working in the distribution agencies and some of them are working in bookstores. And they call themselves the association of publishers or people in the publishing industry who don’t want to contribute to hate speech and xenophobia. I think these books are the first to identify Japanese hate books as a social problem. So, these books came out in 2014 and in that period, there was an outcry and there was more awareness surrounding the phenomenon of hate books thanks to these publications. And I’ve been following this association of publishers on Facebook, but it seems like they’re not very active anymore. So, I don’t know what happened, but there was at least some pushback from insiders in the publication industry. And also, maybe some of the listeners are familiar with the anti-hate speech law that was passed.

Michael Penn: That was my next question. Shouldn’t that have an effect?

Ulv Hanssen: Yeah, exactly. So that was established in 2016 and it’s often called Japanese Anti-Hate Speech Law. And one clear problem with this law is that it doesn’t make hate speech. It doesn’t criminalize hate speech in the sense that you’re not allowed to do it, but there’s no punishment. So even if you say something hateful or write something hateful, there is no risk of punishment. So, the law is always going to have limitations. But it has had a positive effect on hate speech it seems like because the cases of, or reports of hate speech have gone down after the passing of this law. So, therefore, many observers and analysts of the hate book phenomenon were carefully or moderately hopeful that the law could also have a similar effect on hate books. And it seemed initially as if it did because the number of hate books went down after the passing of the law, but then with the development of the trade war between Japan and South Korea in 2019, we got another spike of hate books in that year. So it seems like the power of this anti-hate speech law is very limited when it comes to preventing the publication of hate books.

Michael Penn: Okay. Let me stop you there. Related to that, not at the national level, but at the local level, there are some hate speech ordinances which have a little bit more teeth. For example, I think there’s one in Osaka and Kawasaki and some other local jurisdictions. Have these local hate speech ordinances ever addressed at all the idea of hate speech in a printed form as opposed to just the spoken form?

Ulv Hanssen: I’m not sure, actually. I haven’t looked into that. But I know that there are stricter regulations on the local level. And I’m not familiar enough with those regulations to say whether they have any impacts on hate books or not.

Michael Penn: Okay. And how about the public, I mean, has there ever been a lawsuit or has there ever been a case where a public, “mothers against hate speech” or whatever, any sort of other public interest groups other than this group within the publishing industry? I mean, has there ever been any outcry?

Ulv Hanssen: I’m not sure about whether there have been lawsuits over hate books. I haven’t heard about that, but I wouldn’t be surprised because after all… I mean, it is hate speech in written form. So, if someone has felt targeted by these books specifically, I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to remedy it in a legal way, but I’m not familiar with cases such as that.

Michael Penn: Okay. So, what else did you find in your research?

Ulv Hanssen: Yeah, so I think it’s interesting to see that the production of hate books really spikes in the years when relations between Japan and South Korea worsen. And very often this book, Manga Kenkanryu, this is often said to be the first hate book. It came out in 2005. It means something like hating the Korean wave manga. Yeah. And it’s published by Yamano Sharin.

Michael Penn: Was that like Fuyu no Sonata, that period?

Ulv Hanssen: Yeah, exactly, this was in the time of the Korean wave.

Michael Penn: Right.

Ulv Hanssen: Actually, Korea for many Japanese during that period had a very positive impact because of K-Pop and dramas from Korea. And Yamano Sharin’s book was an attempt at reversing this positive view of South Korea by highlighting negative aspects of that society and the Korean people. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this book comes out in 2005 because this was a very, very tense year in Japan-South Korea relations. In fact, it was labeled the Japan-Korea Friendship Year because it was fifty years after the signing of diplomatic relations or establishment of diplomatic relations in 1965. But it was anything but friendly because Shimane Prefecture, they established Takeshima Day that year. And that caused an uproar in South Korea. And there were very dramatic protests with finger cutting and flag burning. So, you see a spike in the dislike rate towards South Korea that year. And that is the year when the allegedly first anti-Korean hate book is published. And then you see similar spikes in 2014 which comes on the heels of then President Lee Myung-Bak’s visit to the Takeshima-Dokdo Islands in 2012. Also, very dramatic anti-Japanese protests. And then you see a spike in hate book production. And then finally with the trade war in 2019, there’s another spike. So, it’s interesting to note that the number of hate books produced closely correlates with the developments in the relations between the two countries. It’s very clear, actually.

