Too often we look at an issue, like the rise of neo-nazism in Germany or neo-nationalism in Japan out of context. I lay before you here first an article from 2002 and another from 2012. This part 1 makes predictions. The part 2 article came out yesterday and makes almost no allusions to the background discussed in the first article. What is needed by a reader is to tie the two decades and stories together. Discuss the failures in Japanese education, social struggles, etc. a bit more in detatil WALL STREET JOURNAL!.–KAS
PART 1
The Rise of Japan’s Neo-Nationalists: What It Means to the United States
November 21, 2002
Council on Foreign Relations
[Note: A transcript of this meeting is unavailable. The discussion is summarized below.]
Project Director: Eugene A. Matthews
1. What we know:
Different terms, such as nationalists, patriots, populists, and realists, have been used to refer to the group of Japanese who believe Japan needs to be self-determined and independent of the United States. “Nationalism” does not necessarily refer to a right-wing movement, which in Japan is quite small. The nationalist movement is characterized more by a sense of national pride and a desire for self-determination than by aggression or militarism. In fact, the same people who want Japan to have a stronger military are the same people who favor more open trade.
The origins of Japanese nationalism are based on the following: (1) a belief that the Emperor is a descendant of God, (2) geographic isolation, (3) a desire for expansion within the region. Different kinds of nationalism have emerged during different periods in Japan’s history.
Two issues at the forefront of the current discussion of nationalism in Japan are Article 9 of Japan’s Constitution and history textbook reform. Many Japanese nationalists favor a stronger Japanese presence on the world scene and would like to see Japan have a stronger, full-fledged military, instead of being confined to the Self Defense Forces as dictated by the Japan’s Constitution. It seems likely that Article 9 will be revised, but even though some would like to develop Japan’s military capabilities, they still favor the U.S.-Japan Security Alliance and are likely to continue cooperating with their main ally, the United States.
Education reform is becoming an increasingly active and important movement in Japan. Members of the New Education Reform Group advocate a stronger, more clearly defined identity for Japan as a nation. China and Korea in particular have taken great exception to the textbooks’ handling of Japan’s atrocities in Nanking and the treatment of the issue of “comfort women” from Korea, China, Indonesia, and the Philippines. It is important, however, to keep this issue in perspective: historical accounts are subjective, and every country teaches revisionist history to some extent. Even within the United States, versions of events and movements like the Civil War and the civil rights movement differ across regions of the country.
Prime Minister Koizumi’s visits to the Yasukuni Shrine have also raised concerns that Japan is becoming too nationalistic. It is important to bear in mind that while Yasukuni Shrine houses class-A war criminals; it also holds the remains of Japanese citizens who have died in the service of their country since the 19th century, much like Arlington National Cemetery in the United States. The attention surrounding it is unwarranted, and the United States must be mindful of the fact that right now, the most nationalistic country in the world is the United States.
Shintaro Ishihara, Governor of Tokyo, has been regarded as a staunch nationalist because of his strong, offensive remarks concerning immigrants. However, Ishihara does favor a U.S. alliance because he recognizes that Japan cannot defend itself alone right now, and that Japan will not be able to build up its military without U.S. assistance.
The economic malaise of the past decade and a half has forced Japan to reevaluate itself. Economic hardship, combined with a politically apathetic public and discreet economic stressors, could set the stage for a populist politician, such as Ishihara, to rise to power. An economic shock, such as the failure of the banking system or a debt situation crisis, would fuel the popularity of nationalist ideas. With the closures of many banks in Japan, people are losing money. The extent to which an economic shock would boost a nationalist movement depends on how afraid the country becomes. A terrorist attack on Japan’s soil could also prompt a rise in the nationalists’ influence.
2. What we don’t know:
The nationalist movement in Japan does not have to gain widespread popularity for it to gain widespread influence. If some of the views put forth by this movement become popular enough, they could garner enough backing to influence the Japanese government. How popular do these ideas have to become in order for them to affect Japanese foreign policy and necessitate a U.S. response?
