5
FASCISM IN WORLD HISTORY, 1937–1943
The threatening arrival in Uraga of the black ships is a dream of a long time ago. The white vessels from Italy have come to Yokohama to bring friendship.
—Yomiuri shinbun, April 19, 1938.
On July 30, 1940, Japan, Italy, and Germany entered into a formal political alliance by signing the Tripartite Pact. In this document, the three countries demanded that “all nations of the world be given each its own proper place” and stipulated that Japan, Italy, and Germany would “stand by and co-operate with one another in regard to their efforts in Greater East Asia and the regions of Europe respectively wherein it is their prime purpose to establish and maintain a new order of things.”1
These somewhat vague terms exhibited a certain distrust for the European fascist powers in the higher echelons of the Japanese government. The military were divided over whether to attack the Soviets in unison with the Wehrmacht; the diplomatic corps was plagued by factional rivalry between advocates of further negotiations with the United States and declared sympathizers of the Axis, such as Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yōsuke; and senior court officials, especially the last genrō, Saionji Kimmochi, maintained a certain pro-British stance.2 The road toward the Tripartite Pact had been tortuous. In many ways the alliance was a pragmatic, perhaps even reluctant, diplomatic move by three countries that sought to avoid isolation.3
Ideologically, however, the import of Japan’s relationship with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany was deep, because the Axis alliance came to intersect with Japanese visions of a new order at home and in Asia. In 1937, when the Japanese army launched an all-out attack on China, preparations for a state of total war were stepped up, with the Diet passing the National Mobilization Law (Kokka Sōdōinhō, 1938), just as Araki Sadao, the militant education minister, launched a “spiritual mobilization” campaign. Further political reforms followed in 1940. Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro masterminded the New Political Order Movement (Shintaisei Undō), which culminated in the abolition of political parties and their merger into a single body, the Imperial Rule Assistance Association (Taisei Yokusankai).4 Reforms at home mirrored ambitious plans abroad. The war in China, initially labeled as a “holy war,” was integral to what Konoe called, in November 1938, a new order in East Asia, a vision of Japanese regional hegemony, which found its most brazen formulation in the declaration of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Daitōa Kyōeiken) in June 1940.5 By then, the radicalization of politics at home and abroad solidified the common ground between Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany.
The Tripartite Pact may have amounted to little in terms of diplomatic coordination, but it mattered as an ideological document that signaled the coming together of the Japanese, Italian, and German new orders since the late 1930s. In Japan, it heightened the sense among some of Japan’s leading politicians, intellectuals, bureaucrats, and military men that they had reached a world-historical moment. They felt that an unprecedented opportunity had arrived to replace the international system set up at Versailles and, for many of them more important, to move into an altogether new stage in world history, with new hegemons working to overcome modernity itself.6 In the drive toward this goal Italy and Germany were partners of a kind. In Konoe’s words, delivered to the emperor in July 1940, the world faced a “great turning point” (ichidai tenkanki), and as Japan moved toward a “new world order” it was necessary to “seek intimate relations” with Germany and Italy, which were fighting for the same cause. It was “senseless” to rely on these two countries or “work as if we were their agents.” Yet, “when it comes to growing out of the old world order, replacing the existing Anglo-American rule and establishing a new order, the Empire’s stance is completely in unison with the interests of Germany and Italy.”7
In 1940–41 the prospect of an Axis victory over the liberal powers raised the question of how Japan would negotiate world hegemony with its European partners. Though it was all very well for ideologues to acknowledge the commonalities with Italy and Germany, the knottier question was the extent to which Japan could reconcile its vision of the new order with that of its European partners. As they saw it, what both linked and divided their countries was national history. Arguments could be made that Japan, Italy, and Germany were nations whose rise signaled the overturn of Anglo-American liberalism and materialism. But could Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany really be disentangled from the “West?” Sharing a belief in national uniqueness was a paradox that set the limits to the collaboration—both diplomatic and ideological—among the three countries and their new orders, but it did not stop ideologues from attempting to reconcile their national histories. The result was a debate about the historical nature of Italy and Germany with the aim of assessing their place in world history and, by extension, their relationship to Japan. For the Japanese mission in Asia the Alliance opened up new possibilities even as it revived old complications.
Celebrating Fascist Italy
Japan’s descent into total war ushered in profound changes to Japanese politics and society. The police apparatus increased its surveillance of the press and ordinary citizens, often with brutality. Labor laws mobilized men, women, and even children into compulsory factory work in industries that were crucial to the war effort. Consumer goods progressively vanished from stores; food became scarce.8 And yet, as Ken Ruoff has demonstrated, in wartime Japan privations coexisted with celebrations. The state kept its citizens informed not only of major military exploits—first in China, then in the Pacific—but, in keeping with the heightened sense of history, poured vast resources into cultural events, in particular the 1940 festivities around the 2,600th anniversary of the mythical founding of Japan.9 Promoted by government institutions and supported by civil groups, a celebratory mood often pervaded public life in what was designated as an epoch-making moment.
Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were integrated into these performances. The half-decade stretching from 1937 to 1943 represented a new phase in the relations between the three countries, a period in which the fascist powers enjoyed unprecedented exposure in the journalistic, academic, and official debates.10 Starting with Italy’s joining of the Anti-Comintern Pact in November 1937, sealed the previous year by Japan and Germany, the government began to stage commemorative events to celebrate the important dates in the Axis calendar—anniversaries of pacts or military victories—but also to honor individuals and representatives of these countries. Through these campaigns, Japanese officialdom sought to conjure a cordial image of Italy and Germany. Kawai Tatsuo, the head of the Foreign Ministry Information Section (Gaimushō Jōhōbu) and postwar ambassador to Australia, expressed the official stance when Italy joined the Anti-Comintern Pact, asserting that it was “a natural outcome for people [kokumin] with a spiritual proximity to get close and seek one another” and that, as this friendship grew, they would advance “world civilization and peace.”11
In the case of Italy, it is remarkable how fast official and public discourse shifted from one of apprehension and hostility during the invasion of Ethiopia to one of support and sympathy in the years after 1937. Tacit realignment had, in fact, started even earlier. On May 9, 1936, only four days after Italian forces had entered the Ethiopian capital, a functionary of the Japanese Embassy in Rome paid a visit to the Italian Foreign Ministry. He “expressed congratulations for the surrender of Addis Ababa,” the ministry recorded, “adding that the congratulations of the Japanese Government ought to be considered among those truly sincere.”12 The enthusiastic Japanese official may have overstated the case, as a substantial pro-British faction in the foreign ministry opposed an alliance with Italy. Nonetheless, as argued by the diplomatic historian Valdo Ferretti, the Japanese Foreign Ministry spearheaded a conciliatory policy toward Italy, proceeding to improve relations with Rome through a rapid series of diplomatic agreements.13 On November 18, 1936, Japan became the first power to recognize the Italian annexation of Ethiopia and downgraded its embassy there to the rank of a consulate. The Italians reciprocated somewhat belatedly, as it took some time to disengage from its China-centered foreign policy in East Asia.14 But the following year, in November 1937, Italy joined Japan and Germany in the Anti-Comintern Pact and recognized Manchukuo. In March 1939 Italy and Japan signed a cultural pact and, on September 27, 1940, the Tripartite Pact.
