Arbiters of Patriotism: Right-Wing Scholars in Imperial Japan 2019054489, 9780824881788, 9780824883386, 9780824883638, 9780824883645, 0824881788

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ARBITERS OF PATRIOTISM

A Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute

ARBITERS OF PATRIOTISM Right-Wing Scholars in Imperial Japan John Person

University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu

© 2020 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20    6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Person, John, author. Title: Arbiters of patriotism : right-wing scholars in imperial Japan /   John Person. Other titles: Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia  University. Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press, 2020. | Series:   Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University |   Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019054489 | ISBN 9780824881788 (hardcover) | ISBN   9780824883386 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9780824883638 (epub) | ISBN   9780824883645 (kindle edition) Subjects: LCSH: Mitsui, Kōshi, 1883–1953—Political and social views. |   Minoda, Muneki, 1894–1946—Political and social views. | Genri Nihonsha.   | Nationalism—Japan—History—20th century. | Japan—Intellectual   life—20th century. Classification: LCC DS885 .P47 2020 | DDC 320.540952092/2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054489 Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University were inaugurated in 1962 to bring to a wider public the results of significant new research on modern and contemporary East Asia. University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Cover art: This 1928 general election poster from the Home Ministry reads “If you vote, the public politics of Showa Restoration become a reality and the world will become bright. If you don’t vote, it will turn dark.” Courtesy of Ohara Institute for Social Research, Hosei University.

Contents

Acknowledgments  vii Introduction 1 chapter one

From Writing the Self to Reading the Nation 14 chapter two

Japanist Democracies and Taisho Restorations 41 chapter three

International Nationalisms and the Suppression of Socialism 64 chapter four

Surveilling the Right 88

vi Contents chapter five

The Dream of Intellectual Leadership 121 Epilogue 155 Notes  161 Bibliography  191 Index  203

Acknowledgments

I am fortunate to have so many people to thank in completing this book. I must first thank Jim Ketelaar and Susan Burns for guiding my research at the University of Chicago. I am also grateful to Michael Forster for agreeing to join a committee on a topic far outside of his field to help me navigate the works of German writers referenced by Japanese intellectuals. Over the course of my graduate studies, I benefited from the camaraderie of fellow graduate students and postdocs, who offered friendship and criticism. They include Katsuhiko Endo, Jacques Fasan, Helen Findley, Clinton Godart, Taeju Kim, Yuko Murata, Steven Platzer, Motohide Saji, Andy Yamazaki, Junko Yamazaki, and Yijiang Zhong. I also thank the many friends I made through our union, Graduate Students United, which continues to do inspirational work on campus. The late Okuizumi Eizaburō at the Regenstein Library was an important mentor, whose research advice I continue to miss very much. Hiroyoshi Noto humbled me in bungo class and on the racquetball court, all with great humor and kindness. Satō Takumi, my advisor at Kyoto University during my research, was generous with his time and enormous collection of primary source material. I gained valuable insight from presenting at his graduate seminar and the Minoda Muneki research group, where I received helpful advice from Takeuchi Yō, Uemura Kazuhide, Inoue Yoshikazu, and many others. Ishii Kōsei, Tomiyama Ichirō, and Sakiyama Masaki also offered advice and encouragement at an early stage of this project. After graduation, I had the wonderful opportunity to spend a year at UCLA, home to a great community of Japan scholars and historians, thanks to a postdoctoral fellowship through the Terasaki Center for Japanese vii

viii Acknowledgments

Studies. This project benefited from many workshops, reading groups, and conversations at the Brew Co. with Tanya Barnett, Seiji Lippit, Bill Marotti, Kelly McCormick, Ken Shima, and Jack Wilson, among many others. After UCLA, I spent a productive year at Hamilton College under its excellent Asia Studies postdoctoral fellowship program. Lisa Trivedi and Tom Wilson were wonderful mentors who offered feedback on both my research and teaching. My fellow postdoc Lawrence Chua and his partner, Tim, were a constant source of friendship, support, and critical feedback. I am eternally grateful to Lawrence for inviting me to write at Denniston Hill for a summer; it brought this project back on track after two years of relocating and looking for work. Over the years, I have benefited from many colleagues and mentors who generously read portions of the project; they include Michael Bourdaghs, Mark Driscoll, Robert Eskildson, Norma Field, Brian Hurley, Robert Stolz, Robert Tierney, Julia Thomas, and Max Ward. I am incredibly lucky to have landed in a department that is collegial and supportive at the University at Albany. Every one of my senior colleagues has gone out of the way to reduce the junior faculty service load to help us establish our research. For this and their friendship, I am very grateful. I owe an incredible debt to Sue Fessler, who continues to be a role model for balancing teaching, writing, and other important work while maintaining a healthy space for life outside of the university. I could not ask for a better mentor. I am also thankful for my colleagues in and outside of the department for their solidarity and for organizing numerous writing sessions and beer dates. They include Michael Chan, Angela Commito, Luis Cuesta, Tony DeBlasi, Maeve and Jim Kane, Peter Kwon, Aaron Proffitt, Sami Schalk, and Carmen Serrano. This project was made possible by the generous funding of many institutions. I would like to thank the University of Chicago for financial assistance throughout my graduate studies. I received the support of the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship and the Toyota Centennial Fellowship and funding through the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. My research at Kyoto University was supported by the Institute of International Education Fulbright Program. I am also grateful for the support I received from the Dissertation Fellowship Program of the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and the affiliated fellows program at the Franke Institute for Humanities at Chicago. At the University at Albany, I benefited from support from the Faculty Research Assistant Program, which allowed me to travel to Japan to collect additional materials at a critical juncture. I also thank my former dean, Elga Wulfert, for granting me a semester’s release from teaching, which allowed me to complete substantial revisions of the manuscript.