China’s growing economic power in the region could lead to an increase in the appeal of some of Japan’s “nationalist” ideas. Japan will have to create a niche for itself, perhaps in product design or financial services, in order to remain a dominant economic force in the area. If Japan aims to focus on design, many Japanese will likely lose jobs. How will this affect the political climate? Will the appeal of the populists rise? Will Japan take a protectionist route?
Similarly, many industries will likely disappear if Japan’s non-performing loans are cleaned up. The resulting layoffs could also alter Japan’s political environment.
3. What are the next steps; what should be done and by whom:
It is important for the United States to monitor the nationalist movement. The question is when do Japan’s calls to become more independent move into the realm of belligerence or militarism? Japan currently does not have any fascist leaders poised to come to power, but there are some politicians with nationalist tendencies who are popular enough to warrant U.S. attention. A study of political history suggests that the United States should be concerned and should definitely keep this movement on its radar screen.
PART 2
Japan’s Nationalist Movement Strengthens
Lawmakers Find Ways to Draw Young Supporters Who Favor a More Assertive Foreign Policy; ‘We’ve Been Too Complacent’
By YUKA HAYASHI
TOKYO—Nationalist politicians and activists are wielding new clout in Japan, straining the country’s ties with China and South Korea, and creating headaches for policy makers in Tokyo.
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara is the face of Japanese nationalism.
Two Japanese cabinet ministers visited Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine—a place strongly associated with the country’s imperialist past—on Wednesday, the first such visits since the Democratic Party of Japan took power three years ago. The visits further inflamed a dispute with South Korea; South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, who upset Japanese officials with his visit to an islet contested by the two nations, said in a speech Wednesday that Japan must resolve issues from the World War II era before the two countries can develop better relations.
Mr. Lee referred to Japan as a “close neighbor, a friend” but noted the sexual enslavement of Korean women by Japanese soldiers during World War II.
“It was a breach of women’s rights committed during wartime as well as a violation of universal human rights and historic justice,” he said. “We urge the Japanese government to take responsible measures in this regard.”
Adding to tensions in Japan, the Russian Defense Ministry said Tuesday it would soon send two navy vessels to the disputed Russia-controlled islands known as the Southern Kurils in Russia and the Northern Territories in Japan to honor Soviet soldiers who died there after World War II.
Nationalist lawmakers have found new ways to drive the policy debate in recent weeks, using tactics that go beyond traditional noisy protests to embrace a younger generation of supporters—and their videos and social media. Various blogs, tweets and Internet videos offering nationalistic views shunned by most of Japan’s mainstream media are helping to bring together conservative politicians and the public.
In the past three months alone, Japanese politicians have twice drawn formal diplomatic protests from the Chinese government: by hosting in Tokyo a large conference of Uighur separatists, branded terrorists by Beijing, and by pushing Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda into proposing to buy a chain of privately owned islands claimed by both China and Japan.
A separate group of parliament members stirred complaints from Seoul by visiting the U.S. to demand the removal of a New Jersey monument dedicated to so-called comfort women, Korean women forced to work in military brothels during Japan’s occupation of Korea during World War II.
The growing influence of nationalist causes complicates matters for Mr. Noda, who has so far avoided saber-rattling but faces poor approval ratings ahead of a tricky leadership campaign in coming months.
Mr. Lee’s visit last week to South Korea-controlled islets claimed by Japan pushed Tokyo to give a strong response. It recalled its ambassador to Seoul, and postponed a meeting between its finance minister and his South Korean counterpart.
The nationalist agenda is to push Japan’s government to be more assertive in defending the country’s territorial claims in a region fraught with multiple such disputes.
Many hope the growing interest in territorial issues will give momentum to their ultimate goal: revising Japan’s pacifist constitution, which severely limits the role of the military, known as the Self Defense Forces.
Associated Press
Former South Korean ‘comfort woman’ Kil Un-ock, center, joins a protest.