Determined not to let the pacts be dead letters, the Japanese government, in coordination with Fascist authorities, devised a series of strategies to introduce Italy to the Japanese public. But top-down propaganda alone cannot fully account for the variety of responses to the alliance with Italy.15 Despite the undoubtedly official nature of these initiatives, patriotic associations, newspaper editors, industrialists, artists, as well as private individuals celebrated the alliance with Fascist Italy, revealing how the interest in the ally included actors who had played a key role in mobilizing Japanese society since the Manchurian Incident of 1931.16
The celebration of the Anti-Comintern Pact offers an insight into the participation of individuals, as well as into the interplay between city, prefectural, and central government levels, in the construction of a friendly image of Fascist Italy. The ceremonial was held at the Kōrakuen stadium in Tokyo in front of a large crowd of officials and ordinary Japanese who had been mobilized to show appreciation for the new diplomatic partner. The most fervent admirers contributed to the festivities by offering gifts to Mussolini. Miyamoto Kinpachi, a violin maker from Denenchōfu, in the suburbs of Tokyo, presented Mussolini with a violin—“I heard,” he wrote in the note to the Duce, “that in what little leisure time official duties allow you, you play the violin.”17 Gotō Tadanao, the head of the Amama paper-manufacturing company in Shizuoka Prefecture, commemorated the first anniversary of the Anti-Comintern Pact by sending Mussolini a painting of Mount Fuji—“wrapped in beautiful paper,” as the Italian Embassy specified.18 The Women’s Patriotic League (Dai-Nihon Rengō Fujinkai) and the Young Girls’ Youth Movement (Dai-Nihon Rengō Joshi Seinendan), honored the anticommunist alliance by sending gifts to Mussolini and Hitler. In January 1938 Ambassador Auriti formally accepted the Women’s League’s “pure Japan-style ‘Yamato doll’ that expressed the faith of its twenty million members.”19 Later, in June 1939, the city of Kawasaki dedicated a cherry tree to Benito Mussolini and his brother Arnaldo—poor weather conditions had a negative effect on the turnout, though youth associations and school students were made to attend.
“Springtime for the Anti-Comintern Pact.” Produced in January 1938, this poster displays three young women each holding a hagoita, a wooden paddle used to play hanetsuki, a game similar to badminton, during the New Year. Pictures on the bats portray the leaders of the Axis countries, Adolf Hitler, Konoe Fumimaro, and Benito Mussolini.
(Courtesy of Kyōdō News.)
A high point in the celebrations of Fascist Italy was reached during a visit to Japan by an official delegation of the National Fascist Party, comprising some two dozen Fascists and headed by the ex-diplomat Giacomo Paulucci de’ Calboli as well as the writer and amateur Orientalist Pietro Silvio Rivetta. Officials took great care to make the visit, the most high-profile by Fascist representatives to date, into a memorable one, for both the guests and the hosts. On March 22, 1938, the party sailed into Nagasaki for a one-month sojourn, during which the Italians toured Japan’s major cities as well Manchuria. The tour was highly publicized. The media kept a close eye on the journeying Fascist delegation, reporting on their activities and meetings with local and government notables. The impressive number of gifts for Mussolini that the travelling party collected from these encounters indicates the extent to which authorities and local elites took the alliance seriously. Yonai Mitsumasa, the navy minister, donated a precious suit of samurai armor, complete with bow, arrows, and sword. The city of Fukuoka also gave a sword, and Kure a lacquered pen. Tsuda Shingō, the head of the Kanegafuchi Spinning Company in Kobe, contributed an “enormous and precious carpet,” and Shirai Matsujirō, director of the Osaka Bunraku Theatre Company, a “three-hundred year old puppet.” From Arita, a rural township in Saga Prefecture famous for its pottery, came a “splendid porcelain plate,” while in Tokyo the mayor added a “large stone lantern”; in Manchukuo, Emperor Puyi gave a “marvellous skin of a tiger, a rare exemplar for its size and value.”20
The “Benito Mussolini Cherry,” auspiciously planted with Shinto rites despite the adverse weather. Kawasaki, November 30, 1939.
(Photo courtesy of ASMAE.)
Ordinary Japanese were also drawn into the festivities. The delegation included a film crew from Italy’s documentary and cinematographic center, the Istituto Luce. The footage they shot during the tour of Japan, Korea, and Manchukuo reveals the extent to which Japanese authorities mobilized the population for the occasion.21 The delegation was paraded through Kamakura, posing in front of the Great Buddha. In Nara, the ancient capital, de’ Calboli addressed a vast crowd at a gathering held on the grounds of one of the city’s temples. As they passed through Osaka, the Italians drove through streets lined with their national flags and were hailed by a sea of bystanders, some of whom demanded autographs. Socializing with the Italian visitors was common during the many receptions held in their honor in the various cities they visited. The media did their part. The delegation was advertised in newspapers and on radio. Businesses chimed in. Purchasing space for commercials, Kirin beer toasted the Fascist visitors, as did the department store Mitsukoshi.22 Some Japanese joined the festive spirit by sending lyrical effusions to the daily Yomiuri shinbun.
Welcome, delegation from our faraway friend Italy, be our guest in this bright spring23
The empire of the rising sun and Fascist Italy are fraternizing, the flowers are in bloom, and the birds sing.24
Regretting to part with the cherry blossoms in bloom, their mission of prosperity accomplished, the Fascist friends have left the capital.25
With the Anti-Comintern Pact, the Right, too, fell in line with the official embrace of Fascist Italy. Tōyama Mitsuru took the occasion to backtrack on the anti-Italian sentiments he had championed at the time of the Ethiopian crisis. According to the journalist who interviewed him, Tōyama now “supported wholeheartedly the rapprochement between Italy and Japan…participating enthusiastically in pro-Italian demonstrations.” Tōyama added that he was a personal admirer of Mussolini and that he was convinced that “the moment of renovation has inexorably arrived; the hour has come for Italy, Japan, and Germany to hurry and bond with one other to consolidate their union.”26
In what could be called a form of new-order tourism, some right-wingers and admirers of the Axis found it worthwhile journeying to Rome to extend to the dictator their personal compliments, as well as those of the institutions they represented. Hatoyama Ichirō, a leading figure in one of the two largest political parties, the Seiyūkai, and postwar prime minister, traveled to Rome and Berlin in November 1937. There he was granted an audience with both dictators. He was particularly impressed by Mussolini, enthusing about “the effective national capacity under the Fascist regime” and praising the “great moral force” of Italians.27 Nakano Seigō, now a right-wing Diet representative and outspoken pro-Axis advocate, followed in Hatoyama’s steps when he visited Mussolini and Hitler the following week.28 According to Auriti, Nakano, close to Tōyama Mitsuru, apologized for his past support of the Ethiopian cause—“he spontaneously acknowledged the mistake and said, ‘I feel ashamed about it.’”29 On his return to Tokyo, Nakano reported about Fascist Italy at a meeting of the Army General Staff also attended by Imperial Prince Chichibu, the emperor’s younger brother, who had a reputation for possessing right-wing sympathies.30 Auriti was informed that “Nakano’s communiqué deeply impressed the military” and, no doubt with some exaggeration, said that “all are by now convinced that the only country in the world on which Japan can rely is Italy.”31 Another right-wing activist, the Osaka industrialist and head of the Greater Japan Justice Association (Dai-Nippon Seigi Dan), Sakai Eizō, also visited Mussolini. It was his second journey to Rome (he had met Mussolini in 1923). This time he expressed his conviction that Japan and Italy had joined hands to fight international communism, thanking Mussolini for “accepting my proposal for a perennial collaboration between fascism and the Greater Japan Justice Association of which I am the president.”32
Members of the Mission of the Fascist Party, surrounded by entertainers, at a reception in their honor. Their leader, Paolucci de’ Calboli, sits in the middle. Place unknown, 1938.