Acknowledgments ix

I could not have finished this project without the support and enthusiasm of Ross Yelsey, formerly at the Weatherhead Institute at Columbia University. Thank you for checking in so many times during the dark months of writing. Stephanie Chun at the University of Hawai‘i Press guided me through the process of publishing my first book, and Wendy Lawrence patiently tightened my manuscript into something presentable. Along the way, I received critical feedback from readers through Weatherhead and the University of Hawai‘i Press, which helped me rethink key aspects of the book from a new perspective. Thank you to my parents, David and Nahoko, for their unconditional love and generosity, and to my brother Andy for the beer, video games, and baby pics. My wife, Johanna, has been a pillar of support through the most stressful stages of finishing the project. Thank you for gently encouraging me to take breaks and enjoy the world outside of the house; I could not have finished this without you. Thank you also to the extended BatmanPost family for being exactly the way you are. Special thanks are due to our late greyhound, Henna, who spent the last years of her life trading solutions to unwieldy sentences for belly rubs. Responsibility for the end result of those sentences, as well as the broader contents of the book, lies solely with me, the author. Parts of chapters have appeared elsewhere. My exploration of Minoda Muneki’s critique of Marxism in chapter 3 appeared as “Japanese Rightwing Discourse in International Context: Minoda Muneki’s Interwar Writings on Class and Nation” in the Journal of the History of Ideas 79, no. 4 (2018). My analysis of the government’s response to right-wing nationalism in chapter 4 appeared as “Between Patriotism and Terrorism: The Policing of Nationalist Movements in 1930s Japan” in the Journal of Japanese Studies 43, no. 2 (2017). I would like to thank both publications for allowing me to use these materials for the book, as well as the thoughtful comments I received from the readers they assigned to the manuscripts.

Introduction

How do we think about fanatics in history? Those considered to be fanatical or irrational have played significant roles in shaping the way certain events have unfolded, played out, and are remembered. Representations of fanatics are all around us, couched in a discourse of fear over their unpredictable actions and undeniable destructiveness. But it is this apparent unknowable nature of the fanatic that makes such a person a ready scapegoat of history’s tragedies—an unfathomable, alien cause of humanity’s self-destruction. This book is an attempt to narrate the political activism and intellectual production of two of the most notoriously “irrational fanatics” of modern Japanese history: Mitsui Kōshi and Minoda Muneki. Minoda (1894–1946), the more well known of the two, was an academic philosopher and president of the Genri Nippon Society, which he founded in 1925 with his mentor Mitsui (1883–1953), a columnist and editor for several conservative magazines. The society’s eponymous periodical became the forum for articles advocating the censorship and termination of university professors whom the editors unilaterally deemed traitors to the Japanese nation. Scholars unfortunate enough to be featured in Genri Nippon (1925–1944) became targets of slander and physical attack by nationalist politicians and patriotic organizations; some were censored, taken to court for treason, and fired from university positions. Kyoto School philosopher Nishida Kitarō called Minoda a “rabid dog” and “third-rate scholar,”1 while an early postwar biographer posthumously labeled him the “Joseph McCarthy of Japan.”2 The noted historian of Japanese nationalist thought Hashikawa Bunsō likened Minoda to a “strange shaman,” who resisted easy comparison with other prominent right-wing ideologues of the wartime 1

2 Introduction

era.3 Intellectuals critical of government-led campaigns of political and academic suppression came to associate Minoda and the obscure theory of ethnonationalism that he advocated, Japanism (Nihonshugi), with the oppressive intellectual climate of that period. While contemporary and postwar accounts agreed on the fanatical nature of Minoda, his own writings seemed to confirm this diagnosis. His rambling sentences and awkward phrasings, not to mention his confrontational attitude, did not promote academic exchange—in fact, they seemed aimed at the opposite. Consider the following sentence from an essay cited at a meeting of the Japanese parliament, the Imperial Diet, which ultimately led to the dismissal of its target, Kyoto Imperial University law professor Takigawa Yukitoki: The fact that the source of political party-worshiping, Diet-centered, and disloyal “democratic” thought, which injures and pollutes the actual lives of our national citizens domestically and threatens our national prestige and sovereignty on an unprecedented level internationally, as well as the source of pathology and the incubating grounds of Marxism, the deathly enemy of humanity, humanism, and the Japanese nation that has turned Germany into a “nation of slaves” and a “tributary state,” while bringing into existence a “living hell” in Russia, are both found in the nucleus, the ultimate source of the Japanese nation’s thought on learning and scholarship, the Schools of Law and Letters of the Imperial Universities—this is, along with Marxism itself, the “proxy for religion” and “rhetorical monster,” what we, members of the Genri Nippon Society and the Shikishima Way Group, have been crying out and clamoring, “exorcise this source!” as far as our voices can carry, even if we should perish in our mission, carefully employing the scientific methods of the Shikishima way, and here again in this book I appeal to the brethren of our entire nation and the applicable authorities for its censorship and pray for appropriate measures to be taken!4

