4
IMPERIAL CONVERGENCE: THE ITALO-ETHIOPIAN WAR AND JAPANESE WORLD-ORDER THINKING, 1935–1936
To the blacksmith’s astonishment, [that day] he had no customers whatsoever. This was because of the news from overseas in the morning and evening papers, as well as the radio broadcasts—everyone’s mind was on that faraway African country, Ethiopia.
—“Shōbai te ni tsukanu kajiya san,” Yomiuri shinbun, 28 September 1935
In the mid-1930s the debates on fascism entered a new phase.1 The catalyst for the shift was Fascist Italy’s attempt to carve out an empire in East Africa. The invasion of Ethiopia began in October 1935 and, after a short but brutal war, terminated in Mussolini’s proclamation of an Italian empire in May 1936. While the Fascist leadership had invaded largely out of concerns with its domestic politics—the Duce’s desire to boost his regime’s popularity by making Italy into a great power—the significance of the war was in how it shook the political, economic, and ideological foundations that underpinned the post–World War I order.2 Its institutional embodiment, the League of Nations, appeared not only unable to live up to the goal of maintaining peace among member nations, which included Italy and Ethiopia; some of the more scathing analysts attacked the League for bending to the influence of two Great Powers, Great Britain and France. Economically, the conflict further undermined faith in free trade, already shaken by the Great Depression, and strengthened calls to consolidate imperial self-sufficiency.3 Discrediting liberal internationalism, the Italo-Ethiopian War paved the way for a rethinking of global politics, unwittingly giving fascism and imperialist dimension. No longer just signifying national rebirth, anticommunism, or virile leadership, fascism was now tied to the reform of the theory and practice of international politics.
Empire and Imperialism
The shift from an internationalist to a regionalist foreign policy had been in the making for some time, and the Italo-Ethiopian War accelerated this process.4 In 1931 the Kwantung Army had invaded Manchuria and, the following year, proclaimed the establishment of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. Army and civilian leaders hailed the new state as the cornerstone of Japan’s new role in Asia. Manchukuo represented both a slap in the face to the open-door policy in China and, in the Pan-Asianist rhetoric dear to right-wing ideologues, a place where Chinese, Koreans, Manchus, Mongols, and Chinese would live in harmony.5 Fascist Italy’s war confirmed to these onlookers that the path they had trodden in Manchuria was the right one. The League looked frail, its diplomacy powerless in the face of the determination of an imperial power. For Japanese ideologues, economists, and politicians international relations were nearing a turning point.
The Italo-Ethiopian War catalyzed the crisis in international affairs with Japan’s own imperial fervor and, in doing so, raised the question of the relationship between Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy. If, in hindsight, it is easy to notice the parallels between Rome and Tokyo’s imperialist goals, in 1935 Japanese observers debated intensely over the commonalities between Fascist Italy’s schemes in East Africa and Japan’s visions for East Asia. The crux of the matter was Italy’s place among the Western powers. On one side, they condemned the Italian invasion because it bore all the hallmarks of old-fashioned European imperialism, with its brutal subjugation of “colored races” to “white” rule.6 It is therefore not surprising that large numbers of Japanese activists and ordinary people protested against Mussolini’s invasion, participating in an antiwar movement which, in the second half of 1935, saw demonstrators taking to the streets in cities as far apart as London, New York, Beijing, and Calcutta.7 On the other side, there were those who regarded Mussolini’s rash act as symptomatic of the desire of “have-not” countries, such as Japan and Italy, to overturn the much-reviled Anglo-Saxon domination of the world. The Darwinian argument that colonies represented a nation’s wealth and “lifeline” had gained prominence during the Great Depression, even though it was of older date. Most interesting was the almost simultaneous call for a colonial redistribution by pre–World War nationalists in Italy, such as Enrico Corradini and the poet Giovanni Pascoli, and, after the Great War, by the young Prince Konoe Fumimaro, who chastised the Versailles Peace Conference, which he had attended, for failing to adequately compensate Japan with colonies.8
The Italo-Ethiopian War, then, posed a dilemma to Japanese officials and foreign-policy pundits. They faced the problem of denying Italian imperialism on the grounds of Western world hegemony while supporting Italy to oppose the empires of the Great Powers in Africa and, indirectly, in Asia. The resolution of these disputes occurred gradually as a result of the geopolitical shift that the war itself had created. Although, during the early stages of the war, dismay over the Italian invasion dominated the Japanese discourse, from late 1935 it became apparent that sympathy for Ethiopia had moved toward understanding for Fascist Italy on the ground that the conflict, while objectionable in principle, could hasten in practice the overthrow of the League of Nations and weaken the European powers, especially Britain. The Italo-Ethiopian War led journalists, intellectuals, and politicians to discuss international questions relating to economic autarky, international organizations, and imperial politics and, in so doing, they inadvertently formulated the first articulation of the ideological links between Japan and Italy (as well as Germany), almost half a decade before the Tripartite Pact.
