Japan in the American South’s Embrace: MOFA’s Event with the Russell Kirk Center in Tampa
What do Japan and the American South have in common? “Both of us were done in by Yankees,” Kansai University Visiting Professor and former journalist Aida Hirotsugu recalled once telling a U.S. military colonel from the South over dinner.
So began the first of two intellectual tour-de-force talks by Professor Aida on panels about American conservative thought co-hosted and co-organized by the Consulate General of Japan in Miami and the Russell Kirk Center, held alongside the annual meeting of the Philadelphia Society. This conservative intellectual society features prominent conservative university professors and is sponsored by heavyweights such as the Bradley Foundation, Heritage Foundation, and National Review Foundation.
The timing of the visit, though perhaps coincidental with the Philadelphia Society’s 60th Jubilee anniversary, was nonetheless noteworthy, following the week after Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio’s special visit to the United States for high-level talks with the Biden administration, a special address to a joint meeting of Congress, and a spectacular state dinner.
The Trump administration’s time in office left Japanese alliance-handlers and conservative intellectuals in the U.S. alike reeling at the unpredictable words and policy turns of their fickle partner in the White House. In Japan, they worried about everything from new tariffs on Japanese steel and a U.S. trade war with China, to demands for greater payments for U.S. military bases in Japan, to what Trump might negotiate away in his direct talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. U.S. conservative intellectuals wondered if the libertine and former Democratic Party-aligned Trump would be true to the social conservative priorities he had promised and if he would ever be able to control himself on Twitter.
Both got some of what they wanted — with a side of heartburn and new reasons to build up their own leadership capacities for the long-haul. While the alliance withstood the turbulence of the Trump years, Japan forged ahead with the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement in new form after Trump jettisoned U.S. participation. Japan invested more in their own defense capabilities and took on leadership roles of the G7 and in the UN Security Council. In the U.S., conservative intellectuals have responded to the Trump era by building new institutional “beachheads” for themselves in public universities and by ramping up the “school-choice” movement for public funding of private school vouchers. Amidst plummeting youth support for the MAGA-fied Republican Party, how else might they introduce a new, younger generation to conservative, classical ideals?
Yet the possibility of a second Trump presidency would certainly evoke more heartburn on both sides — is anyone really prepared for 100% tariffs on cars made outside the U.S. or an unmitigated campaign of retribution against all comers? And that’s where the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affair’s interest in building bridges between Japanese intellectuals and conservative intellectuals in the United States seems to make sense — to make sure that the bridge with Japan does not also get burned down amidst the maelstrom.
As the consular official noted introducing the events, U.S.-Japan solidarity is “more important than ever” during a presidential election year and that the U.S.-Japan partnership would be strong “regardless of the outcome of the election.” In a post-Trump world with still-strong America First sentiment, the conservative panelists and audience members (I may have been the lone liberal sitting amongst them) affirmed the solidarity.
One panelist described the meeting as a “less common opportunity” to hear from conservatives in Asia, “especially Japan.” They usually only “hear from Budapest” and other places in Europe, it was noted. Other panelists over the two days spoke warmly of time spent teaching English in Japan and sitting under cherry blossom trees in the spring “watching pretty women,” affinity for Japanese baseball games, and admiration for their Japanese interlocutor on the panel, Professor Aida, who several panelists referred to as a “Japanese Tocqueville” for his keen insights as a foreigner into the United States.
Aida attributed his interest in American conservative intellectualism to a visit to Russell Kirk’s home in Mecosta, Michigan in 1991 and a correspondence he kept with Kirk through the years. Aida translated Kirk’s 1953 classic, The Conservative Mind, into Japanese in two volumes in 2018. He also translated works of Francis Fukuyama and has written widely about American politics, especially on conservative movements and thought. Aida introduced himself to the audience as a “friend” of American conservatives and Kirk’s wife Annette, who presides at the Kirk Center today, also joined the panels.
Aida’s first talk detailed his relationship with Russell Kirk, and especially Kirk’s interest in Japanese culture, as relayed through the works of Lafcadio Hearn, a Greek-born Irish writer who spent time in the U.S. before settling in Japan in 1890. Hearn became a legendary writer and translator of Japanese tales, and Kirk was fascinated by Hearn’s ghost stories, in particular. Aida also noted Kirk’s friendship with Edwin McClellan, who is responsible for the most well-known translation of Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro, among many other famous titles.
Aida saw Kirk’s rootedness in the Gothic traditions of the Midwest, which were similar to those in the South in some ways, with a “reverence for the presence of the dead” and ancestors who “carry their own triumphs and failures,” giving energy to the living. Aida noted Kirk’s conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism at age 45, as well as Kirk’s connection with a “pre-Christian world of lore” with Celtic lineage, his interest in the medieval, and “fascination with the mysterious.”
