Here's a surprising fact: One Japanese in a hundred lives abroad. It's surprising because so much is made lately of Japan's growing insularity. Young people seem less interested than ever in studying overseas, and voters last month elected a new government whose platform includes strong doses of patriotism and patriotic education — necessary, advocates say, for the cultivation of national pride; mendacious, retort critics at home and abroad, because 20th-century Japanese militarism and imperialism, taught honestly, are more conducive to painful soul-searching than pride.
The new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, speaks fervently about love of country and readiness to die for it. His solid electoral victory in December is not necessarily a popular endorsement of that attitude — voters affirm they are more concerned with the economy than anything else — but it's not a rejection of it either. Japan is at a low ebb. Will it rise again on a surge of patriotism, and so repeat the recent history it prefers not to teach?
It's a legitimate fear, and yet 1.18 million Japanese — more than ever before — make their lives outside the country, according to foreign ministry figures for 2011. A report earlier this month in the Asahi Shimbun's Sunday supplement Globe raises several reasons for the swelling diaspora — business, adventure, comfortable retirement, better education and broader horizons for the kids, general dissatisfaction with the state of things at home. A nation so easy to leave is not necessarily unpatriotic, but its patriotism is more apt to be gentle and accommodating than murderous and suicidal.