1. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 219–23.
2. Yomiuri shinbun, August 2, 1933.
3. György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 83–86.
4. Benito Mussolini, “Fascism’s Myth: The Nation,” in Fascism, ed. Roger Griffin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995 [1922]), 44.
5. See, most notably, the conservative historian Itō Takashi. Developing a parallel argument to the Italian revisionism of Renzo De Felice, Itō stated that the argument for fascism was an ideological tool of the Marxists, who attacked the national past in order to serve left-wing political goals in the present; Itō, “Shōwa seijishi kenkyū e no isshikaku,” Shisō, no. 624 (1976). As noted by Sakai Tetsuya, Itō’s revisionism paralleled a global turn against the concept of fascism. It was in these years that American scholarship attempted to shrug off fascism from Japan’s past, claiming, in line with Itō, that it was a loose and Eurocentric concept that did not accurately describe the political reality of Japan. See, for example, Peter Duus and Daniel Okimoto, “Fascism and the History of Pre-War Japan: The Failure of a Concept,” Journal of Asian Studies 39 (1979). Most English-language scholarship is derivative of this moment. Hence the historian of fascism Stanley G. Payne refers to “Japanese authoritarianism” (Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995], 335), while Robert O. Paxton, in his analysis of generic fascism, prefers “militarist expansionist dictatorship” (Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism [London: Penguin, 2004], 199).
In recent years, however, a growing number of scholars have revisited the question of fascism in Japan through new methodological approaches, showing that the debate is far from over. Harry Harootunian has stressed the centrality of fascism in the cultural and philosophical production of the 1930s and 1940s; Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Alan Tansman has uncovered a fascist aesthetic among several of Japan’s foremost interwar writers; Tansman, The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). See also Alan Tansman, The Culture of Japanese Fascism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). Two studies that have associated the political and institutional trends in interwar Japan with fascism include Janis Mimura, Planning for Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); and Suzaki Shinichi, Nihon fashizumu to sono jidai: tennōsei, gunbu, sensō, minshū (Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten, 1998). Rikki Kersten has criticized the Eurocentric bias in the historiography on Japanese fascism, pointedly capturing the tensions between particularism and universalism inherent in the study of fascism; Kersten, “Japan,” in The Oxford Handbook of Fascism, ed. R. J. B. Bosworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Federico Finchelstein provides an innovative study of fascism outside Europe, investigating links between Argentina and Italy; Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
6. The Japanese debates on Italian Fascism have received scant attention, both in Japanese- and English-language scholarship. One exception is Fuke Takahiro, who has treated the subject in depth, showing how Fascism and Nazism stimulated a wide debate among Japanese right-wing ideologues and movements; Fuke, Senkanki Nihon no shakai shisō: “Chōkokka” e no furontia (Tokyo: Jinbun Shoin, 2010), esp. chapters 5, 6, and 8. Two further studies are Yamazaki Mitsuhiko, “Itaria fashizumu, sono Nihon ni okeru jūyō to hyōgen keitai,” in “Taishō” saikō, ed. Seki Shizuo (Tokyo: Mineruba, 2007); Yamazaki Mitsuhiko, “‘Fashisuto’ Mussorini wa Nihon de ika egakareta ka: hyōgen bunka ni okeru seijiteki eiyūzō,” Ryūkoku Daigaku kokusai sentā kenkyū nenpō, no. 15 (2006). See also Hori Makiyo, Nishida Mitsugi to Nihon Fashizumu undō (Tokyo: Iwanami, 2007), 8–18, 21–26. Valdo Ferretti has written on diplomatic relations between the two countries; Ferretti, Il Giappone e la politica estera italiana (Rome: Giuffrè, 1983).
7. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, 4 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 2007), 3:16–19.
8. Maruyama Masao, “The Ideology and Dynamics of Japanese Fascism,” and “Theory and Psychology of Ultra-Nationalism,” both in Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics, ed. Ivan Morris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). The terms “authoritarianism” and “militarism” have informed Ben-Ami Shillony, Politics and Culture in Wartime Japan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Richard H. Mitchell, Thought Control in Prewar Japan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976); Elise K. Tipton, The Japanese Police State: The Tokkō in Interwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1990). “Total war” has been put forth as a paradigm that describes a broader interwar trend applicable both to Japan and to liberal democracies. See, for example, the essays in Yasushi Yamanouchi, J. Victor Koschmann, and Ryūichi Narita, eds., Total War and “Modernization” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). Elaborating on the “total war” paradigm, Louise Young stresses the role of empire in forging social, economic, and cultural mobilization; Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). After 1945, only Marxists held on to the term “fascism” to characterize prewar Japan, but typically in terms of a national history of backwardness, not of global connections. Marxists focused on the “emperor system” as the pivotal institutional and ideological site of “absolutism” and “fascism.” See, for example, Inoue Kiyoshi, Tennōsei zettaishugi no hatten (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron, 1951); Hattori Shisō, Tennōsei zettaishugi no kakuritsu (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron, 1948).
9. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, 15.
10. Harry Harootunian, “Introduction: A Sense of an Ending and the Problem of Taishō,” in Japan in Crisis: Essays on Taishō Democracy, ed. Bernard S. Silberman and Harry Harootunian (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 4.
11. For a discussion of the historiography on Taishō democracy and liberalism, see Andrew Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 5–9. Peter Duus has highlighted some of the tensions in prewar Japanese liberalism; see Duus, Party Rivalry and Political Change in Taishō Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); and “Liberal Intellectuals and Social Conflict in Taishō Japan,” in Conflict in Modern Japanese History, ed. Tetsuo Najita and J. Victor Koschmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982). See also the essays in Harry Wray and Hilary Conroy, Japan Examined: Perspectives on Modern Japanese history (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1983). More recently, Narita Ryūichi has stressed the interplay of empire and democratic politics in the Taishō period; Narita, Taishō demokurashii, vol. 4, Shiriizu Nihon kingendaishi (Tokyo: Iwanami, 2007).
12. Asahi shinbun, August 2, 1933.
13. Alan Tansman has pointed out the aesthetic logic that informed the “disavowal” of fascism in his provocative study of the culture of Japanese fascism. Tansman also shows that what he calls the “rhetoric of unspoken fascism” informed one of the key political texts of the 1930s, the Kokutai no hongi (Principles of Our National Polity, 1937); Tansman, Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism, 19, 150–68.
14. Two studies that examine the impact of empire building on Japanese society, politics, and culture are Young, Japan’s Total Empire, and Mimura, Planning for Empire.
15. Prasenjit Duara discusses Manchukuo in terms of overlapping discourses on nationalism, empire, and anti-imperialism; Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
1. Shimoi Harukichi, Fassho undō (Tokyo: Minyūsha, 1925), 39–40.
2. Ibid., 18–19.
3. Shimoi has often been indicated as a representative of a minor pro-Italian current in interwar Japanese politics; Hori Makiyo, Nishida Mitsugi to Nihon Fashizumu Undō (Tokyo: Iwanami, 2007), 13–14; Christopher W. A. Szpilman, “Fascist and Quasi-Fascist Ideas in Interwar Japan, 1918–1941,” in Japan in the Fascist Era, ed. Bruce E. Reynolds (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 97. A closer study of Shimoi’s activities between Japan and Italy can be found in Fujioka Hiromi, “Shimoi Harukichi to Itaria, Fashizumu: Danunchio, Mussorini, Nihon,” Fukuoka Kokusai Daigaku kiyō 25 (2012).
4. ACS, MI, Polizia Politica, fascicoli personali, pacco 654, 47, Shimoi Harukichi, Rome, October 9, 1931.
5. For an outline of various fascist movements around the world, see Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 329–54; Stein Ugelvik Larsen, Fascism Outside Europe: The European Impulse against Domestic Conditions in the Diffusion of Global Fascism (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 2001).
6. The rise of socialist and liberal activism is discussed in Peter Duus and Irwin Scheiner, “Socialism, Liberalism, and Marxism, 1901–1931,” in Modern Japanese Thought, ed. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). The tension arising between culture and politics in the 1920s is addressed in Harry Harootunian, “Introduction: A Sense of an Ending and the Problem of Taishō,” in Japan in Crisis: Essays on Taishō Democracy, ed. Bernard Silberman and Harry Harootunian (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974).
7. Maida Minoru, “Itari no seikyoku (jō),” Gaikō jihō 493 (1925): 64–66.
8. Katayama Sen, “Fuwashizumu to Ōshū no genjō,” Kaizō 5, no. 9 (1923): 72.
9. Ninagawa Arata, “Fuasichizumu no kōryū to rōdō sōgi no gentai,” Tōtaku geppō 5, no. 1 (1924): 2. See also “Ikoku no saikin kakumei to sono kōka,” Gaikō jihō 4, no. 1 (1923).
10. Early renderings for “Fascism” included fuwasshizumu and fasshisutei. See, for example, Fujii Tei, “Sekaiteki fuwasshizumu to Nihon no kensei,” Chūō kōron 8 (1927).
11. Until the early twentieth century there were only limited contacts between Japan and Italy. After the Meiji Restoration, a small number of Italian artists were active in Japan, most notably the painters Antonio Fontanesi (1818–1882); Edoardo Chiossone (1833–1898), who painted the famous portrait of Emperor Meiji; and the sculptor Vincenzo Ragusa (1841–1927). See the essays in Adolfo Tamburello, ed., Italia-Giappone, 450 anni, 2 vols. (Naples: Istituto italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente; Università degli Studi di Napoli “l’Orientale,” 2003). Japanese travelers and missions to Europe in the late nineteenth century are the subject of W. G. Beasley, Japan Encounters the Barbarian: Japanese Travellers in America and Europe, 1860–1873 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). See also Hirakawa Sukehiro, “Japan’s Turn to the West,” in Modern Japanese Thought, ed. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 54–69.
12. Victoria de Grazia argues that Fascism continued the nineteenth-century project of making national citizens; de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 6–7.
13. The social meanings of “rising in the world” are the focus of Earl H. Kinmonth, The Self-Made Man in Meiji Japanese Thought: From Samurai to Salary Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
14. Donald Roden, Schooldays in Imperial Japan: A Study in the Culture of a Student Elite (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 157. For a discussion of the culture and thought of social mobility, see Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
15. Fujioka, “Shimoi Harukichi to Itaria, Fashizumu,” 53–54.
16. Roden, Schooldays in Imperial Japan, 10, 247. On conservatism in late Meiji, see also Kenneth Pyle, “Meiji Conservatism,” in Modern Japanese Thought, ed. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
17. Jason Karlin has explored the student culture of late Meiji with a focus on the gendered aspects of the literature that these youths consumed; Karlin, “The Gender of Nationalism: Competing Masculinities in Meiji Japan,” Journal of Japanese Studies 28, no. 1 (2002): 70–77.
18. For a discussion of the crisis of Meiji conservative morality in Taishō, see Harootunian, “Introduction,” 18.
19. These themes were central in Iwaya’s journal Shōnen sekai (Children’s World). Harry Harootunian examines the “folk” as a representational strategy of communitarian life at a time of capitalist modernization; Harootunian, “Figuring the Folk: History, Poetics, and Representation,” in Mirror of Modernity, ed. Stephen Vlastos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
20. Shimoi Harukichi, Ohanashi no shikata (Tokyo: Dōbunkan, 1926 [1917]), 1.
21. Ibid., 5.
22. Yomiuri shinbun, January 22, 1920.
23. For a study on the relationship between the Florentine modernists and Fascism, see Walter L. Adamson, “Modernism and Fascism: The Politics of Culture in Italy, 1903–1922,” American Historical Review 95 (1990): 362.
24. Nicola D’Antuono, Avventura intellettuale e tradizione culturale in Gherardo Marone (Naples: Laveglia, 1984), 9–12.
25. Quoted in Adele Dei, “La Diana” (1915–1917), saggio e antologia (Rome: Bulzoni, 1981), 7.
26. An exposition of the Italian reception of Japanese culture is to be found in Flavia Arzeni, L’immagine e il segno (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1987), 41–49. See also Tamburello, Italia-Giappone, esp. vol. 1, sections 3–5, for studies on the contribution of Japanese culture to the development of Italian art and literature.
27. In the closest thing to a manifesto for La Diana, Lionello Fiumi declared that he wanted “neither past-ism, nor futurism, but presentism”; Fiumi, “Appello neoliberista,” in Opere poetiche, ed. Beatrice Fiumi Magnani and Gianpaolo Marchi (Verona: Fiorini, 1994), 3–7.
28. Giuseppe Ungaretti, Lettere dal fronte a Gherardo Marone, 1916–1918 (Milan: Mondadori, 1978), 81.
29. Giovanni Papini, “Lettres italiennes,” Mercure de France, nos. 11–12 (1917): 151.
30. The episode is mentioned in the second edition of Lirici giapponesi by Marone himself. He felt flattered at being mistaken for Yosano Akiko and reminisced nostalgically about the days when he and Shimoi worked on the project; Shimoi Harukichi and Gherardo Marone, eds., Lirici giapponesi (Lanciano: G. Carabba, 1926).
31. Shimoi Harukichi and Gherardo Marone, eds., Poesie giapponesi (Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1917), 5–17.
32. Shimoi and Marone, Lirici giapponesi, Ungaretti to Marone, September 15, 1917. For Ungaretti’s interest in Japanese poetry, see also Ungaretti, Lettere dal fronte a Gherardo Marone, 81. The extent to which Japanese poetry influenced Italian modernists is still disputed, but it cannot be denied that a number of poets avidly read the Japanese poetry published in La Diana and adopted the haiku’s forms as their own. For example, “hermeticism” (ermetismo) was a current in poets including Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale, who came of age during the 1920s and 1930s and were loosely associated with La Diana in their early years. Marone had used the term “hermetic” in a comment about Maeda Suikei, a little-known poet: “He is an extraordinary poet precisely because he accumulates his vast intuition in a hermetic sobriety of expression”; Marone to Fiumi, undated letter, in Silvana Gallifuoco, ed., Lettere di Lionello Fiumi (Naples: Macchiaroli, 2003). On this topic, see also Suga Atsuko, “Ungaretti e la poesia giapponese,” in Atti del Convegno Internazionale su Giuseppe Ungaretti (Urbino, 1979).
33. Antonio Gibelli has illustrated the ways in which World War I changed the worldview of soldiers; Gibelli, L’officina della guerra e le trasformazioni del mondo mentale (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2007). For an account of the role of youth in World War I, as well as the representation of death and mourning following the conflict, see George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
34. Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel (London: Allen Lane, 2003). An account of the experience of World War I among youth can be found in Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 53–69.
35. Shimoi Harukichi, La guerra italiana (Naples: Libreria della Diana, 1919), 19, 22, 32. Giuseppe De Lorenzo, a distinguished geologist, amateur scholar of Indian Buddhism, and since 1913 senator, vouched for Shimoi’s commitment to Italy, declaring that he “has for more than three years dedicated all his energy to the study and understanding of our country”; ibid., 19.
