I. THE ‘NEW MAN SOCIETY’

In 1918 a ‘New Man Society’ (Shinjinkai) was founded at Japan's leading academic institution, Tokyo Imperial University, by a group of young students and academics. Although now known as ‘Japan's first student radicals’ because of their revolutionary activism a few years later, initially the Society members were not fire-breathing radicals but idealistic liberal-democrats who were, by no coincidence, gentlemanly young members of the privileged elite. As in Europe after World War I, there was a widespread conviction that the ‘new age’ required a ‘new man’. Thus, fascists were by no means the only ones to make use of the idea – it was part of the general zeitgeist of the age, as other writers in this volume have pointed out was also the case in Europe. Politically speaking, it would be hard to imagine a more inoffensive and moderate group than the Japanese New Man Society of 1918. Nonetheless, as William Miles Fletcher has written, they ‘aspired to be the “new men” who would pioneer the economic and social rebirth of Japan’. With all the high idealism and ambition of youth, they yearned not merely for political reform but for a far more fundamental transformation of the underlying values and structure of society. In their own high-flown language, they sought nothing less than ‘to eradicate the system of materialistic competition which stands in the way of love and peace and to liberate mankind from the state of materialistic struggle’. These idealistic students at first opened themselves to a variety of international political and social influences and reformist movements – most especially, at first, the new populist and unionist developments that were occurring in British parliamentary democracy (with the rise of the new Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald).

By the mid-1920s, however, most members of the New Man Society had veered sharply to the left. In Japanese political history today, in fact, the New Man Society is known as an important and influential group of elite young Marxist intellectuals who eventually served as a propaganda arm of the Japanese Communist Party and, for several years, put up a brave last-ditch stand against the rising tide of militarism and fascism in late 1920s Japan.