Are we in a period of “restoration-revolution” to be permanently consolidated, to be organized ideologically, to be exalted lyrically?
—Antonio Gramsci, 1935
Our revolution is a restoration.
—Mikami Taku, 1933
On different sides of the Eurasian continent—and on opposing sides of the barricades—Antonio Gramsci and Mikami Taku spoke of a common problem in similar terms. In the 1930s, when liberal capitalism had entered a period of crisis, they debated the contemporary trend to enact political reform while maintaining social relations unaltered or, to borrow the novelist Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s dictum, “to change everything so that everything would remain the same.” Gramsci, the Marxist thinker imprisoned by Benito Mussolini, analyzed this condition in terms of a “revolution-restoration” (rivoluzione-restaurazione), a moment of crisis when neither the forces of progress nor those of reaction managed to prevail.1 Lieutenant Colonel Mikami, interrogated in a Japanese courtroom about why he had shot Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi, had organized a response to this condition by calling for a “restoration-revolution” (ishin-kakumei), explaining that this meant bringing about the “emperor’s benevolent rule and oneness of sovereign and subject.”2 Together, these comments captured the mechanism of fascism, its role in revolutionizing the old and restoring the new in order to reconcile the tension between capital and the nation.
In interwar Japan, as elsewhere, the global nature of capitalism and its tendency to crisis clashed with the nation’s attribute of exclusivity as well as its claims of harmony and timelessness. Across the world class conflict was intensifying, the gap between city and countryside had widened, and culturally, the dislocations of modern life were reflected in a sense of a fragmented everydayness and commodified social relations.3 Fascism promised to realign the nation with capital by restoring authority, hierarchy, and community as central notions in modern politics. The result would be a new order premised, as Mussolini put it in 1922, on fascism’s ability to rid the “political and spiritual life of all the parasitic encrustations of the past which cannot carry on existing indefinitely in the present because this would kill their future.”4
Why Japanese intellectuals, writers, activists, and politicians, although conscious of the many points of intersection between their politics and those of Mussolini, were so ambivalent about the comparability of Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy is the subject of this book. Focusing on how contemporary Japanese understood fascism, it recuperates a historical debate that has been largely disregarded by historians, even though its extent reveals that fascism occupied a central position in the politics of interwar Japan. Since the 1970s historians of Japan have often dismissed the concept of fascism as Eurocentric and vague, but for Japanese of all backgrounds who came of age from the 1920s to the 1940s, fascism conjured up a set of concrete associations.5 They discussed fascism for its nationalism, its leader, its economics of autarky and corporatism; and later, for its drive toward empire and a new world order. That they understood fascism in different ways at different times speaks for the concept’s vitality more than its amorphousness, because, as this book suggests, Japanese found the many meanings of fascism relevant to their reflecting on their own political anxieties and aspirations. My aim is to rethink the history of Japan as part of a wider, interconnected, history of fascism, arguing that Japanese politics and ideology in the first half of the twentieth century were enmeshed in a dialogue with European fascism.6
Fascism needs to be examined through its relations. A vast scholarship exists on the relationship between fascism and other ideologies, with Marxists stressing the intimacy with liberalism, and liberal historians and social scientists emphasizing the “totalitarian” character of fascism and socialism (or communism). My intent, however, is to explore the relations between fascisms in various national contexts, focusing on Japan and Italy. This approach has at least two advantages. First, it will expose a fundamental contradiction at the heart of this ideology. On the one hand, fascism stood for particularism. It claimed to represent the deep spiritual essence of the nation, the key to unraveling a politics that represented the aspirations of a people. On the other hand, fascism’s declared aim to counteract the negative effects of capitalist modernity (though not capitalism itself) implied a universal valence. The circuits of exchange between Japanese fascist thinkers and political figures and their Italian counterparts reveal the agony of coming to terms with the contradiction of fascism being at once the ideology of a country, Italy, and, especially after the 1930s, a political concept in its own right, applicable to movements, ideas, and individuals around the world, including Japan. To maintain this distinction, which Japanese made implicitly or explicitly, I capitalize Fascism when it refers to Italy and use the lowercase f to indicate where it is being used as a generic ideology.
Second, recognizing that fascism was both nationally specific and structurally transnational means to reevaluate the process by which it was articulated in Japan. Interwar Japanese were keenly aware of the tensions of fascism, the way that it simultaneously emanated from Italy and emerged domestically. Intellectuals, bureaucrats, and politicians interacted with fascism on their own terms, indicating that it would be simplistic to reduce it to “influences” from Italy. At the same time, it appears unconvincing to consider what have variously been termed the “Shōwa restoration,” “reformist bureaucrats,” “ultranationalism,” or the “New Order Movement” as singularly Japanese manifestations of fascism because, as this book shows, the protagonists of these movements and policies were so deeply involved in a conversation with European fascism. By moving away from Euro- and Japano-centric approaches, this study uncovers the making of fascist ideology as a complex interplay between ideas both local and global.