Michael Penn: Other than that trend that it fluctuates with sort of diplomatic tensions with South Korea, are there any trends that you see towards either these books, in general, getting more popular or less popular? I mean, do you have a sense of where it’s likely to go in the decade ahead? Is somebody going to step in and say, hey, this is just unacceptable? Do you think it’s going to blow up one day where one of these books is going to suddenly hit international headlines and suddenly Japan’s going to get embarrassed and decide that for their national reputation, they need to clamp down on these things?

Ulv Hanssen: No. To be honest, I don’t see that happening. I think this is a phenomenon that’s here to stay. Because unless there are major changes in the publication industry or if there’s a miraculous improvement of bilateral relations between the two countries, then I don’t see it stopping because then the fundamental conditions for hate book production and sale are still intact. So, I think this phenomenon is here to stay, unfortunately. Yeah, so I assume that the next time we see a flare-up in the relations between Japan and South Korea, we will see a new hate book wave as well. So, I think the reason why we have seen fewer hate books in recent years after 2019 is because of Covid-19. I mean, that has kind of overshadowed the bilateral problems between Japan and South Korea. But they’re still there, nothing has been solved. So, I think it’s only a matter of time before there’s another crisis and then we will see more hate books, unfortunately. They’re very easy to produce. They’re not very sophisticated. If something happens, they are published almost the same month or at least one month later. They’re very easy to write. They follow more or less the same script every single time. So, they’re always very timely and they don’t last very long on their bookshelves because they get outdated very quickly. But I think, yeah, we will see more hate book waves as soon as we enter the next crisis.

Michael Penn: Do you see any links between this phenomenon of hate books and Japanese politics? So, it could be either maybe extreme racist parties like Makoto Sakurai’s Japan First Party or more mainstream right wing of the Liberal Democratic Party, maybe protecting this industry because in a sense they want a certain amount of anti-Korean sentiment out there as part of their political base. Do you see any of these threads or links between the publishing of these books and the political system in Japan?

Ulv Hanssen: Yeah, I think so. So, you mentioned Sakurai Makoto, so he’s the founder of Zaitokukai, a very anti-Korean organization, and more recently the founder of the Japan First Party, which is also extremely anti-Korean. Yeah, he is also a hate book author, and not very surprising. So, he published this, Idaina Kenkan Jidai, in 2014, I think.

Michael Penn: The year of hating Koreans.

Ulv Hanssen: Yes. So, the year of great Korean hate, and his argument was that now after Lee Myung-Bak’s visit to the Takeshima Islands in 2012, now it’s finally become acceptable in Japanese society to say that I hate Koreans. So that’s what he means by The Age of Great Korea Hate.

Michael Penn: Well, it’s interesting. That’s also very sort of early Trump era that people talked about being liberated in a sense to express their hatred and racism, right?

Ulv Hanssen: He’s saying exactly that. And same thing with Yamano Sharin also. He’s saying that now, finally, we can say that we hate Koreans without any weird looks. Now it’s acceptable. Yeah. And actually, I met Sakurai a couple of years ago, completely randomly here in Hachioji, I didn’t really have much time to talk to him, but yeah, it was very strange.

Michael Penn: I’ve interviewed him once.

Ulv Hanssen: You have, yeah. So of course, it’s not very surprising that this… He’s also a politician. It’s not very surprising that he writes hate books. That is kind of his character. I think, actually, going back to your question about the political system and the more mainstream politicians, I think that might be a bigger problem because in the LDP, you constantly have politicians who appear in not necessarily the hate books, they don’t write hate books, but they often appear in, for example, magazines such as this, Hanada and WiLL.

Michael Penn: Right. So, they’re monthly magazines, which are very kind of hard right, and many of them definitely move into the hate territory.

