was a Japanese intellectual and professor emeritus of literature at the

University of Electro-Communications The is a national university in Chōfu, Tokyo, Japan. It specialises in the disciplines of computer science, the physical sciences, engineering and technology. It was founded in 1918 as the Technical Institute for Wireless-Communications. H ...

Tokyo Tokyo, officially the Tokyo Metropolis, is the capital of Japan, capital and List of cities in Japan, most populous city in Japan. With a population of over 14 million in the city proper in 2023, it is List of largest cities, one of the most ...

, Japan.

Life and career

Nishio was awarded a degree in German literature and a

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

in literature from the

University of Tokyo The University of Tokyo (, abbreviated as in Japanese and UTokyo in English) is a public research university in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Founded in 1877 as the nation's first modern university by the merger of several pre-westernisation era ins ...

. He translated the works of

Friedrich Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher. He began his career as a classical philology, classical philologist, turning to philosophy early in his academic career. In 1869, aged 24, Nietzsche bec ...

and

Arthur Schopenhauer Arthur Schopenhauer ( ; ; 22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher. He is known for his 1818 work ''The World as Will and Representation'' (expanded in 1844), which characterizes the Phenomenon, phenomenal world as ...

into Japanese and wrote over seventy published works and over thirty translations. Nishio, who was regarded as a rightist intellectual, was the head of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform (新しい歴史教科書を作る会, Atarashii Rekishi Kyokasho wo Tsukuru Kai). This was founded in January 1997 by right-wing scholars and cartoonists to devise a new Japanese history textbook because they considered existing ones to be "self-torturing". Nishio had a wide following in Japan. He was quoted as saying "Why should Japan be the only country that should teach kids -- 12- to 15-year-old kids -- bad things about itself? I think it is ridiculous, and very sad and tragic that Japan cannot write its own patriotic history. We lost the war, and a fantasy was born that by talking bad about yourself, you can strengthen your position. I call that masochistic". He opposed immigration into Japan because he believed it would cause social disorganisation and threaten social cohesion; the subtitle of one of his works is "foreign workers will destroy Japan". Nishio claimed "This is not necessarily an economic problem. Frankly speaking, it is a problem of ‘cultural defense’". Nishio died on November 1, 2024, at the age of 89.評論家の西尾幹二さん死去　保守派の論客、「つくる会」初代会長

Notes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Nishio, Kanji 1935 births 2024 deaths Scholars of German literature Academics from Tokyo University of Tokyo alumni Japanese historical negationists Japanese nationalists Activists from Tokyo Academic staff of the University of Electro-Communications