(Photo courtesy of Kuribayashi Machiko, Tokyo.)
Resurrecting the Heroic Narrative of Fascism
All these initiatives had an important consequence. In celebrating Italy, the government and sympathetic voices in the public also redefined the meaning of fascism. In the 1920s fascism was closely associated with its country of origin, and Japanese manifested a high degree of interest in what appeared to be an innovative and radical form of nationalism. Starting in the early 1930s, with the rise to power of the radical Right across Europe, the term assumed global connotations. At this time the Right lionized Italian Fascism for its patriotic politics even as several ideologues had misgivings about the commensurability of fascism and their own “reformist” politics. But after the Italian-Ethiopian war and, more so, in conjunction with the Anti-Comintern Pact, intellectuals, politicians, and writers reevaluated fascism, averring that Japan had more in common with Italy and Germany than they had been willing to admit only a few years earlier. In a discursive shift, ideologues resurrected the heroic right-wing narrative of fascism of the early 1930s, according it an official status. Although Fascism referred specifically to Italy’s regime and ideology, it was nonetheless intimately linked to Japan’s new order, becoming an integral ideological component of the Axis alliance.
The task of defining the official meaning of the alliance was taken up by a government-sanctioned institution, the Itaria No Tomo No Kai (Society of the Friends of Italy). Established in May 1938, the Itaria No Tomo No Kai was a direct product of the rapprochement between Japan and Italy following the Anti-Comintern Pact (its Italian twin was the Società Amici del Giappone, Society of the Friends of Japan). While its founder, one Ishida Tatsuo, was a private individual of means with an interest in Italy, the membership quickly expanded to include a mixture of “reformist bureaucrats,” right-wing activists, academics, writers, and intellectuals, all of whom contributed to the Society’s mission to “unite the pro-Axis opinion leaders, striving to make a clean sweep of our country’s liberalists and to take active measures to build a new Japan.”33
Until late 1940 the Itaria No Tomo No Kai largely relied on Italian funding. In the 1930s Italy’s propaganda in Japan had been decidedly ad hoc, with one official remarking that the most “efficient and strenuous asserters of the Fascist fatherland” were the priests of the Catholic Salesian Mission in rural Miyazaki Prefecture.34 In 1938, however, the regime sent a new cultural attaché, the pugnacious Mirko Ardemagni, an ex-journalist and “first-hour” Fascist, to step up the spread of information.35 Under Ardemagni’s aegis, the Society channeled its energies into the organization of talks and behind-the-scenes lobbying, especially in military quarters. To do so, Ardemagni sought the help of the old pro-Italy hand, Shimoi Harukichi, and other Fascist sympathizers. These men traveled around the country distributing pamphlets drafted by the cultural attaché and held talks at the major universities, corporations, and other public venues. To spread knowledge of Italian, they set up language courses, priding themselves as being the only institution outside universities to do so.36
The second phase of the Itaria No Tomo No Kai began after the Tripartite Pact (September 1940) and was characterized by a marked involvement of the Japanese government.37 In late 1940 the Foreign Ministry and the Cabinet Information Board, the institution in charge of coordinating propaganda among various ministries, began funding the Itaria No Tomo No Kai, promoting it as the government’s unofficial voice on Fascist Italy. As a sign of the unity of mind that existed between Rome and Tokyo, little changed in the functioning and mission of the Society with the exception that the new backing allowed for the publication of a monthly, Itaria (Italy), in May 1941. Throughout the two and a half years of its lifetime, this journal enlisted a variety of contributors, ranging from the diplomatic architects of the alliance, Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yōsuke, and the ex-ambassador to Italy, Shiratori Toshio, to Pan-Asianists such as Ōkawa Shūmei and Kanokogi Masanobu, and to public intellectuals and writers including Hasegawa Nyozekan and Satō Haruo. This diverse group gave an aura of respectability to the journal and its mission to “introduce Italy, promote friendship between Italy and Japan, and promote the pro-Axis argument [ronkyaku].”38 Itaria never achieved a mass circulation, but its emphasis on contemporary Italian politics, Fascist ideology, and relations between the Axis Powers, makes it valuable as a source for examining the orthodox view of Fascism in wartime Japan.
The goal was to make the most obvious shortcoming of the alliance, the unwillingness among the three nations to coordinate foreign and military policies, into a strength: Japan and Italy, as well as Germany, were bound together not so much by old-fashioned international law as by ideological commonality and feeling. “We love Italy,” declared the journalist Tokutomi Sohō, proclaiming that the “Tripartite Pact is solid like a rock, and rises to the sky like Mount Fuji.”39 Emphasizing a uniformity of war aims (the destruction of international communism and Anglo-Saxon world hegemony), political commentators wrote about the parallel wars that each Axis country had undertaken independently. In the words of Shiratori Toshio, who was also the president of the Itaria No Tomo No Kai, “the conclusion of the Tripartite Pact once again makes clear the ‘federative but reciprocal character’ (sōgo renmeisei) that exists between the wars in Asia and in Europe.” Shiratori argued that the three countries were linked to one another by the regional political structures they were putting in place in their respective spheres of influence. “Japan will go beyond the Japan-Manchuria-China bloc and build a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere…while Germany and Italy will create a vast region that includes Europe and Africa.” He dismissed lack of coordination as a minor matter. It was “natural” that, “in their objective to form a new world order, Japan, Germany, and Italy should collaborate on the basis that each attacks the objective that it chooses.” Moreover, the global effort of the Axis Powers, Shiratori continued, should not be confused with the aggressive wars of the past. The aim of the Axis was to overturn the “liberal civilization” of Anglo-America, which would lead to the triumph of “human culture” and the “renovation of the world.”40
A poster invoking “Tripartite friendship” on the occasion of the New Year in January 1941, shortly after the signing of the Tripartite Pact.
(Image courtesy of Getty Images.)