Anti-Italian Sentiment
Like the Manchurian Incident, the Ethiopian war was a media event. Indeed, the media apparatus and popular mobilization that emerged after 1931 also set the tone for the debates on the war in Ethiopia. Through a variety of outlets—radio, newspapers, pamphlets, movies, and well-publicized study groups—ideologues, journalists, and bureaucrats took a lead in discussing the Italian invasion, causing much sensation among the population in the attempt to influence government policy.9 A September 1935 Yomiuri editorial illustrated the effort to align national interest with popular opinion, lamenting the “great necessity” that the “authorities pay attention to the domestic mood by investigating the rights and wrongs of the people’s perspective on foreign policy, while we have to dedicate ourselves to move public opinion in the right and proper direction.”10 On their part, officials were all too aware that the Italian invasion was a matter of great public interest. In December 1935 the Japanese foreign minister, Hirota Kōki, cautioned his ambassador to Paris that the Italian-Ethiopian conflict was not just a matter of international affairs: “because our disposition towards the conflict has attracted significant attention among the public, it will be necessary to exercise utmost care.”11
The popular mood was decidedly anti-Italian, to the point where the government had to struggle to keep public passions under control. In July 1935 Japanese hostility toward Italy erupted in a diplomatic rift quickly named by the press “the Sugimura affair,” after Sugimura Yōtarō, the ambassador in Rome. The high-profile diplomat—he had been under-secretary general of the League, was a member of the International Olympic Committee, and a keen swimmer and judo wrestler—had not weighed his words carefully enough in a meeting with Mussolini, thus giving the Italian regime the opportunity to misquote him by asserting that Japan had little interest in Ethiopia. Relations between the two countries quickly deteriorated. In Italy, the “anti-Japanese movement” was so violent that two hundred policemen had to be deployed around the Japanese Embassy.12 The anti-Japanese rhetoric, in turn, provoked a hostile reaction to Italy in Japan. Diplomatic commentators chastised Fascist Italy’s crude attitude. The Sugimura affair “makes us doubt Italy’s gentlemanly refinement,” commented one analyst. This kind of attitude, he argued, did not become a Great Power and proved that Italy was not on the level of Great Britain and the United States—or Japan.13
Mussolini’s lack of diplomatic finesse may have compromised support for Italy’s invasion, but more than anything what rallied Japanese to the Ethiopian cause was Italian violence. The disproportionate military capabilities of the modern Italian armies, whose weapons included poison gas, and of the poorly equipped Ethiopian troops horrified Japanese onlookers.14 “Italy is going to hell; choosing to go to war might be a shortcut” was the invective of one Japanese in the Yomiuri column where readers expressed their political opinions in pithy one-line commentaries.15 Nowhere was the exasperation with Italy expressed more forcefully than in attacks against Mussolini himself. Up to 1935 the Italian leader had cut a relatively positive figure in the Japanese press. There was, especially among conservatives and the radical right, a certain admiration for the Duce’s quashing of the socialists and for his advocacy of a social order based on intransigent nationalism. Opponents of parliamentary democracy approved of his efficient, personal rule; educators styled him as an example of masculine virtuosity. But widespread skepticism remained about Mussolini’s resort to—even glorification of—violence as a means to achieve his goals. Preferring persuasion to repression as a way to control dissent, Japanese elites retained latent misgivings about the domestic politics of Fascist Italy.16
The Italian invasion of Ethiopia revived the topic of the violent nature of Fascism and its leader, Benito Mussolini. In columns, articles, and even cartoons, Japanese condemned the Duce as a bloodthirsty, arrogant, and cruel dictator. Yamakawa Kikue, a socialist feminist, declared him a mafia “boss” (oyabun). Other sardonic comments included the pronouncement: “This unmanly Mussolini! Should we send him a raw carp liver from Japan?”17 Even children had misgivings about the Italian hero. Edamatsu Hideyuki, a sixth-grader from Sumiyoshi, a township near Osaka, declared that “when I see Mussolini in a photograph, I like him a lot as a hero but, to think that he bullies weak Ethiopia like that, I don’t like that at all! [iyadanaa].” In Japan, he explained, it is “manly” for the strong to help the weak, and the idea of the suffering of so many Ethiopian children moved little Hideyuki “to tears.” “Doesn’t Mussolini understand the sadness of a boy?”18
Mussolini portrayed as a demon devouring an innocent cat that represents Ethiopia. In the background, the leaders of the League of Nations look on squeamishly.
(From Yomiuri shinbun, April 21, 1936.)
Anti-Italianism and sympathy for Ethiopia merged into a discourse on solidarity of “races of color” against “whites.” As another one-liner put it, the “lions of Africa have become fireflies before the white man, soon they will be eaten.”19 The theory that the Ethiopian war fell into the history of conflict between the West and the rest of the world was particularly dear to right-wing ideologues. In their Pan-Asianist rhetoric they championed the cause of anticolonialism even as they advocated Japanese domination in Asia. Ethiopia received the support of the powerful Amur River Society (Kokuryūkai), led by Tōyama Mitsuru.20 Widely recognized as the high priest of the Japanese Right, in June 1935 he founded the Friends of Ethiopia Group to lobby for the African country in what he regarded as the wider struggle to liberate the world from the yoke of “racial discrimination.” Ethiopia, one member of the group declared, fell “victim to both Italian power and European domination.” “Our Imperial Japan, given its intrinsic mission to overthrow racial inequality, and given the sympathy for those seriously weak people who trust in us, cannot overlook the fact that it is tied closely to this question.”21
The Right’s determination to harness and direct the wave of popular sentiment was noted by Italian officials. Guglielmo Scalise, the Italian military attaché in Tokyo, deplored the number of speakers, orators, and writers who were “swarming a bit everywhere, brandishing the same arguments” and producing a “remarkable flowering of pamphlets” against Italy. The diplomat also observed that, to prove that their sentiments of friendship went beyond rhetoric, some right-wingers held fund-raising rallies in Tokyo wards and other cities, managing to gather sums that were “conspicuous.”22 Other radicals were willing to take sensational if clearly unrealistic steps. The daily Yomiuri reported that in Osaka a group of four pilot volunteers, led by the businessman and postwar fixer as well as philanthropist Sasakawa Ryōichi, declared their “ardent desire” to form a squadron and join the Ethiopian army, ready to “risk their lives for the races of color.”23 More plausibly and, for Italian officials, worryingly, there were also those who threatened Giacinto Auriti, the ambassador in Tokyo, in “anonymous letters with insults and death threats.”24
The Role of the League of Nations
Anti-Italianism, however, was not the only sentiment generated by the Ethiopian war; it was neither the most prominent nor the most enduring response. Alienating though Mussolini’s attitude was, the community of foreign-policy analysts increasingly vented their frustration at the League’s incapacity to stop a renewed European imperial venture. They viewed the war in the context of a wider imperial competition among the Western Great Powers and Mussolini’s aggression in Ethiopia as a reminder that, while Japan was battling for a new Asia liberated from Western colonialism, in Africa the old coordinates of violent, racist white-man’s domination remained in place. And, in their mind, the League was complicit in the perpetuation of the imperial status quo.
