Transnational Right-Wing Movements and Discourses in Japan and South Korea

In recent decades, right-wing movements have gained renewed visibility across the globe, and East Asia is no exception to this global trend. Against this backdrop, right-wing movements in Japan and South Korea are deeply embedded in disputes over the colonial past and postwar memory. In these debates, right-wing discourses of “historical truth” have become influential frameworks for interpreting and contesting the colonial past and collective memory within each national context. What is notable is that right-wing actors in these two countries have increasingly engaged in cross-border interactions around historical revisionism since the 2000s. Right-wing intellectuals in South Korea, self-identified as the “New Right,” have drawn on Japanese revisionist claims to challenge Korea’s own dominant nationalist historical narratives of the colonial past, while Japanese right-wing actors have in turn actively embraced these voices. This raises the question: how do right-wing discourses of “historical truth” circulate across Japan and South Korea, and through which networks, practices, and media are they produced and reinforced across national borders?

This talk is based on fieldwork conducted in Japan as part of my doctoral research, which examines how Korean right-wing discourses appear within the Japanese right-wing discursive field. Drawing on archival research mainly in major Japanese conservative and right-wing opinion magazines, including Seiron, WiLL, and Hanada, I will share preliminary findings from my fieldwork and discuss what these sources reveal about the transnational circulation of revisionist narratives. By examining these materials, I seek to offer an empirical window into how revisionist discourses travel and become entangled across national contexts in East Asia.