Academics and social scientists made a more methodical appraisal of Italy, frequently championing Fascism’s legal and political achievements. The Waseda legal scholar Wada Kojirō (1902–1954), for example, upheld Mussolini’s doctrine of the state. Wada saw the “totalitarian state” as a remarkable development in political theory and practice. It replaced liberalism and Marxism with an idea of leadership embodied in Mussolini and made it possible to “spiritually unify” Italians.41 The economist and social scientist with a bent for political philosophy, Ueda Tatsunosuke (1892–1956), praised Italy’s corporatism as a way to mend the class struggle generated by capitalism. Corporatism, Ueda explained, mobilized “all the forces of the state…spiritually, politically, and economically.” It stood at the heart of the domestic and international new order. Amounting to a “leadership principle” equal to Japan’s “ideal of ‘all the world under one roof,’” corporatism was a model of the new “supervision and management” of the world.42
Referring to commonalities between Japan and Italy was another way to underscore the alliance. Ueda had pointed to similarities emerging from economic reforms, but some contributors pointed out the cultural resemblances between the two countries. The literary critic Kamei Katsuichirō (1907–1966) explained the spiritual proximity between Japan and Italy on the grounds of the natural and geographic environment of the two countries. In an article entitled “A Dream for Italy” Kamei lyrically theorized that a nation (minzoku) blessed by the seas has a natural tendency to long for “things far away.” It was an inclination that he described as a “nation’s youth [seishun]” that was born from “the infinite élan vital of the ocean.” “Japan in the Pacific, Italy in the Mediterranean—they have been such nations since antiquity.”43 Kamei was echoed by Kiyosawa Kiyoshi, a journalist and public intellectual schooled at the University of Washington. Kiyosawa’s self-identification as a liberal did not keep him from expressing a sense of familiarity with Fascist Italy.44 When he visited Italy in 1937, Kiyosawa was struck by how natural it was for a Japanese to feel accustomed to the local culture. It was an impression that could not be expressed in “theories” but only on the level of “feelings”—there was something about ancient cultures with a common history of adopting foreign elements. He also noted that Japan and Italy were distinct from the Anglo-Saxon world in one further respect. During his sojourn in Italy, he was surprised to notice that “the toilets were Japan-style, and whenever I saw one, I felt it as such a Japanese thing.”45
Itaria took advantage of commemorations that were significant for the Axis or Italy. One occasion presented itself when in August 1941 Mussolini’s son, Bruno, a keen aviator, died as the result of a botched landing. Saitō Mōkichi, a prominent poet and sometime psychiatrist, devoted a few lyric lines to him in a poem entitled “Immortal” (Fumetsu).
Leonardo, Michelangelo were immortal, and so are you Bruno Mussolini.
A symbol of bravery, you took command—thinking of you my heart aches.
You dropped bombs over Ethiopia, France, Greece, Yugoslavia.
The frontlines in Greece could not take your young life.
Your youthful blood stains the grass in the outskirts of Pisa like deep-pink plum blossoms.
You devoted yourself to your ancestral land, our ally Italy.
You make the heart of your father and your ancestral land throb.
Hearing your country Italy gather and cry, I, too, weep.46
The Italian Past in the Japanese Present
In these expressions of sympathy for Italy, writers may have been currying favor with the government, but their enthusiastic participation cannot be categorized entirely under the rubric of propaganda. This point becomes all the more obvious in the deep—if contested—way in which eminent historians and philosophers began debating about the significance of the Tripartite alliance in the course of world history. In their view, the magnitude of the present rested on the belief that the new order in East Asia, and by extension a new world order, would come about through Japan’s pursuit of its historical mission. If in this endeavor Japan had tied itself to two European powers, the resulting question was about the extent to which Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were animated by a similar drive to fulfill their own histories. How, then, did the pasts of Italy and Germany compare to that of Japan? And how could one fit these countries into the cosmology of Japan’s world history?
At stake in the debate over the Axis was therefore not only the issue of national uniqueness; the alliance with the fascist countries also complicated the relationship between Japan and Western civilization. Harry Harootunian has shown how Japanese modernist intellectuals critiqued the social unevenness brought about by capitalism, lamenting that it was the result of the influence of Western modernity. They sought to overcome this condition by imagining communities that would be harmonious and found the solution in putatively timeless cultural practices such as religion, the aesthetics of the folk, and premodern customs. In so doing, they counterposed (Japanese) culture to (Western) civilization.47 But they were not alone in proposing these theories. As Benjamin Martin has argued, in the late 1930s Italian and German intellectuals discussed very similar possibilities. They reviled civilization as liberal, Anglo-Saxon, and universal; and they praised culture (cultura and Kultur) as spiritual, national, and authentic. Just like an Italian–German cultural alliance would define the meaning of the new order in Europe, so the Japanese spirit would reform the face of Asia.48 In this way, from a Japanese perspective Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany became uncomfortable cultural allies, pursuing the same goals yet unsettling the notion of Japanese national peculiarity along with drawing a rigid distinction between East and West.
An important forum for the discussion of the relevance of the Italian past to Japan’s present was the journal Nichi-I bunka kenkyū (Studies in Japanese and Italian Culture). Appearing monthly between May 1940 and March 1944, the journal was tasked with promoting Italian culture to a Japanese readership. It inherited this mission from its parent organization, the Nichi-I kyōkai (Japan-Italy Association), founded in July 1940 for the same purpose.49 Unlike the Itaria No Tomo No Kai, whose associates were often right-wingers who exposed the political valence of the Axis, the Nichi-I kyōkai and its publication attracted an educated, mainstream membership that set out to discuss the merits of the Italian cultural tradition—italianità or, as the Fascist regime was fond of calling it, romanità (Romanness). Hitherto limited to a handful of specialists and connoisseurs, Italian culture was to become more broadly known in Japan and promoted through the right channels (Italian officials made a fuss that the “masterpieces of Italian art are introduced to the Japanese public through cheap French and German books; and the task of illustrating romanità in all its aspects is carried out exclusively by Germans”).50
In 1993, reminiscing about their work in the journal, a group of contributors to Nichi-I bunka kenkyū stressed that the periodical—and the Association—were exquisitely cultural. One old member pointed out that the leading figures, academics such as the legal scholar Tanaka Kōtarō; the art historian Dan Inō, who in the early 1920s had spent time in Naples in the company of Shimoi Harukichi; the Renaissance specialist Yashiro Yukio; and the painter and scholar Wada Eisaku, were “liberals” (jiyūshugisha). They were “men of culture” (bunkatekina hito), adding that the Association had no room for “economics and politics.”51 Indeed, in its short life, Nichi-I bunka kenkyū attracted a remarkable range of young and talented scholars of Italian culture who covered topics such as classics, medieval philosophy, and the Renaissance. Unlike Itaria, Fascist theoretics was not its main theme. Yet, the group’s comprehension of Italian culture was far from disconnected from politics. Romanità, for example, was integral to Fascist ideology, from the symbolism of the fasces to the Roman salute, and from the cult of Rome as a foundational myth of Italy to the desire to re-create a Mediterranean empire.52 More crucial, however, was the consciously presentist goal adopted by the journal’s contributors. Quoting the philosopher Benedetto Croce’s adage that “all history is contemporary history,” Dan Inō noted that Italy’s rich history “clearly necessitates a new, contemporary interpretation…from our scholars we expect an original [dokuji] interpretation.”53 Japanese humanists may not have discussed politics, but they raised issues of culture that were eminently political in the context of Japan’s new order in East Asia.
Perhaps the most central—and contested—topic discussed in the pages of Nichi-I bunka kenkyū was the Renaissance. This age, which conjured up an idea of rebirth in the arts, civic life, and science, carried a powerful allegorical meaning at a time when Japanese intellectuals were outlining plans for a resurgence of their own culture. Just as painters such as Michelangelo, the scientist Galileo Galilei, or the political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli, displayed a keen self-consciousness about how to advance their fields, so contemporary Japanese intellectuals felt that they were engaged in a reflection on their present condition.