In Japan, the conviction that post–World War I international relations were set on rules that favored the Western powers was of long standing. It began at Versailles in 1919, when Woodrow Wilson rejected Japan’s proposal to add a racial equality clause to the Covenant of the League of Nations in response to Australia’s objections.25 The London Naval Treaty (1930), which allowed Great Britain and the United States to maintain a larger fleet than Japan, aroused the ire of those Japanese policymakers and military who advocated an expansion of Japanese naval power in Asia.26 Subsequent events in East Asia raised the stakes. Both the League and the Great Powers condemned the Japanese invasion of Manchuria (1931) and refused to recognize the puppet state of Manchukuo (1933), an opposition that offended the revisionist groups in the Japanese government to the point that they withdrew Japan from the League that same year. As far as Matsuoka Yōsuke, the head of the Japanese delegation at Geneva, was concerned, urgent measures had to be taken lest Europe and America carried out their goal to “crucify” Japan.27
Mussolini trumps the Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, in collusion with the French foreign minister, Pierre Laval, and the British foreign secretary, Samuel Hoare. The cartoon is mockingly titled “Superior and Inferior Races.”
(From Yomiuri shinbun, October 20, 1935.)
Thus, by the early 1930s, while a number of older pro-British liberals in Japan still defended Wilsonian internationalism, a younger crowd of “go-fast imperialists” voiced their contempt for the ideas and institutions that underpinned the world order set up after World War I—and the war in Ethiopia provided the latest platform for their cause.28 They were made up of a loose grouping of intellectuals—academics, high-level bureaucrats, and journalists—who wrote in respected journals close to the bureaucratic and political establishment such as Gaikō jihō and Kokusai chishiki.29 In these pages they debated the Ethiopian war as a turning point for Japanese foreign policy. The editors of Gaikō, for example, drew attention to the Sugimura affair not so much to criticize Fascist Italy but because they found it symptomatic of a deeper problem with the conduct of Japanese foreign policy: “Japanese diplomats are trapped aimlessly in old-fashioned ideas and, as a result, are incapable of grasping the national consciousness [kokuminteki ishiki] of our new Japan.”30 Moved by the pressing concern with a revision of the international system set up at Versailles in 1919, these commentators regarded the Italo-Ethiopian War in light of their desire to press for what contemporaries called an “assertive foreign policy” (kyōchō gaikō) based on Realpolitik and aimed at upholding Japan’s imperial interests in East Asia.
Many of them saw the Western handling of the Italo-Ethiopian War as duplicitous and found confirmation of their suspicions in the Hoare-Laval Pact of December 1935, in which Great Britain and France negotiated a deal with Fascist Italy at the expense of Ethiopia, a League member. Political commentators had expressed growing dismay with the attitude of the two European Great Powers, France and Britain, since early 1935. On January 7 the French foreign minister, Pierre Laval, had sealed an agreement with Mussolini as part of a diplomatic strategy aimed against Hitler’s Germany. In return, France promised not to interfere with Italy’s colonial ambitions in Africa.31 This bilateral diplomacy proved to Matsuda Shōichi, a political scientist, that “in its relations with Italy, France had awakened to realistic politics.”32 According to him, France and Britain dealt with the crisis, not on the basis of the internationalism of 1919, but out of their own imperialist interests. “If we truly want to keep the League of Nations as the sanctuary of peace,” he continued, “it is necessary to advance with the true principles of the League. It is not right to mislead the world and make use of the League opportunistically.”33 Hori Makoto, another political scientist, put it more bluntly. “While France has appointed itself as the most loyal follower of the spirit of the League, by supporting Italy’s aggressive policies, it is trying to destroy this very spirit.”34
The spirit of internationalism of the League, Japanese commentators contended, had done little to dispel the Darwinian logic that animated the foreign policy of the Great Powers, especially that of Britain. London’s interests were such that, “on one side it proclaims frontally the superiority of the League and rallies together all small countries, on the other it moves its fleet and shows its resolve: it prepares for both peace and war.”35 Britain epitomized the Western desire to maintain the international status quo. For this reason Kano Kizō, a specialist in German geopolitics, welcomed the Italo-Ethiopian War, hoping that the conflict would “finally lay bare [the fact] that the League is a prop of British foreign policy.” He was convinced that Italian saber rattling proved that “the strong” always find a reason to oppress the weak. “Just as in Aesop, when the wolf eats the lamb, the act of eating is the result of a decision taken from the beginning, which precedes the pretext for conflict. The Italian-Ethiopian conflict is just like that.”36 Italy’s aims were reprehensible, but no more so than British hypocrisy.