Long, rambling sentences like the one above would typically be sandwiched by the poems of Emperor Meiji, cited as unyielding proof for whatever patriotic argument Minoda was making—a practice that liberal and progressive intellectuals found baffling. His prohibitive prose is almost legendary, and many intellectuals who lived through Japan’s wartime era claimed that they could not even comprehend his arguments. That Minoda’s talking points had been promoted to the status of evidence in arguing for the dismissal of university professors in the Imperial Diet was at once mind-boggling and spine-chilling to academics sympathetic to the political critiques offered by Marxist and socialist viewpoints. The result was the dismissal and public shaming of high-profile professors and the self-censorship of innumerable others.

Introduction 3

Yet the significance of this “fanatic” goes beyond his problematic deeds before and during the Second World War. In the postwar era, long after his death by suicide in 1946, Minoda began to enjoy a new career on the pages of intellectual history, with the figure of his fanatical persona now serving as a useful rhetorical tool in arguing for the relative innocence of other notable intellectuals. Juxtaposed alongside a description of Minoda’s wartime activities, other intellectual positions were made to seem less offensive, and the experience of being on the receiving end of his polemical attack was cited as evidence suggesting the relative innocence of their wartime nationalistic musings. Minoda and his reputation as a fanatical ultrarightist was taken as a point of reference on an imagined political spectrum in which everyone else was to the left, or at least not as far right, during the true irrationality of the “dark valley” period of Japanese history that was the first decades of the Showa era (1926–1989).5 These juxtapositions often involved little research into Minoda’s own writings, and the fanatical nature of his prose was taken for granted, while those measured against Minoda were deemed to be more moderate and less offensive compared to the right-wing extremism displayed by his organization, the Genri Nippon Society. Indeed, some studies seemed to imply that Minoda’s notorious reputation made any serious inquiry into the substance of his reputation unnecessary.6 Of course, matters are more complex. More recent scholarship on Minoda produced in Japan has managed to break through this easy stereotyping of Minoda-as-fanatic, demonstrating that an understanding of Minoda and the Genri Nippon Society is important in developing a broader perspective of how intellectuals contributed and responded to the political climate of their time.7 There is no denying the aggressiveness with which Mitsui and Minoda attempted to eliminate intellectual positions antithetical to their own. To those prominent intellectuals who were critical of jingoistic nationalism in the 1930s, these were the worst of the bunch and perhaps the most influential. To them, Minoda’s fanaticism and network of politically powerful connections were an especially dangerous combination. It bears pointing out, however, that “fanatic” was a label attached to them by their critics and not something inherent to their thought or a word they used to describe themselves. The use of the word “fanatic” to describe the Genri Nippon Society may tell us more about those who deploy the label than about the society itself, as it implies the existence of a more reasoned, even legitimate, approach to relating to the world and solving issues in society.8 Such easy labeling is complicated by the fact that the status of reason was itself a focus of scrutiny among philosophers during the period in which these intellectuals were active. Mitsui’s career as a public intellectual began

4 Introduction

with his study of poetic representations of emotion and probing the limits of reason, while Minoda was an academic philosopher with interest in the study of logic, psychology, and critical approaches to German idealist philosophy. As scholars have long pointed out, this type of vitalist thought, which sought the essence of the human manifested in life rather than the capacity to reason, was an important cornerstone of fascist thought everywhere. Masked by the typical narrative of the fanatical nationalist is the fact that both Mitsui and Minoda were products of Japan’s elite academic institutions. Both were graduates of Tokyo Imperial University and attended its elite feeder system of Higher Schools—Mitsui, the First Higher School in Tokyo and Minoda, the Fifth Higher School in his native Kumamoto Prefecture. Like many who attended the elite universities during this period, Mitsui and Minoda were deep believers in the power of education and personal cultivation in building an enlightened society. Their polemical stance against the Imperial University professors was not a manifestation of antagonism toward the academic pursuit per se but rather a revolt against a certain brand of idealism they perceived to be the dominant trend in the academy and detrimental to Japanese society at large. I want to make clear from the outset that this book is not an attempt to resuscitate the theories of Mitsui and Minoda or any other of the ultranationalist ideas that were most visible during the era in question. Their thoughts and activities were a significant detriment to the health and dynamism of the Japanese academy, and their works lack the sophistication of those who are regarded as the canonical philosophers of their era, such as Nishida Kitarō, or contemporaneous thinkers associated with the Right, such as Kita Ikki and Ōkawa Shūmei. Rather, I take the Genri Nippon Society as a useful standpoint from which we can begin to account for the rise and trajectory of radical nationalist thought and activism during the height of imperial Japan, when chauvinistic nationalism was in many ways normalized. The utility of Mitsui and Minoda in this undertaking lies in their broadly prolific career. In contemporary parlance they might be best described as trolls with a breathtakingly long list of high-profile targets. The list of their targets constitutes a who’s who list of leading figures in the Japanese academy, including professors of law, literature, philosophy, and economics, with political allegiances that could be described as liberal, Marxist, leftist, rightist, and even Japanist. From the vantage point of Japan’s most prolific, most vilified polemicists of the era, we can gain a unique picture of the substance and place of radical nationalist activism and philosophy in an age in which jingoistic nationalism reigned. Arbiters of Patriotism seeks to provide historical context to the oftencaricaturized figure of the Japanist intellectual. It does not do this in an