As far as its historical meaning was concerned, the Italian Renaissance was crucial for Japanese intellectuals for two reasons. It was part of what some contemporaries in Italy called the “Italian tradition,” a glorious moment whose inheritance belonged to the greatness of Italian national history. But how could the Italian tradition be compared to that of Japan? Moreover, at the same time that it validated the Italian past, the Renaissance was also implicated in the development of European culture. In particular, what role had the Renaissance played in the development of capitalism, socialism, and liberal democracy, the features of Western civilization that many Japanese had increasingly come to criticize? Was the Renaissance at the origin of these divisive political and philosophical currents, or, to the contrary, had it sought to create a society in which citizens and state formed a coherent totality? The stakes were high. The interpretation of the Renaissance was directly tied to the nature of the relations between Italy and Japan, East and West, and more broadly, to the position of Japan in world history.
Far from having a unified view, Nichi-I bunka kenkyū reflected a variety of positions on the Renaissance. One loose group was made up of scholars of Western history (seiyōshi) who cast a positive light on the Renaissance. These academics argued that because the Renaissance had unified science and spirit into a harmonious whole, it had to be regarded as a genuine turning point in history, both for Italy and Europe. For Ōrui Noboru (1884–1975), a pioneering scholar of the classics and the Renaissance, the culturally unifying force of the Renaissance was visible in the way in which it strove toward the “completion of humanity [ningensei no kansei].” Ōrui argued that the “man of the Renaissance” should be seen not only as an artist or idealist but as a “multifaceted” individual rooted in “actuality” (genjitsu). He mastered politics as well as the arts, merging them, as Machiavelli had done. Combining the “ideal” and “reality” created the characteristic “great harmony of the total.” The spirit of the Renaissance, Ōrui concluded, was not merely a brief outburst in the fifteenth century but a “force alive in eternity.”54 The cultural historian Kamo Giichi (1899–1977) presented an argument on the harmonizing capacity of the Renaissance from the perspective of the history of science. Kamo argued that, during the Renaissance, science was not divorced from the “spirit,” as was the case in modern times. The “idea of harmony” between parts of the totality distinguished the Renaissance, but it also was a necessary principle whenever “a new era begins.” On such occasions, the “feeling of the self [ jiko kanjō] spontaneously extends to feeling of the state [kokka kanjō]”—this alignment was visible also in the “new Renaissance” of Japan.55
Other scholars stressed the centrality of Italian culture to European civilization. Italy could not match the German, French, and British lead in military, financial, or colonial power, but it trumped its European neighbors by virtue of having given (and continuing to give) the continent its cultural identity. Contributors elevated Italy to the status of the mother of European high culture, pointing out the Italian achievements in a variety of areas. Niizeki Ryōzō (1889–1979), a distinguished scholar of German and classical theater, argued that Italian theater stood at the heart of modern drama. The theater of the Renaissance, he argued, had absorbed the theories of Rome and Greece and reworked them for modern purposes. Italian Renaissance theorists, Niizeki continued, defined the principles of acting, character structure, and even the architecture of theaters and then spread them to the rest of Europe.56
Nishiwaki Junzaburō, writer, critic and, after the war, nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, painted the significance of Italian culture in broader strokes. For him, Italy had held firm to the essence of Roman culture throughout the period of decadence that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. The Christian Church, he argued, remained the repository of the Roman “spirit.” From the early medieval period, through Dante, the Renaissance, and all the way up to the twentieth century, “men of culture” had traveled to and learned from Italy. Nishiwaki was a linguistic prodigy—he read German, French, and English and had written his dissertation in Latin—and made it clear that, for him, Italy stood at the top. “Be it from the perspective of the Middle Ages or the early modern period, it is clear that Italy has been the cultural epicenter of Western Europe.” Even today, he claimed, analyzing Italian culture was crucial to understanding Europe. Nishiwaki claimed that he had intensely studied German, French, and English literature, but it was through reading Italian literature that it was possible to “historically know the truth [jijitsu] of the culture of the Europeans.”57
These scholars were neither sympathetic to Italian Fascism nor spokesmen of Japan’s new order; indeed, the opposite could be the case, as when Hani Gorō, the Marxist historian, published an article on Leonardo da Vinci that subtly criticized contemporary politics.58 Ironically, however, they painted an image of the Renaissance that suited both Italian and Japanese wartime rhetoric. By positing that the Renaissance represented a high point in European culture, they replicated the claims of some Italian and German intellectuals, who regarded humanism as a foundation for a new cultural order in Europe.59 But by stressing that, as a movement, the Renaissance was characterized by a capacity to absorb ancient and diverse cultural traditions and mold them into a harmonious totality, they also came close to likening its significance to the peculiarity that new-order ideologues ascribed to Japanese culture—namely its ability to synthesize the civilizations of East and West. Consciously or not, they created both links and parallels between Italian and Japanese history.
This universalist interpretation of the Renaissance, along with its implications for Japanese history, ran up against the resistance of a group of thinkers and writers associated with the Kyoto School of Philosophy, the Japan Romantic Group, and the Literary Society.60 In July 1942, exponents from this group met in Tokyo for a symposium on the theme of “overcoming the modern.” As the meeting coincided with Japan’s military conquest in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, these thinkers discussed the meaning of this “world-historical” moment and what Japan’s role in pushing history to the next stage should be. The goal was to redeem Japan from the pernicious influence of Western civilization, which they equated with modernity, and to revive the pure spirit of Japan in the construction of a new, ethical, world. Because the Renaissance occupied a key role in the history of Western civilization, it is not surprising that these scholars felt the need to criticize it as the intellectual movement that was at the root of modern social conflict and moral decay. In their view, the Renaissance had failed to maintain the unified order of things of antiquity by separating the spiritual from the material, thus giving rise to the evils of modernity.
These intellectuals had expressed such views in Nichi-I bunka kenkyū even before the symposium. In March 1942, the literary critic Kobayashi Hideo, one of the more militant members of the Kyoto School, published an article entitled “The Legacy of Ancient Rome,” in which he examined the role of the Renaissance in the transformation of Roman thought from antiquity to the present.61 Kobayashi admired ancient Rome. The Romans had created civilization by developing law and “imperial thought.” The combination of these principles created a “unified state” and invested power in the sovereign, the emperor. His rule (shihai) extended over a vast empire; and, crucially for Kobayashi, it was a benevolent rule. The Romans, he claimed, had “joined the concept of world peace with the thought of empire.” Even after the collapse of the Roman Empire, its spirit did not fade. Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon—all proceeded in attempts to “restore” (saikō) the Roman Empire. The same attempt was also visible in the war aims of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, two countries that earned his respect: “It would be a great mistake to think that the expansionary movement of our Axis partners Italy and Germany are merely an act of aggression. Both have built a unified state under a new system, and there can be no doubt that their goal is to seek the happiness and prosperity of their own peoples and, ultimately, world peace.”62
And yet, though he saw a direct continuity between the principles established by the ancient Romans and those of Mussolini and Hitler, Kobayashi did not go so far as to equate the Roman tradition with the East Asian one borne by Japan. Japanese history was pure and unbroken in the imperial lineage; Western history was hybrid, because Roman civilization had been corrupted by Greek culture, which was the origin of notions of individual rights and democracy. The Greek cities, he pointed out, were at constant war, without one being able to dominate another. The survival of Greek thought and practices brought about the collapse of the Roman Empire and the disunity of Europe ever after. Worse, this condition lay at the root of the development of “liberal thought” and “trade competition.”63 Greek thought, therefore, stood in antithesis to Roman, and the history of the West demonstrated a continuous struggle between the two. Because the Renaissance valorized Greek as well as Roman traditions, Kobayashi disapproved of this movement, but, implicitly, he also rejected the claim that a European order under the Nazi–Fascist aegis could stand up to that of Japan in Asia.