The tensions of Wilsonian internationalism—the yawning gap between the ideals of the League and the practice of the Powers—was reflected in international law. For Tachi Sakutarō, an expert in international law, the League’s legal framework was not only sluggish, but its covenant could not address a conflict such as the Ethiopian war satisfactorily. For example, Article 10 guaranteed the territorial integrity of member nations and therefore should have protected Ethiopia from Italian aggression. Italy, however, declared that Ethiopia threatened the Italian colony of Eritrea and invoked the right of self-defense.37 Ashida Hitoshi, a diplomat-turned-politician (and future postwar prime minister), concluded that these conflicting arguments illustrated that the legal means at the disposal of the League to dissuade or punish a renegade state were limited. Enforcing the legal powers of the League was altogether a different matter. Article 16, he argued, gave the League the power to issue sanctions, but both Britain and France were unwilling to resort to a full embargo and continued to permit imports of coal and oil: “probably no country is thinking of using military force” to stop Italy, Ashida surmised in November 1935.38
In the eyes of these commentators, the League was convulsing in its death throes. It lacked a legal basis to enforce its ideals, suffered from a political deficiency consisting of the non-membership of the United States, and was struggling to survive the moral vicissitudes emerging from imperial power games. These problems, one political scientist put it, had reduced the League of Nations to a “European League.”39 Even the liberal journalist Baba Tsunego insisted that the idealism of the 1920s was dead. The nature of “Realpolitik,” he explained dryly, was such that it “lacks any connection to ethics,” concluding that in international relations there was “no god and no Buddha.”40
The Italo-Ethiopian War generated not so much gloom as a widespread sense of relief, hardening the Japanese resolve to build a new world order on the ruins of the League. By mid-December 1935 foreign affairs journals registered their satisfaction with the year that was about to come to a close, concluding that Japanese, at last, had stood up to the League and corroborated their imperial consciousness. At home, the vestiges of 1920s constitutional democracy (minponshugi) were fading. The “movement for the clarification of the national polity [kokutai]” had defined exactly what that mystic entity meant, recasting the legal principle that the emperor was not subject to the Constitution, but transcended it.41 Internationally, the Ethiopian war had undercut what legitimacy the League had left, promising a revision of the world order. “Domestically, the national consciousness [kokumin ishiki] has been perfected; abroad, the worldview of our nation has been corrected; in our international life we have gained tremendous confidence.” With this newly found vigor and a foreign policy based on the “self” (ji)—self-sufficiency (jishu), autonomy (jiritsu), and confidence (jishin)—Japan could right the wrongs of the current world order, a task that required it to become “the leader of Asia.”42 Convinced that they faced the political and moral collapse of liberal internationalism, a growing number of Japanese political analysts believed that the moment had come to push ahead with neo-imperial visions by consolidating—and perhaps extending—the project started in Manchuria in 1931.
Political Economy
This prospect did not stop at a muscular foreign policy; it also meant reforming East Asia’s political economy. While foreign-policy pundits ruminated about the possibilities of a colonial redistribution, business groups, industrialists, and government bureaucrats sensed that the moment had come to replace the remnants of free trade—and, hence, Western influence in Asia—with a regional economy centered on Japan. To thwart future crises of capitalism such as the Great Depression, in the early 1930s governments around the world turned toward protectionism and a tighter integration of the metropolitan and colonial economies. Japanese economists and businessmen regarded this transition as inevitable but at the same time felt uneasy about it.43
On the one hand, they regarded Japan as being at the forefront of the trend toward a “managed economy.” At home, corporatism, a tighter cooperation between government and big business, promised to solve tensions between labor and capital and to guarantee social harmony.44 In the empire, particularly in Manchuria, a young generation of technocrats (the so-called reform bureaucrats), in conjunction with military leaders, right-wing ideologues, and industrial conglomerates (zaibatsu), worked on a “rationalized,” planned economy that would provide Japan with natural resources and Asia with a model for industrial “development.”45 On the other hand, they worried about Japan’s increasingly uncertain foreign markets. After the Great Depression the Japanese economy had recovered fast. Exports of consumer goods such as cotton and rayon surged; military demand for steel and munitions increased; and new industrial conglomerates such as Nissan, Nichitsu, and Riken expanded the chemical and technology sectors. Companies, however, faced increasingly tight import restrictions in places like the United States, but also India and the Middle East. To secure their country’s economic survival, then, economists, businessmen, and planners sought to extend Japanese access to Asian markets.46 In this context, they came to see the Ethiopian war as opening an avenue toward bridging the gap between Japan’s innovative economic thinking and its old problem of lacking access to resources and markets: the rising tensions in Europe would weaken the Great Powers’ grip over their colonies in Asia.
The result was that the Ethiopian war brought together reformist thinking in both foreign affairs and political economy, inducing many economists to believe that a reconstruction of capitalism in an expanded empire was nearing. Indeed, what emerges from the reactions of the business community is just how marginal the idea of free trade on a world scale had become. Few businessmen were anxious about the possibility that the Italo-Ethiopian War might close Western markets to Japanese trade. Only the relatively marginal community that envisaged Africa as an untapped trading frontier raised some concerns about the effects of the war. In these quarters Africa, and Ethiopia in particular, was thought of as a market for Japanese goods and as a place from which to import raw materials and agricultural produce. In fact, in the decade preceding the conflict, trade relations between Japan and Ethiopia had intensified, with Japanese firms exporting large amounts of cotton fabrics, rayon, pottery, and glassware to the African kingdom.47 The two countries had signed a Friendship and Trade Agreement in 1928, and in the early 1930s further private and government initiatives got under way. In November 1931 the business newspaper Chūgai shōgyō shinpō (predecessor of the postwar financial daily Nihon keizai shinbun) reported on conditions in Ethiopia, pointing out that as “[Ethiopia] is venturing out onto the international stage, one can foresee that this will be a remarkable customer country for [our] exports.”48 According to the Cape Times, in the first half of 1934 Japanese products in Ethiopia outsold those of Western countries: Japan exported goods of the value of 8.5 million francs, compared to Britain’s 3.2 million and Italy’s tiny 240 thousand.49 At the same time, the country was rich in lucrative export products, such as animal furs, coffee, beeswax, ivory, and musk. “As Japan receives treatment of most favored nation,” the article concluded, “and given that there is a strong demand for Japanese products and that the climate is not too bad, those who are well-informed are increasingly making this new friend of Japan the object of their attention.”50 For these businessmen, the war, and even more so an Italian victory, meant being cut off from Africa.
