LA RETORICA DEL PRIMORDIALISMO NEL DISCORSO NAZIONALISTA DI SUZUKI TAKAO E WATANABE SHŌICHI. ANALISI DI TRE SAGGI DI NIHONJINRON

After fifty years since the boom of the Theories on Japanese culture (Nihonbunkaron) and in conjunction with the rise of Japan as a cultural superpower in the world, the official ideology of the establishment still keeps alive the stereotypes, clichés and myths connected to the particularistic paradigm of ‘Japanese nation’ which was popular since the postwar period among Japanese intelligentsia especially in the form of the amatorial essay. Far from being weakened, the Nihonjinron nationalist discourse persists and proliferates through theories, opinions, discussions dealing with Japaneseness in the form of essays, articles, academic seminars, public discussions. Re-interpreting the primordialist perspective in the field of Nationalism Studies as a category of social practice (Coakley 2017), it is especially the belief in the primordiality of Japanese nation that is recently re-assessed with renewed strength by some ideologized and influential intellectuals as Suzuki Takao and Watanabe Shōichi. Echoing the philosophical ideas of German organicism on the nation embodied by Herder and Fichte, the textual and rhetorical analysis of Suzuki’s (2016, 2017) and Watanabe’s (2008) essays offers an interesting tool to bring on the surface the ideological mechanisms underlying Nihonjinron and its ideological core, primordialism.