In the same spirit was an article, written for the same issue of Nichi-I bunka kenkyū, by another intellectual who would participate in the symposium on “overcoming modernity,” the Catholic theologian Yoshimitsu Yoshihiko. A scholar of medieval theology, he bemoaned the fact that modernity had lost the religious spirit that had characterized ancient times. Seeing in the Renaissance the movement that had separated faith and science, he instead valorized the Middle Ages, a time in which everyday life, untarnished by materialism, still retained a sense of spiritual totality. In his article, Yoshimitsu examined the influence of the medieval philosopher Saint Thomas Aquinas on Dante’s Divine Comedy, arguing that the poet’s masterwork had been conceived as a work of theology. In Yoshimitsu’s view, there was a religious nucleus in Dante, a “belief” (he used the Italian word credo) that had its origin in Aquinas. Yoshimitsu’s argument was not merely academic, for his aim was to devise an interpretation of Dante for “us today.” He therefore advanced the thesis that the condition of metaphysical turmoil that afflicted modern man called out for a turn back to religion and poetry—precisely what he saw as the essence of Dante’s work.64
Kobayashi and Yoshimitsu refrained from openly criticizing the Renaissance in the pages of Nichi-I bunka kenkyū. But months later, at the symposium, Yoshimitsu was less reticent. “The so-called modern European culture with which we have come in contact is actually a culture that has lost sight of God,” he thundered. “This loss,” he continued, “results in the Renaissance’s inability to concretely revive classical humanity in its true sense.” As he saw it, the faults of the Renaissance extended all the way up to the modern period. But what about Japan? Through the introduction of Western thought in the late nineteenth century Japan was also affected, but not in the same way as the West. Whereas in the West the problem was a constitutive one, Japan had kept the pure spirit of antiquity until its encounter with the West. Even when the Western influence made itself felt, Japanese maintained more of the ancient traditions than the West had done. What the West lacked was the unbroken lineage of the imperial family.65
The divergent positions on the Renaissance held by historians of the West and members of the Overcoming Modernity group represented a conflict over the symmetry between Eastern and Western civilization. For the historians of the West, the Renaissance contained a unified core where the spiritual and material components of Western civilization coexisted in harmony. On these grounds, they accorded the West a status equal to that of Eastern civilization. In contrast, the Kyoto philosophers denied that the two civilizations could be put on the same plane: Western thought tended by nature toward conflict and fragmentation. The historians of the West were relativists, arguing that Japan and Italy were equals in their own cultural spheres; the Overcoming Modernity group believed in cultural hierarchies, and, in their view, Japan’s culture towered over that of the West, even where it carried the spirit of Italian history. As a consequence, they saw Fascism as a botched Western attempt to overcome Western modernity.
This view of history had direct implications for the understanding of the alliance with Italy and Germany. In a second seminar held in July 1942 by the Overcoming Modernity group, called “The World-Historical Position and Japan” (Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon), the philosophers Kosaka Masaaki, Nishitani Keiji, Kōyama Iwao, and a historian of the West, Suzuki Shigetaka, fleshed out the relation between Japan and its Axis partners.66 They argued that there was a clear “link” (tsunagari) between the “right to life” of Japan, Italy, and Germany. This commonality sprang from being latecomers to the nation-state form and the imperial game. Far from being an impediment, this condition had forged a peculiar relationship between the nation (minzoku) and the state, one animated by “moral energy” (moralische Energie). Persisting to the present, this national characteristic explained the consistent “concentration into oneself” (jiko shūchū), making Japan, Italy, and Germany into “leading countries” to push the world into a new order.67 Yet even though the group acknowledged the common Axis intent for a spatial rearrangement of the world, they averred that an irreconcilable gap existed in terms of the temporal meaning of Japan’s undertaking. Germany and Italy acted out of a need to reinforce themselves as nations, a project that dated to the nineteenth century. Japan, in contrast, was animated by a morality that had sprung from its “world-historical consciousness.”68 In the case of Germany, Kōsaka concluded, the new world order was an “extension of world history”; in Japan it was “the call from within history.”69
Overcoming Internationalism
Just as intellectuals found that the past harbored differences between the Axis countries, so they realized that, after a putative victory, the future interaction of these countries presented its share of obstacles. By announcing the creation of a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere in August 1940, the Japanese government charted the outline of an Asia under Japanese hegemony, but in so doing it also opened itself to the need to define the future relations with the new orders being set up in Europe. As Prime Minister Tōjō Hideki later put it, “it is truly an unprecedentedly grand undertaking that our Empire should, by adding these regions, establish everlasting peace in greater East Asia based on a new conception, which will mark a new epoch in the annals of mankind, and proceed to construct a new world order along with our allies and friendly Powers in Europe.”70 Conscious that Japan could not bring about a new world order by itself, intellectuals and academics turned to formulating the moral and legal principles that would replace liberal international law. With regional blocs being a common feature of Axis geopolitical thinking, they were confronted with the problem of how these spheres would cooperate.
Japanese visions of the interaction between Japan, Italy, and Germany rested on two contending conceptions of Asian regionalism.71 The first stream of thought was an outgrowth of Pan-Asianism. Its proponents, such as General Ishiwara Kanji and the publicist and activist Shimonaka Yasaburō, emphasized Japan’s “kingly way” (ōdō) as the embodiment of an Eastern ethics (jingi dōtoku) that would challenge Western oppression and form the basis of an Asian union.72 The second current sought to devise scientific criteria for an Asian “community” (kyōdōtai). It was promoted within the Shōwa Research Association (Shōwa Kenkyūkai), a think tank close to Konoe Fumimaro, by such intellectual exponents as the philosopher Miki Kiyoshi and social scientist Rōyama Masamichi. Miki devised the concept of “cooperativism” (kyōdōshugi) in which he outlined the principles for a bloc economy in East Asia that would overcome the contradictions of capitalism by stressing the claims of the collectivity over those of the individual.73 Rōyama, who was dissatisfied with the culturalist arguments of Pan-Asianism, developed geopolitics, especially those of Karl Haushofer, to redefine the political and economic framework of an Asian “Grossraum.”74 Despite their distinct emphases, both the Pan-Asianist vision and that promoted by the Shōwa Research Association informed Konoe’s declaration of the new order in East Asia (1938) and, subsequently, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere—after all, they had an important common ground because they both opposed a world order based on liberal internationalism. But it was an altogether different matter to square these visions with those of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, even though these powers shared their antagonism toward internationalism.