Kirk was also deeply skeptical of Enlightenment values, said Aida, as seen in his concerns about values of progress and efficiency channeled to the ends of total warfare in the Second World War. Kirk criticized the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in The Conservative Mind, seeing them as descent into nationalistic savagery and barbarism; a Hillsdale College professor elsewhere writes that Kirk also detested Japanese-American internment during the war, “and even found the World War II victory celebrations offensive.”
Allen Mendenhall, a Troy University business school dean with a legal background and love of literature, also picked up the theme of comparing the U.S. South and Japan through the prism of war losses. I originally thought Mendenhall a curious choice for the panel, first because of his support for John Eastman, the recently disbarred pro-Trump attorney who was allegedly a key architect of the conspiracy to prevent Joe Biden from assuming the presidency, and second, because of his Obama-era writings advocating that the U.S. military should leave Japan entirely in response to protests against U.S. bases in Okinawa.
Mendenhall’s views have changed significantly over time, however, a shift that he attributes partly to a mistaken college-age conversion to liberalism that was healed by a sojourn in Japan teaching English after college. He also turned out to be one of the most interesting speakers on the panels. He said he felt many cultural commonalities between the U.S. South and Japan, including a similar sense of community, social cohesion, and social obligation, as well as a “sense of shame and guilt,” as both lost major wars and struggled with history. Both, he said, have had to try to “preserve what is good and true about the past,” while acknowledging great horrors with responsibility.
Mendenhall noted that aspects of the U.S. Civil War such as the destruction of civilian homes and lives in General Sherman’s March to the Sea in Georgia were examples of total warfare that anticipated the atomic bombings of Japan, an observation also made by the famous Cold War-era nuclear strategist Thomas Schelling in his brilliant essay on the “The Diplomacy of Violence.” Mendenhall noted that Sherman had abducted women and children from the South and put them in internment-like camps. Mendenhall pondered if generations of Americans had been more reflective of what had happened during the war that perhaps things would have turned out differently in the Second World War.
I couldn’t help but reflect on how many themes here in the conference I had also picked up in an introductory class on political science class that I used to teach. For the class period on American conservatism and liberalism, I paired Russell Kirk’s “Ten Principles of Conservatism” with historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s “American Liberalism: A Note for Europeans.” The class is also one where I discussed American political culture by drawing upon the work of Sinclair Lewis, a contemporary of Russell Kirk’s, as well as a fellow man of the Midwest, hailing from Sauk Centre, Minnesota. Lewis was the first U.S. citizen to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Lewis himself considered America’s lack of critical reflection on its long history of wars and aggression in his 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, a book warning that fascism could come to America, which also seemed to presage the Trump years. Lewis’s novel traced the origins of his fictitious fascist movement to the Midwest, not the South, and a left-leaning populism that was insurgent in the era of the Great Depression. In the pre-Trump era, though, the signs were seemingly everywhere. After seeing a Tea Party rally in downtown Tampa in 2010 that curdled with anger against Obama, I ordered an old WPA-style poster made for a theater production of Lewis’s novel and hung it up in my university office.
Lewis, a sharp liberal social critic, used the narrator, a New England newspaper editor, to question American myths about war glories. Writing of the U.S. Civil War, the fictitious editor mused,
“Slavery had been a cancer, and in that day was known no remedy save bloody cutting. There had been no X-rays of wisdom and tolerance. Yet to sentimentalize this cutting, to justify and rejoice in it, was an altogether evil thing, a national superstition that was later to lead to other Unavoidable Wars — wars to free Cubans, to free Filipinos who didn’t want our brand of freedom, to End All Wars.
“Let us, thought Doremus, not throb again to the bugles of the Civil War, nor find diverting the gallantry of Sherman’s dashing Yankee boys in burning the houses of lone women, nor particularly admire the calmness of General Lee as he watched thousands writhe in the mud.”
It was at this point I was losing total coherence of American regional place and identity, as well as connection to ideology. I was attending a conference panel addressing the American South co-hosted by the government of Japan and the Michigan-based Kirk Center alongside a meeting of the Michigan-based Philadelphia Society in Tampa, Florida, a former Confederate state helmed by an arch-conservative governor who said that he “geographically” grew up in Florida but that his upbringing “culturally” reflected the values of Ohio and Pennsylvania. Was there anything essentially “conservative” about the values, critiques, and reflections on this panel anyway? Or anything essentially “Southern” or “Japanese” about particular cultural attributes these regions were said to have? It was hard not to be skeptical.
Professor Aida’s second talk on American conservative intellectualism and the panelists’ comments in response also drew attention back to the Midwest, specifically the state of Michigan, as well as the dueling themes of universalism and particularism.