Introduction 5

attempt to revive the legacy of intellectuals like Mitsui Kōshi and Minoda Muneki. Rather, it argues that our understanding of the broader intellectual history of this period will benefit from such an undertaking, allowing us to better understand not only how arguments were deployed to justify the censorship and destruction of liberal and Marxist ideas and movements but also how Japanism emerged from the same intellectual environment as its enemies and thus shared many of their assumptions concerning society, politics, and philosophy. In other words, Arbiters of Patriotism aims at once to clarify the obscure figure of the Japanist intellectual as well as to complicate the familiar dichotomy between right and left. THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM AND HISTORY Aside from “fanatic,” “right wing” is another word often used to describe the Genri Nippon Society. Though many aspects of Mitsui and Minoda’s political ideas and agenda, such as their nationalism and disdain for communism, correspond to what is generally called right wing, it is worth considering what we mean by this term. The use of the political spectrum of right and left to categorize ideas and movements dates back to the days of the French Revolution and the seating arrangements in the French National Assembly.9 This fact alone should make us pause before applying these categories in the analysis of twentieth-century Japan. While there is a long history of categorizing certain political ideas and movements in modern Japan as right wing, like the label “fanatic,” Minoda and the Genri Nippon Society did not use this word to describe their own politics. This does not invalidate the use of the category in describing them, but it should prompt us to pay attention to the politics of how this category has been deployed in the past, both in the historical moment in which the Genri Nippon Society was active and more generally as a category historians have used to describe ideas, movements, and individuals. Historians today often categorize Minoda as a right-wing ideologue of the idealist type (kannen uyoku), distinguishing him from left-leaning individuals, such as Marxists and liberals, and the so-called control right wing (tōsei uyoku), a term associated with military and civilian technocratic planners of state capitalist and social mobilization policies. But what does it mean to be a rightist in the context of imperial Japan? The political spectrum with its dual political categories of right and left is useful in measuring certain types of affinities, both conceptual and practical, among different political camps, but its weakness lies in the fact that it is dimensionally impaired and leaves unspecified what stands in the center.

6 Introduction

Scholars have already discussed these issues in various contexts, often suggesting a modification to the spectrum, along the lines of an additional dimension, to give it some much-needed depth. Asaba Michiaki has scrutinized the history of the political spectrum in modern Japan, pointing out that the first usage was employed, understandably, in books dealing with the French Revolution.10 The application of the framework to domestic politics emerged in the late Taisho era (1912–1926), eventually becoming standard in the lexicon of political concepts. Asaba argues that while the left-right spectrum originates from a specific historical context, the general categories of progressivism and conservatism carry a certain amount of universal applicability useful for the analysis of political opposition in other historical moments as well. Asaba suggests that we can improve the applicability of the political spectrum if we recognize that the categories of progressive and conservative ought to be used in reference to specific political issues debated in specific contexts. He attempts to achieve this by inserting an additional vertical axis that measures the radicalism, or the distance from established powers, of the individual or group being evaluated, thus creating a two-dimensional plot chart, as opposed to the one-dimensional spectrum. According to Asaba, we can organize the history of political ideology according to broad trends in debates, rereading the “progressive versus conservative” axis as “people’s rights versus state rights” in the early Meiji era, “European gentleman versus Eastern hero” (borrowing from Nakae Chōmin’s parable) in the mid- to late Meiji, “democracy versus outward expansion” in the Taisho era, and “modernism versus national security fascists” in the prewar Showa era.11 While this intervention is illuminating in several ways—namely, in highlighting the historicity of the political spectrum itself and the fact that it tends to also be used to measure the degree to which ideas are critical or even threatening to established institutions of power—Asaba’s suggestion glosses over the fact that it was possible to be a “modernist” while clamoring for hawkish national security policies and that the notion of “democracy” was not always antagonistic to the outward expansion of Japan. For “rightists” like Mitsui and Minoda, ideas related to the discourse of “democracy” in imperial Japan were not at all alien to their articulation of political and institutional ideals but were a crucial component. Both were modernists and national security hawks at the same time, a position not at all uncommon during that era. While I do not avoid using the right/left dichotomy, I do pay particular attention to the way the discourse of right and left functioned at particular moments in the history of imperial Japan. The emerging practice of

