Kanji Nishio

Kanji Nishio (b. 1935) is a Japanese intellectual and professor emeritus of literature at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo, Japan.

He was awarded a degree in German literature and a PhD in literature from the University of Tokyo. He translated the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer into Japanese. He has written over seventy published works and over thirty translations.^[1]

Nishio, regarded as a rightist intellectual,^[2] was the head of Atarashii Rekishi Kyokasho wo Tsukuru Kai (Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform), founded in January 1997 by right-wing scholars and cartoonists to devise a new Japanese history text book as they considered existing ones to be "self-torturing".^[3] Nishio has a wide following in Japan.^[4]

He is against immigration into Japan because he believes it would cause social disorganisation and threaten social cohesion; the subtitle of one of his works is "foreign workers will destroy Japan". Nishio claimed "This is not necessarily an economic problem. Frankly speaking, it is a problem of ‘cultural defense’".^[5]

Notes

1. Profile at the Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact.
2. Bessho Yoshimi and Hasegawa Eiko, ‘The Logic of Apologizing for War Crimes "as a Japanese"’, Review of Japanese Culture and Society, Vol. 11/12, Violence in the Modern World (Special Issue) (December 1999-2000), p. 42.
3. Yuri Kase, ‘Japan's Nonnuclear Weapons Policy in the Changing Security Environment: Issues, Challenges, and Strategies’, World Affairs, Vol. 165, No. 3 (Winter 2003), p. 130.
4. Jennifer Lind, ‘The Perils of Apology: What Japan Shouldn't Learn From Germany’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 88, No. 3 (May/June 2009), p. 136.
5. John Lie, Multi-Ethnic Japan (Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 15.