Japan: Old Ideal, New Reality : Cult: The imperial throne loses purity; new nationalists reshape Japanese sensibility.

As the long deathwatch for the late Emperor Hirohito came to its close last year, Hitoshi Motoshima, mayor of Nagasaki, did a brave thing. A man of quiet and unprepossessing demeanor, he publicly declared a belief that the emperor was “responsible,” not legally or in any direct sense, but “morally,” for Japan’s disastrous plunge into world war.

From that day forward, Japan’s emperor-worshiping rightists promised revenge, and six weeks ago they struck. In an act of shocking violence, Motoshima was gunned down on a Nagasaki street. It was the first shooting of a politician in this almost entirely disarmed country since the bloody 1930s era of “government by assassination.”

For complex cultural reasons, Japan’s rightists can claim to be custodians of a vague but potent dimension of Japanese-ness, deriving from their uncompromising loyalty (the supreme Japanese virtue) to the imperial throne.

In a way consistent neither with the American view of the late Japanese emperor as grandfatherly nor imperial warlord, the emperor has been traditionally viewed by Japanese as the indispensable repository of national purity and otherworldliness. The imperial throne has been a manifestation not of the nation’s wealth or strength but of its ideals.

The emperor has therefore stood as a perennial reminder of Japan’s inherent capacity to transcend the petty corruptions of moneymaking and the profound moral dangers in the exercise of power. As long as the occupant of the imperial throne shepherds such idealism, greed will never be good in Japan.

This imperial idealism helps explain why the Japanese hold money-grubbing politicians at arm’s length. An implied defense of national purity motivates--or justifies--right-wing attacks on conservative Japanese politicians and business leaders. They are so obviously impure.

The emperor has carried, almost on his person, tradition’s “claim of the ideal” into the 20th Century. At least until 1945, there was a persistent danger that the bold kidnaping of the imperial institution during the 1860s by Japan’s modernizers might some day backfire on the kidnapers. In the 1930s, it did.

To defend this kind of innocence or purity, an errant branch of Japanese tradition authorizes violence. The words and death of Yukio Mishima, the supreme genius of postwar Japanese letters, was in essence one long meditation on this creed.

This tradition worships the quintessential beauty that defines selfless violence in defense of the imperial throne, the redoubt of national innocence and moral self-regard. Motoshima was supposedly struck down in the name of this tradition. But because of the liberal stance of the new emperor, Hirohito’s son, reality is seeping out of this imperial cult.

As if to drive the point home, the new crown prince used the recent occasion of his 30th birthday to denounce violent assaults on the exercise of free speech. The case at issue was the Motoshima shooting.

One result has been a subtle alteration in Japanese sensibility. A feeling of release from the violent doppelganger that has shadowed the whole Japanese experiment with modernity is palpable now every time one walks the perimeter of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo.

The new mood is nicely captured in the life and more recent time of Shintaro Ishihara. A celebrated novelist and popular conservative politician, Ishihara recently became something of a household name in America because he co-authored, with Sony Corp. Chairman Akio Morita, a controversial best-selling book, “A Japan That Can Say No.”

The book made the rounds on Capitol Hill in a pirated English edition reportedly paid for by the Pentagon. Written in subliterate English and riddled with misreadings of the original, the book provoked a storm of protest among Japan’s critics in Congress. Overnight, Morita’s reputation as an unrivaled transpacific communicator and spokesman for the U.S.-Japan relationship was destroyed.

But for all his extraordinary attractiveness to Japanese voters, Ishihara does not speak for the dominant pro-American faction in Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party. He is too much of a political dilettante and his nationalist views are too waspish to make him a player in Japanese policy-making.

Ishihara and his nationalist values are attracting fresh attention in Japan precisely because too many otherwise responsible Americans have succumbed to the temptation of blaming Japan for U.S. economic ills. In other words, U.S. anti-Japanese revisionism provokes Japanese anti-American revisionism.

Once it is clear that Ishihara’s target is Japan’s residual inferiority complex and almost childlike sense of dependence on American goodwill, the book reads in an entirely different light.

A number of gratuitously offensive remarks aside, Ishihara’s critique is no more blustery than Lee Iacocca’s assaults on Japan. Its thoughtful sections provide ample meat for Americans to chew on.

At several points these Japanese essays bear comparison with the only American revisionist tract worth reading: Clyde Prestowitz’s “Trading Places: How America Allowed Japan to Take the Lead.” But Ishihara, the aroused nationalist, merits a still closer look.

During Japan’s recent election, he urged voters to support conservatives in the name of sound U.S.-Japan relations. He seeks not to abolish alliance but to remake it into an adult partnership.

As a good economic nationalist, he has something else to teach. After a recent trip to Washington, Ishihara confessed that he could not recall meeting a single U.S. politician who had yet read “Made in America: Regaining the Productive Edge,” from the MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity.

If it takes a Japanese nationalist to make Americans read this important study, then Ishihara is worth keeping in our sights, as a sparring partner, even as a friend.

True, he makes Americans furious with his undisciplined tongue, but he also appears to care what happens to us. Perhaps that care should be mutual.