Epilogue

FASCISM AFTER THE NEW WORLD ORDER, 1943–1952

Our country was attacked by the fascist aggressor, Japan. The “Sons of Heaven” were promptly joined by their fascist partners of Germany and Italy.

—Army Talk (U.S. War Department, March 24, 1945)

Japanese nationalism is entirely unrelated to occidental forms of nationalism.

—The Brocade Banner: The Story of Japanese Nationalism (General Headquarters, Far East Command, Military Intelligence Section General Staff, September 23, 1946)

When, on December 11, 1941, Italy joined Japan and Germany in declaring war on the United States, Japanese military, political, and ideological elites knew their allies well. For almost two decades they had been part of a dialogue on what seemed to them to be the ideology and politics of the future: fascism. From the first appearance of the term in the 1920s, Japanese intellectuals and public figures time and again evoked fascism in their efforts to redefine Japanese politics. Social critics interpreted fascism as a particularly strong form of nationalist revival characteristic of Italy, but with lessons for Japan. Mussolini, in particular, was admired for his leadership and for his capacity to mobilize youth to strengthen his nation. In the early 1930s, Japanese observers examined fascism as a global alternative to socialism, liberalism, and democracy, probing the possibility of its applicability to Japan. And in the second half of that decade a consensus on fascism emerged according to which Japan, Italy, and Germany were linked in the ideological endeavor to forge a new world order even as they retained a nucleus of incomparability due to their national peculiarities.

In tracing the shared fascist experiences of Japan and Italy—from anticommunism, through domestic reform, to an international new world order—this book has shown not only that fascism was integral to interwar political and cultural thought, but also that it was the product of complex, and deeply fought, processes of global exchange. At the heart of the debate on fascism was the struggle over how to define and practice a “revolution-restoration” from the right. In the early 1920s, Italian Fascism and Benito Mussolini pioneered this attempt and bestowed upon it its own name, but in so doing they only set the terms of the debate, not provide a rigid model. Indeed, in many ways, the history of fascism since Fascism has been one of mistrust and denial—not only from the Left but also from the Right. Today, what amounts to Europe’s largest fascist party, Greece’s Golden Dawn, refutes the appellation “fascist” even as it heralds Mussolini and Hitler as heroes. For many interwar Japanese intellectuals, activists, and politicians, predominantly on the right or liberal, the problem was how to bring about fascism without fascism—this was the logic of global fascism, or what I have referred to as the “fascist critique of fascism.” And yet, I argue, the contradictions between universal claims and particularistic (national) rationales unsettled fascism as a global ideology but did not prevent Japan from participating in the making of a world fascist consciousness.

After World War II, however, the connections between Japan, Italy, and Germany were broken, and the fascist flirtations forgotten or downplayed. Much as no postwar Japanese government ever officially denounced its alliance with Italy and Germany, so few historians made much of it. Both considered the past alliance with the Axis Powers a departure from Japan’s political trajectory. The discourse on the European partners was dismissed as propaganda; the diplomatic pacts signed by the Axis Powers were made to appear inconsequential. This view relieved postwar Japanese of the need to reflect on such controversial matters as the links between the “Japanese ideology,” as Tosaka Jun called the pronouncements on the “national polity” and the “kingly way,” and Italian Fascism, as well as German Nazism. But it also helped to sideline the history of fascism into the history of a concept that, during the Cold War, liberal and conservative historians discounted as vague and meaningless.

The severance of the fascist link occurred in two phases that were determined by the course and outcome of World War II. The first turning point came in 1943. On July 10, Allied troops landed in Sicily, rapidly defeating Italian and German defenses. Facing an Anglo-American invasion, renegade Fascists deposed Mussolini, while King Victor Emmanuel III named an army general, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, prime minister. In Japan, these events caused much speculation about the future of the Axis. Shimoi Harukichi, still a trusted friend of Italy, tried to dispel fears that Badoglio might leave the alliance. Boasting that he was a good friend of the marshal, he explained that Badoglio was a man of the best Italian military tradition, reliable and trustworthy. He had proven in the Great War that he did not follow the “Western, calculating way” of making war, but fought “in a rather Japanese way” (nihonjinrashiku).”1 Italy, Shimoi implied, might have shed Mussolini, but its martial valor and spiritual determination lived on in his successor, guaranteeing that the country would honor the pact with Japan and Germany.

Shimoi miscalculated. After a summer of uncertainty as to whether or not Italy would pursue the war and if so on which side, on September 8, 1943, Badoglio signed an armistice with the Allies. Italy was thus divided into two—the south, controlled by the Allies and forces loyal to Badoglio and the king, and the north, occupied by Nazi Germany but nominally an independent state headed by Mussolini and known as the Italian Social Republic. This anomalous state of affairs stirred Japanese into rescinding the alliance with Fascist Italy. The prime minister, General Tōjō Hideki, inveighed against the Italian half-capitulation, confiding that, politically speaking, he had always thought that Italy was the “black star” of the Axis (militarily, he welcomed the event, as it would give Hitler a free hand in Europe).2 The media followed suit. Condemning Fascism as a fraud and Italy as a second-rank country, commentators called Badoglio a “traitor” and his decision to capitulate to the Allies a “contemptible step of [people] without confidence in their military power.” His unconditional surrender violated the Tripartite Pact, an alliance that was meant to be “stronger than iron.” It was an “act of disloyalty,” as the undersecretary of the Foreign Ministry called it, that “not even heaven could forgive.”3 Japanese authorities considered the “betrayal” an offense to the “sacred international morality” that the three countries had promoted.