Introduction 7

applying the right/left dichotomy to domestic politics in the late Taisho era was contemporaneous with two broader trends: the rise of popular politics, punctuated by the passage of the General Election and Peace Preservation Laws in 1925, and the rise of populist nationalist movements in Europe that were drawing the attention of Japanese intellectuals. The founding of the Genri Nippon Society, also in 1925, coincided with the adoption of a new practice of differentiating political movements along a spectrum of right and left. A more attentive historical analysis of the term “right wing” reveals the ways in which the deployment of the word was closely linked to networks of political power. As will be discussed more extensively in chapter 4, the Japanese bureaucracies played an important role in introducing the practice of using the word “right wing” (uyoku) to describe radical nationalist activists and ideas in the 1930s. Important in this adoption was the fact that the word “right wing” did not describe ideological content but only marked a direction and distance from an implied center that remained unspecified. This was precisely the moment when radical nationalist thought became the rhetoric behind dozens of successful and unsuccessful attempts to assassinate politicians and financiers. While the right wing is remembered in some historical accounts as a group of conspirators with the wartime government in building an authoritarian state, the word “right wing” was a practical way for government agencies to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate forms of nationalist expression without having to elucidate the content of its ideology. In the final decades of imperial Japan, “right wing” registered two facets of political perspective. First, it referred to those who proposed social reform through political economic restructuring within the nation-state form, as opposed to Marxist materialism, which placed class struggle and material inequality at the foundation of revolution. Second, and relatedly, it also measured the degree to which one advocated for a change in the government structure. Thus, it was possible to speak of both a revolutionary left and right during the era in question, though the imagined outcome and beneficiaries of their respective revolutionary program varied greatly. This book builds an account of the relationship between forms of Japanese nationalism and state power by paying attention to competing uses of nationalist rhetoric among both government and nongovernment actors. JAPANISM AND FASCISM The question of whether or not imperial Japan was fascist has been controversial. In an area of study dominated by scholars of Europe, historians of

8 Introduction

fascism have endeavored to identify characteristics in government form, political leadership and parties, populist politics, nationalist symbolism, and other areas of interest that are consistent across certain nation-states viewed to be candidates for the label of fascism, usually associated with the Axis alliance, including Italy, Germany, Japan, Spain, Hungary, and so on. Despite the wealth of knowledge these works have contributed, they have tended to define fascism by means of a cumbersome checklist of items that form a “fascist minimum.”12 The case of Japan usually fits outside of the parameters set by these lists.13 While the fascist minimum approach is useful for making comparisons across national state boundaries, its emphasis on including or excluding locales due to a somewhat arbitrary set of standards has hindered the use of the “fascism” concept as a lens to understand trends that are not entirely determined by national state boundaries. During the first decades of the Cold War, the notion of totalitarianism became a popular lens for interpreting the 1930s and 1940s. Under this approach, scholars attempted to link fascism with communism through a theory of an all-controlling police state.14 But as more recent scholarship has demonstrated, the totalitarian police-state approach obscures the complexities of the relation between the state and individuals and has proven to be more of an obstacle in understanding early Showa Japan. As should be clear from the discussion above, Mitsui and Minoda were not totalitarian statists. They disagreed with key components of state policy, including aspects related to mobilizing the nationalism of the population, and right-wing intellectuals of the early Showa era were remarkably varied in their conception of the state. Still, fascism can be an important framework for understanding the oppressive politics of the early twentieth century, provided it is linked to changes occurring through the capitalist modernization process, a process that transcended national state boundaries and very much included Japan. Such an approach has a long history in Japan, and Japanism has been a topic of interest in such studies from the beginning. The locus classicus of critical fascist studies in the Japanese language, the 1935 Japanese Ideology by the materialist philosopher Tosaka Jun, defined Japanism as the ideology of fascism in the Japanese context. Taking Japanism broadly as an interconnected amalgam of nationalist discourses concerning family, agriculture, martial spirit, and the imperial house, Tosaka analyzed the ways in which Japanist discourse attempted to mask material inequality by substituting it with an abstract feeling of equality as fellow Japanese, framed as a “restoration” of an authentic Japanese mode of being of the past, and how this discourse played a crucial role in the government’s mobilization policies under its wars of imperialism.