Neighborhood Watch
April 2012 Tokyo Gov. Ishihara proposes the purchase of Senkaku/Diaoyu islands—disputed between Japan and China—from a private owner.
May LDP calls for revising the constitution to boost the status of the military.
May Japanese lawmakers visit Washington to request help in solving issue of North Korean abductions.
May Japanese lawmakers host a conference in Tokyo of Uighur activists, considered terrorists by China
June Japanese nationalists hold signature drive to
protest a New Jersey comfort-woman monument on a White House petition site. This follows a visit by Japanese lawmakers to the U.S. town
in May.
July Prime Minister Noda offers the purchase of Senkaku/Diaoyu islands by the government. Chinese patrol boats enter Japanese waters.
WSJ research
“Many Japanese are beginning to realize we’ve been too complacent,” says Keiji Furuya, an opposition politician who, among other things, spearheaded the Uighur effort and joined the Korea protest in New Jersey. “Just look at all the claims made on our territories from China, South Korea and Russia. We’ve never been made to look so foolish.”
Japan’s 21st-century nationalist movement has no single leader or party, but is a loose alliance of politicians, young and old, from the two main political parties—along with some rightist activist groups—backed by increasingly influential commentators and business executives.
One prominent figure in the movement is Shintaro Ishihara, the 79-year-old governor of Tokyo. Mr. Ishihara has been the face of Japanese nationalism from the time he wrote his best-selling “The Japan That Can Say ‘No,’ ” in 1989 as a member of parliament.
But after years of being dismissed as largely a fringe provocateur, Mr. Ishihara’s clout appears to be on the rise. He was able to translate his trademark China-bashing into policy this summer with his plan for the Tokyo metropolitan government to buy the contested Japan-controlled Senkaku islands—called Diaoyu in China—from private Japanese owners.
Mr. Ishihara got considerable attention for his Senkaku gambit when his online island-buying fundraising campaign raised $16 million in two months. Playwright and movie director Satoru Mizushima says his network of nationalist organizations generated one-third of that cash. He also raised $13,000 to defray costs for the visiting Uighurs in May.
Realizing the diplomatic perils of letting Mr. Ishihara control the territory, Mr. Noda felt compelled to have the national government step in to try to purchase the islands, currently owned by a Japanese family and leased by the Japanese government. But that, in turn, has raised Beijing’s ire, leading to protests and a Chinese patrol-boat mission to the area—prompting counter-protests from Japan. Another boatload of protesters from Hong Kong is expected to arrive at the islands within the next few days.
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
South Korean students marched last week during a memorial for ‘comfort women,’ who worked as sex slaves for Japanese troops in World War II.
Today’s leading nationalist organizations try to distance themselves from traditional right-wing groups, whose public image is one that includes loud and menacing protest rallies. The issues driving the current generation also are distinct from earlier ones, which were more focused on Japan’s war experiences and on issues such as worship of the imperial family. Some see the nationalists as drawing from the same pool of disgruntled youth as the antinuclear protesters, although that movement has moved closer to the mainstream.
What ties elements of the current movement together are the territorial rivalries and the desire to see Japan act more decisively over them. “At a time when China is claiming even Okinawa as part of its own territory, Japan must be more resolute in our foreign policy,” said Takeo Hiranuma, a parliament member who heads the small Sunrise Party of Japan.
Nationalist Internet sites have proliferated in recent years, allowing participants—known as netto uyoku, or Internet rightists, to air their views, often using incendiary and derogatory terms for China and Korea.
The 63-year-old Mr. Mizushima is another leader among Japan’s new nationalists. He helped start a political group in 2010 called Ganbare Nippon, or Hang Tough Japan, which has organized seven so-called fishing expeditions to the disputed islands that Mr. Ishihara wanted to purchase, as a way of underscoring Japan’s territorial claims.