The relations between Imperial Japan and Italy degenerated. Shortly after September 8, Japanese authorities entered the Italian Embassy in Tokyo and arrested its Italian occupants. With the exception of Mirko Ardemagni and a handful of Fascist diehards, who swore allegiance to Mussolini’s Social Republic, all other Italian subjects refused to do so. As a result they were sent to internment camps across Japan, where they endured harsh treatment and, according to one ex-prisoner, abuse worse than that to which Korean forced laborers were subjected by the Japanese. One of the favorite “amusements” of the head of the “concentration camp,” a postwar Italian report stated, “was to force the Italian ambassador to compete with other officials for a bucket of water to do laundry, make a repulsive soup, or take a shower, initially just at biweekly intervals, then monthly.”4 In Italy, anti-Fascist partisans considered Japanese nationals enemies. In June 1944, a group of partisans attacked and killed the Japanese naval attaché, Rear-Admiral Tōyō Mistunobu, as he was traveling near Pistoia, in Tuscany.5 And, on July 15, after Nazi Germany had surrendered but before the war in the Pacific had ended, Italy declared war on Japan, a gesture with little practical impact, but by which the Italians hoped to improve their condition in postwar negotiations.6

Thus Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy, declared friends since the late 1930s, ended World War II on a more ambiguous, even hostile, note. Although collaboration with Mussolini’s Social Republic continued until the very end, the events that took place in mid-1943 damaged the political relations between the two countries. The status of fascism suffered accordingly. Initially accorded a high status in the Japanese discourse about a new world order, now ideologues and politicians felt compelled to discredit fascism as the ideology of an unworthy ally. The breaking of the fascist link, then, began at the hands of Japanese at a time when they accused Italy of failing to live up to the ideals of Fascism itself.

A camp housing Italian internees in Kemanai, Akita Prefecture, in the north of Japan.

(Photo courtesy of ASMAE.)

The wartime distancing from Fascist Italy was reinforced after 1945. During the Occupation period (1945–1952), American and Western authorities dropped references to fascism and, with it, the links between the Axis Powers that they had regularly, even if somewhat hesitatingly, asserted before Japan’s defeat in World War II. In 1937, for example, William Henry Chamberlin, the American historian and journalist, wrote that he doubted Japan had evolved into a “full-blooded dictatorship on the German or Italian model” but that, nevertheless, one could speak of a “semi-Fascist” state.7 Hugh Byas, Chamberlin’s fellow journalist and a Japanologist, commented on Japan’s “Nazified bureaucrats” and regretted the Allied mistake of understating Japan as “Hitler’s little yellow partner.”8 Even where Western commentators mentioned “nationalists” and “patriotic societies,” they often did so in a comparative frame of mind. The leaders of Japan’s military and right-wing societies, claimed the political scientist William C. Johnstone in January 1945, had “played a role in Japan similar to that of the Rosenbergs, Goebels [sic], Heines, von Killingers and Streichers in Germany.”9

But the emerging alliance between Japan and the United States was premised on a rereading of Japanese history with fascism left out. This shift owed much to the American Cold War preoccupation of moving from the fight against fascism to the crusade against communism. Geopolitical considerations led Occupation authorities and academics—sociologists, historians, and anthropologists—to promote Japan as an Asian bastion against communism by emphasizing its successful modernization and dismissing the darker sides of its past as an aberration that could be remedied.10 Dwelling on fascism as a central feature of Japanese history would have connected Japan’s past to that of Italy, Germany, and perhaps other countries, and thus raised the uncomfortable question of fascism’s role in solving the global crisis of liberal capitalism in the 1930s. For this reason, as argued by Harry Harootunian, postwar social science increasingly “banished” fascism as a useful historical paradigm, a trend that became evident also in the revisionist historiography on Germany and Italy in the 1960s and 1970s.11 Japan, however, was the first country to be separated from fascism.12

In its stead, disciplines from law to history and sociology developed the tropes of “militarism” and “ultranationalism.” In distancing Japan from Italy and Germany, these concepts created two advantages. Legally, the distinction supported the decision of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP), General Douglas MacArthur, to retain the emperor, for it would have been far more difficult to legitimize the monarch’s exemption from prosecution had greater commonality between Japan, Italy, and Germany been established (Mussolini was tried and executed by Italian partisans, and it would have been inconceivable that Hitler would not have faced a court had he not committed suicide).13 As it turned out, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East used the categories of “militarists” and “ultranationalists” to define those labeled “Fascists” in Italy and “Nazis” in Germany to prosecute war criminals and purge unwanted individuals from holding office in the postwar state. After 1952, when the ban on “ultranationalists” was lifted, some of these figures, such as the two future prime ministers Hatoyama Ichirō and Kishi Nobusuke, who had had once spoken fondly of fascism and its leaders, recanted their past pronouncements or swept them under the carpet.14