The quest for an ideological common ground was strewn with obstacles. Like their counterparts in Italy and Germany, Japanese writers discerned an “ideological kinship” between their new orders in their rejection of international law.75 Rōyama, for example, stated that the new order in East Asia was but “one link” (ikkan) of a “new world order”; Italy and Germany were working on the same project in their spheres in the Mediterranean and in central Europe.76 But the problem of how these countries would interact was complex, because it was not clear what norms would replace international law and underpin the future interactions between the Axis Powers. Pan-Asianists believed in a fundamental—and rigid—separation between Eastern and Western ethics. How could they embrace Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany as equal partners? Also, social scientists like Rōyama faced a theoretical challenge. If each bloc constituted a finite, self-sufficient unit, there would no longer be a need for these spheres to interact, not least because doing so smacked of old-style internationalism. So, paradoxically, for some Japanese foreign-policy pundits, the fact that Fascist Italy was an unlikely partner in the traditional (balance of power) understanding of diplomatic alliances only made it a more plausible member in a vision of international affairs where imperial blocs would work together on an ad hoc basis.
Many Japanese writers and theorists integrated the relationship with the Axis into their discussion of the new order in East Asia. The bureaucrat, postwar construction entrepreneur, and diplomatic historian Kajima Morinosuke (1896–1975) and Fujisawa Chikao (1893–1962), an ideologue and right-wing Japanist activist, deserve particular attention for their attempts to overcome internationalism by reconciling the new orders in Asia and Europe. After World War I both had been committed supporters of the League of Nations, but by the early 1930s they became disenchanted and began to search for ways to reform internationalism. In those years they came to regard Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany as two inspiring competitors of the Anglo-American world order. In the late 1930s Kajima and Fujisawa took on positions in government think tanks devoted to producing ideas and policies for the Japanese new order. Fujisawa worked for the Kokumin Seishin Bunka Kenkyūjo (Research Institute for the National Spirit and Culture), an organ affiliated with the Ministry of Education, and taught at the Asia-oriented Daitō Bunka Academy. Kajima headed the high-level Imperial Rule Assistance Association Research Institute (Taisei Yokusankai Chōsakyoku Chō). It was in these positions that both men began to publish widely in academic and current affairs journals, theorizing about continental blocs in a dialogue with ideas promoted by intellectuals such as the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt and Count Richard Nikolaus Eijiro von Coudenhove-Kalergi, the founder of the federalist Pan-European Union. Relating the theories of these thinkers to the Japanese pronouncements about Asian reform, they reached a loose consent on the moral and legal principles for a new world order based on imperial blocs. Thus an analysis of their writings provides clear pictures of an attempt to solve the contradictions inherent in fascism and of a Japanese conception of postwar international relations in a world dominated by the Axis Powers.
Kajima’s move from early 1920s internationalism to wartime support of fascist blocs occurred gradually. A graduate of the Faculty of Law at Tokyo Imperial University (1920), he entered the Foreign Ministry, serving in Berlin, where he encountered Coudenhove-Kalergi. The Austrian aristocrat (whose mother was Japanese) left a deep impression on the young bureaucrat. He was much taken with Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan-Europa, published the year after his arrival in 1923, in which the count espoused the conviction to forge European unity on the basis of liberal democracy and a federation of states.77 Upon meeting Coudenhove-Kalergi, Kajima was seemingly urged to promote an East Asian Union on the same model. Indeed, Kajima later recalled that “I advocated Pan-Asia from Berlin.”78 In the 1930s, even as he quit his career in the Foreign Ministry to devote himself to his father’s construction business, Kajima remained an establishment figure with close ties to policy circles while also making a name for himself as a commentator in foreign affairs—a combination that prompted Tosaka Jun, the Marxist critic, to ask sardonically, “Why must foreign-policy theorists [gaikō rironka] always sound so like diplomats [gaikōkanteki]?”79
Japan’s seizure of Manchuria swung Kajima further toward regionalism. As Mitani Taichirō has argued, this event led many intellectuals and bureaucrats such as Kajima and Rōyama to try to reform internationalism in a regionalist key. They argued that an East Asian Federation (Tōa renmei) would be a more effective “institution for peace” than the existing League of Nations, but did not reject internationalism outright: even as Japan occupied a special role in the setup of an East Asian Federation, it would abide by the principle of international cooperation.80 For Kajima, the same was true for Europe. “The question is not,” he contended, “‘the League of Nations or Pan-Europa?’ but ‘the League of Nations in accordance with Pan-Europa.’” Moving away from the old League “centralism” to a “continental federalism” (tairikuteki renbōshugi) would, in the long run, pave the way to a “United States of the World.”81
Even the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany, and later Italy, did not shake Kajima’s faith in regional federalism. Quite the opposite was the case. Unlike his mentor Kalergi, who rejected the Nazis as chauvinist nationalists, Kajima regarded the pact as a celebration of his ideas. The pact, Kajima argued, sprang from the desire to contain the spread of communism and advance the members’ mutual interest in reforming the international system. It was not, he stressed, directed at the Soviet Union or toward other nations. As an effort at “international collaboration,” the pact did not “see Britain, France, and the United States in a hostile way,” as the signatories strove to “maintain relations of friendship with all countries,” to which membership in the pact presumably stood open.82 His position was perhaps expressed in clearer words by the international lawyer Takayanagi Kenzō, who hoped that the “Berlin–Rome–Tokyo Axis…which has been so much abused in the West, may gradually develop into the London–Paris–Berlin–Rome–Tokyo–Washington–Moscow Axis.”83
With the outbreak of the war in Europe, Kajima dropped the last vestiges of internationalism. In June 1940 German military power overran France and, along with it, Coudenhove-Kalergi’s (and his own) lofty vision of voluntaristic federations. The following month Kajima announced that Hitler’s Germany (and, to a lesser extent, Mussolini’s Italy) constituted the practical and theoretical vanguard of a new Pan-Europa, as well as a model for Pan-Asia. The new world order rested, after all, on power politics. Kajima now discounted Coudenhove-Kalergi’s vision of “federated Europe” on the basis that liberalism and democracy were an “utter impossibility” and that the count’s Constitution of Europe had become “scrap paper.” “Just as Napoleon unified Europe,” Kajima observed, “the idea to unify Europe by force has emerged, and it is precisely force that Hitler is using to unify Europe.”84 He supported the Tripartite Pact on the basis that Germany and Italy were to become the “focal points” in Europe, while Japan would pursue the same role in Asia. For that reason Kajima urged Japan’s leaders to take action. The time of the “coexistence of small nations” had passed, he explained. The future would give birth to larger political and economic units, and for this reason the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere would be “the basis to see through the future of international affairs, and therefore we have to give the peoples of Greater Asia our earnest support.”85 By now, Kajima’s federalism was designating the loose alliance between Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany.