To capture the intersection between fascism in Japan and in Italy means to reevaluate the history of fascism as that of a process, not of a clearly defined model. As Gramsci remarked in those years with reference to Caesarism, a code word for fascism, the “exact significance of each form of Caesarism, in the final analysis, can be reconstructed only from concrete history, not from a sociological schema.”7 Indeed, for contemporary Japanese commentators, Italian Fascism—and fascism—represented a starting point, an inspiration rather than a blueprint. They evinced a deep ambiguity toward fascism. They may praise fascism’s uncompromising faith in the nation and its goal to overcome a range of modern woes, such class conflict, moral degeneration, and the policies of autarky. But many doubted, for example, the need for a leader like Mussolini, arguing that a move away from parliamentary democracy did not necessarily mean a one-man dictatorship: in Japan a politics based on the emperor system would offer a more adequate solution. In other words, they regarded fascism as open-ended, as a new politics of the right that began with Mussolini but that would find different, and possibly more sophisticated, expressions in Japan.
Contemporary observers, especially those on the right, approached fascism with a comparative mindset. Beset with an obsession with Japanese national uniqueness, they distanced fascism from Japan, vowing to circumvent fascism, or to subsume it altogether into nativist forms of ideology articulated in such phrases as the “national polity” (kokutai), or the “imperial way” (ōdō). But, as I argue in Chapter 3, the Right’s displacement of fascism into various formulations of Japanese nationalism was part of the fascist logic itself, its drive to generate a politics of cultural authenticity. The Right’s discourse on Japanese difference needs to be approached critically not only to understand the concealment of fascism, but also because much of the postwar historiography on 1930s Japan replicates some of its assumptions of Japanese peculiarity. The liberal political scientist Maruyama Masao, though describing as fascist certain political movements, famously preferred the neologism “ultra-nationalism” as a marker of prewar Japan. Other scholars have proposed an array of alternative terms, such as “authoritarianism,” “militarism,” “Japanism,” “expansionism”—or a combination thereof—all of which characterize Japan as more or less sui generis.8 In this sense, this book aims to be an anticomparative history of fascism even though it is premised on how prewar Japanese compared the politics of Japan and Italy. The point, as contemporaries readily (if often just tacitly) recognized, is that comparisons were premised on an awareness of connections.
Finally, the focus on the fascist nexus between Japan and Italy allows for a methodology that is multiperspectival. To highlight the scope of the Japanese encounter with fascism, I survey individuals (often little-known ones), theater plays, official documents, popular literature, newspapers, and philosophical treatises. An exposition of the various fascist foci will offer a view over the landscape on which fascism thrived. Robert O. Paxton has stated that a historian of fascism will need to determine which part of the elephant he chooses to study; my attempt is to cast a wide net over the beast of fascism, capturing the textual thickness of the pachyderm’s skin.9 In this sketch, readers may wonder about the more indirect treatment accorded to German National Socialism. Though the Third Reich loomed large among Japanese civil and military bureaucrats in the second half of the 1930s and during the war, as an ideology Nazism fell within the discourse on the concept of fascism; that is, it was in many ways distinct from Italian Fascism, but it was seen as a continuation of the politics of fascism that had begun in Italy and were undergoing elaboration in Japan. For this reason, I discuss Nazism at key moments in the larger history of fascism.
This book follows a chronological order, tracing the major shifts in the history of the interaction of Japanese and Italian fascism from World War I to the years following Japan’s defeat after 1945. It will become clear that during this period fascism attracted widespread attention among Japanese thinkers and politicians because it was caught up in a configuration of ideas about nation, capitalism, empire, and notions of the “West.” In the 1920s, the apogee of what is often known as the period of Taishō democracy, Japanese commentators discussed fascism in terms of the social and political experience of modernity. As elsewhere, also in Japan, industrial capitalism ushered in a society where class conflict, consumerism, gender norms, and individualism clashed with established assumptions about order and hierarchy.10 Urban workers, buoyed by socialism and the proletarian movement, took to the streets demanding better conditions. Their numbers swelled from an influx of rural laborers who moved to the cities seeking work in the expanding industrial sector but also in new service and culture industries, ranging from banks to department stores and the cafés and brothels. To conservative critics, the new identities and unevenness brought about by mass society jarred with visions of the nation as a harmonious community. Chapter 1 examines how one such figure, Shimoi Harukichi (1883–1954), found in Italian Fascism a set of social and cultural tools to realign modern mass society with the nation. An educator with a penchant for romantic literature and, later, a right-wing activist, Shimoi lived in Italy for almost two decades (1915–1933), witnessing World War I and the rise of Fascism. From this experience he conceived Fascism as a pedagogical strategy to mobilize the masses—especially youth—through patriotism and devotion to the state.
Politically, the 1920s brought about calls for constitutional democracy (minponshugi) and expanded suffrage. In 1918 Hara Kei became prime minister in the first cabinet headed by an elected member of the Diet rather than an appointed bureaucrat, soldier, or senior statesman. Yet even as party cabinets became the norm in the 1920s, voices critical of parliamentarism multiplied. Not just conservatives, who regarded increased popular involvement in politics as an attack on the prerogatives of the state (and the emperor), but also the younger generation of politicians who had spearheaded notions of individualism, universal suffrage, and party politics—the promoters of liberalism—found fault with these new forms of politics. Many worried that parliamentary democracy, plagued by corruption and subject to the interests of the social elites, fell short of genuinely representing the aspirations of the people.