But most industrialists and businessmen discussed the Italo-Ethiopian War with aplomb. Indeed, the prospect of a wartime economy created much cheer. “Europe’s instability is East Asia’s stability. When Europe darkens, Japan brightens up.”51 With such confidence the finance and banking journalist Katsuta Teiji (1893–1952) welcomed the possibility that Japanese goods would flow into those markets cut off from their European suppliers, as had happened during World War I. Daiyamondo (Diamond), the foremost popular business magazine, hurriedly published a guide about the war’s influence on the stock market.52 With a war raging in East Africa and, potentially, in the Mediterranean, Western merchant ships would likely be recalled to their home countries. “At one time foreign merchant ships in Asia had reached six hundred thousand tons; recently the figure is closer to one hundred thousand.” Japan’s shipping industry would reap great profits from this situation. The same was true of the spinning industry (should the Suez Canal be closed, British competition would all but disappear); the shipbuilding industry (which would benefit indirectly); and machinery (exported to markets in Asia but also Britain, Germany, and the United States).53 More than any other, the ailing Japanese rayon business would find respite by taking over the Italian market share. As one reader bluntly put it, “traders in rayon are those who, deep in their hearts, hope most fervently that the war will expand.”54 Investors agreed that the war’s impact on the stock market was likely to be minor. In November, Kajiwara Nakaji, former head of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, wrote that the situation was stable and that, unless the war degenerated into a second European-wide conflict, there was no reason for investors to fret; his advice was to “keep calm and keep buying.”55
The wartime economy could boost big business for another reason. As the leaders of Japan’s great firms saw it, a renewed period of destabilization would likely weaken the presence of Western capital in Asia and, crucially, do away with their competition. To discuss how to manage Japan’s future hegemonic position in the region a number of corporate heavyweights gathered for a roundtable talk organized by the daily Ōsaka Asahi shinbun. They felt exhilarant. Yokota Tsukuri, managing director at Nomura Securities, declared that since the Meiji Restoration of 1868 Japan had not witnessed such a “blissful” period. The collaboration between the military and the bureaucracy was “far less self-interested” than party cabinets; Japan’s position in East Asia had become “firm”; the alliance with Manchukuo had laid the groundwork for a “great fervor.” Yokota, in other words, saw the Ethiopian crisis through the lens of Japan’s “action” in Manchuria. Ethiopia continued that project, confirming the conviction that the world economy had reached a turning point. “Politically and economically, we have the essential elements ready, and although we are currently still in a preparatory period, it is clear that we are following the road to advancement.”56
“Advancement” meant, first of all, no going back to the economics of the 1920s. A return “to the time of the prewar economy when trade was comparatively free is an illusion,” argued Matsui Haruo (1891–1966), one of the “reformist bureaucrats” who had been active in Manchuria and who, in 1937, would become a member of the Planning Agency (Kikakuin).57 But these arguments were not limited to technocrats like Matsui. Individuals with a long-standing liberal pedigree also hailed the Ethiopian war as a momentous event, revisiting their established convictions in favor of new solutions to the crisis of capitalism. On October 7, Katsuta Teiji, the finance and banking expert, welcomed the outbreak of hostilities between Italy and Ethiopia. The war was the natural result of the “impasse of European liberalism” and gave a chance to move beyond its strictures. “Thinking in terms of the interruption of the distribution economy [ryūtsū keizai], of the coming of a bloc economy, of the reoccurrence of wars for the redistribution of colonies, of a clean slate of the inequalities of capitalism, the Italo-Ethiopian War appears to be the first step toward a new century in the history of humanity.” As Japanese capitalism was expanding “left and right” and as Japan was asserting its position as the “champion [ōsha] of East Asia,” this was a “period of soul-searching.”58 The Ethiopian crisis dealt a double blow to both political and economic internationalism, signaling a global turn toward the kind of imperial economy that Japan had spearheaded in Manchuria.
The convergence of political and economic reformism in the mid-1930s gave the Italo-Ethiopian War a significance that it would not have had only a few years earlier. As Iida Seizō, an economist at Sumitomo Bank and, later, at Nomura Securities, explained, what distinguished the world economy in 1935 from that of World War I was the “stage of capitalism.” World War I was a struggle for the balance of power; Ethiopia was fundamentally about imperial powers trying to secure resources.59 In other words, the world economy would henceforth no longer be global and competitive but regional and regulated. It was this geopolitical framework that Matsui had in mind when he advocated a “bloc economy” based on a “new free trade.”60 The creation of self-contained, regional blocs entailed a conjoined action on two fronts. Politically, Japan had to redraw the parameters of an expanded sphere of interest in East Asia; and, economically, it was necessary to “rationalize” the use of resources. Taking this step, it seemed to Katsuta Teiji, was the “ironclad rule of capitalism.”61
Economists and bureaucrats increasingly referred to these policies as “development.” In September 1935 the aging (and soon-to-be assassinated) finance minister and sometime champion of the gold standard, Takahashi Korekiyo, bent to the winds of economic change. No longer expecting national growth through trade, the veteran minister now called on state intervention to secure Japan and Asia’s “development.”