Professor Aida’s brilliant talk, which he made clear represented his own views and not MOFA’s and is too rich to fully encapsulate here, traced the rise of populism in the U.S. on both the Bernie Sanders-style left and the Trumpist right to the failed Afghanistan and Iraq Wars as well as the 2008 financial crisis, and even more broadly to “perceived failures of U.S. politics, society, and economics over decades.” These failures, he argued, led to populist attempts to try to revive the “shrinking middle class” and led to a political process of turning inward in foreign policy to enact domestic reforms.
Aida pointed to Pat Buchanan’s rise to prominence in the early 1990s in the United States as a kind of pushback against universalist ideals of neoconservatism and neoliberalism, offering the particularism of an America First program in politics, economics, and immigration as an alternative. Aida noted that Russell Kirk supported Buchanan’s 1992 presidential bid, even chairing the Michigan state campaign for Buchanan, and that the American Conservative magazine, overseen by Buchanan, rose in influence over the Trump years. That rightist populism, a movement against the “managerial elites,” seemed to be the throughline to Donald Trump.
Panelist Wilfred McCray provided further insightful history of populism, putting Michigan at the center of the movement at several key points in history, from Father Coughlin’s broadcasts of the 1930s to Alabama Governor George Wallace’s victory in the Michigan Democratic presidential primary in 1972 to Trump’s victory in the state in 2016. He attributed this to the Democratic Party abandoning protectionist policies and growing populism in the labor movement. McCray sees Buchanan, however, as more of a true moral crusader with an “open call to arms in the culture war” than Trump, who McCray argues takes more after the economics-focused businessman H. Ross Perot, who ran for president on a third-party ticket in 1992.
Overall, the discussion of populism by Aida and fellow panelists was heavy on economics and foreign policy and light on three words I didn’t hear mentioned even once over the two panels — race, gender, and abortion — though it’s possible I could have missed something. It’s a curiosity because Kirk, despite being drawn to Buchanan, was said to be wary of populism in general; what appealed to him about Buchanan was apparently his opposition to affirmative action and immigration — issues related to race. Kirk, a Catholic convert, was also fiercely opposed to abortion, the issue Buchanan put at the center of his fiery 1992 Republican convention speech and “culture war” call to arms. Those were certainly Trump election issues, too.
The foreign policy discussions at the panel were especially salient, though, and for good reason. The rise of populism and the turn inward toward America First-style policies, Aida noted, was complicating U.S. alliance policies abroad. He said that while alliance rebuilding is happening steadily in Asia, there are “foundational challenges” that are “similar to what is happening on the Atlantic side.” The U.S. has served as a “bedrock of security” in the region, but under multiple U.S. presidents on the left and right, the U.S. is turning inward and a shift is happening away from postwar bilateral alliance systems to the emergence of multiple, overlapping governance networks such as the Quadrilateral of the U.S., Japan, India, and Australia, as well as the new Japan-led renewed TPP trade framework. Aida pointed out that U.S. allies have stepped up in the face of U.S. retrenchment, “which we hope is temporary,” he said.
Aida explained that many of the Quad countries, including Japan, while wanting to provide deterrence against and a “check” on possible Chinese aggression, also hoped not to contain China or decouple from its economy, still viewing it as an important neighbor and business partner. The goal, Aida explained, was to “strive for coordination with China while upholding differences.” A panelist echoed that sometimes our U.S. “sabers rattled too much” and that we also always need to be mindful to separate China from the Chinese Communist Party that rules the country. U.S. conservatives at both the conference and in Washington D.C. notably have seemed to be less conflicted over support for the U.S. alliances and partnerships in Asia, amidst a rising China, compared to U.S. support for Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression.
Aida said he understood the turn inward as a result of populism in the U.S. and pointed out commonalities in Europe and even in the nascent “rise of small populist parties” in Japan. He cited “seeds of the same problems” in Japan and the U.S., where it seems stable in Japan now, but there is “magma moving underneath.”
The challenge for these societies in the long run, Aida explained, is what George Kennan cites as the ultimate answer at the end of his famous “long telegram” and 1947 X article explaining the dawning Cold War dynamics of U.S.-Soviet antagonism. Kennan argues that Cold War success depends, in the end, on U.S. domestic order: If you can keep it together successfully, “you will win.” The same dynamic applies to the challenge of the Chinese Communist Party, Aida suggests. That’s a tall order for a country seething with tensions that no one predicts will go away soon.
Several panel participants noted the essentially reactionary character of populism and lack of specific policy plans or models to create a better society. No one made any predictions about November or what would happen to this movement.
Yet over and over again, like waves lapping the shore, came Aida’s themes of the “moderating” forces of traditional liberalism, and a sense among broader publics that we still have to move in the direction of modernity, that it’s “inevitable” — but among conservatives, in response to a universal modernity, a universal kind “aversion to modernity,” too. Conservatives, he says, mourn the loss of premodern traditions in their particularistic varieties around the world. They are, in the Gothic tradition evoked by Aida, “enamored by the dead.”