36. Ibid., 32.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., 29.
39. Ibid., 44.
40. Ibid., 25.
41. Ibid., 46.
42. Ibid., 30.
43. For Shimoi’s discussion of D’Annunzio’s rule at Fiume, see Gabriele D’Annunzio, “Le pagine di D’Annunzio,” in Shimoi, La guerra italiana, no page numbers provided. See also Michael Ledeen, The First Duce: D’Annunzio at Fiume (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). For evidence of the lascivious behavior of D’Annunzio’s men, see Claudia Salaris, Alla festa della rivoluzione (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), 12.
44. For a study of the role of aviators in the popular imaginary, see Robert Wohl, The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920–1950 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).
45. Vito Salierno, “Il mancato volo di D’Annunzio in Giappone,” in Un capitolo di storia: Fiume e D’Annunzio, Atti del Convegno, Gardone Riviera, San Pelagio, 27–8, ottobre 1989, ed. Elena Ledda and Guglielmo Salotti (Rome: Lucarini, 1991), 158.
46. By his own admission a “fanatic of aviation,” the future Duce contacted the organizers, expressing his “intention to participate” and to “prepare me a plane.” Letters Mussolini-Brezzi, October 9 and 20, 1919, in Guido Mattioli, Mussolini aviatore e la sua opera per l’aviazione (Rome: Casa Editrice Pinciana, 1936), 50–54.
47. KKK, 2A, 11-200, 1313-100, reel 26200, Cabinet Secretary to various ministries, September 12, 1919.
48. Ibid., Tanaka Giichi to Hara Kei, September 13, 1919.
49. Ibid.
50. Shimoi, La guerra italiana. D’Annunzio’s autograph, Easter 1919.
51. SHPP, D’Annunzio to Shimoi, Fiume d’Italia, January 29, 1920.
52. AV, AP, 303l/2899.
53. The same was true in Italy, where he was invited to give talks and write articles about his experience at Fiume and on Japanese culture; Yomiuri shinbun, January 21–23, 1920.
54. Asahi shinbun, January 17, 1920.
55. Yomiuri shinbun, January 28, 1920.
56. Asahi shinbun, January 19, 1920.
57. Yomiuri shinbun, January 15, 1920.
58. Doi Bansui, “Su le orme dell’ippogrifo,” trans. Shimoi Harukichi and Elpidio Jenco, Sakura 1, no. 2 (1920), 14–15.
59. Doi Bansui, “Tenba no michi ni: Gaburiere Danunchio o mukauru chōshi,” Chūō kōron 35 (1920). The Italian translation appeared in Sakura, “Su le orme dell’ippogrifo.”
60. Asahi shinbun, May 10, 1921. Shimoi’s story was published in three installments, on May 7, 9, and 10.
61. The standard account of Mussolini’s rise to power is Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy, 1919–1939 (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). For a study focusing on the role of Mussolini, see R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy: Life under the Dictatorship 1915–1945 (New York: Allen Lane, 2005), 123–216. On the early Fascist squads, see also Mimmo Franzinelli, “Squadrism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Fascism, ed. R. J. B. Bosworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
62. Tokutomi Rōka, Nihon kara Nihon e, vol. 13, Rōka zenshū (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1929), 192–200. Upon learning that D’Annunzio had called off the flight, Tokutomi, disappointed, refrained from sending the poem.
63. Yomiuri shinbun, July 12, 17, and 20, 1920.
64. Dan published two books about his journey to Italy and the Mediterranean. See Dan Inō, Itaria bijutsu kikō (Tokyo: Shunyōdō, 1922); Dan Inō, Parunasu no junrei (Tokyo: Ōmura, 1924).
65. Shimoi’s writing about this collection of poetry earned him some repute in the scholarly world. The Dutch Japanologist (and later Fascist and Nazi sympathizer) Jan Lodeweijk Pierson regularly referred to “professor Shimoi’s” interpretations of the Manyōshū. See, for example, J. L. Pierson, The Manyōshū: Translated and Annotated, vol. 1 (Leyden: Brill, 1929), 3, 112, 147.
66. Tsuda Shun, “Casupole giapponesi di campagna,” Sakura 1, no. 4 (1920): 102.
67. Shimoi Harukichi, “Duello di poesia,” Sakura 1, no. 1 (1920): 26–27.
68. Ibid.
69. “Fior di ciliegio,” Sakura 1, nos. 1–2 (1920): 1.
70. Introduction to Yosano Akiko, Onde del mare azzurro, trans. Shimoi Harukichi and Elpidio Jenco (Naples: Sakura, 1920), 16.
71. An internal accounting document of the Oriental Institute at the University of Naples states that Shimoi “had resigned” in the 1919–1920 academic year, and there is no further reference to him at the university while he was residing in the city; AION, Elenco delle proprietà immobili, Ispezioni ministeriali, Bilanci, Prospetto analitico del personale, 1919–20.
72. GGSK, I, 3, 1, Teikoku, mokuji.
73. Asahi shinbun, May 9, 1921.
74. Il Popolo d’Italia, September 13, 1922. The newspaper named the three deputies as Masaki, Yuasa, and Sakurauchi.
75. Shimoi returned to Japan from December 1924 to May 1925, from October 1925 to February 1926, from May to November 1926, and from March to July 1927. For his reception in Japan, see Asahi shinbun, December 2, 5, 9, 12, and 18, 1924. Earlier, in 1921, he had sought to establish a Dante Museum (Casa di Dante) as a “bridge of poetry,” but the attempt came to nothing; Asahi shinbun, May 10, 1921. See also Yosano, Onde del mare azzurro, 16.
76. AV, AG, XXVIII, 1, Shimoi Harukichi, June 6, 1924.
77. AV, AG, b. Shimoi Harukichi, nn. 26288–89, Telegram D’Annunzio–Shimoi, October 31, 1924. See also AV, AG, XXVIII, 1, Letter Shimoi to D’Annunzio, July 30, 1924.
78. Mussolini, March 1926, in an advertising pamphlet entitled Itari gen shushō Mussorini shi no messeji narabini ryakuden (Tokyo: Karupisu Seizō, 1926). The same message was reprinted in an advertisement in the newspaper Asahi (“Itari shushō Mussorini no messeji kuru: zen Nihon seinen danjo shokun e!,” May 15, 1926). Military valor was one stereotype that Italians associated with Japan. Nitobe Inazō’s Bushido (1900) was translated into Italian in 1917, though it had been read earlier in English.
79. ASMAE, 1919–1930, b. 1189 (4663) rapporti politici, Della Torre to Mussolini, Tokyo, May 16, 1926. Della Torre puts the number as “not inferior to ten thousand” while Shimoi claimed no less than 30,000 (ASMAE, AP, Giappone, 1919–1930, b. 1189, miscellanea, Shimoi–Mussolini, Rome, January 28, 1927). One Italian resident, however, declared the event a commercial farce and Shimoi an “ambitious charlatan and swindler”; ASMAE, 1919–1930, b. 1189 (4663) rapporti politici, Pastorelli to Mussolini, May 24, 1926.
80. Yamane seishi kaihō, August 15 and 19, 1926, 2.
81. ASMAE, 1919–1930, b. 1189, miscellanea, Shimoi–Mussolini, Rome, January 28, 1927.
82. Friends of dictators, though not always deriving benefit from that relationship, did usually gain renown. See, in the case of Hitler, the English aristocrat Lord Londonderry and his childhood friend August Kubizek: Ian Kershaw, Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry, the Nazis, and the Road to War (New York: Penguin, 2004); August Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew (London: Greenhill Books, 2006).
83. For a thesis according to which Fascism amounted to little more than Mussolini “invok[ing] symbolic means and forms that would excite emotions in the people,” see Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
84. Shimoi Harukichi, Taisenchū no Itaria (Tokyo: Shingidō, 1926), 11.
85. Fascism insisted on its youthful character even when, by the 1930s, many of its leaders had passed middle age. See Patrizia Dogliani, “Propaganda and Youth,” in The Oxford Handbook of Fascism, ed. R. J. B. Bosworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). The generational aspect of Italian Fascism is explored in Bruno Wanrooij, “The Rise and Fall of Italian Fascism as a Generational Revolt,” Journal of Contemporary History 22 (1987). The regime founded various institutions to organize youth, such as the Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB) and the Gruppi Universitari Fascisti (GUF).
86. Tokutomi Sohō in Kitamura Mitsuko, Seinen to kindai: seinen to seinen o meguru gensetsu no keifugaku (Yokokama-shi: Seori Shobō, 1998), 251.
87. David Ambaras, Bad Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
88. Kitamura, Seinen to kindai, 248.
89. The evocation of heroism and sacrifice was part of a larger culture of remembrance explored in Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
90. Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 214.
91. George L. Mosse, “The Poet and the Exercise of Political Power: Gabriele D’Annunzio,” in Masses and Man: Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987).
92. Shimoi, Taisenchū no Itaria, 11.
93. Ibid., 235.
94. For a study of mass culture in the 1920s, see Minami Hiroshi, Taishō bunka (Tokyo: Shinsōban, 1988), 269–380. See also the relevant sections in Minami’s Shōwa bunka (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 1987).
95. Yomiuri shinbun, March 1, 1930. Shimoi Harukichi, Fassho undō and Mussorini no shishiku (Tokyo: Dai Nihon Yūbenkai Kōdansha, 1929). Other publications include Shimoi Harukichi, Gyorai no se ni matagarite (Tokyo: Shingidō, 1926), Taisen ga unda Ikoku no niyūshi (Tokyo: Teikoku bunka kyōkai, 1926), and Fassho undō to Mussorini (Tokyo: Bunmei Kyōkai, 1927).
96. ASMAE, AP, Giappone, 1919–1930, b. 1189, miscellanea, Shimoi–Mussolini, January 28, 1927. Shimoi, Gyorai no se ni matagarite.
97. Shimoi, Fassho undō to Mussorini, 45–47.
98. Ibid.
99. Ibid., 20–21, 106.
100. Ibid., 68–69.
101. Ohara Tatsuaki, in Shimoi, Taisen ga unda Ikoku no niyūshi.
102. ASMAE, AP, Giappone, 1919–1930, b. 1189, miscellanea, Shimoi–Mussolini, January 28, 1927.
103. Shimoi, Fassho undō to Mussorini, 26–27.
104. Sano Manabu, “Fashizumu ni tsuite no danpen,” Keizai ōrai 11 (1927): 88–89.
105. ASMAE, AP, Giappone, 1919–30, b. 1189, (4663) rapporti politici, Della Torre to Mussolini, November 29, 1925.
106. ASMAE, AP, Giappone, 1919–1930, b. 1189, miscellanea, Shimoi–Mussolini, January 28, 1927.
107. Ibid.
108. ASMAE, AP, Giappone, b. 1889, 1925–28, f. commemorazione, Della Torre to Mussolini, February 23, 1928.
109. GGSK, I, 1, Byakkōtai kinenhi kankei, dai ichi maki, Yamakawa to Tanaka, February 1, 1928. Japanese foreign ministry officials passed a French translation to their Italian counterparts (ASMAE, AP, Giappone, b. 1889, 1925–28, f. commemorazione).
110. ASMAE, AP, Giappone, b. 1889, 1925–28, f. commemorazione, 138/68, Della Torre to Mussolini, March 3, 1928.
111. ASMAE, AP, Giappone, b. 1889, 1925–28, f. commemorazione, note “Biakko-Tai.” The selected text read: “Rome always present in the spirit of the heroes with this millenarian column exalts the memory of the Byakkōtai—image of a Fascio—sixth year of the Fascist Era, 1928.”
112. ASMAE, AP, Giappone, 1919–30, b. 1189, commemorazioni ed onoranze, 685/292 and 835/327, Aloisi to Mussolini, Tokyo, December 6, 1928.
113. ASMAE, AP, Giappone, 1919–30, b. 1189, commemorazioni ed onoranze, 835/327, appendix to Aloisi to Mussolini, Tokyo, December 6, 1928. Mussolini reciprocated Konoe’s niceties: “In expressing my best wishes for the prosperity of the Japanese nation I am pleased that the event gave us the opportunity to confirm once again the ties of friendship that [have] exist[ed] for a long time between our two countries” (ibid., Mussolini to Konoe, December 5, 1928).
114. ASMAE, AP, Giappone, 1919–30, b. 1190, rapporti politici, letter Aloisi to Mussolini, Tokyo, July 12, 1929.
115. Yomiuri shinbun, November 26, 1929.
116. GGSK, I, 1, 7, Byakkōtai, Debuchi to Matsuda, February 28, 1928.
117. ASMAE, AP, Giappone, 1919–30, b. 1189, commemorazioni ed onoranze, 835/327, Aloisi to Mussolini, Tokyo, December 6, 1928.
118. Matsudaira himself was committed to advancing the cause of Aizu. Only three months before the byakkōtai commemoration, in September 1928, he wedded his daughter Setsuko to Prince Chichibu, the emperor’s younger brother—clearly Matsudaira’s key role in the Byakkōtai Committee was not coincidental.
119. ASMAE, AP, Giappone, 1919–30, b. 1189, commemorazioni ed onoranze, 685/292, appendix from Aloisi to Mussolini, October 6, 1928.
120. GGSK, I, 1, 7, Byakkōtai, Debuchi to Matsuda, February 28, 1928 and GSK, I, 1, 7, Byakkōtai, Matsuda to Tanaka Giichi, November 2, 1928. The ambassador also recalled a past embarrassing episode in Shimoi’s private life—a scandal he had provoked years earlier in Naples when he “lived with another woman.” Shimoi’s conjugal immorality, though, was less outrageous in the eyes of the Italian ambassador. “If one considers,” he wrote, “that until a few years ago concubinage was a legally recognized institution in Japan, if one considers that until one year ago there was a high court dignitary who appeared in public between his wife and concubine…it does not seem to me logic to inveigh against the poet guilty of having reevoked in his family life the customs of the daimyo and samurai”; ASMAE, AP, Giappone, 1919–30, b. 1189, commemorazioni, onoranze, 118/58, Della Torre to Mussolini, February 28, 1928.
121. ACS, SPD, CO, Shimoi Harukichi, note “Ministero degli Affari Esteri,” Rome, December 26, 1927. Beltramelli’s wife, Yoshiko Tetsu Beltramelli, who was Japanese, had studied music in Italy. After World War II Shimoi claimed that he had introduced Yoshiko to Beltramelli to repay him a favor: “Bring her to me,” was Beltramelli’s sexist remark, “I’ll teach her how to sing”; Indro Montanelli, L’impero bonsai, cronaca di un viaggio in Giappone, 1951–2 (Milan: Rizzoli, 2007), 168. For an assessment of Beltramelli’s work see Luisa Passerini, Mussolini immaginario (Rome: Laterza, 1991).
