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A New Look at the Problem of “Japanese Fascism”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

George Macklin Wilson
Affiliation:
Indiana University

Extract

In the decade and a half from 1931 to 1945 Japan confronted a series of domestic and international crises culminating in the national disaster of World War II. Many authors - both Japanese and Western - have portrayed this period in terms of the labeling generalization “fascism”, suggesting that Japan's experience ran parallel to that of such European countries as Italy under Mussolini and Germany during the Third Reich. My object here, after first attempting to explain how and why this interpretation arose, is to take issue with it, but in criticizing the use of the label fascism I do not mean to fall back to the position that what happened was simply sui generis, a somehow “unique” Japanese response to the troublesome developments of the interwar world. Fascism has the virtue of being a comparative concept, and if we throw it out we need to seek other comparative concepts to test as possible replacements.

Type
Patronage and Parties in Political Structure
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1968

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References

1 A compendium of readings both pro and con on the question of whether “fascism” applies to Japan is Morris, Ivan, ed., Japan 1931–1945: Militarism, Fascism, Japanism? (Boston, D. C. Heath, 1963).Google Scholar

2 The classic statement of the Marxist position on fascism is perhaps Dutt, R.Palme,Fascism and Social Revolution (New York, International Publishers, 1934).Google Scholar

3 See Wilson, George M., “Kita Ikki's Theory of Revolution”, Journal of Asian Studies, XXVI. 1(11. 1966), pp. 9496.Google Scholar

4 Tanin, O. and Yohan, E. [pseuds.], Militarism and Fascism in Japan (New York, International Publishers, 1934), pp. 2122Google Scholar.

5 Avdeyev, Yu.I. and Strunnikov, V.N., Burzhuaznoe gosudarstvo v period 1919–1939 gg. (Moscow, Izdatel'stvo Instituta mezhdunarodnykh otnoshenii, 1962), p. 409Google Scholar.There have been remarkably few Soviet studies of European fascism; some of the reasons why are explored in Laqueur, Walter, Russia and Germany (Boston, Little, Brown, 1965), pp. 196251.Google Scholar

6 Latyshev, I.A., Vnutrenniaia politika iaponskogo imperializma nakanune voiny na Tikhom okeane, 1931–1941 (Moscow, Gospolitizdat, 1955), pp. 34Google Scholar

7 Latyshev, , pp. 215216Google Scholar; see also Avdeyev, and Strunnikov, , p. 285 n. 54Google Scholar. Another more recent Soviet study of modern Japan that takes much the same line as Latyshev is Kutakov, L.N., Ocherki noveishei istorii laponii 1918–1963 (Moscow, Izdatel'stvo prosveshchenie, 1965).Google Scholar

8 There is a vast literature on the capitalism controversy (Nihon shihonshugi ronsō); one reliable and straightforward introduction to the historiography of the controversy is the section called “Meiji ishin kenkyū no rekishi” in Nihon no rekishi (Tokyo, Yomiuri shimbunsha, 1963), X, pp. 246251Google Scholar. In English, see Beckmann, George M., “Japanese Adaptations of Marx-Leninism - Modernization and Histor”, Asian Cultural Studies, III (International Christian University, Tokyo; 10. 1962), pp. 103114Google Scholar. On the controversy's application to the problem of Japanese fascism, see Shigeki, Tōyama and Shin'ichi, Satō, eds., Nihonshi kenkyū nyūmon, I (Tokyo, Tōkyō daigaku shuppankai, 1954), pp. 362367; II (1962), pp. 268–279.Google Scholar

9 Kōza (Symposium) comes from the title of a famous multi-volume series of essays on the history of Japanese capitalism (Nihon shihonshugi hattatsushi koza [Tokyo, Iwanami shoten, 19321933]); the opponents of the Koza faction, i.e., those who believed that the Meiji Restoration was a bourgeois revolution, were known as the Rono (Worker-farmer) faction, after the title of a magazine put out by a group of Marxist intellectuals.Google Scholar

10 Kamiyama Shigeo is the most prominent advocate of this minority position; see his Tennōsei ni kansuru rironteki shomondai (Tokyo, Minshu hyōronsha, 1947).Google Scholar

11 Inoue Kiyoshi, Nihon no rekishi, III (Tokyo, Iwanami shoten, 1966), p. 188.Google Scholar

12 Tanaka Sōgorō, Nihon fuashizumu shi (Tokyo, Kawade shobō shinsha, 1960), pp. 34.Google Scholar

13 Scalapino, Robert A., Democracy and the Party Movement in Prewar Japan (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1953)Google Scholar; Storry, Richard, The Double Patriots (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1957)Google Scholar and Japanese Fascism in the Thirties”, Wiener Library Bulletin, XX.4 (Autumn 1966), pp. 17.Google Scholar

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15 Maruyama, , pp. 5766, 7677, 80 (from “The Ideology and Dynamics of Japanese Fascism”, pp. 25–83).Google Scholar

16 Maruyama, , p. 172 (from “Fascism - Some Problems: A Consideration of its Political Dynamics”, pp. 157–176).Google Scholar

17 Kikuo, Nakamura, ‘Tennōsei fuashizumu wa atta ka”, Jiyū, No. 73 (12. 1965), pp. 5059Google Scholar and Manshū jihen (Tokyo, Nihonkyobunsha, 1965), pp. 194202.Google Scholar

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20 Maruyama, , pp. 84134 (“Thought and Behaviour Patterns of Japan's Wartime Leaders“).Google Scholar

21 Maruyama, , passim, esp. pp. 36, 41, 51Google Scholar. Maruyama's stress on continuities makes it difficult to determine when or how Japan changed from being nationalist to being ultranationalist or “fascist”, a point noted by Hashikawa Bunzō in his introduction to Chōkokkashugi (= Gendai Nihon shisō taikei, No. 31) (Tokyo, Chikuma shobō, 1964), p. 9.Google Scholar

