National Foundation Day
I forgot to mention earlier that this past Monday was National Foundation Day in Japan. The Japan Visitor Blog has an excellent post on this holiday, as well as a video of Japanese Nationalists haranguing everybody passing through Shinjuku station. My impression of this holiday is that, aside from the Nationalists, it doesn’t inspire particularly strong feelings for most Japanese (sort of like Labor Day in the US, which inspires more Americans to make one last trek to the beach than to think deeply about the history and contributions of the American labor movement). In regard to the flags used by the Nationalists in the video, I should point out that swastikas in Japan aren’t strongly associated with Nazism like they are in the US and Europe. I’m not certain about this, but in this context I think the association is with Shintoism and purity, which the Nationalists use to make political implications for things like racial purity (so the connotations may not be all that much better).