1. Mizuno Hironori, “Fasshizumu to Nihon,” Keizai ōrai, no. 11 (1927): 82. Mizuno does not mention the name of the newspaper that conducted the survey. The second was Bernard Shaw, with half the votes of the Italian leader.
2. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 50–55. For a study on the reception of Mussolini in the United States, see John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972). Falasca-Zamponi also considers aspects of the Duce’s image outside of Italy. For Japan, Yoshimura Michio concentrates on the political meanings of the Japanese debates about Mussolini; Yoshimura, “Shōwa shoki no shakai jōkyōka ni okeru Nihonjin no Mussorini zō,” Nihon rekishi, no. 497 (1989). A more sophisticated reading of the various expressions of Japanese interest in Mussolini can be found in Fuke Takahiro, Nihon fashizumu ronsō: Taisen zenya no shisōka tachi (Tokyo: Kawade Bukkusu, 2012), 39–66.
3. Peter Duus, “Liberal Intellectuals and Social Conflict in Taishō Japan,” in Conflict in Modern Japanese History, ed. Tetsuo Najita and J. Victor Koschmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 420–21.
4. Tetsuo Najita, Japan: The Intellectual Foundations of Modern Japanese Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 120–21.
5. Harry Harootunian, “Between Politics and Culture: Authority and the Ambiguities of Intellectual Choice in Imperial Japan,” in Japan in Crisis: Essays on Taishō Democracy, ed. Bernard S. Silberman and Harry Harootunian (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 122–24.
6. I use “consent” in the sense that Antonio Gramsci understood it. How, Gramsci asked, could “legislators prepare the ‘spontaneous’ consent of the masses who must ‘live’ those directives, modifying their own habits, their own will, their own convictions to conform with those directives and with the objectives which they propose to achieve?”; Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 266. The question of the “new individualism” in Taishō is raised in Harry Harootunian, “Introduction: A Sense of an Ending and the Problem of Taishō,” in Japan in Crisis: Essays on Taishō Democracy, ed. Bernard Silberman and Harry Harootunian (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 12.
7. Tsurumi Yūsuke, Eiyū taibō ron (Tokyo: Dai Nihon Yūbenkai Kōdansha, 1928), 10.
8. The German terms employed by Weber were, in fact, “alltäglich” and “ausseralltäglich,” literally “everyday” and “outside-everyday.” English translations of them as “ordinary” and “extraordinary” fail to give the temporal sense of the original. See Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundrisse der verstehenden Soziologie, vol. 3, Grundrisse der Sozialökonomik (Tübingen, 1922), 140–47.
9. The formation of the myth of Mussolini has been examined in Renzo De Felice and Luigi Goglia, Mussolini, il mito: Grandi opere (Rome: Laterza, 1983). See also Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle. For a study that de-emphasizes the purchase of Mussolini’s myth on Italians, see R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy: Life under the Dictatorship, 1915–1945 (New York: Allen Lane, 2005).
10. Tsurumi, Eiyū taibō ron, 5–8.
11. Tsurumi Yūsuke, Ōbei tairiku yūki (Tokyo: Dai Nihon Yūbenkai Kōdansha, 1933), 659–60, 662–63.
12. Ibid., 659–60.
13. Harootunian, “Between Politics and Culture,” 140–41.
14. Nitobe Inazō, Ijin gunzō (Tokyo: Jitsugyō no Nihon sha, 1931), 87–90.
15. For a biographical sketch of Nakano, see Leslie Russell Oates, Populist Nationalism in Prewar Japan: A Biography of Nakano Seigo (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985). Inomata Keitarō, a former member of Nakano’s Tōhōkai (Eastern Society), has also produced a biography; Inomata, Nakano Seigō (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1960).
16. Nakano Seigō, “Entakukei no Mussorini to yōchina rōnōtō,” Chūō kōron 43, no. 5 (1928): 81–83.
17. Inahara Katsuji, “Mussorini kōtei ni naruka,” Gaikō jihō 577, no. 12 (1928): 13. Another journalist, Shiotsu Seisaku, stated that the dictator “was trying to make Italy into a second Prussia”; Shiotsu, “Mussorini no kōka,” Kokusai chishiki 8, no. 8 (1928): 60.
18. Inahara, “Mussorini kōtei ni naruka,” 21.
19. Ibid., 19.
20. Uesugi Shinkichi, “Dōri to seigi no teki Mussorini ron,” Chūō kōron 43, no. 2 (1928): 29–31, 39–40.
21. A discussion of reformism among Taishō politicians can be found in Sharon Minichiello, Retreat from Reform: Patterns of Political Behavior in Interwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1984), 1–6.
22. Yomiuri shinbun, April 20, 1933. Participants in this group conversation (zadankai) on Hitler, Mussolini, and patriotism (aikokushin) included the journalists Ōya Sōichi and Murobuse Kōshin and the actor and musical pundit Iba Takashi.
23. Ugaki Kazushige, Ugaki Kazushige nikki, 3 vols. (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 1968–1971), 1:391, 414.
24. Jung-Sun N. Han has shown how liberal thinkers, especially Yoshino Sakuzō, rationalized the relationship between imperialism and liberalism; Han, An Imperial Path to Modernity: Sakuzō and a New Liberal Order in East Asia, 1905–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 40–88. See also Jung-Sun N. Han, “Envisioning a Liberal Empire in East Asia: Yoshino Sakuzō in Taishō Japan,” Journal of Japanese Studies 33, no. 2 (2007).
25. Two studies that examine the complex relationship between Japanese internationalism and imperialism are Thomas W. Burkman, Japan and the League of Nations: Empire and World Order, 1914–1938 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008); Jessamyn R. Abel, “Warring Internationalisms: Multilateral Thinking in Japan, 1933–1964” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2004). The military and political aspects of Japan’s invasion of China are discussed in James B. Crowley, Japan’s Quest for Autonomy: National Security and Foreign Policy, 1930–1938 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966).
26. Maida Minoru, “Itari no seikyoku,” Gaikō jihō 493, 495 (1925): 34.
27. Nakahira Akira, “Mussorini no gaikō,” Gaikō jihō 518, no. 7.1 (1926): 81–82. Anticipating Japan’s wartime Asianist rhetoric, of which he would become a supporter, Nakahira added that “we must plan the construction of an Asian civilization. Our country needs a higher form of absolute supremacy—if Italy has the right to call for war based on industrial development, must we feel restraint in calling for the liberation of Asia based on principles of humanity and culture?”
28. Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, 45–47. The regime’s policies, however, often met with indifference and even resistance. For a persuasive account that relativizes the extent to which Italian society succumbed to Fascist ideology and culture, see Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy.
29. Yoshida Yakuni, “Mussorini enzetsu no inshō,” Kaizō 11, no. 3 (1929): 119–20.
30. Peter Duus has argued that Nagai’s anti-imperialism more than his liberalism was at the heart of his drift toward “nationalism”; Duus, “Nagai Ryūtarō and the ‘White Peril,’ 1905–1944,” Journal of Asian Studies 31, no. 1 (1971). Nagai is also the focus of Sharon Minichiello’s study. Employing Itō Takashi’s category of “reformism,” she locates Nagai’s turn to the right in the 1930s. But his flirtation with Mussolini suggests that his liberalism was already imbricated with fascist elements; Minichiello, Retreat from Reform, 94–96.
31. Nagai Ryūtarō, “Mussorini shushō no shojo enzetsu,” Yūben 18, no. 1 (1927): 22. It was a wording that very likely paraphrased the title of a famous article written by the liberal scholar Yoshino Sakuzō in 1916, “On the Meaning of Constitutional Government and the Methods by Which It Can Be Perfected.” Yoshino’s statement read “kensei no hongi o toite sono yūshū no bi o sumasu” and was widely celebrated as a tribute to the nascent parliamentary democracy of the 1920s. Nagai’s phrase was “dōryoku o kago shi sono yūshū no bi o togeshime.”
32. Ibid.
33. Audiences with Mussolini, with a focus on German visitors, are the subject of Wolfgang Schieder, Mythos Mussolini. Deutsche in Audienz beim Duce (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2013).
34. Until 1929 the audiences were held at the Quirinale or in Palazzo Chigi.
35. Okada Tadahiko, Senpūri no Ōshū (Tokyo: Teikoku Shoin, 1936), 339–42.
36. This thesis is expressed in Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
37. Takaishi Shinjirō, “Ningen Mussorini to kataru,” in Itaria no inshō (Tokyo: Itaria Tomo No Kai, 1943), 155–58.
38. Nagai Ryūtarō, “Uiruson kara Mussorini made,” in Yūkō kurabu kōenshū (Tokyo: 1927), 14–15.
39. Ibid., 24.
40. Miriam Silverberg, “Constructing a New Cultural History of Prewar Japan,” in Japan in the World, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. C. Harootunian (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 127.
41. As shown by Miriam Silverberg, other figures, too, had a similar function. In the early 1920s, for example, the media played a key role in popularizing the young Shōwa emperor; Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 25–28.
42. This musical theater, evoking Broadway-style productions in its melodrama and choreography, opened in 1914 and within a few years had become a great popular success. Kishida Tatsuya was an important playwright in Takarazuka’s early period. He had studied with Giovanni Vittorio Rosi, the Italian choreographer and a key figure in introducing Western opera to Japan in the 1910s. Kishida toured France and Italy before returning to Japan and producing his greatest hit, the revue “Mon Paris,” in 1927 and the following year the “Revue Italiana.” See also Jennifer Ellen Robertson, Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
43. Tsubouchi Shōyō had adopted Shikō as his son only to repudiate him over disagreements about Shōyō’s private life. Shōyō was also involved in the foundation of the musical theater Takarazuka. He had studied at Harvard and later became a professor at Waseda University.
44. James R. Brandon, “Mussolini in Kabuki: Notes and Translation,” in Japanese Theatre Transcultural: German and Italian Intertwinings, ed. Stanca Scholz-Cionca and Andreas Regelsberger (Munich: Iudicium, 2011), 71. In this essay Brandon focuses on Osanai Kaoru and Ichikawa Sadanji. See also James R. Brandon, Kabuki’s Forgotten War, 1931–1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009), 18–20.
45. Brandon, Kabuki’s Forgotten War, 10–13. Another form was the “overnight pickle,” a play that staged recent developments in the Russo-Japanese war, effectively being half-news half-entertainment.
46. Yamazaki Mitsuhiko, “‘Fashisuto’ Mussorini wa Nihon de ika egakareta ka: hyōgen bunka ni okeru seijiteki eiyūzō,” Ryūkoku daigaku kokusai sentā kenkyū nenpō, no. 15 (2006): 207–10.
47. “Mussorini” alarmed Italian authorities, even in the sanitized version that appeared in Kaizō. Having asked Shimoi Harukichi to translate the entire play for Italian scrutiny, Roman officials protested that the piece was a “disgraceful attack on Italy, Mussolini, and Fascism.” Yet the decision of the Japanese authorities to ban the play from public performance did little to alleviate Italian outrage. To their chagrin, the prohibition was issued, not because of the way it represented Mussolini, but for its talk of “revolutions, violence, and strikes…for its repercussions on domestic politics and the Japanese people”; ASMAE, AP, Giappone, 1919–30, b. 1189, pubblicazioni offensive, Guido Perris to Ezio Maria Gray, March 11, 1928. For a more detailed analysis of Maedakō’s play, see Reto Hofmann, “The Fascist Reflection: Japan and Italy, 1919–1950” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2010), 91–98.
48. Yamazaki, “‘Fashisuto’ Mussorini wa Nihon de ika egakareta ka,” 208.
49. Osanai Kaoru and Ichikawa Sadanji, as quoted in Yamazaki Mitsuhiko, “Itaria fashizumu: sono Nihon ni okeru jūyō to hyōgen keitai,” in “Taishō” saikō, ed. Seki Shizuo (Tokyo: Mineruba, 2007), 269–73.
50. Tsubouchi, in Yamazaki, “‘Fashisuto’ Mussorini wa Nihon de ika egakareta ka,” 211.
51. Tsubouchi Shikō, “Mussorini,” in Nihon gikyoku zenshū. Gendai hen (Tokyo: Shunyōdō, 1928–30), 500.
52. Ibid., 501.
53. Ibid., 485.
54. Ibid., 495–96.
55. Ibid., 504.
56. Luisa Passerini, Mussolini immaginario (Rome: Laterza, 1991), 154.
57. Nakagawa Shigeru, Mussorini, vol. 52, Ijin denki bunkō (Tokyo: Nihonsha, 1935).
58. Okumura Takeshi, Kaiketsu Mussorini (Osaka: Enomoto Shoten, 1928), and Jidōsha ō Henri Fōdo (Osaka: Enomoto Shoten, 1928).
59. Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, 42–61.
60. Giuseppe Prezzolini, Fascism (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1927); Luigi Villari, The Awakening of Italy (London and New York: Methuen, 1924); Pietro Gorgolini, The Fascist Movement in Italian Life (London: Unwin, 1923).
61. Luigi Sturzo, Italy and Fascismo (New York: Harcourt, 1926); Ivanoe Bonomi, From Socialism to Fascism, a Study of Contemporary Italy (London: M. Hopkinson, 1924); Guglielmo Ferrero, Four Years of Fascism (London: P. S. King, 1924).
62. The (unnamed) editor in Usuda Zan’un, Wagahai wa Mussorini de aru (Tokyo: Chūseidō, 1928), 337.
63. Sawada’s Mussorini was published in 1928, 1936, and 1938; his Hittora-den in 1934, 1939, and 1940. Both found a postwar afterlife, being published again in 1983.
64. Sawada Ken, Mussorini den (Tokyo: Dai Nihon Yūbenkai Kōdansha, 1928), 1.
65. Ibid., 3.
66. Ibid., 4–5.
67. Ibid.
68. Usuda, Wagahai wa Mussorini de aru, 1–3.
69. Though probably Usuda was unaware of the fact, Mussolini was fond of cats—one exemplar would often sit on his desk—and at least once compared himself to one: “Have you ever watched a cat while it studies its prey and then, with a leap, is upon it? Watch one. I intend to act in the same way.” The statement dates from April 21, 1940, and is quoted in Brian R. Sullivan, “The Impatient Cat: Assessments of Military Power in Fascist Italy, 1936–1940,” in Calculations: Net Assessment and the Coming of World War II, ed. Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millet (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 97.
70. Mark Jones, Children as Treasures: Childhood and the Middle Class in Early Twentieth-Century Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 117–18.
71. Ueda Sakuichi, Mussorini shushō: Kinsei dai ijin (Tokyo: Kōmin Kyōiku Kenkyūkai, 1927); Abe Sueo, Mussorini: Shōnen sekai ijin dokuhon (Osaka: Hōbunkan, 1930); Matsudaira Michio, Mussorini (Tokyo: Kin No Seisha, 1928); Ashima Kei, Shōnen Mussorini den (Tokyo: Bunkadō, 1932).