Mr. Mizushima also runs a cable channel that, in 2009, became focused on right-wing talk shows, one of the few such outlets in Japan. “We created our channel as a counterweight to national newspapers and broadcasters that don’t tell the truth,” said Mr. Mizushima, whose media production company also posts its shows on the Internet. An Internet show called “Senkaku Islands, What If Japan Goes to War With China?” drew 37,000 viewers.
— Evan Ramstad contributed to this article.
Write to Yuka Hayashi at yuka.hayashi@wsj.com
A version of this article appeared August 15, 2012, on page A8 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Japan’s Nationalist Movement Strengthens.
Richard Sims looks at Japanese fascism in the 1930s.
Seigō Nakano
The 1930s were the most eventful and turbulent decade in Japanese history since the 1860s, Its early years witnessed the assassination or fatal wounding of two prime ministers, the murder of two other prominent public figures, the plotting of two abortive military coups, and the ending of governments headed by party politicians. In foreign policy there was a decisive rejection of international co-operation as the Japanese army engineered the seizure of Manchuria and Japan withdrew from the League of Nations. In 1936 radical discontent among young army officers burst forth dramatically in the February 26th Incident, an attempted coup in which more establishment leaders were killed. This marked the peak of violence, but when Japan stumbled into war with China in 1937, the trend towards totalitarianism quickened pace. Trade unions were suppressed, with an Industrial Association for Service to Country taking their place, while in 1940 the political parties were dissolved to make way for the Imperial Rule Assistance Association. As Japan entered into alliance with Germany and Italy in 1940 and then slid towards war with America and Britain, there were, unsurprisingly, no open voices of dissent.
Until recently very few Japanese historians hesitated to describe the Japanese experience in the 1930s as fascist. Most interpreted it in Marxist terms as a last-ditch defence by monopoly capital- ism, while also stressing that fascism had special characteristics in Japan. As Abe Hirozumi puts it, ‘it goes without saying that fascism is the special form of preventive counter-revolution in the general crisis of capitalism,’ adding, however, the significant gloss that ‘the role of fascism is not just the negative role of suppressing the revolutionary movement and shutting off the growth of anti-establishment: forces, but also that of positively drawing off the nation’s energy and turning it towards foreign aggression. In Japan, because party cabinets had already carried out the negative role in part, the role of fascism was mainly oriented towards the latter.’ In support of such assertions, Japanese historians have pointed to features, such as terrorist violence, fierce opposition to communism, authoritarian government, totalitarian ambitions, and virulent nationalism, which Japan shared with Germany and Italy in the 1930s.
Since the early 1960s Western historians of Japan have generally been reluctant to accept this interpretation, and in recent years Japanese scholars have also been turning away from it. While most are willing to accept that there was a fascist movement of sorts, they deny that Japan had a fascist regime, even in the special form of ‘fascism from above’, that is, a change to fascist methods of governmentn without a revolutionary change in leadership. In the words of G.M. Wilson, ‘Instead of a “metamorphosis” to a fascist or communist movement-regime, the bureaucratic, political-party and military elites who had emerged from the Meiji state composed their differences as best they could and acted as a conservative coalition to maintain the system they had inherited’.
A major reason for the lack of consensus over the validity of the term ‘Japanese fascism’ is the difficulty of defining fascism in general. Historians and political scientists have been unable to agree whether fascism is primarily revolutionary or conservative, modern or traditional; whether it was essentially a product of the First World War or of the general process of social modernisation; whether it belongs to a particular stage of capitalism or whether it depends on the nature of the adjustment of agriculture to economic modernisation; whether it was above all a form of ultranationalism or whether it was most concerned with maintaining or restoring the status structure. In particular they have differed over whether the concept applies only to Italy and Germany or whether different categories of fascism can be distinguished. Some go so far as to apply it to all modern developmental dictatorships, and one recent comparative study even states that ‘Japan was fascist before the word was invented’.