Introduction 9

Tosaka wryly referred to Japanism and restorationism as a form of “primitivizationism” that repurposed concepts and symbols from the past as modern slogans that suggested a formal sense of equality between fellow Japanese. One example is the samurai, which in the early modern era referred to a select minority of men who by virtue of heredity enjoyed political and often economic privilege. The concept was appropriated in the modern era by civilian and military bureaucracies to refer to the character of all Japanese. This redefinition of the samurai helped to frame the Meiji State’s policy of conscription as egalitarian, despite the fact that the Japanese military was still characterized by class disparities between officers and conscripted soldiers.15 By reframing the material and bodily sacrifice of imperial subjects as affirming a natural order of Japaneseness inherent to the population, Japanism became a convenient rhetorical device to sidestep the issue of material inequality in demanding participation. Not all imperial subjects were convinced by this rhetoric of Japanism. In practice, people responded to these demands of the state in different ways, determined by such factors as their socioeconomic status, gender, and colonial subjectivity, among others.16 But by the 1930s, the Japanist rhetoric reached a hegemonic status in Japanese political discourse, and it became difficult to challenge or avoid its reach. It was within this context that Mitsui and Minoda rose to notoriety, as they appointed themselves arbiters of true patriotism. Tosaka’s work has enjoyed a posthumous renaissance in Anglophone studies of Japan, as scholars have sought to rethink the issue of fascism and Japan from the standpoint of its relationship to the history of capitalist modernization.17 For scholars writing about fascism in the Japanese context today, Tosaka was one of many interwar intellectuals who provided a set of tools for analyzing the events unfolding on a global scale: the establishment of imperial powers and their mobilization of people for war, on the one hand, and the suppression of antiestablishment politics, on the other. Studies like his have shown that nationalist movements and ideas need to be understood in an international context. While the term “Japanism” might invite the assumption that it is a completely indigenous development best understood in the social, intellectual context of Japan, nothing could be further from the truth. The development of Japanism as an ideology was intimately related to the evolving circumstances of Japan as an imperial power in the late Meiji period. On an individual level, the ideas of Mitsui and Minoda were in many ways a response to the changing political economic landscape of the Taisho era. In building their theories of Japaneseness and its relation to political economy, Mitsui and Minoda partook from

10 Introduction

an intercontinental discourse of social theory that itself emerged from different, but similar, experiences of capitalist development, imperialism, and mass politics. Their Japanism drew upon non-Japanese figures, and their writings are filled with praises of those they viewed as important nationalists of other countries, who included not only figures like Hitler and Mussolini but also Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Mahatma Gandhi, and Jesus Christ. Minoda, Mitsui, and contributors to Genri Nippon did not identify with fascism as an intellectual or political movement—in fact, they were quite critical of fascism, sometimes accusing other nationalists of being fascists. But if we understand fascism more as a set of interconnected trends manifesting on a global scale—namely, clashes between empires internationally and mobilization and suppression domestically—the Genri Nippon Society was indeed an important part of the picture. It dismissed class struggle as a faulty, “universalist” means of understanding society while it promoted and celebrated sacrifice to the nation. It was at the forefront of efforts to silence critics who questioned the assent of nationalism as the primary arbiter of correct politics. It advocated the worship of Japan and its emperor as a new form of religion befitting the modern age. In a word, the Japanism of the Genri Nippon Society was one manifestation of the ideologies of fascism in Japan. It would be a mistake to assume that Japanist ideologues and the government were in lockstep during those years. Many Japanists placed their loyalty in a conception of the nation that transcended the particular form of government and state of their day and were vocal critics of politicians and bureaucrats whose thoughts and activities did not conform to this conception. While some Japanists, like Mitsui and Minoda, at times criticized politicians and bureaucrats in their publications, other nationalists engaged in direct, physical action in the name of “restoring” the Japanese state to its proper form, attacking and at times murdering figures in government and finance. Members of the political and economic elite looked upon this form of nationalist “restorationism,” inspired by the Meiji Restoration of 1868, with great unease. While Japanist rhetoric, even restorationist rhetoric, served as the foundation of state mobilization policies, it was also a lethal double-edged sword that threatened the stability of the state and the very lives of its leaders. This was because nationalism for Japanists was based upon an emotional connection between the individual patriot and whatever that patriot imagined to be the essence of the ethnos. As such, it often lay beyond the bureaucratic structure of the Japanese state, both in form and as an object of control. Bureaucrats charged with the task of studying nationalist opposition to the government, no doubt

Introduction 11

devoted to the nation through an acute sense of patriotic duty themselves, looked upon these forms of Japanism both with trepidation and the hope that they could harness its power to “propel our Japan forward.”18 The nationalism of the Genri Nippon Society also carried this sense of ambivalence toward the state. Its basic philosophical standpoint might be described as a form of moral individualism that at once celebrated individual free will and expression while confining that individual to a conservative, moralist conception of Japanese nationalism by positing that human experience was necessarily shaped by ethnicity.19 Viewed from this perspective, the nation is understood to be part of the natural environment within which the individual is embedded. The individual’s life, thoughts, emotions, and habits are always already national, at least if he or she is true to human nature. Thus, the ideal individual naturally acts out of his or her own free will in ways that accord with the interests of the nation. Such a vitalist conception of the nation served as one of the pillars of fascist thought in Europe as well.20 Both Minoda and Mitsui were vocal critics of universalist forms of individualism (kojinshugi) of their more progressive contemporaries. Although the tradition of liberalism in Japan contained influential threads that shared the nationalist moral individualism of the Genri Nippon Society, liberalists targeted by Minoda and Mitsui tended to define this relationship in more universalist terms of Enlightenment ideals. In contrast, Minoda and Mitsui advocated a more organic, vitalist conception of the modern Japanese subject, which they believed to be better grounded in lived reality. The right/left dichotomy fails to capture the dynamic of the Japanist ideology in imperial Japan because the term “right wing” itself was part of the government tool kit for attempting to harness nationalist ideology for maintaining order and mobilizing populations. Minoda and Mitsui appointed themselves arbiters of patriotism and were immensely successful in silencing voices that fell outside their definition of patriotism. But as critics of the government that used the rhetoric of patriotism, including terrorists, grew more prominent in the 1930s, the content of ideology became secondary to the urgent need to maintain a monopoly over its use. As government agencies adopted the directional modifier of “right wing” to denote Japanist ideologies antithetical to the status quo, in essence evaluating ideology based upon the degree of threat rather than content, “right wing” came to symbolize the ultimately arbitrary nature of the content of Japanist ideology, in contrast to its utility as a rhetoric for social order and mobilization. In that history, the Genri Nippon Society embodied the paradoxically hegemonic yet arbitrary nature of nationalist ideology in imperial Japan.