72. Abe, Mussorini. Introduction by the (unnamed) editor.
73. Koyama Shizuko examines the ideal of “good wife, wise mother” from Meiji to the 1930s, focusing on moral tracts; Koyama, Ryōsai kenbo: The Educational Ideal of “Good wife, Wise mother” in Modern Japan (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
74. Abe, Mussorini, 30–33. See also Ashima, Shōnen Mussorini den, 48.
75. Ashima, Shōnen Mussorini den, 48.
76. Abe, Mussorini, 16.
77. Matsudaira, Mussorini, 18–21. This recurrent episode is also narrated in Abe, Mussorini, 48–51. For Matsudaira, the young Benito’s manly character also emerged in academic preferences. He had little time for subjects like Latin grammar or the history of religion: “Instead of spending his energies on insignificant subjects, he was completely engrossed in reading about Caesar and the heroes of ancient Rome” (Matsudaira, Mussorini, 32).
78. Duus, “Liberal Intellectuals and Social Conflict in Taishō Japan,” 438.
79. Abe, Mussorini, 18–20.
80. Ashima, Shōnen Mussorini den, 333.
81. Ibid., 335.
82. As quoted in Yamazaki, “Itaria fashizumu, sono Nihon ni okeru jūyō to hyōgen keitai,” 268.
83. Ashima, Shōnen Mussorini den, 4. This view was reiterated in the late 1930s by the philosopher Miki Kiyoshi in this theorization of “cooperativism” (kyōdōshugi). Mobilization from below—or self-mobilization—was needed to avoid “totalitarian control.” “Cooperativism [does not] rest on abstract democracy; rather, it recognizes the important significance of leaders. The leaders required by cooperativism are not authoritarian dictators, nor are they separated from the people. Rather, they enter among the people, educate the people, and lead the people by taking up their demands”; Miki Kiyoshi in Duus, “Liberal Intellectuals and Social Conflict in Taishō Japan,” 440.
1. Hugh Byas, Government by Assassination (New York: Knopf, 1942).
2. The argument that Manchuria represented the “jewel” in Japan’s crown is made by Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 21–52. Sandra Wilson relativizes the impact of the Manchurian Incident on Japanese society; Wilson, The Manchurian Crisis and Japanese Society, 1931–33 (London: Routledge, 2002). For a contemporary account of how in the 1930s the world of the radical Right mixed with the criminal underworld, see Eiko Maruko Siniawer, Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists: The Violent Politics of Modern Japan, 1860–1960 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 108–38. For an examination of the February 26, 1936, attempted coup d’état, see Ben-Ami Shillony, Revolt in Japan: The Young Officers and the February 26, 1936, Incident (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973). The rise of the police state is described in Elise K. Tipton, The Japanese Police State: The Tokkō in Interwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1990). Janis Mimura analyzes the technocratic visions of Japan’s “new bureaucrats” and the ideological connections to European fascist administrators; Mimura, Planning for Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). On the issue of “reformism” and reformist bureaucrats, see Itō Takashi, Taishōki kakushinha no seiritsu (Tokyo: Hanawa Sensho, 1978). A recent study of the February 26, 1936, Incident in the context of fascism is Hori Makiyo, Nishida Mitsugi to Nihon Fashizumu Undō (Tokyo: Iwanami, 2007).
3. An overview of fascist movements around the world can be found in Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 329–53. Recent works on fascism in China are Margaret Clinton, “Fascism, Cultural Revolution, and National Sovereignty in 1930s China” (New York University, 2009); Brian Kai Hin Tsui, “China’s Forgotten Revolution: Radical Conservatism in Action, 1927–1949” (Columbia University, 2013).
4. One of the few exceptions is Richard Torrance, “The People’s Library: The Spirit of Prose Literature versus Fascism,” in The Culture of Japanese Fascism, ed. Alan Tansman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 74. Torrance precisely notes how widespread the term “fascism” was among left-wing writers, who used it to criticize repression of the Left and censorship. Another example is Miles Fletcher, The Search for a New Order: Intellectuals and Fascism in Prewar Japan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). In Japanese, the recent work of Fuke Takahiro examines the debate on fascism among intellectuals: Fuke, Nihon fashizumu ronsō: Taisen zenya no shisōka tachi (Tokyo: Kawade Bukkusu, 2012), and Senkanki Nihon no shakai shisō: “chōkokka” e no furontia (Tokyo: Jinbun Shoin, 2010).
5. Carol Gluck discusses the kokutai in the context of late-nineteenth-century nation building; Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). Konno Nobuyuki focuses on the function of the kokutai in the 1930s for the right-wing Pan-Asianist intellectual and Indologist Ōkawa Shūmei and the historian Hiraizumi Kiyoshi; Konno, Kindai Nihon no kokutairon: “Kōkoku shikan” saikō (Tokyo: Perikan, 2008).
6. The economist Fukuda Tokuzō, an advocate of welfare economics, had studied with Lujo Brentano in Leipzig in 1899–1900; Tamotsu Nishizawa, “Lujo Brentano, Alfred Marshall, and Tokuzo Fukuda: The Reception and Transformation of the German Historical School in Japan,” in The German Historical School: The Historical and Ethical Approach to Economics, ed. Yuichi Shionoya (London); Erich Pauer, The Transfer of Technology between Germany and Japan from 1890 to 1945, vol. 3 of Japan and Germany: Two Latecomers to the World Stage, 1890–1945, ed. Kudō Akira, Tajima Nobuo, and Erich Pauer, (Kent: Global Oriental, 2009), 466–510. Economic relations between Japan and Germany in the pre- and postwar periods have been examined by Kudō Akira; Kudō, Nichi-Doku keizai kankeishi josetsu (Tokyo: Sakurai Shoten, 2011).
7. Katō Tetsurō, “Personal Contacts in Japanese-German Cultural Relations during the 1920s and Early 1930s,” in Japanese-German Relations, 1895–1945: War, Diplomacy, and Public Opinion, ed. Christian W. Spang and Rolf-Harald Wippich (London: Routledge, 2006). In 1929, 151 government-sponsored scholars studied in Germany as opposed to 34 in Great Britain and the United States and 29 in France.
8. Mimura, Planning for Empire.
9. Hijikata Seibi, Fashizumu: shisō, undō, seisaku (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1932), 253–54.
10. Particularly influential was Sombart’s Die Zukunft des Kapitalismus (1932); Osamu Yanagisawa, “The Impact of German Economic Thought on Japanese Economists before World War II,” in The German Historical School: The Historical and Ethical Approach to Economics, ed. Yuichi Shionoya (London: Routledge, 2001).
11. Mimura, Planning for Empire, 18–20, 36–39.
12. On Konoe’s New Order Movement (shintaisei undō), see Yabe Teiji, “Konoe Fumimaro to shintaisei,” in Kindai Nihon o tsukutta hyakunin, ed. Ōkōchi Kazuo and Ōya Sōichi (1965).
13. Fletcher, Search for a New Order, 53–57, 80–82, 120.
14. See, for example, a Yomiuri shinbun editorial entitled “The National Essence Party and the National Essence Association” (kokusuitō to kokusuikai), or the reference to Mussolini’s 1922 cabinet as the “national essence cabinet” (kokusui naikaku): “Kokusuitō naikaku soshiki,” Yomiuri Shinbun, November 1, 1922; “Kokusuitō to Kokusuikai,” Yomiuri shinbun, October 31, 1922; ibid.
15. Fuke, Nihon fashizumu ronsō, 69–70, 72–75.
16. I use the term “national socialism” even though the literal translation of kokkashugi is “state socialism.” This rendering reflects its proponents’ emphasis on the state as an institution to solve economic and social problems. But the adherents of this ideology often translated kokkashugi as “national socialism,” and contemporaries often remarked about the parallels with German National Socialism. For example, the title of the journal of this school of thought was kokkashakaishugi, which they translated as “national socialism.”
17. Other examples of bibliographies on fascism are Gotō Toranosuke, Fashizumu to wa nanika, fashizumu naigai bunken (Tokyo: Rōnō Shobō, 1932); Toda Takeo, ed., Fashizumu sankō bunken (Tokyo: Tōkyō Shakai Kagaku Kenkyūjo, 1933). The political scientist Sassa Hiroo, who translated the philosopher H. W. Schneider’s study on Fascism (1928), appended a lengthy and detailed bibliography of Japanese and foreign works relating to fascism; Sassa Hiroo and H. W. Schneider, Fashizumu kokkagaku (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1934). For the Home Ministry’s survey of fascism, see Naimushō keihōkyoku, ed., Fashizumu no riron, vol. 5, Shuppan keisatsu kankei shiryō shūsei (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 1986 [1932]), 269–509.
18. Mussolini’s inconclusive attempt to internationalize Fascism is the subject of Michael Ledeen, Universal Fascism: The Theory and Practice of the Fascist International, 1928–1936 (New York: H. Fertig, 1972). See also Luca De Caprariis, “‘Fascism for Export’? The Rise and Eclipse of the Fasci Italiani all’Estero,” Journal of Modern History 35, no. 2 (2000).
19. Ishikawa Sanshirō in “Fashizumu hihan,” Keizai no ōrai, no. 11 (1927): 86.
20. The pamphlet published by the club stressed that “fascism, the hero of our times, is linked to the idea of a controlled economy; Nihon Kōgyō Kurabu Keizai Kenkyūkai, “Fassho Itari saikin no ugoki,” Keizai kenkyū sōsho 19 (special edition; 1934): 1–2. As early as 1928, the Concordia Association (Kyōchōkai), a half-government half-industry–sponsored association tasked with harmonizing the relations between capital and labor, also conducted a study of Italy’s agricultural labor contracts; Negishi Benji, Itari no nōgyō ni okeru shūgōteki rōdō keiyaku (Tokyo: Kyōchōkai Nōsonka, 1928).
21. Yoshino Sakuzō, “Fascism in Japan,” Contemporary Japan 1, no. 1 (1932): 185.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 185.
25. Ibid., 190–93.
26. Ibid., 193.
27. Ibid., 195.
28. Ibid., 185–86. Yoshino maintained some faith in Japan’s political elites: “Fascism aims in theory at bringing democracy down to the ground, but it may well serve in practice, there and indeed elsewhere, to keep democratic politicians up to scratch”; ibid., 197.
29. Hasegawa Nyozekan, Fashizumu hihan (Tokyo: Ohata Shoten, 1932).
30. Ibid., 6–9, 26–29.
31. Ibid., 31. “Domestically the middle class did not feel the class anxieties of the development of the bourgeoisie and the rise of proletariat to such an intense degree”; ibid., 131.
32. Ibid., 46–47.
33. Ibid., 28.
34. Ibid., 14–15.
35. Ibid., 18.
36. Ibid., 20.
37. Maruyama Masao, “Theory and Psychology of Ultra-Nationalism, “in Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics, ed. Ivan Morris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). For a more detailed discussion of liberal debates on fascism, see Hori, Nishida Mitsugi to Nihon Fashizumu undō, 64–72.
38. Tosaka appreciated his liberal colleague for being a “mature English-style bourgeois materialist” but found that his refusal to “recognize the use of dialectics” limited his understanding of the class dynamics of fascism; Tosaka Jun, Nihon ideorogiiron (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1977), 358–59.
39. Two studies that have taken seriously Tosaka’s analysis of fascism are Naoki Sakai, “Imperial Nationalism and the Comparative Perspective,” Positions 17, no. 1 (2008); Harry Harootunian, “The Black Cat in the Dark Room,” Positions 13, no. 1 (2005). For an analytic overview of Tosaka’s philosophy, see Harry Harootunian, “Time, Everydayness and the Specter of Fascism,” in Re-politicising the Kyoto School as Philosophy, ed. Christopher Goto-Jones (London: Routledge, 2008).
40. Tosaka, Nihon ideorogiiron, 26–27, 134–35, 146–47.
41. Ibid., 18–20, 25–26, 29–30.
42. Ibid., 413.
43. Ibid., 420.
44. Ibid., 27. See also Harootunian, “The Black Cat in the Dark Room,” 146–47.
45. Hiranuma Kiichirō, “Nihon no kakushin undō,” Kaizō 14, no. 6 (1932): 94–95.
46. H. D. Harootunian and Tetsuo Najita, “Japan’s Revolt against the West,” in Modern Japanese Thought, ed. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
47. Yomiuri shinbun, May 25, 1933.
48. He had probably begun these works while still in Rome. See Shimoi Harukichi, Fashizumu no shintai to Itari no sangyō tōsei, ed. Katō Etsuzan (Osaka: Osaka Tosho Kabushikigaisha, 1933); Ikoku no sangyō seisaku to rōdō kensho (Tokyo: Kantō Sangyō Dantai Rengōkai, 1933); Fassho undō to Itari no nōson shinkō seisaku ni tsuite (Tokyo: Nagano kenjin Tokyo Rengōkai, 1933); and Itari no kumiaisei kokka to nōgyō seisaku (Tokyo: Dayamondosha, 1933). Three of these books were transcripts of talks Shimoi had given in various parts of the archipelago (one speech, exceeding one hundred pages, was delivered only a week after his arrival). But the fast pace of publication can also be explained by his parroting of Italian works. Shimoi, however, meticulously avoided literal translations of terms that might upset the censors. “Revolution,” commonly used in Italian to refer to the “Fascist revolution,” was rendered as “restoration,” in line with the politically correct parlance of the day. Under corporatism, Shimoi argued, labor and capital had come to an agreement to set their differences aside for the sake of the state. In Italy the so-called Labor Charter (Carta del lavoro) sealed a historic arrangement that was “the greatest achievement of the Fascist restoration”; Ikoku no sangyō seisaku to rōdō kensho, 17.
49. Shimoi Harukichi, Nekketsu netsuryū no daienzetsu (Tokyo: Dai Nihon Yūbenkai Kōdansha, 1933), 130–32. Kessoku is also the literal translation of the Italian fascio.
50. SHPP. Shimoi probably met Banzai in 1932 or 1933 while the latter was visiting Italy as military attaché in Germany. Another business card found among Shimoi’s papers is that of Nakano Fumi (1883–1966), the founder of a girls’ school in Shiga.
51. Richard Smethurst examines the relationship between the military and the countryside in the 1930s; Smethurst, A Social Basis for Prewar Japanese Militarism: The Army and the Rural Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). Thomas R. H. Havens focuses on agrarianist thought (nōhonshugi); Havens, Farm and Nation in Modern Japan: Agrarian Nationalism, 1870–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974).
52. The standard account of Ōmoto is Yoshio Yasumaru, Deguchi Nao (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1987). In English, see Emily Groszos Ooms, Women and Millenarian Protest in Meiji Japan: Deguchi Nao and Ōmotokyō (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
53. Nancy K. Stalker, Prophet Motive: Deguchi Onisaburo, Oomoto, and the Rise of New Religions in Imperial Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008), 3, 12.
