I’m looking forward to speaking this month at Tokyo’s Sasakawa Peace Foundation and at Waseda University about a new project on Japanese nationalism, co-authored with Waseda’s Professor Chikako Kawakatsu Ueki.

Observers of East Asia warn of a surge of Japanese nationalism, and of Tokyo’s increasingly assertive national security policy. For example, China’s Global Times declares “the renewed rise of ultra-nationalism in Japan”; South Korea’s Hankyoreh laments “the right-wing nationalism that is represented by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.”

Rising Japanese nationalism would have serious implications for the region, and for Japan’s ally the United States. But is nationalism really on the rise?

In our project, Professor Ueki and I are researching trends in Japanese nationalism with the goal of contributing analytic clarity and empirical evidence to current debates. The current discussion is plagued by several problems: first, commentators have been warning about the rise of Japanese nationalism for decades, yet over those decades we have seen Tokyo adhere to a highly restrained defense policy. Thirty years ago, for example, policy changes by Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone sparked concerns, and observers have sounded a drumbeat of rising Japanese nationalism basically ever since. Was Japan’s nationalism rising thirty years ago? Is it now? The answer is far from certain.

Second, pronouncements about surging nationalism – both then and now – have been completely unsystematic. Because commentators don’t define what they mean by “nationalism,” how can one persuasively say that “it” is on the rise? Furthermore, analysts discussing Japanese nationalism “select on the dependent variable” (focusing on confirming evidence and ignoring disconfirming); they fail to compare nationalism in Japan today to prior levels; and they fail to compare Japanese nationalism to nationalism in other countries.

Before we can know whether Japan’s nationalism is on the rise, we presumably need to understand what we mean by “nationalism”; we need to understand to what extent it is rising in Japan (if at all); and we need a better sense of how Japanese nationalism compares to that of other countries.