12 Introduction

BOOK OVERVIEW The chapters of the book unfold chronologically. The first two focus on the early career of Mitsui Kōshi, the elder statesman of the Genri Nippon Society and the main architect of its theories. Today, Mitsui’s poetry is featured prominently at the controversial Yūshūkan museum on the grounds of the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where a waka (a type of Japanese poem) of his is displayed in the opening room of a historical exhibit celebrating and defending Japan’s imperial legacy. In 1908 Mitsui was twenty-five years old and a rising star in the Japanese literary world, having been anointed editor of Akane, the journal of the Negishi Tanka Society founded by the pioneer of modern Japanese poetry, Masaoka Shiki. Chapter 1 explores Mitsui’s ethnonationalist theories of poetry that would eventually tear that poetry society in two. Mitsui’s theory of waka, perhaps the most important genre of nationalist literature, is strikingly cosmopolitan, inspired by figures such as Wundt, Goethe, and Whitman. The chapter traces how Mitsui’s project of exploring the human capacity of free expression paradoxically led to a patriotic hermeneutic that raised the waka of the Meiji emperor to the status of religious scripture. Chapter 2 continues the examination of Mitsui’s career into the Taisho period (1912–1926), known to historians as the era of “Taisho democracy.” Despite their antidemocratic reputation, many Japanists, including Mitsui, saw democratic thought as consistent with their own prescriptions for solving political problems. This chapter examines Mitsui’s nationalist, moralist brand of democracy in the context of the discourse of the Taisho Ishin, or Taisho Restoration, which sought to understand the political changes of the era as completing a process inaugurated with the 1868 Meiji Restoration. This restorationist discourse would later evolve into a radicalized form as Showa restorationism, an ideology that historians often associate with Japanese fascism. Chapter 3 focuses on Minoda Muneki’s criticism of Marxism in the 1920s and 1930s during the early years of Genri Nippon magazine. Though Minoda was indeed a virulent nationalist, in developing his critique of Marxism he borrowed from a cosmopolitan discourse of anti-Marxism. In turn, Japanese Marxists whom he criticized also drew upon intercontinental conversations. Marxists and anti-Marxists alike sought to build a more sophisticated understanding of the role of human agency in history than previous generations, whom they criticized as deterministic. Minoda’s essays and translations of European intellectuals critical of Marx and Marxism were useful to bureaucrats in the Ministry of Education seeking to combat the popularity of socialist thought among elite university students.

Introduction 13

This brought the Genri Nippon Society to the forefront of the government’s campaigns against socialism. The highest profile campaign that ensured the place of Minoda and the Genri Nippon Society in the history books was their role in the public downfall of liberal constitutional scholar Minobe Tatsukichi in the so-called Imperial Organ Theory Incident, the topic of chapter 4. Minoda was a leader of a massive campaign of patriotic organizations that ultimately led to the government’s public disavowal of Minobe’s theory, which had long stood as the basis for broad parliamentary powers in the constitutional monarchy. It is seldom recognized, however, that by this time the Japanese government had grown wary of radical nationalism, having lost prime ministers and politicians to nationalist assassins. The incident, though remembered as the decisive moment in the suppression of liberal thought, was also the stage for the struggle over the august mantra of patriotism between the government and nationalist activists like Minoda. Chapter 5 examines the decline and ultimate demise of the Genri Nippon Society and the Japanist movement. While Minoda’s crusade against liberal and Marxist intellectuals continued into the early 1940s, so, too, did government surveillance of Japanist movements. The society struggled to produce a coherent philosophy of Japan’s imperialist project and its wars, as it competed with organizations like the Showa Research Association and the so-called reform bureaucrats who brought a technocratic ethos to Japan’s mobilization policies. As the war intensified, Genri Nippon’s paper rations were cut short, and its more vocal collaborators critical of the Tōjō Cabinet were labeled communists and arrested. Depressed and in failing health, Minoda ceased writing in the summer of 1943, and Genri Nippon folded shortly thereafter.