In the absence of an accepted theoretical definition of fascism, the most logical approach to the question of ‘Japanese fascism’ is to examine the parallels and differences which existed between Japan and Italy and Germany. Before doing so, however, the extent of direct influence or imitation needs to be considered. In 1932 Yoshino Sakuzo, in an article entitled ‘Fascism in Japan’, pointed to the ‘feeling among the Japanese that if democracy is not quite good enough for those who invented it, then Japan, who has always slightly mistrusted it, has no particular reason for keeping it going’. This sense of the trend of the times being opposed to democracy can be detected in other Japanese writers. Nevertheless, when Japanese books on fascism first began to appear in 1929, the tone was usually hostile, and even in the 1930s it was difficult for sympathisers to see how the role of the leader, the most obvious feature of European fascist movements, could be made compatible with the position of the emperor. As a result, the label of fascism was not attractive. Among political groups only the unimportant Japan Fascism League (Nippon Fascism Remmei ) adopted it formally, and among significant political figures only Nakano Seigo looked openly towards Europe.
Although Germany and Italy had little direct influence on Japan, Japan’s economic and social situation in the early 1930s was rather closer to those of Italy and Germany than was Spain’s or Rumania’s or Hungary’s. Not only had Japanese industry far surpassed agriculture in value of output, but the post-war decade had also been a period of dislocation and relative stagnation. Moreover, unemployment rose to unprecedented heights between 1929 and 1932, and the peasantry were reduced to desperation as agricultural prices plummeted. But although dissatisfaction with government policies and political and economic institutions was rife, Japan was not on the verge of a revolution. While disputes involving labour unions did indeed rise from 393 in 1928 to 998 in 1931, the number of strikers never exceeded 80,000, only slightly more than in 1919. Similarly, although tenant disputes with landlords, rose to over 3,000 in 1931, the numbers involved dropped to 80,000, only half of the 1926 total. The comparatively low level of political organisation and consciousness of the Japanese masses is further indicated by the fact that only a handful of proletarian party candidates were successful in the general elections of 1928, 1930 and 1932.
If the immediate threat from the left was less than in Italy and Germany, it nevertheless is apparent that the establishment was alarmed by it. After 1918, when spontaneous riots over the rocketing price of rice had spread over much of Japan, many conservatives and reactionaries formed or joined associations pledged to the maintenance or revival of Japanese traditional values. Some top leaders gave surreptitious support, not only to crude strike-breaking organisations, but also to the much more radical nationalist societies which now began to emerge. In this respect the situation in Japan, though less critical, was not unlike that in post-First World War Italy.
Another parallel between Japan, Germany and Italy can be found in the discontent of lower middle-class elements and the frustration and dissatisfaction of the young. The expansion of the zaibatsu – the huge financial/industrial combines – had adversely affected many small enterprises, while in Tokyo the growth of department stores cut the sales of ordinary retailers by over a third between 1922 and 1932. The resentment and frustration of small businessmen were reflected not only in the increasing public criticism of zaibatsu, but also in the formation of new political parties with such names as All-Japan Commerce and Industry Party, or Association of Friends of Commerce and Industry. It seems likely that such elements were also an important component of the hundreds of nationalist societies which sprang up in the 1930s, together with primary school teachers, petty officials, Buddhist and Shinto priests, and small landowners. The social problem most commented on by contemporary newspapers, however, was that of the ‘interi-lumpen’ (intelligentsia-lumpen-proletariat). The number of university and college graduates had risen from 9,208 in 1925 to 22,959 in 1929, but their chances of employment diminished in the same period from 66.6 per cent to 50.2 per cent, further slumping to 37 per cent in 1931. Although most radical students still turned to the left, the number of right-wing student groups rose by 1933 to nearly a hundred. More than half the members of the Blood Brotherhood Band, which was responsible for two of the assassinations of 1932, were university students.