Ulv Hanssen: Yeah. Some of them, I would actually classify as hate literature. And it’s very problematic that you have people like Abe Shinzo, for example, appearing in these monthlies because that gives them a veneer of legitimacy. It shows that they are acceptable in Japanese society. So even if the politicians don’t write hate books themselves, at least many LDP politicians, they do legitimize the existence of hate literature by appearing in these monthlies.

Michael Penn: They kind of give them a political cover in a sense.

Ulv Hanssen: Yes, I think so.

Michael Penn: Okay. Well, is there any other aspect to this issue that you’d like to draw our attention to before we wrap up the interview?

Ulv Hanssen: Yeah, so in our research, we came across, we had to engage with the nationalism literature because we’re not nationalism experts. And we wanted to find out like when does nationalism go from a cold state to a hot state? So, when do we get these very dramatic outpourings of emotion and anger directed towards Koreans? And of course, I already said that we get that whenever there are bilateral crises. But we also came across an interesting observation in the nationalism literature by an author whose name is John Hutchinson. And he argued that we move from what he calls “cold nationalism” to “hot nationalism,” which is the more antagonistic type when the autonomy, identity, and territorial integrity of the nation is perceived as threatened. And I thought that was interesting because that’s exactly what we’re seeing in the relationship between Japan and South Korea. So, let’s start with the autonomy of the nation. So, I think that when Koreans protest against Japanese prime ministers visiting the shrine, for example, or when they say that you need to pay reparations for the abuse of Comfort Women and heavy labor, that I think to many Japanese is seen as a threat to the autonomy of the nation because essentially, many Japanese would say, oh, our prime minister, of course, should be able to worship wherever he wants. Why should the South Koreans interfere with that? So, I think that really triggers a lot of Japanese people because it’s seen as sort of an attack on their autonomy. But also, when it comes to the identity of the nation, I think many of these South Korean criticisms, they basically try to equate Postwar Japan with Prewar Japan. You saw that very clearly during the time of the trade war, then the ruling party in Korea said that Japan is continuing its warfare against Korea now in the economic sphere. But this is essentially the same as they were doing during colonial times. So, they’re blurring the distinction between Prewar Japan and Postwar Japan, which is very important to Japanese identity construction because in Japanese postwar identity construction very often a positive and peaceful self has been contrasted to an aggressive militarist other of the past. But that distinction is kind of blurred in Korean narratives. So that’s also something that I think is particularly sensitive in Japan.

Michael Penn: Before you move on to the third point, isn’t there a sort of fairness to that? I mean, for example, while it may be true in many respects, Japan did transform remarkably between 1945, in terms of sort of attitudes of superiority towards Koreans, the transformation may not have been that profound. And so maybe from a Korean perspective, maybe elements of continuity may seem stronger than the elements of a break.

Ulv Hanssen: Yeah. I think that’s absolutely right. And I don’t want to make an evaluation of whether these Korean criticisms are correct or not. I’m just trying to say that they are very sensitive to many Japanese. They’re perceived as threats to the nation by many Japanese. And I think that’s why they have the potential to really worsen the bilateral relationship. And then just to wrap up, so the final point that Hutchinson made was that cold nationalism can turn into hot nationalism when there is a perceived threat to the territorial integrity of the nation. And I think Lee Myung-Bak’s visit to the Takeshima islands was extremely important because that was seen as a violation of Japanese territory, at least for many Japanese nationalists. So, in fact, you have all these three factors that Hutchinson identified as drivers of hot nationalism. So, they are present in the bilateral relationship between Japan and South Korea. And I think that’s important to understand when we look at the constant flare-up of ever new crises between the two countries.

Michael Penn: Okay. Well, your explanations are very clear and logical. Is there any final point that you’d like to make before we end the public part of this presentation or this interview?

Ulv Hanssen: I think I have mentioned what I wanted to mention, so I think I’m good.

Michael Penn: Okay. Well, thank you all for joining the SNA Speakeasy. I believe this was our 65th SNA Speakeasy. So, it will be on YouTube in the relatively near future, I assume sometime next week. So, thank you Ulv for joining us. I think it’s a very articulate and clear explanation of the problem and certainly, some ideas in there that I think will be fresh for a lot of people. So, thank you very much.

Ulv Hanssen: Thank you.

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