As far as our investments and cultural projects in North China are concerned, Britain, the United States, and all other countries are too troubled by the conflict between Italy and Ethiopia to call much attention to them. But, should the conflict be settled, it is clear that Western capital will necessarily flow toward North China…we are not yet prepared for [such] investments and this is not only a problem of prestige for Japan, the leader of East Asia—it is also a serious problem in terms of Japan’s future development. Therefore from now on we ought to start considering the future prospects of North China, and instruct all ministries to make arrangements accordingly.62
The Italo-Ethiopian War prompted Japanese businessmen and bureaucrats to rethink the possibilities for capitalism in one empire. As they saw it, free trade had not to be abolished but reconfigured spatially within the boundaries of an expanded Japanese imperial polity. At the same time, some form of collaboration between state and capital was required to harmonize the economy. The “greatest impact of the Italo-Ethiopian War,” wrote Takeuchi Kenji (1895–1978), a scholar of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, was that it had become increasingly necessary to establish a “fundamental plan for heavy industry and, especially, the steel industry.” Like many bureaucrats, politicians, and journalists, he was beaming with optimism: “our country’s political position has become very bright indeed.”63
Toward a Reconciliation with Fascist Italy
Thus the Italo-Ethiopian War generated conflicting responses in Japan. On one side, it led to a popular anticolonialism that was expressed in widespread hostility toward Fascist Italy’s aggression of an African country. On the other, it revived Japanese imperialism by emboldening those politicians, ideologues, and bureaucrats who were waiting for the moment to consolidate Japan’s “independent foreign policy” and to extend the idea of a regional economic bloc to the rest of Asia. These contradictions in Japan’s stance on world affairs did not escape Nogami Yaeko, the liberal feminist writer and activist. She had read an article by Bernard Shaw in which the British intellectual took the press of his country to task for antagonizing Italy but remaining silent on Britain’s own imperialism. Sardonically, Shaw had called attention to the hypocrisy of those who drew all too clear distinctions between Britain’s and Italy’s methods of bringing civilization to the colonized. In turn, Nogami questioned the lack of self-criticism among Japanese intellectuals. “If in Japan we had an old man [oji] who spoke frankly in this way,” Nogami wrote, “the general populace [ippan taishū] who, in the past two or three years, has had a bloated belly would feel relieved as if after an enema.”64
Nogami’s pointed critique raises the question of how various Japanese intellectuals and policymakers reconciled the contradiction between opposing Italian imperialism in Africa while pleading for Japan to build a new order in Asia. Several commentators found no inconsistency at all, resolving the paradox with arguments about national exceptionalism. Japanese were ethically equipped to “feel” the plight of the colonized people and then to lead them out of subjugation. “This is probably because of Japan’s bushido,” wrote the liberal intellectual Baba Tsunego, referring to that chivalrous attitude of the strong toward the weak that the Christian internationalist Nitobe Inazō had identified as the unwritten morality underlying Japanese social conduct. For Baba, bushido not only had a domestic meaning; it had an international applicability. Its moral code not only could harmonize Japanese society but could be exported to other countries as a way to resolve the tensions plaguing the contemporary world.65 Tsurumi Yūsuke, another liberal internationalist, contended that Japanese values represented the apogee of civilizational progress. In his book on the Italo-Ethiopian War, Ethiopia: Crucible of Misfortune (1935), he argued that
A superannuated Europe is resorting to its last strengths in the effort to hold on to its throne of world domination. Greece collapsed, Rome collapsed, the Han dynasty collapsed, the Mughal empire collapsed, Napoleon collapsed. Times change, nations [minzoku] rise and decline. A man’s life does not reach one hundred years; how can a nation flourish for one thousand? Unless we make coexistence and coprosperity the ideal of humanity, we cannot tolerate that on this earth the monopoly of one people and one race [hito minzoku, isshuzoku] be powerful for eternity.66
The idea that in its foreign policy Japan was following a moral mission legitimized a clear-cut distinction between Italian aims in Africa and Japan’s project in Asia. Kanezaki Ken, an advocate of Japanese expansion in North China, contrasted Italy’s imperial aims with what he saw as Japan’s moral mission. “The development of the Japanese nation [minzoku] is not about a persistent imperialism and expansionism, as Westerners believe. It is an expansion based on a pure sense of justice for the world. The Japanese people have a strong sense of justice [seigi] and resent injustice [ fugi].”67 Legal scholars also went to great lengths to distinguish between the two empires. Ashida Hitoshi, for example, maintained that the Italian invasion of Ethiopia was a “conflict”(funsō); the Japanese invasion of Manchuria was no more than an “incident” (jihen). In his mind, Japan “supported the independence of Manchuria” whereas Italy “destroyed an independent state.”68 This reasoning found its most extreme expression among some sections of the radical Right. The activist Kita Reikichi, for example, developed an argument in support of Japan’s expansion based on Pan-Asianist fraternity, co-opting the language of sympathy with Ethiopia for a self-serving justification of Japanese empire.69 He denounced Italy’s “insane declaration” to subjugate “blacks,” and called on Japan to work for “world justice” by embracing “racial equality as the basis of international affairs.” Yet this criticism of Italian imperialism had nothing to do with Japan’s hegemony over Asia. “Ruling over China, Japan should give grand spiritual encouragement to Ethiopia from the principle of a racial levelers’ movement [ jinshu suihei undō].”70
And yet, in the long run, arguments that drew all too neat distinctions between the Japanese and Italian empires gave way to a more conciliatory, even sympathetic, disposition toward Fascist Italy. By December 1935, the shift was palpable. Guglielmo Scalise, the military attaché in Tokyo, reported that “large swathes of public opinion are perhaps still sympathizing with Ethiopia, but among them there are various currents that work in our favor, and these currents are already setting foot in the milieus that direct politics and the various activities in the country, in particular the military and navy.”71 By late 1935, disillusionment with the League of Nations had eclipsed frustration with Italy, repositioning the Ethiopian conflict in a wider imperialist struggle that made many Japanese reconsider their priorities—and allegiances. In Japan’s imperial schemes Italy may have counted for little, but more than Ethiopia. As this realization germinated, the Italo-Ethiopian War ceased to be a conflict between the forces for and against Western domination of the world and took on the connotations of an ideological war between resurgent nations such as Japan and Italy and the decadent liberal Great Powers. Imperial Japan’s fascist tendencies overlapped with Fascist Italy’s imperial policies; the commonalities were too obvious to be whisked away, even though this was often admitted only between the lines.