22 As indicated above, the neo-Kōza school of postwar Japanese Marxist historians also generally insists on this sort of qualification, although such writers hew more closely to the original Marxist assessment of fascism than do the advocates of the authoritarian-modernization thesis. Barrington Moore, Jr., whose comparative study of landlord-peasant relations and modernization covers Japan as well as numerous other countries, represents a variation on the usual authoritarian-modernization thesis of Japanese fascism since he offers no significant qualification and refers to Japan as having followed the “capitalist and reactionary” route to the modern world, resulting, as it did also in Germany, in “fascism”. See Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston, Beacon Press, 1966), pp. xv, 159161, 228313Google Scholar. But Moore defines fascism at an extremely high level of generalization as “conservative modernization through revolution from above” (p. 436) or “an attempt to make reaction and conservatism popular and plebeian” (p. 447). This is tantamount to asserting that any form of paternalism or authoritarianism for purposes of industrialization equals fascism, a reading that would make “fascists” even of Bismarck and the Meiji oligarchs.

23 John W. Hall makes this point in examining the relevance of feudalism as an explanatory generalization for aspects of earlier Japanese history; Feudalism in Japan - a Reassessment”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, V.1 (10. 1962), pp. 2024.Google Scholar

24 Tanin, and Yohan, , pp. 722.Google Scholar

25 For building this model, one would have to add to earlier studies at least three major contributions of the nineteen-sixties to the comparative study of fascism in Europe. First there is Seymour Lipset, M.'s thesis, in Political Man (Garden City, N. Y., Doubleday, 1960)Google Scholar, that fascism represents the extremism of the usually moderate and liberal middle class due to prolonged and severe economic aggravation, which Lipset bases on an analysis of voting patterns in Germany and other Western countries. Second is the ideological taxonomy of fascism by Nolte, Ernst in Three Faces of Fascism (New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966)Google Scholar, according to which fascism arises out of a philosophical revolt against the modern world; Nolte holds that fascism appropriates the ideas of Marxism but turns them against the Marxists for the glory and benefit of the nation. Finally, there is Sauer, Wolfgang's article “National Socialism: Totalitarianism or Fascism?” in The American Historical Review, LXXIII.2 (12. 1967), pp. 404424, which supplements Nolte's philosophical analysis by using economic-growth theory in order to provide a socio-economic dimension to the non-Marxist interpretation of fascism.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 For an epitomatic statement reflecting both of these attitudes, see Masao, Maruyama, Nihon seiji shisōshi kenkyū (Tokyo, Tokyō daigaku shuppankai, 1952)Google Scholar, “Atogaki”, pp. i-xii. His “Author's Introduction t o the English Edition” in Thought and Behaviour, pp. xi-xvii indicates a similar line of thought.

27 As examples see Yoshino, Sakuzo, “Fascism in Japan”, Contemporary Japan, 1.2 (09. 1932), pp. 185197Google Scholar and Bisson, T.A., “The Rise of Fascism in Japan”, Foreign Policy Reports, VIII.17 (10. 26, 1932), pp. 196206.Google Scholar

28 Consider, for instance, Scalapino, Robert A. and Junnosuke, Masumi, Parties and Politics in Contemporary Japan (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1962).Google Scholar

29 See Hall, John W. and Beardsley, Richard K., Twelve Doors to Japan (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1965), p. 159.Google Scholar

30 Tucker, Robert C., “Towards a Comparative Politics of Movement-Regimes”, American Political Science Review, LV.2 (06 1961), pp. 281289CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The definition appears in italicized form on p. 283. I am grateful to William E. Steslicke for calling my attention to Tucker's concept.

31 “Totalitarian” in the sense elaborated by such theorists as Arendt, Hannah in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1951)Google Scholar and Friedrich, Carl J. and Brzezinski, Zbigniew in Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1956).Google Scholar

32 Tucker, , American Political Science Review, LV.2, pp. 286287Google Scholar. Examples of this kind of “extinction” include Chiang Kai-shek's Republic of China, Rhee's regime in Korea, and, apparently, Sukarno's in Indonesia.

33 Tucker, points out (American Political Science Review, LV.2, p. 284)Google Scholar that Mazzini in Italy conceived a precursory idea of this sort of national-liberation mass movement.

34 Tucker, , American Political Science Review, LV.2, p. 283.Google Scholar

35 See Stern, Fritz, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1961)Google Scholar. Ōkawa Shūmei, of course, was no mere cultural conservative such as Arthur Moeller van den Bruck in Weimar Germany (see Stern, , pp. 231325). Okawa's organizational skills and political ambitions led to several plots against the existing constitutional order. He was a leading conspirator until he went to jail following the failure of the putsch of May 15, 1932.Google Scholar

36 Inter alia, see Maruyama, , Thought and Behaviour, pp. 33, 66Google Scholar; Storry, , Wiener Library Bulletin, XX.4,3.Google Scholar

37 Fusao, Hayashi, Daitōa sensō kōteiron, 2 vols. (Tokyo, Banchō shobō, 19641965).Google Scholar

38 George Akita holds that the Meiji experience cannot serve as a model for today's emerging nations because of the different circumstances of the mid-twentieth century, which he feels vitiate comparisons with what Meiji leaders confronted; see Foundations of Constitutional Government in Modern Japan (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 161, 175Google Scholar. Different as conditions may be, however, the internal problems of social control and building industry are major concerns for these nations today, just as they were for Meiji Japan.

39 See Crowley, James B., Japan's Quest for Autonomy (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1966).Google Scholar