Fujisawa Chikao took a different road to imperial blocs. Where Kajima pushed federalism into regional autarky, Fujisawa attempted to reform international law through the national ethics of “kingly way” (ōdō). Like Kajima, in his youth Fujisawa also possessed the credentials of a highly educated internationalist. He graduated from the Law Faculty of Tokyo Imperial University in 1917 and then joined the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce (Nōshōmushō). A polyglot, he acquired fluency in French, English, German, Dutch, Russian, Spanish, and Italian—the “good young man,” a journalist found out, had learnt Esperanto in “three or four days,” before representing Japan at the 1920 Esperanto World Conference in Belgium.86 In recognition of his academic prowess, the Ministry of Education granted him a scholarship to Germany, where he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Berlin in 1923. After returning to Japan, however, Fujisawa turned his back to the West. As he shifted to the right, he began to attack the entire tradition of Western philosophy: “[Western] scientific philosophy now in vogue cannot attain the true nature of human knowledge and formulate an appropriate outlook on life. Occupied exclusively with the scrutiny of the trees, the adepts of modern epistemology are prone to lose sight of the existence of the forest. In accordance with our Oriental conception, the ultimate end of philosophy is to penetrate the secrets of the world.”87 Like many of his contemporaries on the right, Fujisawa condemned Western civilization for its materialism and individualism. To his mind, the answer to this condition, which he also observed in Japan, was to enact a political reform that was based on the ethics of a nation.
In the early 1930s Fujisawa was inspired by Italian Fascism and German Nazism because he believed that these movements were putting into practice the kind of moral and political renovation that he advocated. But he felt compelled to examine the compatibility between European fascisms and Japanese “national thought.” Like the Japanese spirit, Fascist thought stood in opposition to Western materialism and its political expressions, whether liberalism, socialism, or democracy. It was a political philosophy in its own right. “The goal of fascism,” Fujisawa wrote, “is a fundamental reform [kakushin] of political and moral [dōtoku] thought; [Fascism] is by no means a vulgar reactionary movement.” He was convinced that legal changes in political and social institutions, such as corporatism and parliamentary reforms, constituted a significant national renewal, stating that “fascism should not be a monopoly of Italy, it is a global question.”88 At the same time, he cast doubts on Japan’s need to learn from outside models. He declared that there was a fundamental “otherness” (i) between Fascism and Japan’s “kingly way.” Ōdō was totality. It encompassed a “religious morality” (heaven), “politics” (man [hito]), and “economics” (earth [chi]).89 Fujisawa found Fascism, as well as Nazism, to be “incomplete” because these ideologies lacked the notion of “loyalty” (chū) that Japanese felt toward the emperor. As far as he was concerned, “our country is the origin of the fascio, and the more Western fascism develops, the more the imperial way will become a matter of interest for all humankind.”90 He concluded that, given its perfection, ōdō—not Fascism or Nazism—had to be exported. “Japanism” (nihonshugi), Fujisawa wrote, “must contribute concretely to the welfare and peace of humankind around the world.”91
Fujisawa’s condescension toward Fascism and Nazism did not stop him from enlisting them as worthy partners in a new world order. Regardless of the differing stages of spiritual evolution, the Japanese, Italian, and German new orders constituted an international “current of thought” that sprang “organically” from their domestic orders. Cooperation was the natural outcome. Indeed, it struck Fujisawa as a “strange enough historical destiny” that Japan, Italy, and Germany found themselves fighting under a similar “leadership principle.”92 This principle was the precedence of national culture over international law and universal, liberal civilization. Thus he argued that a shared notion of culture was at the root of the Anti-Comintern and Tripartite pacts. “Culture is politics and politics is culture,” Fujisawa maintained.93
This reasoning had implications for the practice of international relations. The culturalist norms that underlay the expansion of Japan, Italy, and Germany would make empires—not nations—into the basic units of a new world order and, in turn, call for a reform of international law.94 It was the jurist Carl Schmitt who, for Fujisawa, articulated the new principles of international law most incisively. In the interwar years Schmitt was well known among Japanese legal scholars and political scientists, and caused a debate for an article he wrote in April 1939 that outlined his vision of a new international order based on Grossraum.95 Japanese scholars of international law, especially Yasui Kaoru (1907–1980), turned to this theory in 1942, after the declaration of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, in the effort to elaborate an “East Asian international law” (daitōa kokusai hō) that would determine the laws and rules by which this area would form relations with Japan and the outside world.96
Yet for Japanese new world order ideologues, including Fujisawa, Schmitt represented only a sophisticated synthesis of the theories they had been developing for over a decade. True, their own formulations of a new world order bore the imprints of Carl Schmitt, but they had their origins in Pan-Asianism, the establishment of Manchukuo, and the great power politics with Western nations. For this reason Fujisawa praised Schmitt for showing that a territorial rearrangement by a “leader-nation” (shidō minzoku) would lead to that new “unit of international law, the great-region” (dai chiiki, the literal translation of Grossraum). But, he pointed out, Schmitt was merely stating the obvious, for Japanese had been stressing their “co-prosperity sphere” in Asia since at least the Manchurian Incident. Nevertheless, Fujisawa agreed with Schmitt’s “fundamental principle of the new international law,” namely the “principle of mutual respect of one another’s great-region or co-prosperity sphere.” For both Fujisawa and Schmitt, this meant that these regions would not “interfere” with each other and would “safeguard the divisions.”97
Superseding the existing practice of international relations—and its premises in international law—was critical for all the Axis Powers. In Japan, as illustrated by the writings of Kajima and Fujisawa, a loose consent emerged on the notion of a greater East Asia, but it was not clear how the interaction between the Asian and European spheres would be managed. The autonomous yet collaborative nature of the new empires was intended to be a compromise between nationalism and a desire not to descend into provincialism. Yet not even the theoretical sophistication of Carl Schmitt and his Japanese acolytes could reconcile the contradictions of what Fujisawa saw as the “new international law” that would regulate the new world order. For all the talk of “mutual respect,” the assumptions of Fujisawa, as well as those of Mussolini and Hitler, were that clear hierarchies existed not only within the various great-regions but also among themselves. As the philosopher Nishida Kitarō remarked in 1943 in an article entitled “The Principles of the New World Order,” “not only the Anglo-Saxon powers will submit [to the Japanese kokutai], but also the Axis will come to the point of emulating it.”98 With “equality” written out of the mindset of the fascist new world order, it is not surprising that wartime collaboration among the Axis Powers was all but nonexistent. It was not only a matter of power politics or opportunism; the moral principles that Fujisawa outlined as the basis of the new world order made the idea of a “new internationalism” theoretically impossible.
Linked but incomparable—this was the often implicit understanding of the Axis among Japan’s commentators. Despite its ambiguities, it was a powerful notion that pervaded Japanese politics and culture during the years of the alliance with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The Tripartite Pact connected the war in Asia with the one in Europe, but the new world order was more than rhetoric about a joint war effort. As an ideological pronouncement, it was also a cultural order to which intellectuals, writers, and bureaucrats lent their support, even if often qualified. Regardless of their political stance, ordinary Japanese were also involved in the many festivities surrounding the Axis Alliance—and many simply referred to the Rome–Berlin–Tokyo relationship with the familial-sounding acronym RO-BER-TO. Nazi Germany may have rapidly outpaced its southern ally as the paramount military power in Europe, but Fascist Italy maintained an important place in the imaginary of Japan’s new order in Asia, its classical—and imperial—heritage remaining a consistent point of reference for intellectuals. When, in April 1942, the architect Tange Kenzō sketched the Memorial of Greater East Asia, to be erected near Mount Fuji, he drafted a structure that combined elements of a Shintō shrine with the style of Michelangelo, placing it in a setting reminiscent of the Capitoline Hill, the sacred high ground in Rome.99 The Italian past, it seemed, deserved a prominent place in Japan’s future.