But “militarism” and “ultranationalism” also had implications for the writing of the history of Japan. Rather than tackling the question of the global crisis of capitalism of the 1930s, these concepts singled out pathological elements in Japanese national history, often remnants of a premodern past, to explain the country’s aggression in World War II. Japan, the narrative ran, had failed to fully modernize in Meiji, retaining a number of feudal traits that accounted for the behavior of the military and the passive attitude of the populace. “The feudal tradition,” explained George Sansom, the British historian and diplomat as well as wartime adviser to the United States, created a “military class whose history had led them to believe in discipline and force, and whose conception of power was based upon a long tradition of feudal warfare in which victory meant the conquest of territory, and control over its inhabitants.”15

The embrace of this view was not limited to Western historians. It was the liberal intellectual and political scientist Maruyama Masao who produced the most sophisticated analysis of ultranationalism in an essay he published in 1946. Maruyama used the concepts of “fascism” and “ultranationalism” almost interchangeably and did, in several instances, compare Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. But he, too, emphasized national uniqueness, explaining that the key factor that pushed Japan toward the war and imperialism was an “all-pervasive psychological coercion,” which stemmed from an internalized nationalism that prevented Japanese from acquiring a truly modern, individual, subjectivity. Ultimately, Maruyama relegated fascism to Italy and Germany.

Japanese Marxists revisited the concept of “emperor system fascism”; but theirs was an understanding of fascism that ignored many of the complexities and ambiguities that the term had carried in the 1930s. Continuing to argue that the emperor system retained a feudal character, these intellectuals sought to underline the contradiction between the idea of a democratic Japan and that of the continuing presence of the emperor, even in his constitutionally reduced role as the “symbol of the nation.” Activists of the reborn Japanese Communist Party, concerned over the policies of the “reverse course” (1947–1952)—curtailing labor unions, the progressive reinstatement of the prewar elites, the “red purge”—saw a return of the specter of “fascism.” As early as February 1946, the Communist Party warned of a “conservative-reactionary fascist front” that attempted to “crush the people’s [ jinmin] consciousness.”16 In August 1948 the “Committee for the Improvement of Livelihood” called for a “people’s mass demonstration” (jinmin taikai) to protest against the “terroristic repression and fascism” of the government of Prime Minister Ashida Hitoshi.17 While the organized Left was correct in detecting signs that the Occupation and the Japanese government were set to roll back several democratic reforms enacted immediately after 1945, the use of the term “fascism” smacked of the all-embracing Comintern definition, according to which all noncommunist forces were suspect of fascist leanings.

Thus, in the postwar period fascism, too, was “post.” By now signifying little more than the politics of interwar Italy, fascism was banished not only in time but also in space, and Japan was the first case that fell to this logic. Fascism lost the sense of open-endedness that, as this book has shown, it possessed in the debates stretching from the mid-1920s to the wartime. The possibility that fascism might assume different forms or arise outside the “core countries,” was discounted. Whereas, before the war, Japanese discussed fascism in terms of the attempt to overcome capitalist modernity, postwar social scientists saw the issue as one of incomplete modernization; if, in the 1930s, fascism was central to Japanese (and global) thinking, in the 1950s it became a peripheral problem of a select number of countries.

In many ways Shimoi Harukichi’s postwar existence was symptomatic of the changed environment. Much like the ideology he had once advocated, he remained forgotten. Because his identity was so closely tied to Fascist Italy’s fortunes, he risked imprisonment in 1943 at the hands of Japanese authorities and in 1945 by Allied tribunals. Shimoi eluded the former and escaped with an ordinary ban from public office from the latter, a probable indication that neither authority took him seriously. Shimoi fought on, if only to make a living. His wartime connections to Italian priests of Tokyo’s St. Paul’s congregation helped him to make some behind-the-scenes deals selling Japanese scrap metal.18 Adjustment to the new, American, world order proved difficult. As he told the visiting (ex-Fascist) journalist Indro Montanelli in 1952, he was involved in a “Society for the Improvement of Eloquence,” for, he was convinced, “Japanese are not capable of speaking. No one. Not the lawyers. Not the teachers. And least of all the Dietmen.”19 In a fashion echoing the spite for the German people expressed by Hitler—but also the social conservatism of the 1920s—Shimoi blamed the Japanese people:

In Japan nothing is left: not even Japan, for what is the place in which we now live? A zoo full of monkeys who are copying the Americans. You buy a book: it’s American. You read a newspaper: it’s about news from New York. You turn on the radio: you’ll hear the voice of a Negro baritone from Hollywood. You stroll in the streets: you’ll find girls dressed as if they were in Chicago…a tradition of two hundred years is suffocating one of two thousand years.20

He returned to the study of Dante and reminisced fondly about the years he had spent in Naples. “Italy—one should have seen it in those days. There never was in the world a country more beautiful, more noble, more generous.”21 Embittered and nostalgic, he mourned fascism, an ideology that, in the pursuit of social and political order, had brought about violence and destruction.