54. Ibid., 175–79.
55. On March 10, 1935, the Taiwan Nichi-nichi shinpō announced that Deguchi Onisaburō and his aide-de-camp, Shimoi Harukichi, had disembarked with its membership clad in khaki uniforms.
56. Ikeda Akira, ed., Ōmoto shiryō shūsei, vol. 3 (Tokyo: Sanichi Shobō, 1982–85), 470, 859.
57. Ibid., vol. 2, 759.
58. Ibid., vol. 2, 557. Another Shinseikai member declared that Fascism and Nazism had not reached the “great leadership principle of the imperial way [kōdō]” (ibid., 811). For other criticisms of fascism, see ibid., 583, 714.
59. Stalker, Prophet Motive, 184.
60. Yomiuri shinbun, January 18, 1932. See also Naoki Sanjūgo, Fashizumu sengen sono ta, vol. 14, Naoki Sanjūgo zenshū (Tokyo: Shijinsha, 1992), 121.
61. For a discussion of these authors, see Torrance, “People’s Library.”
62. The league’s publications are lost.
63. An anonymous reviewer stated contemptuously that Naoki had many “joking sides” (fuzaketa bunshi) to him and that it was clearly difficult to tell how serious he was about fascism; “Bungei nōto,” Shinchō 29, no. 3 (1932): 20.
64. Yomiuri shinbun, February 11 and 28, 1932.
65. See, for example, Nakamura Burafu et al., “Fassho to fashizumu bungaku ni tsuite,” Shinchō 29, no. 4 (1932). This roundtable comprised twelve writers and journalists, including Tokuda Shūsei, Nii Itaru, Yoshikawa Eiji, Mikami Otokichi, and Murobuse Kōshin. Elsewhere, the philosopher and journalist Tsuchida Kyōson, an ex-liberal who had turned to the right in the 1930s, argued that there were no self-styled fascists in Japan, nor was there a reason for fascistization, but that there was a need for a debate on fascism; Tsuchida, “Fassho to bungaku,” ibid., no. 3.
66. Nii Itaru, “Bungei jihyō,” Shinchō 29, no. 3 (1932): 110–14.
67. Maedako Hiroichirō, “Fassho ryūkō,” Yomiuri shinbun, March 8, 1932. See also Ōya Sōichi, “Gurando ruru no nai bundan (jō),” Yomiuri shinbun, March 27, 1932; “Gurando ruru no nai bundan (chū),” Yomiuri shinbun, March 29, 1932; and “Gurando ruru no nai bundan (ge),” Yomiuri shinbun, March 30, 1932.
68. “1934-nen no bungei dōkō zadankai,” Yomiuri shinbun, January 9, 1934. The participants included Kikuchi Kan, Yamamoto Yūzō, Naoki Sanjūgo, Ishihama Tomoyuki, Nakamura Murao, Yokomitsu Riichi, Asahara Rokurō, Hayashi Fusao, Sugiyama Heisuke, and Fukada Kyūya.
69. Alan Tansman, The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
70. Sakai, “Imperial Nationalism and the Comparative Perspective,” 168.
71. Sugimori Kōjirō, The Principles of the Moral Empire (London: University of London Press, 1918), 6, 238–39.
72. Sugimori Kōjirō, “Fashizumu no bunseki oyobi hihan (1),” Shakai seisaku jihō 154 (1933): 118–20. Sugimori was pleased that this counterrevolutionary nationalism had emerged also in Japan: in this sense, he argued, “one has to recognize [fascism’s] existence and development also in Japan”; Sugimori, “Fashizumu no bunseki oyobi hihan (2),” Shakai seisaku jihō 155 (1933): 110. He made the same claim in “Fuwasushizumu,” Kokuhon 12, no. 3 (1932).
73. Sugimori, “Fashizumu no bunseki oyobi hihan (2),” 76–78.
74. Ibid., 80–81.
75. Richard Storry, The Double Patriots, a Study of Japanese Nationalism (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1957), 26.
76. Military-led groups are sometimes divided into the “imperial way” (kōdō) and “control” (tōsei) factions. The former tended to be comprised of young army and navy officers who favored direct, violent action against leading political and economic figures. The “control faction” included more senior officers, who were more inclined toward an organized, state-led reform of the institutions. The distinction, however, was often blurred, also because there was some significant crossover of individuals. For a discussion of these factions, see Maruyama Masao, “The Ideology and Dynamics of Japanese Fascism,” in Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics, ed. Ivan Morris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 69–71. For a narrative of the factionalism, as well as the military and political intrigues of the early 1930s, see also James B. Crowley, Japan’s Quest for Autonomy: National Security and Foreign Policy, 1930–1938 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 244–300.
77. For a critical overview of the right wing in the 1930s, see Tetsuo and Harootunian, “Japan’s Revolt against the West.”
78. The confrontation between Japanists and national socialists has also been analyzed in Fuke, Senkanki Nihon no shakai shisō, 251–321.
79. Kita was educated at the elite Waseda University and Harvard University. He had also spent time in France and Germany, where he had embraced Bergson’s notions of élan vital. A hardened opponent of social science—this discipline could not possibly understand “the totality of life” (seikatsu no zentai)—he turned to philosophy as the only way to find an “immutability [fuhensei] that runs through the past, present, and future.” For Kita, the spirit embodied in the people represented the fundamental “metahistorical” (chōrekishiteki) element in the life of the nation, and he therefore founded a society, the Sokokukai (Ancestral Land Association), to move from thought to action. He advocated restorationist politics: if the Meiji Restoration was a process from above, its Shōwa rehearsal would be “from below for above, from the many for the few, from the periphery to the center”; Kita Reikichi, “Sekai wa dō ugoku de arō ka,” Kaizō 6, no. 1 (1924): 42–55.
Takabatake famously attempted a synthesis of Marxism and nationalism. After World War I he had authored the first Japanese translation of Das Kapital, before relinquishing socialist politics for kokkashakaishugi. For a discussion of Takabatake, see Germaine Hoston, “Marxism and National Socialism in Taishō Japan: The Thought of Takabatake Motoyuki,” Journal of Asian Studies 44, no. 1 (1984).
80. Takabatake Motoyuki, Mussorini to sono shisō (Tokyo: Jitsugyō No Sekaisha, 1928), 107–9.
81. Takabatake Motoyuki, “Gokai sareta Mussorini,” Bungei shunjū, no. 6 (1928): 16.
82. Takabatake Motoyuki, Kokka shakaishugi daigi (Tokyo: Nihon Shakaishugi Kenkyūjo, 1932), 1.
83. Kita Reikichi, Fassho to kokka shakaishugi (Tokyo: Nihon Shosō, 1937), 1.
84. Kita, Fassho to kokka shakaishugi, 152–53.
85. Kita Reikichi, Shōwa ishin (Tokyo: Sekai Bunkō Kankōkai, 1927), 39–40.
86. Takabatake, Mussorini to sono shisō, 91–92, 102–3.
87. The history of the term “totalitarianism” is the subject of Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
88. Fuke, Nihon fashizumu ronsō, 170–73; ibid.
89. On Kanokogi, see Christopher W. A. Szpilman, “Kanokogi Kazunobu: ‘Imperial Asia,’ 1937,” in Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History, Volume 2: 1920–Present, ed. Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011).
90. Nakatani Takeyo, “Fasushisuchi kokka no kokumin kyōiku (1),” Kokuhon 11, no. 4 (1931): 44–45.
91. Nakatani Takeyo, “Fasushisuchi kokka no kokumin kyōiku (2),” Kokuhon 11, no. 5 (1931): 48.
92. Nakatani Takeyo, “Fashizumu no honshitsu to sono kokka kannen,” Kokuhon 12, no. 4 (1932): 21–23.
93. Tsukui Tatsuo, Nihonshugi undō no riron to jissen (Tokyo: Kensetsusha, 1935), 20–25.
94. Nakatani Takeyo, “Fashizumu yori kōdōshugi,” Kokuhon 12, no. 11 (1932): 37–38.
95. Tosaka Jun, Nihon ideorogiron (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1977), 206.
96. Tansman, Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism, 152–53.
97. Japan, Ministry of Education, Kokutai no hongi (Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Senta, 2003), 1–7, 143–56. The translation is taken from “Fundamentals of Our National Polity (Kokutai no hongi),” in Sources of Japanese Tradition, ed. Theodore Wm. De Bary, Carol Gluck, and Arthur E. Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005 [1937]), 968–75. For a study of the language and aesthetics of Kokutai no hongi, see Tansman, Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism.
98. Murobuse Kōshin, Fassho ka Marukusu ka (Tokyo: Ichigensha, 1932), 183–84.
1. This is a revised version of an article that appeared in the Journal of Contemporary History in 2015.
2. Alexander De Grand argues that in 1935 the regime was at an “ideological dead-end.” The corporatist experiment had failed, and Mussolini was feeling the competition from Nazi Germany. The more radical members of the regime, such as Giuseppe Bottai, found in the empire a way to reawaken a stalled revolution and toughen Italians; De Grand, “Mussolini’s Follies: Fascism in Its Imperial and Racist Phase, 1935–1940,” Contemporary European History 13, no. 2 (2004): 136–37. For a history of Italian imperialism, see Nicola Labanca, Oltremare: Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002). For a study of the military and political elites in the lead-up to the Ethiopian war, see Giorgio Rochat, Militari e politici nella preparazione della campagna d’Etiopia. Studio e documenti, 1932–1936 (Milan: Angeli, 1971). Davide Rodogno examines Fascist Italy’s imperial policies in Europe and the Mediterranean; Rodogno, Fascism’s European Empire: Italian Occupation during the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
3. Protectionism was on the rise in these years, and the Fascist regime envisioned its colonies in Libya and East Africa as contributing to the goal of economic self-sufficiency, or “autarky.” See Philip Morgan, “Corporatism and the Economic Order,” in The Oxford Handbook of Fascism, ed. R. J. B. Bosworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Giovanni Federico, “Autarchia,” in Dizionario del Fascismo, ed. Victoria de Grazia and Sergio Luzzatto (Turin: Einaudi, 2002). The émigré anti-Fascist Gaetano Salvemini weighed the usefulness of Ethiopia as a market and provider of raw materials in Salvemini, “Can Italy Live at Home?” Foreign Affairs 14, no. 2 (1936).
4. Sakai Tetsuya examines the transition from the post–World War I consent on internationalist foreign policy to propositions of a new international order; Sakai, Kindai Nihon no kokusai chitsujoron (Tokyo: Iwanami, 2007), 97–99, 103–5. See also Thomas W. Burkman, “Nitobe Inazō: From World Order to Regional Order,” in Culture and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals during the Interwar Years, ed. J. Thomas Rimer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
5. Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 9–40. Duara examines the intersection between nationalism and imperialism in the establishment of Manchukuo.
6. Furukawa Tetsushi has provided a critical examination of the pro-Ethiopian rhetoric in Japan, showing how it intermingled with a Japanese imperial mindset; Furukawa, “Japan and Ethiopia in the 1920s–30s: The Rise and Fall of ‘Sentimental’ Relations,” Ningen kankyōgaku 8 (1999). For the most part, however, existing studies have read the Japanese response to the Italo-Ethiopian War in an anticolonial key. See Okakura Takashi, “1930 nendai no Nihon-Echiopia kankei: Echiopia sensō o chūshin ni,” Afurika kenkyū 37, no. 12 (1990). Okakura also examined the anti-Western reaction among Japanese and Indian Pan-Asianists; Okakura, “Futatsu no Echiopia sensō to Nihon: Dai-Ajiashugisha o chūshin ni,” Tōyō kenkyū, no. 122 (1996). Joseph Calvitt Clarke III proposes a similar argument, focusing on racial politics; Clarke, Alliance of the Colored Peoples: Ethiopia and Japan before World War II (Woodbridge, Suffolk: James Currey, 2011).
7. Not since Wilson’s call for national self-determination had the colonized and semicolonized people around the world found a joint voice against imperial aggression. In India the war had so struck Gandhi that he ended his self-imposed silence, calling on the “Indian people to contribute to the Red Cross fund for Ethiopia” (“Datō Mussorini no koe. Botsuzen Indo ni okiru chinmoku yabutta Ganji shi,” Yomiuri shinbun, July 27, 1935). In China, the fascist blue-shirts professed sympathy for Ethiopia, a weak nation at the mercy of white imperialism; Margaret Clinton, “Fascism, Cultural Revolution, and National Sovereignty in 1930s China” (PhD diss., New York University, 2009). In Harlem, some twenty thousand African Americans were stirred to demonstrate against Italian imperialism; Clare Corbould, Becoming African Americans: Black Public Life in Harlem, 1919–1939 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). See also Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
8. Konoe made this point in a controversial article he published in 1918, “Reject the Anglo-American-Centered Peace”; Yoshitake Oka, Konoe Fumimaro: A Political Biography (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1992), 15. For Konoe’s impression of the Versailles Peace Conference, see his own account. The prince was particularly irritated by the unwillingness of the Powers to grant Japan a foothold in China and by the question of racial equality; Konoe Fumimaro, Ōbei kenbunki (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 2006), 35–36, 136–37. Corradini and Pascoli advocated Italian expansion in Libya (1911), the poet famously calling on Italy, the “Great Proletarian,” to “make a move.”
9. For a discussion of the media’s reaction to and role in the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, see Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 55–113.
10. “Taigai mondai no kansatsuten,” Yomiuri shinbun, September 26, 1935.
11. Nihon gaikō bunsho [Documents on Japanese Foreign Policy], Shōwaki II, 4 (Tokyo 1996), Hirota to Sato, December 4, 1935, 228–29.
12. Yomiuri shinbun, July 27, 1935. For Sugimura’s role in the League, see Thomas W. Burkman, Japan and the League of Nations: Empire and World Order, 1914–1938 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008), esp. 179.
13. Commentators reminded people that this incident was in line with Mussolini’s policy in East Asia: Rome opposed Japanese rights in China and sold weapons to Chiang Kai-shek, a policy that caused great irritation among Japanese leaders; Ashida Hitoshi, “Echiopia mondai o meguru kakkoku no dōkō,” Kokusei isshin ronsō 8 (1935): 3–4.
14. Mussolini made immense war preparations. Nearly one million troops were mobilized for the invasion, strengthened by mechanized divisions and, crucially, the air force. Aerial bombardment played a central role in the Italian strategy: the fascists not only made use of it against military targets but indiscriminately bombed villages that were suspected of harboring resistance fighters, most notoriously using poison gas. See Angelo Del Boca, I gas di Mussolini: Il fascismo e la guerra d’Etiopa (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1996).