This was the backdrop to the widespread interest in Benito Mussolini, which peaked in the late 1920s. The crisis of liberal democracy in these years has often been explained with reference to the power of the bureaucracy, hostility from the military, or the tight constraints set by a state centered on the emperor.11 While these were surely important factors, this book suggests that the reaction to Fascism on the side of some champions of liberal and democratic ideals was often naïve, if not accommodating or, even, sympathetic. Together, Chapters 1 and 2 offer a picture of the affinities with Italian Fascism among Japanese liberals and conservatives, showing that, at a time of heightened cosmopolitanism, they assumed that Fascism, too, could be selectively interposed into Japan’s liberal politics and culture of the 1920s. For example, as I argue in Chapter 2, the boom around Mussolini reflected a quest for political leadership. And, crucially, it was not so much conservatives as liberals who displayed the keenest interest in Mussolinian strategies of rule, as they sought to reinforce liberalism with fascist notions of leadership, manliness, and morality.
In the early 1930s, however, the notion that Japan needed infusions of Fascism began to fade. Chapter 3 shows that in these years various streams of right-wing thinkers and activists—such as Japanists (nihonshugisha), National Socialists (kokkashakaishugisha), agrarianists (nōhonshugisha)—competed to define the theory and practice of a new domestic order. Contending, as Mikami Taku did, that the bottom line for such reform was that it had to be “interpreted and carried out in a Japanese way,” they disavowed Italian Fascism, as well as fascism, as a foreign ideology.12 And yet, it is important to stress, their negation of fascism did not amount to a complete rejection.13 It was a denunciation of the inadequacies of fascism rather than of fascism per se. Thus, in the 1930s, right-wing ideologues worked out a fascist critique of fascism that acknowledged the links with Italian Fascism.
Japan’s imperial expansion into Manchuria between 1931 and 1933 played a key role in redefining the relationship between Japanese and European fascisms. The establishment of Manchukuo radicalized Japanese politics. It paved the way to the rise of “reformist bureaucrats,” intensified militaristic rhetoric and policies as well as calls for autarky, and heightened patriotic fervor, giving Japanese across the ideological spectrum a sense that Japan had caught up with fascism.14 Paradoxically, the more difficult it became to maintain clear distinctions between Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan, the more fascism appeared obsolescent. And yet, as Chapters 4 and 5 examine, it was in empire that Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, and later, Nazi Germany found a powerful ideological common ground. Chapter 4 illustrates that the Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–1936) moved the debate around fascism from questions of nationalism and state power toward imperialism and international relations. In the minds of many Japanese observers, the Italian invasion smacked of the old, much reviled European colonialism and had nothing in common with Japan’s empire in Manchuria, which they declared was a first step toward the liberation of Asians from Western rule.15 But a consistent section of Japanese foreign-policy analysts and ideologues came to see Fascist Italy’s empire as a blow dealt to the equally detested League of Nations and liberal internationalism. Thus, in the larger context of what they regarded as “white” Anglo-Saxon world dominance, they reconciled Italy’s imperial ambitions in Africa with Japan’s expansion in Asia.
Chapter 5 pursues the Japanese reconciliation with European fascism by exploring the discourse on the alliance between Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany in the late 1930s and wartime. The diplomatic rapprochement among the three countries, exemplified in the Anti-Comintern (1937) and Tripartite (1940) pacts, sparked a debate on the nature of the alliance and the principles that would underpin a new world order after the victory of the Axis. Historians, philosophers of the Kyoto School of Philosophy, and political scientists probed the historical and theoretical roots of European fascism. Praising the Italian and German attack on the status quo, these theorists nevertheless subsumed fascism into the Japanese critique of the West, arguing that to “overcome modernity” it was also necessary to overcome fascism. Even so, the attempt to formulate an ideological orthodoxy that neatly separated Japanese from Italian and German fascism failed, as intellectuals and politicians felt compelled to acknowledge the links to Fascism and Nazism. In conclusion, I show that the long-standing Japanese association with fascism became an inconvenient truth for the Allies after the war, when Americans decided to rehabilitate Japan as their best friend in Asia in the fight against communism.
This book sidesteps the ontological question “Was Japan fascist or not?” preferring an enquiry into how fascism operated at different levels of analysis. It shows that interwar Japanese culture and politics was steeped in fascism, although often in a diffuse ways. A gray area emerged in which liberal thinkers, conservative politicians, and right-wing activists found themselves in agreement with fascist ideals and ends even though they did not always agree with fascist means. Academics, politicians, and bureaucrats turned down a full embrace of fascism but did not hesitate to explore fascist aesthetics, strategies of mobilization, and theories about economics and international relations as intellectual resources to develop an ideology of their own. The ambiguities of Japan’s fascism are a characteristic of fascism itself, reflecting its role as a mediator between revolution and restoration as well as its hybrid nature as a product of global and national history.