From the beginning, popular outrage against Italy was largely genuine but support for Ethiopia was qualified. Sympathy for the plight of Africans had never been uniform, being more pronounced among ordinary Japanese than among the political and intellectual elites, whose racialized views of Africans often paralleled those of their Western counterparts. Ethiopia entered public consciousness at a time in which there were firmly set hierarchies in the Japanese view of the world. If, as Stefan Tanaka has shown, China became categorized as a backward neighbor, no better treatment was to be expected for Ethiopia.72 Sympathetic though they might have been, some commentators could not conceal their condescension, if not plain racism, toward Ethiopians. This was the attitude of an old liberal like the writer and journalist Masamune Hakuchō (1879–1962); in 1935, together with the writers Shimazaki Tōson and Tokuda Shūsei, he had just founded PEN Japan. “As a country, Ethiopia is ancient, but it seems that in terms of cultural production it has nothing to be proud of in this world. So, from that perspective, even if it is destroyed, we can feel relieved. Let it have its cultural institutions rebuilt by a conqueror and, from that point, it will create its own literature as a country.”73 The physiologist Uramoto Secchō questioned the value of the Ethiopian “race.” “It appears that, as individuals and in their physical strength, Ethiopians hold sway over the rest of the world in running and in combat, but, when it comes to racial spirit [jinshu kihaku]…they’re worth zero.”74 Taken on its own terms, outside the context of Italian aggression, Ethiopia no longer appeared a defenseless victim, but a backward place with an interesting, but inferior, civilization.
This Darwinian logic touched a nerve, as even some right-wingers wavered in their support for Ethiopia. Increasingly interpreting the Italo-Ethiopian War as an episode in the struggle for world hegemony between “have” and “have-not” countries, they aligned the interests of Japan with those of Italy and Germany against those of Great Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union. In the words of Mutō Naoyoshi, a little-known Pan-Asianist, the Italo-Ethiopian War’s significance was that it illustrated the “historically inevitable and grave mission for countries whose development has been obstructed by a small and narrow territory.” In this struggle for life or death, Mutō continued, the “highest principle is necessity.” And, in his view, British interests interfered with the evolutionary needs of emerging countries. “Italy looking for a way into Ethiopia; Britain thrusting its nose into this matter. What difference can one see in the positions of Japan and Italy?”75
Other right-wingers outspokenly defended the cause of Fascist Italy on racial grounds. Shimoi Harukichi rallied a number of fellow travelers for what the Italian military attaché called a “thorough operation in favor of Italy.” The group, named the Society for the Study of International Affairs (Kokusai Jijō Kenkyūkai), toured the country to give talks on the African war, presenting Italy’s perspective to industrialists at Tokyo’s Rotary Club, the Osaka Chamber of Commerce, intellectuals, students at Waseda University, military officers and, on one occasion, some one hundred Diet representatives. They churned out numerous pamphlets that countered the concept of racial war. One, for example, argued that Japanese had nothing in common with Ethiopians: “we are not a race of color,” as this term (yūshoku jinshu) only denoted blacks. To argue otherwise would be “racial prejudice.”76
Just like public sympathy for Ethiopia was, after all, relative, so economic and political elites were often ambivalent about their hostility to Fascist Italy. To be sure, the Italo-Ethiopian War was inconvenient to the Japanese government. Fearing that the conflict might have repercussions on Japan’s hold of Manchukuo, it assumed a wait-and-see stance in the hope that the war would come to a quick end.77 To make the situation even more sensitive, the war came at a time when domestic politics were in disarray due to the wave of right-wing terrorism. Many politicians would have preferred it if Italy had stayed in its place lest it destabilize international and domestic politics at a sensitive moment.