15. Yomiuri shinbun, August 20, 1935.
16. Social management is the focus of Sheldon M. Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
17. Yomiuri shinbun, October 9, 1935.
18. Edamatsu Hideyuki, “Sensō to bokutachi,” Yomiuri shinbun, October 20, 1935.
19. Yomiuri shinbun, August 6, 1935.
20. Though dated, Herbert Norman’s study of right-wing societies and their leaders, such as Tōyama Mitsuru and Uchida Ryōhei, is still informative; Norman, “The Genyosha: A Study on the Origins of Japanese Imperialism,” Pacific Affairs 17, no. 3 (1944).
21. Kokuryūkai, I-E mondai to Echiopia jijō, Echiopia mondai kondankai (Tokyo: Kokuryūkai Shuppan, 1935), 2. In a telegram, the Ethiopian foreign minister, Baltingheta Heroui, declared himself “touched” by Tōyama’s commitment.
22. ASMAE, AP, Giappone, 1931–45, b. 10, conflitto Italia-Etiopia, 344, Scalise to War Minister (Mussolini), Tokyo, October 17, 1935.
23. “Echiopia e jūgun shigan,” Yomiuri shinbun, August 6, 1935. For a hagiographic biography of Sasakawa, see Satō Seizaburō, Sasakawa Ryoichi: A Life (Norwalk, CT: Eastbridge, 2006).
24. ASMAE, AP, Giappone, 1931–45, b. 10, rapporti italo-giapponesi, 918/406, Auriti to Foreign Minister (Mussolini), Tokyo, November 7, 1935.
25. Naoko Shimazu, Japan, Race, and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (New York: Routledge, 1998), 13–37, 117–36. See also Noriko Kawamura, “Wilsonian Idealism and Japanese Claims at the Paris Peace Conference,” Pacific Historical Review 66, no. 4 (1997).
26. The controversy over the London Naval Treaty is covered in James B. Crowley, Japan’s Quest for Autonomy: National Security and Foreign Policy, 1930–1938 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 35–81. See also Kobayashi Tatsuo, “The London Naval Treaty, 1930,” in Japan Erupts: The London Naval Conference and the Manchurian Incident, 1928–1932, ed. James William Morley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
27. David John Lu, Agony of Choice: Matsuoka Yōsuke and the Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1880–1946 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002), 85.
28. Young, Japan’s Total Empire, 115–80. Young, following John Dower, uses the term “go-fast imperialism” to refer to the accelerated drive toward expansion in the early 1930s. Thomas W. Burkman takes Japan’s commitment to Wilsonianism more seriously, arguing that an old guard of internationalists such as Makino Nobuaki, Itō Myoji, Nitobe Inazō, and Ishii Kikujirō were dedicated to the League to the end; Burkman, Japan and the League of Nations, xi–xi, 46–50, 142–64.
29. Gaikō jihō (also known as Revue Diplomatique) was founded in 1898, and by the 1920s it had a readership that included academics and members of the educated public, making the bimonthly journal influential in both policy circles and public opinion.
30. “I-E mondai to Nihon (Sugimura taishi wa Ikoku ni riyō sareta),” Gaikō jihō 75, no. 736 (August 1, 1935): 4.
31. G. Bruce Strang, “Imperial Dreams: The Mussolini-Laval Accords of January 1935,” Historical Journal 44, no. 3 (2001).
32. Matsuda Shōichi, “Ōshū kinjō no shoanken to kokusai renmei,” Gaikō jihō 75, no. 737 (August 15, 1935): 13.
33. Ibid., 4.
34. Hori Makoto, “I-E funsō to kokusai seikyoku no dōkō,” Gaikō jihō 737, no. 75 (August 15): 66.
35. Aoyama Kimihiko, “I-E funsō o meguru Ei-I no tachiba,” Gaikō jihō 76, no. 743 (November 15): 96.
36. Kano Kizō, “I-E funsō no shinso,” Gaikō jihō 75, no. 738 (September 1): 186.
37. Tachi Sakutarō, “I-E funsō to kokusaihō,” Kokusai chishiki 15, no. 11 (1935): 8–9.
38. Ashida Hitoshi, “I-E funsō no kakudaisei,” Gaikō jihō 76, no. 742 (November 1, 1935): 3–4.
39. Aoyama Kimihiko, “I-E funsō o meguru rekkyo no rigai kankei,” Gaikō jihō 75, no. 739 (September 15): 54.
40. Baba Tsunego, “Seiji to dōtokusei,” Yomiuri shinbun, July 7, 1935.
41. The kokutai, literally “the national body,” referred to the spiritual and political structure of the Japanese state. In the 1920s constitutionalists argued that the emperor, though occupying a central position in the kokutai, was but an organ of the state. Although this interpretation had gained widespread acceptance, in the 1930s nationalists fought for a revision (or, as they called it, “clarification”) that cast the emperor as a figure that transcended the state. The debates about this vision peaked in late 1935 and gradually replaced the earlier assumptions that had regarded the emperor as a constitutional monarch.
42. “Honnen no Nihon gaikō (jishu, jiritsu, jishin no kakuritsu),” Gaikō jihō 76, no. 745 (1935): 1–4. Kajima Morinosuke put it more poetically. For him, Japanese had rediscovered the principles of bushido (gi, duty). The morality of bushido, though, “transcended class and time” because it was a “universal value” that Japanese had to bring to Asia. See Kajima, “Bushidō no taishūka,” Kokusai chishiki 15, no. 10 (1935): 64–66.
43. The role of military in the move toward autarky is discussed in Michael A. Barnhart, Japan Prepares for Total War: The Search for Economic Security (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 22–49, 64–76. Louise Young examines the interplay between army and business in the framing of Manchuria’s economic development; Young, Japan’s Total Empire, 183–240.
44. An example of managerial attempts to bring unions under control can be found in Andrew Gordon, The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan: Heavy Industry, 1853–1955 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), esp. 211–35.
45. Takafusa Nakamura, Lectures on Modern Japanese Economic History (Tokyo: LTCB International Library Foundation, 1994), 67–77. For a discussion of the new industrial conglomerates (new zaibatsu) and reform bureaucrats, see Janis Mimura, Planning for Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 21–29. On the reform bureaucrats, see also Hashikawa Bunzō, “Kakushin kanryō,” in Kenryoku no shisō, ed. Kamishima Jirō (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1965). Louise Young has examined the relationship between army and civilian planners in Manchuria; Young, Japan’s Total Empire, 183–240. Ramon Hawley Myers outlines the economic protectionism and development policies that Japanese introduced in Manchuria and North China in what he calls an “enclave economy”; Myers, “Creating a Modern Enclave Economy: The Economic Integration of Japan, Manchuria, and North China, 1932–1945,” in The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945, ed. Peter Duus et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
46. Mark Metzler, Lever of Empire: The International Gold Standard and the Crisis of Liberalism in Prewar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 240–42, 252–56.
47. Unno Yoshirō, “Dai-niji Itaria-Echiopia sensō to Nihon,” Hōsei riron 16, no. 2 (1983): 188. According to Unno, between 1922 and 1926 Japanese exports more than doubled. By the early 1930s, Japan had almost a monopoly in the export of silk and rayon. See also Furukawa Tetsushi, “Kindai Nihon ni totte no Echiopia: Shōwa shoki ni okeru keizai kanshin to Heruy shisetsudan rainichi o chūshin ni,” Ōtani gakuhō 86, no. 2 (2007): 2.
48. Chūgai shōgyō shinbun, “Echiopia,” November 8–10, 1931.
49. “Japanese in Abyssinia, No Sign of Territorial Ambitions,” Cape Times, January 4, 1935.
50. Chūgai shōgyō shinbun, “Echiopia.”
51. Katsuta Teiji, “I-E kōsō to zaikai. Ōshū masu kuraushite, Nihon iyoiyo akarushi,” Yomiuri shinbun, October 7, 1935.
52. I-E mondai kakudai to kabushiki sōba no eikyō (Tokyo: Daiyamondo 1935), “Preface.”
53. Ibid., 73–98.
54. “Mussorini to jinken,” Yomiuri shinbun, September 5, 1935.
55. Kajiwara Nakaji, “Fukakudai demo resei jisshitsu kai tsudsukan,” Ekonomisuto 13, no. 31 (1935): 18.
56. “Jūshi subeki I-E funsō. Waga zaikai ni wa kō zairyō,” Osaka Asahi shinbun, September 2, 1935. Other interlocutors included Ogizaka Yasoba, business manager at the plate-making section of Kawasaki Shipping; Sogame Moritsugu, managing director of Sumitomo Bank; Kawasaki Hisaichi, head of the Kobe branch of Japan Raw Silk (Nihon Kiito); and Yagi Seitarō, board member of Japan Cotton (Nihon Menka).
57. Educated at Tokyo Imperial University, Matsui had pursued an unremarkable career as a bureaucrat in the Home Ministry, where he was the director of the Resources Bureau (Shigenkyoku), before becoming governor of Osaka Prefecture and holding other administrative posts in the central government and industry groups—he was director (riji) of the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry (1937). See Mimura, Planning for Empire, 20, 68.
58. Katsuta, “I-E kōsō to zaikai.”
59. Iida Seizō, “Senji keiki mitōshi. Handōrai wa hisshi: Ōshū taisenji to no hikaku,” Yomiuri shinbun, September 9, 1935.
60. Matsui Haruo, “Sekai no dōran to keizai Nihon no shinro: atarashiki tsūshō jiyū,” Yomiuri shinbun, January 7, 1936.
61. Katsuta Teiji, “Shihonshugi no tessoku. Shokuminchi bunkatsu sen: I-E funsō ni odoru kabushiki,” Yomiuri shinbun, September 9, 1935.
62. Takahashi Korekiyo, as quoted in “Ōbei shihon ni taikō Hokushi kaihatsu ni sonoeyo,” Tōkyō Nichinichi shinbun, September 4, 1935. Richard J. Smethurst absolves Takahashi of collusion with “militarism,” suggesting that his budgets merely allowed “the military to fund the conquest of Manchuria and thus to take a preliminary step toward militarism and total war.” The point, however, is precisely to show that the central idea that moved the erstwhile liberal was not “militarism” but a notion of political economy based on empire; Smethurst, From Foot Soldier to Finance Minister. Takahashi Korekiyo: Japan’s Keynes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 268–70.
63. Takeuchi Kenji, “I-E sensō no eikyō ikan. Kono kikai ni tekkō kokuze o kakuritsu seyo,” Ekonomisuto 13, no. 30 (1935): 21.
64. Nogami Yaeko, “Shō ojisan,” Yomiuri shinbun, December 11, 1935.
65. Baba Tsunego, “Seiji to dōtokusei,” Yomiuri shinbun, July 7, 1935.
66. Tsurumi Yūsuke and Komai Jūji, Fūun no rutsubo no Echiopia! (Tokyo: Yashima Shobō, 1935), 19–20, 39–40, 47–49, 54.
67. Kanezaki Ken, “I-E funsō kara hoku-shi kōsaku,” Gaikō jihō 743, no. 76 (November 1, 1935): 35–36, 37.
68. Ashida Hitoshi, “I-E funsō no kakudaisei,” Gaikō jihō 76, no. 742 (November 1): 5–6.
69. For the response of a Pan-Asianist group to the Italo-Ethiopian War, see Okakura, “Futatsu no Echiopia sensō to Nihon,” 14–21.
70. Kita Reikichi, “Echiopia mondai to Nihon,” Keizai ōrai 10, no. 9 (1935): 91.
71. ASMAE, AP, Giappone, 1931–45, b.10, rapporti politici, Relazione sulla propaganda svolta in Giappone dal 1 ottobre al 24 dicembre 1935.
72. Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
73. Masamune Hakuchō, “Korai no bunka,” Yomiuri shinbun, June 6, 1936.
74. Uramoto Secchō, “Minzoku seibutsuryoku to minzoku jumyō,”Yomiuri shinbun, October 27, 1935.
75. Mutō Naoyoshi, Sekai dōran no dōka-sen I-E no sono go? (Tokyo: Tō-A Shobō, 1936), 17, 49.
76. Katakura Tōjirō, Nihon wa Itaria o shiji shite Ei-Bei no appaku ni sonoeyo (Tokyo: Konnichi No Mondaisha, 1935), 11–12. Another anti-Ethiopian cliché was the argument, dear to Italian Fascist propaganda, that Ethiopia was a backward country that still practiced slavery; Kore ga Echiopia da: dorei monogatari (Tokyo: Okuchōsha, 1935).
77. Furukawa, “Japan and Ethiopia in the 1920s–30s,” 140.
78. SMEUS, H3, b.5, forniture militari, f. 2, Scalise-Ministero Guerra, telegram 389 Scalise-Ministero Guerra, December 3, 1935. The military dispatched Hattori Takushirō, a rising star in the army, to observe the war operations. Hattori’s diary can be found in the National Institute for Defense Studies in Tokyo (Nisshi kaisō 658). Hattori spent almost six months in Ethiopia, observing operations from the Ethiopian side. He commented that aerial bombardment was the order of the day and that the greatest weakness of the Ethiopians was not having an air force (December 1).
79. SMEUS, H3, b. 5, forniture militari, f. 2, Scalise-Ministero Guerra, prot. 303, 4 settembre 1935.
80. Kajima Morinosuke, “Shinsei naru rikoshugi (sacro egoismo) (naniga Ōshū kokumin o sensō ni mukawashimen to suru ka),” Gaikō jihō 76, no. 740 (October 15, 1935): 100–101.
81. “I-E funsō no jitsubutsu kyōkun (hattenteki minzoku ni wa ryōdo ga hitsuyō da),” Gaikō jihō 76, no. 742 (November 1, 1935): 1–4.
82. Murobuse Kōshin, “Rokujūnen o okuru,” Yomiuri shinbun, December 29, 1936; Murobuse Kōshin, “I-E sen to sekaisen,” Yomiuri shinbun, October 8, 1935.
83. The Kyoto School was a philosophical movement based at Kyoto Imperial University that during the war years sought to lay the metaphysical foundations for Japan’s empire and its new order. The members of this group—leading philosophers and literary critics—strove to go beyond the strictures of the Western modern and to define Japan’s role in bringing about a world-historical change. They convened at two symposia in July 1942, one known as the “Overcoming modernity” symposium and the other as “The World-Historical Position and Japan” symposium. For a discussion, see Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
84. Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York: Penguin, 2012), 166–67.
85. ASMAE, AP, Giappone, 1931–45, b. 10, rapporti italo-giapponesi, 918/406, Auriti to Minister of Foreign Affairs (Mussolini), November 7, 1935.
86. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 30.
87. Tagawa Daikichirō, “Nichi-Doku-I to Ei-Futsu-Bei,” Kokusai chishiki 15, no. 10 (1935): 41–42. See also Tagawa, “Nichi-Doku-I to Ei-Futsu-Bei,” Kokusai chishiki 15, no. 11 (1935).