Even more than her economic and social situation, Japan’s international position had much in common with Italy’s and Germany’s. She too felt aggrieved at her treatment at the Versailles peace conference (and at the Washington naval limitation conference of 1921-22) and could consider herself a ‘have-not’ nation. Concern about inter- national status led to concern about internal conflict and division, for one of the lessons of the First World War was the importance of national solidarity. As early as 1917 Major Koiso Kuniaki produced a report calling for the preparation, during peacetime, of a war economy, supported by reform of the organisation of enterprise and finance, harmonisation of labour and capital, and improvements in educational facilities and social policy. This approach was shared by other officers and by the more radical civilian nationalists. When, in the 1930s, Japan’s foreign relations deteriorated, hostility towards vested interests which seemed to impede national strengthening grew more intense and more widespread. If W.S. Allen is correct in judging that the broad appeal of Hitler and Mussolini lay in their proposal ‘to exalt national power by building a dictatorially integrated national community on the model of methods and moods familiar from World War I’, then this is a particularly important common factor, though with the difference that in Japan it favoured the military rather than any demagogic leader.
When one turns to ideology, other similarities are immediately obvious. A particularly notable one is the almost tribalistic rejection of internal divisions, and acute sense of separateness from other races, conjured up by the oft-used term, ‘national community’. There was, it is true, the difference that Japanese official propaganda depicted the Japanese people as an extended family, a doctrine which helps explain the efforts made by Justice Ministry officials, quite often with success, to bring arrested communists back into the fold. There were similar national differences, but fundamental similarity, between the nazi theoretical emphasis on the primacy of the rural community and its Japanese counterpart of Nohonshugi . However, the pull of the past was much stronger in Japan. Not only did propagandists constantly refer to the spirit of the mythical national foundation by the emperor’s ancestors, but virtually every nationalist called for a Showa Ishin (Showa-period Renovation) which would renew the Japan of the 1930s as the Meiji Ishin had the Japan of seventy years earlier.
Not only were Japanese nationalists exceptionally oriented towards the past, many of them were strongly influenced by particular Japanese intellectual or religious traditions. Kita Ikki, for instance, who combined socialism with radical nationalism and whose writing was a major influence on the young officer movement, was devoted to Nichiren Buddhism, the most nationalistic of all Japan’s religious sects. Like the Oyomei school of Confucianism, Nichiren tended to be associated with radical forms of the Showa Ishin mentality and to be more influential in the outer and less urban regions of Japan. Where Shinto, a much less intellectual religion, had an influence, it too was usually linked with the radical right. Orthodox Confucianism, in contrast, was promoted by the establishment as a support of conservative authoritarianism. Among the urban educated elites, liberal values continued to be held, though often in muted form. However, it should be noted that many of the Japanese ultranationalists who most closely resembled European fascists also had a predominantly Western-style education. Such was also the case with the ‘revisionist’ or ‘renovationist’ bureaucrats, who favoured government reorganisation and the extension of government controls over the economy. Younger bureaucrats, moreover, were likely to have received some impression from Marxism during their time at university, and that could easily lead in a national socialist direction.
Where Japan differed most obviously from Italy and Germany was in the absence of an effective movement led by a charismatic leader and of any dramatic change in the political process. After the failure of the February 26th Incident only one further attempt was made to achieve a major reorganisation of power. Stimulated by the failure of successive Japanese governments to bring the China Incident to a satisfactory conclusion, army officers at central headquarters, backed by radical civilian nationalists, renovationist bureaucrats and leaders of the main socialist party, mounted a campaign for a new structure. In July 1940 the army engineered the fall of a relatively moderate cabinet, and when Prince Konoe, an aristocrat with ultranationalist connections, became prime minister, it seemed that the plan might succeed. But at this juncture, the politicians and the zaibatsu combined with the mare traditionalist conservatives, including some retired generals, as well as with mainstream bureaucrats in the Home and Justice Ministries to frustrate what they variously criticised as communistic or dictatorial or an attempt to establish a new shogunate. Although the Imperial Rule Assistance Association was set up, it was emasculated and soon came under the control of the Home Ministry.