At the same time, they were pragmatic enough to see chances arising from the tribulations of the League and the weakening of the Royal Navy in Asia. This may also explain the behind-the-scene support for Italy of at least some elements in the Japanese army. In December 1935, Guglielmo Scalise, the Italian military attaché, cabled that “one colonel Kondo, belonging to the nationalist faction of General Araki and doing propaganda for us, has donated one hundred inflatable mattresses for a field hospital and written a highly noble letter expressing his admiration and best wishes for the Head of Government [Mussolini] and the Italian people.”78 He had also heard rumors that the industrial conglomerates Mitsui and Mitsubishi “might be prepared to supply our troops in East Africa should the Suez Canal be closed.”79
If the rift between Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan was more superficial than it appeared at first sight, it was also because Italy’s position in the Japanese divide between East and West was ambiguous. Italy’s grab for empire in Africa fitted squarely into the Pan-Asianist narrative of a civilizational conflict between an imperialist West and the anticolonial movement led by Japan. But Mussolini’s hostility toward the League and the Great Powers cast a different light on Fascist Italy, one that recalled Japan’s own international ambitions. There were those who asserted that, in all the talk about sentiments and feeling, Fascist passions also deserved respect. For the diplomat, politician, and industrialist Kajima Morinosuke, the attack on Ethiopia was not a random act of violence but derived from fascism’s realistic understanding of human nature, the nation, and foreign policy. No doubt, Kajima admitted, violence was an integral element of fascism; and Mussolini was an “extreme imperialist.” But, he continued, the Duce’s attitude was not unwarranted. He had used violence to quell the socialists at home, but had thereby established domestic stability. It was the same in foreign policy: he was making war to prepare for peace. This approach might seem irrational to Anglo-Saxons and to those Japanese who, “fixated with today’s rationalist civilization, cannot in the least understand Fascism’s wildly excited attitude.” Italians, Kajima averred, had a passionate national spirit and saw things differently, and, in his view, rightly so. For “when men decide their actions, it is not so much reason [risei] but sentiment [kanjō] that gets the better of them.”80
The result was that by late 1935 foreign-policy commentators could be heard thinking aloud about siding with Italy’s cause. An editorial in Gaikō jihō declared that Japanese public opinion had demonstrated “an excess of sympathy with the Ethiopians” and a “cold attitude towards the position of Italy…which is not a view that we always support.” As the editors saw it, Italy had, after all, been a “victim” of the Powers, who had prevented this imperial latecomer from acquiring territories in Africa and the Balkans that were necessary for its economic and political survival. Thus the invasion of Ethiopia was of “great significance” to the entire world and taught one “concrete, real lesson”: “unless one determines a new principle for the redistribution of territory for emerging peoples [shikō minzoku] who have culture and energy to develop, the world’s unrest will never stabilize.”81 More radical, right-wing ideologues, such as Murobuse Kōshin, welcomed this instability. The “deep symbolic meaning” of the Italo-Ethiopian War, he wrote in December 1936, was the imminent collapse of Western hegemony, a crisis for which Japan had to ready itself. “To war! To war! We can say with confidence that 1936 was the year that moved us toward the Second World War. Blood is throbbing, the spirit is in trepidation, reason has stopped working. We are on the eve of the spectacle of a second world war.”82
Thus, the significance of the Italo-Ethiopian War lies in the way in which it intensified the crisis of the international system by synthesizing revisionist thinking in foreign affairs, economics, and empire. For Japanese public intellectuals, the Italian aggression on an African state caused moral consternation by demonstrating the error of the Great Powers rejecting Japan’s appeal to include a racial equality clause in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The reaction of the League to the Italian invasion smacked not only of hypocrisy but also of the self-serving influence of Great Britain and France, two colonial powers that staunchly opposed Japan’s call for an expanded sphere of interest in Asia. Such demands had become more strident with the search for a solution to the crisis of capitalism after the Great Depression. They were also wedded to the belief that Japan was morally empowered to liberate Asia from Western imperialism, an idea that was reinforced by the model of Manchukuo as a nominally independent state and that would find its most philosophical expression in the wartime writings of thinkers related to the Kyoto School.83
Yet, just as the Italo-Ethiopian War disclosed that liberal internationalism was shot through with imperial ambitions, so the conflict revealed the hypocrisy of Japan’s professed anti-imperialism.84 Sympathy for Ethiopia, based on Pan-Asian notions of racial equality, generally masked paternalism, which in turn concealed an imperial project of its own. Indeed, the Italo-Ethiopian War radicalized Japan’s imperial fervor, consolidating the moral ground trodden in Manchuria. In the end, the primacy of empire laid bare Imperial Japan’s commonality of interest with Fascist Italy. Caught between the Great Power status quo and Italian-induced instability, Japanese elites compromised with Fascist Italy. As Giacinto Auriti perceptibly reported to Rome, officials in Tokyo saw in Ethiopia a weakening of the British position in the Japanese sphere of interest. In the event of a “European war,” Auriti assumed with prescience, “it is quite probable that Japan will ally with one or the other of the belligerents, but against Britain rather than allied to it.”85 Even hard-nosed believers in the singularity of Manchuria admitted that opposition to the League of Nations and the yearning for autarky pushed Italy and Japan toward similarly articulated imperial goals in Africa and Asia. As the interwar economist Karl Polanyi would later put it, Italy and Japan, as well as Germany, were “in a position to recognize the hidden shortcomings of the nineteenth-century order, and to employ this knowledge to speed the destruction of that order.”86
Ultimately, the Italian war in Ethiopia sparked the realization that Japan, Italy, and Germany were ideologically linked by the desire to revise Wilson’s national self-determination into what can be called imperial self-determination. Japanese visionaries noticed this coming together of global fascism but remained skeptical about the extent to which the three countries would cooperate. One pundit prognosticated an alliance among the countries but, although the three powers aimed at a “revolutionary” overturning of the status quo, doubted that they would form a “compact group”: unlike the clans that had fought in the twelfth-century Genpei war, they would be “internally divided.”87 It was these conflicting forces toward integration and disaggregation that would be put to the test as Japan, Italy, and Germany gravitated toward an alliance in the late 1930s.
Thus, as they debated the Italo-Ethiopian War, Japanese also had to come to terms with the connections between the imperial politics of Japan, Fascist Italy, and, in due time, the Third Reich. In November 1935, Prince Konoe Fumimaro, soon to become prime minister, spoke of an “international New Deal” that would guarantee the “three great nations of Italy, Germany, and Japan” the expansion necessary for their “survival.”88 But ideologues and policymakers were remarkably aware of the irony that the imperial aspirations they shared with the European fascist powers also set clear limits to their collaboration. As Mark Mazower has pointed out, Japan, Italy, and Germany’s hostility toward international institutions and diplomacy facilitated a “banding together” even as it undermined a coordinated policy. The point of all three empires was, after all, to remain politically and economically autonomous units.89