88. Konoe was inspired by some declarations made by Colonel Edward M. House, an American diplomat, whose stance he mistook as pro-Japanese; Konoe Fumimarō, “Kokusai heiwa no konpon mondai,” in Kenryoku no shisō, ed. Kamishima Jirō, Gendai Nihon shisō taikei, vol. 10 (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1965), 312. See also Kazuo Yagami, Konoe Fumimaro and the Failure of Peace in Japan, 1937–1941: A Critical Appraisal of the Three-Time Prime Minister (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 31.
89. Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin, 2008), 580–81.
1. “The Tripartite Alliance of Germany, Italy, and Japan and Accompanying Notes, September 27, 1940,” in Deterrent Diplomacy: Japan, Germany, and the USSR, 1935–1940, ed. James William Morley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976).
2. The tortuous decision-making process, often pushed forth by midlevel bureaucrats and diplomatic personnel, is described in Hosoya Chihiro, “The Tripartite Pact, 1939–1940,” in Deterrent Diplomacy: Japan, Germany, and the USSR, 1935–1940, ed. James William Morley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 191–257. Germany’s perspectives can be found in Ernst Leopold Presseisen, Germany and Japan: A Study in Totalitarian Diplomacy, 1933–1941 (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1958); Theo Sommer, Deutschland und Japan zwischen den Mächten, 1935–1940. Vom antikominternpakt zum Dreimächtepakt: Eine Studie zur diplomatischen Vorgeschichte des Zweiten Weltkriegs (Tübingen: Mohr, 1962); Bernd Martin, Deutschland und Japan im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Vom Angriff auf Pearl Harbor bis z. dt. Kapitulation (Göttingen, Zürich: Musterschmidt, 1969), issued also as a thesis, Marburg, 1967. For a comparative study of the Japanese and German wartime empires, see L. H. Gann, “Reflections on the Japanese and German Empires of World War II,” in The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945, ed. Peter Duus et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). Italy’s foreign policy toward Japan can be found in Valdo Ferretti, Il Giappone e la politica estera italiana (Rome: Giuffrè, 1983).
3. Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin, 2008), 580–81.
4. Masaki Minagawa, Konoe shintaisei no shisō to seiji: Jiyūshugi kokufuku no jidai (Tokyo: Yūshisha, 2009).
5. The policies and thought behind the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere can be found in Joyce C. Lebra, Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in World War II: Selected Readings and Documents (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1975). Walter Skya examines the religious dimensions in Japanese politics and imperialism; Skya, Japan’s Holy War: Ideology of Radical Shintō Ultranationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
6. Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
7. Konoe Fumimaro Papers (Yomei Bunkō), Kokusaku ni tsuite no josōbun [Imperial conference on national policy] Konoe Fumimaro, July 1940, 188–89.
8. For the rapid degeneration of ordinary life in wartime Japan, see Thomas R. H. Havens, Valley of Darkness: The Japanese People and World War Two (New York: Norton, 1978).
9. Kenneth J. Ruoff, Imperial Japan at Its Zenith: The Wartime Celebration of the Empire’s 2,600th Anniversary (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 18. The wide-ranging and multifaceted propaganda efforts of the Japanese state are examined in Barak Kushner, The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007).
10. During this period, the Japanese Foreign Ministry periodically conducted surveys of Fascist Italy’s economy, legal system, agriculture, and foreign affairs. See Gaimushō, “Nichi-Doku-I no bōkyōtei: Itari dattai to renmei,” Shūhō 63, no. 12.29 (1937); Nichi-Doku-I sankoku bōkyōtei ni tsuite (Tokyo: Gaimushō Jōhōbu, 1937); Nichi-Doku-I kokubō kyōtei ni tsuite (Tokyo: Gaimushō Jōhōbu, 1937); Bōkyō Doku-I no Yudayajin mondai, vol. 4, Bōkyō kyōteikoku kokujō chōsa (Tokyo: Gaimushō Chōsabu, 1938); Itari no keizai kikō to gensei (zenpen), vol. 1, Bōkyō kyōteikoku kokujō chōsa (Tokyo: Gaimushō Chōsabu, 1938); Nachisu oyobi Fashisuto no kokka kan (Tokyo: Nihon Kokusai Kyōkai, 1939); Fashisuto Itari no seiji soshiki to sono unyō narabini hantaiha seiryoku, vol. 13, Bōkyō kyōteikoku kokujō chōsa (Tokyo: Gaimushō Chōsabu, 1939); I sansen ori sankoku jōyaku seiritsu, Taisen gaikō dokuhon (Tokyo: Gaimushō Jōhōkyoku Daisanbu, 1940); Itari fassho kumiai giin seido (Tokyo: Gaimushō Chōsabu, 1940); Sengo no Ōshū keizai kyōchō ni kansuru Doku-I ryōgoku no keikakuan (Tokyo: Gaimushō Chōsabu, 1941); Itari no shokuryō mondai (Tokyo: Gaimushō Chōsabu, 1942).
11. Kawai Tatsuo, Nichi-Doku-I sangoku bōkyō kyōtei ni tsuite (Tokyo: Gaimushō Jōhōbu, 1937), 10–11. For anticommunism as an element in Japanese foreign policy since the Manchurian Incident, see Sakai Tetsuya, “The Soviet Factor in Japanese Foreign Policy, 1928–1937,” in Imperial Japan and the World, 1931–1945, ed. Antony Best (London: Routledge, 2010 [1988]).
12. ASMAE, AP, Giappone, 1931–45, b. 13, rapporti Italian-giapponesi, telegram 448 PR/107, May 9, 1936.
13. Ferretti, Il Giappone e la politica estera italiana, 121. Hirota Kōki, the foreign minister, welcomed the scenario of an understanding between Japan and Italy, two powers that had left the League of Nations. He received the emperor’s approval, yet on condition that such an agreement must not damage Japan’s relations with Great Britain. From that moment, according to Ferretti, Japanese diplomacy set out to formulate a policy that would balance good relations with Britain and a rapprochement with Italy.
14. Italy, like Germany, was involved in training the Chinese Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek. Japan objected in particular to Italian weapon sales. The Italian foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, had served as consul in Shanghai (1930–1933) with his wife Edda, Mussolini’s daughter. In China Ciano is said to have forged a friendship with Zhang Xueliang, the Manchurian warlord whose father had been assassinated by the Japanese. Zhang’s antipathy toward Japan seems to have influenced Ciano. It was only with the Japanese invasion of China on July 7, 1937, that Ciano was won over to a pro-Japanese foreign policy.
15. Hashikawa Bunzō, “Nachisu shisō no shintō to sankoku dōmei,” in Kindai Nihon shisōshi no kiso chishiki, ed. Hashikawa Bunzō, Kano Masanao, and Hiraoka Toshio (Tokyo: Yūhikaku, 1971), 395–97.
16. Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 55–114.
17. ACS, SPD, CO, 195.044, Kimpaci Miyamoto.
18. ACS, SPD, CO, 191.772, Giappone, Cantiere di Amama, società anonima.
19. Yomiuri shinbun, January 29, 1938. On January 23, 1938, a girls’ school in Shibuya had also readied a batch of dolls to be delivered to the two dictators (Yomiuri shinbun, January 23, 1938).
20. ACS, SPD, CO, 184.057, Giappone, Patto Tripartito Anticomunista.
21. The documentary (Missione del Partito Nazionale Fascista nel Giappone, 1938) is available online through the archive of the Istituto Luce. A copy is also hosted at NARA, Record Group 242: National Archives Collection of Foreign Records Seized, 1675–1958, ARC 43829 / 242-MID-2819. Ruth Ben-Ghiat has examined the role of cinematography in the making of Fascist culture; Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 131–34 (for the activities of the Istituto Luce).
22. Japan Times, April 13, 1938. The role of department stores in showcasing current affairs and cultural trends has been examined in Louise Young, “Marketing the Modern: Department Stores, Consumer Culture, and the New Middle Class in Interwar Japan,” International Labor and Working-Class History 55 (1999); Kim Brandt, Kingdom of Beauty: Mingei and the Politics of Folk Art in Imperial Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
23. “Yomiuri shinbun chokugen,” Yomiuri shinbun, March 18, 1938.
24. Ibid., March 21, 1938.
25. Ibid., April 3, 1938.
26. ASMAE, AP, Giappone, 1931–45, b. 18, rapporti Italian-giapponesi. Undated text (but probably November 1937) of an article by the Stefani news agency.
27. Interview with Nichi-nichi shinbun, November 17, 1937, as translated in Italian in ASMAE, AP, Giappone, 1931–45, b. 18, rapporti Italian-giapponesi, “L’amicizia oltre il ‘patto.’”
28. Nakano was the charismatic leader of the Society of the East (Tōhōkai). His members mimicked European fascist practices and paraphernalia such as black shirts and rallies and won eleven seats in the Diet in 1937. Nakano sat on the board of directors of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, but he failed to give it a more marked Fascist or Nazi imprint. See Ben-Ami Shillony, Politics and Culture in Wartime Japan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 22–23.
29. ASMAE, AP, Giappone, 1931–45, b. 18, rapporti Italian-giapponesi, telegram n.469, Auriti to Ministry of Foreign Affairs, November 21, 1937.
30. Chichibu had contacts with Tōyama Mitsuru. Kita Ikki gave the prince a copy of the infamous “Plan for the Fundamental Reorganization of Japan”; Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: Harper Collins, 2000), 100–101. Chichibu was also close to rebels in the army. See David Bergamini, Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy (New York: William Morrow, 1972), 680.
31. ASMAE, AP, Giappone, 1931–45, b.18, rapporti Italian-giapponesi, telegrams 198 and 220, Auriti to Ministry of Foreign Affairs, March 19 and 25, 1938.
32. ASMAE, AP, Giappone, 1931–45, b.18, rapporti Italian-giapponesi, letter Sakai to Mussolini, Berlin, January 1938.
33. Itaria no tomonokai kaisoku (Tokyo: Itaria No Tomonokai, 1941), 19–20, 27–31.
34. MCP, Gab., b.1, Case Salesiane del Giappone, presidente Istituto Nazionale Luce to Dino Alfieri, October 31, 1938. In 1935 a request for funds to pay local Japanese for propaganda activities met the resistance of the Italian government organ in charge of these matters, the Ministry of Popular Culture—the costs were excessive; ACS, MCP, reports, b. 12, f. 119, Auriti-Stampa, October 5, 1935. Later Dino Alfieri, the deputy secretary for press and propaganda, authorized the modest sum of five thousand lire “for an experimental organization of a press service in Japan for the period of two months”; ibid., Lettera Riservata, Alfieri-Italian Embassy, Tokyo (October 16, 1935).
35. Ardemagni was from Cremona, the fiefdom of Roberto Farinacci, a die-hard fascist whose squads were infamous for their brutality. Ardemagni claimed to have participated in the 1919 “punitive expeditions” against “subversives.” Later, when working for the regime’s official mouthpiece, the Popolo d’Italia, he seemingly became close with the newspaper’s director, Mussolini’s brother Arnaldo. Ardemagni was also a keen traveler, publishing books about his trips to Latin America and Italian-held Africa. One reason behind his dispatch to Tokyo was that he earned himself a reputation as a troublemaker. The file on Ardemagni can be found in ACS, MCP, Gabinetto, Secondo versamento, b.1, Ardemagni Mirko. An account of early Fascism and squadrismo can be found in Paul Corner, Fascism in Ferrara, 1915–1925 (London: Oxford University Press, 1975).
36. Itaria no tomonokai kaisoku.
37. For a discussion of the Tripartite alliance at the highest levels, see Japan Imperial Japanese Army General Staff Office, Sugiyama memo, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Hara Shobō, 1989), 27–55.
38. Itaria no tomonokai kaisoku, 20.
39. Tokutomi Sohō, “Wareware wa Itaria o aisu,” Itaria, no. 10 (1941): 22.
40. Shiratori Toshio, “Sangoku dōmei to shinsekai,” Itaria, no. 4: 50–52.
41. Wada Kojirō, “Fashizumu no kokka kan,” Itaria, no. 12: 27.
42. Ueda Tatsunosuke, “Sekai shinchitsujo to kumiai kokkasei,” Itaria, no. 6 (1942): 14, 19.
43. Kamei Katsuichirō, “Itari e no yume,” Itaria, no. 10: 119.
44. Kiyosawa’s critical stance over the wartime state can be found in his diary; Kiyosawa Kiyoshi, A Diary of Darkness: The Wartime Diary of Kiyosawa Kiyoshi, trans. Eugene Soviak (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
45. “Kaisō no Itaria: sono geijutsu to seiji,” Itaria, no. 4 (1941): 91. Kiyosawa had already vacationed in Italy in 1930.
46. Saitō Mōkichi, “Fumetsu,” Itaria, no. 3 (1942): 54–55.
47. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity.
48. For the discourse on culture in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, see Benjamin G. Martin, “A New Order for European Culture: The German-Italian Axis and the Reordering of International Cultural Exchange, 1936–1943” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2006). For an examination of how writers envisaged reforming European culture, see Martin’s “European Literature in the Nazi New Order: The Cultural Politics of the European Writers’ Union, 1941–3,” Journal of Contemporary History 48, no. 3 (2013). Naoki Sakai has discussed the philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō’s quest for authenticity, showing how the positionality between East and West was central to his thought; Sakai, “Return to the West/Return to the East: Watsuji Tetsuro’s Anthropology and Discussions of Authenticity,” Boundary 2 18, no. 3 (1991).
49. For a history of the Nichi-I kyōkai, see Reto Hofmann, “The Fascist Reflection: Japan and Italy, 1919–1950” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2010), 269–77.
50. ACS, MCP, reports, b.12, f.119 prop 39–43, “Relazione sulla situazione giapponese,” 7350.A.10 G.G, Rome, October 21, 1939.
51. Morita Tetsurō, in Nichi-I Kyōkai, Nichi-I kyōkaishi (Tokyo: Nichi-I Kyōkai, 1993), 21–22.
52. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). See also Romke Visser, “Fascist Doctrine and the Cult of Romanità,” Journal of Contemporary History 27, no. 1 (1992).
53. Dan Inō, “‘Nichi-I bunka kenkyū’ zōkan no ji,” in Nichi-I Kyōkai, Nichi-I kyōkaishi, 252–53.
54. Ōrui Noboru, “Runessansuteki ningen,” Nichi-I bunka kenkyū 6 (1942): 84.
55. Kamo Giichi, “Runessansu no kagaku ni tsuite,” Nichi-I bunka kenkyū 3 (1941): 85, 89–90.
56. Niizeki Ryōzō, “Kinsei engekishi ni okeru Itaria engeki,” Nichi-I bunka kenkyū 5 (1942): 35–36.
57. Nishiwaki Junzaburō, “Itari bunka,” Nichi-I bunka kenkyū 5, 14–16.
58. Hani Gorō, “Gioconda no hohoemi,” Nichi-I bunka kenkyū 8 (1942): 61. Hani argued against the hagiographical reading of the Renaissance as a high point in Italian national history. Rather, he stated that the Renaissance developed qualities that were universal. The Italian states of this period achieved their greatness not through force (buryoku) but through culture (bunka)—a subtle criticism of Japanese imperialism. For a closer examination of Hani’s article, see Hofmann, “The Fascist Reflection,” 287–89.