The failure of the new structure movement has recently been much stressed by scholars who argue that the main outcome of the turmoil of the 1930s was a conservative reaffirmation. There is an obvious truth in this, but certain other political trends fit the interpretation less neatly. In particular, the preparations for gearing the country for war which were embodied in the 1938 National General Mobilisation Law, together with the enormous increase in military expenditure, point rather to the expansion of the power of the military. Behind the scenes, too, the Military Affairs Bureau of the army frequently interfered in politics, often by intimidation. Above all, the army was mainly responsible for the uncompromising foreign policy which placed such a premium on national integration and greater state control within Japan. This was more than simple militarism, As Vagts noted in 1937, Japan had the most political army in the world. It was the army which produced the 1934 pamphlet which began with the Mussolini-style declaration, ‘War is the father of creation and the mother of culture’. From 1910 it had attempted to spread its ideas among the population, especially in the villages, through its reservists’ and young men’s organisations, and in the 1930s this paid dividends. In so far as the army was the dynamic force which drove Japan towards its New Order in East Asia, it is easy to understand why some Japanese historians write of ‘gun-fuashizumu’ (military fascism).
Nevertheless, ‘military fascism’ is a limiting expression which conveys only part of the character of the 1930s. Though less precise, ‘Japanese fascism’ may be preferable in that it draws attention to the similarities of anti-communism, anti-liberalism, ambivalence towards capitalism, emphasis on national community, and aggressive and ambitious foreign policy, which Japan shared with Germany and Italy. It is, as some have argued, true that these attributes are all to be found in the Japanese nationalism of earlier decades, but they were never so dominant nor pursued so intensely. Nor were Western ideas and values rejected as they were in the 1930s.
A case then exists for ‘Japanese fascism’. However, as with most labels, there is a danger of its distorting historians’ perspectives. It has, for example, tended to obscure the fact that, in 1936-37, following Japan’s economic recovery, political parties and the zaibatsu began to reassert themselves against the army and the bureaucracy, until the outbreak of the China Incident again created a war atmosphere. Moreover, it also suggests that Japan was more totalitarian than was actually the case, Who, for instance, would suspect that more candidates stood in 1942, in wartime, than in any of the pre-war elections? Because it is easy to cite such divergences from the pattern suggested by European fascist experience, ‘Japanese fascism’ is likely to remain a disputed term.
Richard Sims is a lecturer in history at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.
Further reading:
M. Maruyama, Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics (Oxford University Press, 1963); I. Morris (Editor), Japan 1931-45: Militarism, Facism, Japanism (D.C. Heath, Boston, 1963); G.M. Wilson, Radical Nationalist in Japan: Kitta Ikki, 1833-1937 (Harvard University Press, 1969); B.A. Shillony, Revolt in Japan: the Young Officers and the February 26th, 1936 Incident (Princeton University Press, 1973); B. Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Penguin, 1967); H.A. Turner (Editor), Reappraisals of Facism (New Viewpoint, New York, 1975); S.G. Payne, Facism: Comparison and Definition (University of Wisconsin Press, 1980).
http://www.historytoday.com/richard-sims/japanese-fascism
http://www.historytoday.com/gordon-daniels/re-thinking-japan-1937-45
JAPAN
Irrational chauvinists or fearful protectionists? Gordon Daniels looks at the new research and arguments reshaping our view of Japan’s rulers before and after Pearl Harbour.
At the height of the Second World War a young official in the United States Department of State analysed Japanese expansion with surprising detachment. In a paper designed to sketch the outlines of a more peaceful world Robert Fearey attributed Japan’s attacks upon China, America, Britain and Holland to structural economic causes. Among these causes Fearey listed Western protectionism, which had obstructed Japan’s commercial development, and Japan’s lack of secure supplies of food and raw materials. Even more perceptive was Fearey’s suggestion that Japan would soon face Asian competition and needed to develop more varied and sophisticated export products.