Matthew Penney is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Concordia University. He is a specialist on post-WWII Japanese history and his work as focused on memory and contestation of the representation of histories of war and empire on left and right. His recent work has touched on Marxist theories of global capitalism and their links deindustrialization.
Project Statement:
Book project – Righting History: Neonationalism and Neoliberalism in Japan
DePOT article project – (in collaboration with Fred Burrill) Piece about the “rise” of the Chinese economy, the place of China in shaping Canadian economic identity, and the failures of the Canadian left to articulate effective strategies for dealing with these changes from the 1980s to present.
Most writing on the far right in Japan focuses on denial of war crimes and exploitation under the Japanese empire. These are important themes, but my work looks instead at how writers on the right turn to the past to shape images of an economically prosperous, geopolitically powerful Japan for present purposes. The result is not only a denial of historical atrocities and the role of the Japanese state, but a shaping of the usable past to make neoliberal austerity, public to private transfer in the form of military Keynesianism, deregulation, and similar policies seem like a natural outgrowth of “Japanese tradition”. There are continuities with rightwing populist forms prevalent elsewhere, but my project emphasizes the local differences in expressions of neoliberal policies and their justification through history, culture, and understandings of historical change and trans-historical forms, even if they are influenced by global economic trends and ideological networks. As part of this project, I plan to contribute to DePOT an analysis of how rightwing populists in Japan present deindustrialization as an inevitable step to achieve a “rationalized” national economy that guarantees financialized profits and reduces labour “costs” supposedly increasing competitiveness, while at the same time lamenting the practical effects of offshoring. This contradictory imaginary creates a sense of crisis at the core of rightwing writings, political speech, and other forms of public presentation of their ideas.