59. Martin, “New Order for European Culture.”
60. The literature on the Kyoto School of Philosophy and the “Overcoming the Modern” symposium is vast. See, for example, Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity; Naoki Sakai and Isomae Jun’ichi, eds., “Kindai no chōkoku” to Kyōto gakuha: kindaisei, teikoku, fuhensei (Tokyo: Ibunsha, 2010). See also the essays in Christopher Goto-Jones, ed., Re-politicising the Kyoto School as Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2008). For the relationship between Zen and the Kyoto School, see the essays in James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo, eds., Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1995). On the Romantic School, see Kevin Michael Doak, Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
61. The career and writings of Kobayashi Hideo are the subject of James Dorsey, Critical Aesthetics: Kobayashi Hideo, Modernity, and Wartime Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Paul Anderer provides an introductory essay on Kobayashi, followed by translations of seminal texts; Anderer, Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo—Literary Criticism, 1927–1939 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).
62. Kobayashi Hideo, “Kodai Roma no bunka izan,” Nichi-I bunka kenkyū, no. 5 (1942): 62–63.
63. Ibid., 61.
64. Yoshimitsu Yoshihiko, “Sei Tomasu to Dante: Shinkyoku no shingaku ni tsuite,” Nichi-I bunka kenkyū, no. 5 (1942): 76–77.
65. Yoshimitsu Yoshihiko, as quoted in Richard F. Calichman, ed., Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 154, 156–58.
66. For a discussion on this symposium, see Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 42–43. He argues that this group focused to “explain the war within the broader context of the movement of world history, and to analyze what this meant for the Japanese state in a future world order once the Anglo-American alliance was destroyed.”
67. Kosaka Masaaki et al., Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1942), 185–92.
68. Ibid., 194–97.
69. Ibid., 200–201.
70. Tōjō pronounced these words in the Diet in 1942. As quoted in Peter Duus, “Imperialism without Colonies: The Vision of a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 7, no. 1 (1996): 64.
71. A basic account of Japanese conceptions of “Greater Asia” can be found in Tsurumi Shunsuke, An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan, 1931–1945 (New York: KPI, 1986), 33–41.
72. Miwa Kimitada, “‘Tōa shinchitsujo’ sengen to ‘daitōa kyōeiken’ kōzō no dansō,” in Saikō taiheiyō sensō zenya: Nihon no 1930 nendairon to shite, ed. Miwa Kimitada (Tokyo: Sōseki Sensho, 1981), 207–8. On Ishiwara, see Mark R. Peattie, Ishiwara Kanji and Japan’s Confrontation with the West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). In the late 1930s Ishiwara notoriously theorized a “final war” between Japan and the Western powers; see Ishiwara Kanji, Saishūsenron (Tokyo: Keizai Ōraisha, 1978). For a study of the relationship between Pan-Asianism and fascism, including the thought of Ishiwara Kanji, see Matsuzawa Tetsunari, Ajiashugi to fashizumu: Tennō teikokuron hihan (Tokyo: Renga Shobō, 1979).
73. Duus, “Imperialism without Colonies,” 297–98.
74. On Rōyama, see Miwa Kimitada, “‘Tōa shinchitsujo’ sengen to ‘daitōa kyōeiken’ kōzō no dansō,” 236–39; Mitani Taichirō, Taishō demokurashii ron: Yoshino Sakuzō no jidai to sono ato (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1995). On Haushofer, see Christian W. Spang, “Karl Haushofer Re-examined: Geopolitics as a Factor within Japanese-German Rapprochement in the Inter-War Years?” in Japanese–German Relations, 1895–1945: War, Diplomacy and Public Opinion, ed. Christian W. Spang and R. Wippich (London: Routledge, 2006).
75. Martin, “New Order for European Culture,” 309–10.
76. Rōyama in Mitani, Taishō demokurashii ron, 254–56.
77. Martin, “New Order for European Culture,” 2–4.
78. Kajima Morinosuke, “Dai-Tōa to Ōshū no shinchitsujo,” in Kajima Morinosuke gaikō ron senshū (Tokyo: Kajima Kenkyūjo Shuppan, 1973 [1941]), 121.
79. Tosaka Jun, “Chūkanteki gaikō kaisetsu—Kajima, Radekku shi nado no ronbun,” Yomiuri shinbun, February 27, 1936.
80. Mitani, Taishō demokurashii ron, 240–43.
81. Kajima Morinosuke, “Renmei no kaiso to pan-Europpa mondai,” in Kajima Morinosuke gaikōron senshū (Tokyo: Kajima Kenkyūjo Shuppan, 1973 [1936]), 54, 60.
82. “Nichi-Doku-I bōkyō kyōtei no igi,” Chūō kōron 52, no. 13 (1937): 172.
83. Takayanagi Kenzō, “Japan’s View of the Struggle in the Far East,” in Imperial Japan and the World, 1931–1945, ed. Anthony Best (London: Routledge, 2010 [1939]), 134.
84. Kajima, “Dai-Tōa to Ōshū no shinchitsujo,” 122–27.
85. Kajima Morinosuke, “Doku-So sengo no kokusai jōsei,” in Sekai shinchitsujo o meguru gaikō: Dai-Tōa sensō to Dai-Tōa kyōeiken (Tokyo: Kajima Kenkyūjo Shuppan, 1973 [1941]), 293–94. For Kajima’s views on the Tripartite Pact, see Kajima, “Sekai no shinchitsujo to warera no shinro,” in Kajima Morinosuke gaikōron senshū (Tokyo: Kajima Kenkyūjo Shuppan, 1973 [1940]).
86. “Mare naru gogaku no tensai. Fujisawa Chikao kun: Kokusaiteki shin shisōka,” Yomiuri shinbun, May 16, 1920. In later years Fujisawa also published in Esperanto: Fujisawa Chikao, Pri historia evoluado de moderna Japanujo: Kondukinta al la Renovigo de Imperiestra Regimo en 1868 (Fukuoka: Kyushu Imperial University, 1926).
87. Fujisawa Chikao, “Capitalism, Marxism, and the Japanese National Thoughts,” Annals of the Faculty of Law and Letters of the Kyushu Imperial University 1, no. 3 (1928): 6.
88. Fujisawa Chikao, “Fashizumu no seiji tetsugaku ni tsuite,” Gaikō jihō, no. 592 (1929): 16, 20, 24.
89. Fujisawa Chikao, “Sekaiteki nihonshugi e no yakushin,” Gaikō jihō, no. 671 (November 15, 1932): 79.
90. Fujisawa Chikao, “Nihon seishin no gendaiteki igi,” Risō, no. 415 (January 1934): 33–34.
91. Fujisawa Chikao, “Sekaiteki nihonshugi e no yakushin,” 86.
92. Fujisawa Chikao, “Hittora to Ōdōshugi,” Gaikō jihō, no. 681 (April 15, 1933).
93. Fujisawa Chikao, “Nichi-Doku bōkyō kyōtei to shisō kokusaku,” Gaikō jihō, no. 787 (September 15, 1937): 61–63. He had expressed the same line in a three-part series in the daily Yomiuru shinbun (“Nichi-Doku bōkyō kyōtei shisōteki haikei,” Yomiuri shinbun, December 10, 12, and 13, 1936).
94. Fujisawa cited one Fascist intellectual, Bruno Damiani, to show how Italians were shifting from the notion of “imperialism” to that of “empire”—two rather different things as far as Fujisawa was concerned, for the former was exploitative, the latter harmonizing. See Fujisawa Chikao, “Itaria no atarashiki kokusai rinen,” Nihon hyōron 15, no. 5 (1940): 135–37.
95. For the background of Schmitt’s article, see Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, 577.
96. Mitani, Taishō demokurashii ron, 260–63.
97. Fujisawa Chikao, “Doku-I sūjiku no dōgisei,” Gaikō jihō, no. 865 (December 15, 1940): 36–39.
98. Nishida Kitarō, “Sekai shinchitsujo no genri,” http://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/000182/files/3668_16431.html (accessed May 13, 2014).
99. Benoît Jacquet has examined the production of monuments such as that drafted by Tange in the context of the Overcoming Modernity debate; Jacquet, “Compromising Modernity: Japanese Monumentality during World War II,” in Front to Rear: Architecture and Planning during WWII (New York University, Institute of Fine Arts, 2009). See also Jonathan M. Reynolds, Maekawa Kunio and the Emergence of Japanese Modernist Architecture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 126. Arata Isozaki has examined Tange’s plan of the memorial for its meaning in the longer Japanese quest for Japan-ness in architecture; Arata, Japan-ness in Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 15–21.
1. Shimoi Harukichi, “Badorio gensui,” Jikyoku zasshi 2, no. 7 (1943).
2. Tōjō Hideki, in Ito Takashi, Hirohashi Tadamitsu, and Katashima Norio, eds., Tōjō Naikaku Sōri Daijin kimitsu kiroku: Tōjō Hideki Taishō genkōroku (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1990), 246.
3. Yomiuri shinbun hōchi, September 11, 1943.
4. ASMAE, AP, Giappone, 1931–45, b. 34, unnamed folder, report “Italiani in Estremo Oriente,” Tokyo, November 1945. In 1948 an ex-internee claimed that by late 1945 they were on the verge of starvation, each having lost between fifteen and twenty kilos of weight (ibid., illegible name to Brusasca, undersecretary to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Pretoria, July 8, 1948). The postwar Italian government took the issue of the internment of its citizens very seriously, requesting a Japanese apology and compensation before normalizing relations in 1952.
5. Luca Valente, Il mistero della missione giapponese (Rome: Cierre Edizioni, 2004).
6. Italian diplomats also considered the possibility of taking part in the Allied Treaty of Peace with Japan; ASMAE, AP, Giappone, 1931–45, b. 34, telespresso 24911/6, “Trattato di pace col Giappone,” June 6, 1947.
7. William Henry Chamberlin, Japan over Asia (Boston: Little, Brown, 1937), 282, 286.
8. Hugh Byas, The Japanese Enemy, His Power and His Vulnerability (New York: Knopf, 1942), 97.
9. William C. Johnstone, “The Future of Japan,” in Ninth Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations (Hot Springs, VA: American Council Institute of Pacific Relations, 1945), 10.
10. Bruce Cumings, “Japan’s Position in the World System,” in Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Naoki Sakai makes a similar argument with regard to the relegitimation of the Kyoto School after the war; Sakai, “Resistance to Conclusion: The Kyoto School Philosophy under the Pax Americana,” in Re-Politicising the Kyoto School as Philosophy, ed. Christopher Goto-Jones (London: Routledge, 2008).
11. In 1963, the German historian Ernst Nolte, for example, published a (controversial) book in which he espoused a theory about generic fascism, but by the mid-1970s he dropped the concept of fascism in favor of “totalitarianism.” In Italy, Renzo De Felice argued that Fascism was a sui generis modernizing ideology that had nothing in common with Nazi Germany. See Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism: Action Française, Italian Fascism, National Socialism (New York: Holt, 1966); Renzo De Felice and Michael Arthur Ledeen, Intervista sul fascismo (Bari: Laterza, 1975). In the English-speaking world, representatives of this scholarship include Gilbert Allardyce and, for Japan, Peter Duus: Gilbert Allardyce, “What Fascism Is Not: Thoughts on the Deflation of a Concept,” American Historical Review 84, no. 2 (1979); Peter Duus and Daniel Okimoto, “Fascism and the History of Pre-War Japan: The Failure of a Concept,” Journal of Asian Studies 39 (1979): 65–76.
12. To be sure, postwar Marxists still used the term “fascism,” but in a narrative of national pathology constituted by the emperor system. Hirai Kazuomi has noted how postwar Japanese Marxists and liberals, as well as the American understandings that underpinned the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, shared the assumption that the pathologically peculiar emperor system that was established in Meiji was responsible for what happened in the 1930s; Hirai, “Nihon fashizumu ron saikō,” Nihonshi kenkyū, no. 576 (2010): 61–63. In this sense, Katō Yōko’s observation that the transwar continuity in the Japanese interpretations of fascism is due to the “merits of social science” needs to be qualified. For although there were significant prewar contributions to the study of fascism, social science was also instrumental in reconverting the fascist critique of fascism into the postwar narratives of “ultranationalism” and “militarism.” For Katō’s survey of the debates on fascism, see Katō Yōko, “Fashizumu ron,” Nihon rekishi, no. 9 (2006). The central role of social science and modernization theory in the “banishment” of fascism after World War II is discussed in Harry Harootunian, “The Black Cat in the Dark Room,” Positions 13, no. 1 (2005): 137–38; and Harootunian, “The Imperial Present and the Second Coming of Fascism,” Boundary 2 34, no. 1 (2007): 9–10.
13. Takashi Fujitani has written on the American wartime and postwar discussions to absolve the emperor from wartime responsibility, with a focus on the scholar and diplomat Edwin O. Reischauer; Fujitani, “The Reischauer Memo: Mr. Moto, Hirohito, and Japanese American Soldiers,” Critical Asian Studies 33, no. 3 (2001).
14. After the war, Hatoyama went to great lengths to style himself as a long-standing believer in American-style liberal democracy. Accordingly, he took on board the Cold War nostrum of totalitarianism that cast fascism and communism as enemies of liberty. See, for example, Hatoyama Ichirō, Watakushi no shinjō (Tokyo: Tōkyō bunkō, 1951), 105–13.
15. George B. Sansom, Postwar Relations with Japan, Tenth Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations, Stratford-upon-Avon, England (London: The Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1947), 8. Sansom’s contribution to this conference was a reissue of an earlier, wartime paper. Robert Craigie, the British ambassador to Japan from 1937 to 1942, also singled out the “primitive lust for power and dominion among a powerful section of Japan’s warrior caste” as the driving force of Japanese politics. See Craigie, Behind the Japanese Mask (London and New York: Hutchinson, 1945), 162.
16. “Mizukara handō o kakunin. Jinmin no jikaku assatsu no tate,” Yomiuri shinbun, February 23, 1946. The Marxist Okada Takeo, for example, published a book in the early postwar period in which he linked the history of prewar fascism to that of the “new fascism” of postwar Japan; Okada, Fashizumu (Tokyo: Gyōmeisha, 1949).
17. “Han fassho jinmin taikai,” Asahi shinbun, August 12, 1948.
18. SHPP, scrap paper.
19. Indro Montanelli, L’impero bonsai, cronaca di un viaggio in Giappone, 1951–2 (Milan: Rizzoli, 2007), 170.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., 168.