CH A P T ER O N E

From Writing the Self to Reading the Nation

The permanent exhibit at the Yūshūkan museum on the grounds of the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo displays artifacts from wars waged by the Japanese. Through nineteen rooms it builds a narrative of the Japanese soldier that stretches back to ancient warriors, whose traces are left to us in the form of old tales and archaeological discoveries, and up to the modern-era soldiers of imperial Japan, whose spirits are now enshrined as nation-protecting deities at Yasukuni. The exhibit has drawn controversy for the way it frames the Japanese expansionism of the modern era primarily as a justifiable rebellion against Western imperialism.1 The chronologically themed rooms are bookended by galleries with more explicitly emotive displays. Visitors enter the exhibit through a display of poetry commemorating the sacrificial spirit of the Japanese warrior and exit by way of encountering the letters and photos of individual soldiers who fought for the Japanese Empire. Thus, the exhibit is designed in such a way as to invite the visitor to experience the life of selfless loyalty on the battlefield in the opening room, Spirit of the Samurai (Monofu no Kokoro), and leave the exhibit having experienced the vivid humanity of the individual soldiers who lost their lives in the wars narrativized in the rest of the exhibit.2 Taken as a whole, the exhibit is designed to link the personal experience of war and death to a national narrative revolving around the central object of loyalty, the emperor, who is the embodiment of the nation itself. Accordingly, the Spirit of the Samurai display in the opening room features a marshal’s sword, which bears the chrysanthemum seal of the imperial house, at the center surrounded by large banners of waka poetry in the four corners of the room. The four poems read as follows: 14



From Writing the Self to Reading the Nation 15 We shall die in the sea We shall die in the mountain In whatever way We shall die beside the emperor Never turning back. Ōtomo no Yakamochi For the sovereign and the world, would I spare my life, when sacrifice for them is so worthwhile Prince Munenaga If one asks about the Yamato Spirit of these islands it is like the cherry blossoms that bloom in the morning sun Motoori Norinaga The painful lives of those who cared for their country— piled up and up and up, protecting the land of Yamato Mitsui Kōshi

The four poets represent the classical, medieval, early modern, and modern eras of poetry and loyalty to the emperor. Ōtomo no Yakamochi was one of the compilers of the eighth-century Manyōshū, the first anthology of Japanese poetry, and an important statesman of the imperial court in Nara. Prince Munenaga was the loyal son of Emperor Godaigo, the ruler of the brief Kenmu Restoration of the fourteenth century and the founder of the Southern Court after the defeat of his imperial forces at the hands of future shogun Ashikaga Takauji. The eighteenth-century intellectual Motoori Norinaga is perhaps the most well-known scholar of kokugaku (national learning), and a pioneer in the study of the Japanese language and aesthetics. The most curious of the four is Mitsui Kōshi (1883–1953), a poet who was of modest renown even during his most active years.3 Today Mitsui is a largely forgotten figure in the annals of Japanese literature, and many visitors to the Yūshūkan museum might find it somewhat odd to see this relatively obscure poet featured together with the other three. However, this selection makes some sense in the context of the exhibit. The above poem gained some popularity among nationalist activists and soldiers

16

Chapter One

headed to the front during the Second World War.4 Some quoted his words in the letters they sent home, and others kept the words in their pockets as they met their ends on the battlefield. Mitsui’s theory of poetry, which could be read as a kind of nationalist theology, also well suits the Yūshūkan’s physical and institutional setting on the Yasukuni Shrine grounds, and his reputation as a right-wing intellectual matches the political reputation of the shrine today. These aspects of his career have relegated him to the margins of Japanese intellectual history, where he is labeled as a dangerous, irrational, fanatical worshipper of the emperor. Mitsui’s reputation as a dangerous thinker is well warranted. His writings and political activities during the interwar period were directly related to the plight of the many progressive and liberal intellectuals of those years dogged by his accusations of being unpatriotic. Such harassment at times escalated to police surveillance, court proceedings, or even imprisonment. It would be a mistake, however, to push Mitsui to the forgotten margins of intellectual history. If we are to account for the repressive intellectual climate of those years, it is important to understand the motivations and political culture of key players such as Mitsui. As my account of Mitsui’s early career will make clear, the origins of Mitsui’s ethnonationalist theories were neither the fringe of intellectual society nor simply traditionalist. Mitsui drew upon what were at the time cuttingedge literary and philosophical trends that would produce the canonical works of modern literary and intellectual history of Japan. As a young poet, he followed in the footsteps of his hero Masaoka Shiki in attempting to modernize Japanese genres of poetry. Like many of his more famous contemporaries, Mitsui’s philosophical explorations attempted to overcome rationalist models of philosophy in order to incorporate the unpredictable and amorphous elements of life, such as emotions and religious revelation. His reactionary, traditionalist politics were inextricable from his progressive, modernist intellectual interests. MASAOKA SHIKI’S HAIKU: SKETCHING FROM LIFE Mitsui Kōnosuke (later known by his penname Kōshi) was born the eldest son of a wealthy landowner just outside of Kōfu, the capital of Yamanashi Prefecture lying to the west of Tokyo, in 1883, the sixteenth year of the Meiji reign. The Mitsui family traces its roots back several centuries to a samurai lineage and exerted considerable influence in their local politics and economy. As a young man interested in the unpromising field of literature, Kōnosuke did not get along well with his father. Still, he followed



From Writing the Self to Reading the Nation 17

an elite track in education typical for a studious youth of his socioeconomic status, moving to Tokyo in 1898 to enter the Keika Middle School, a relatively new school that soon established itself as a feeder to the most prestigious institutions of higher learning. From there he moved on to the First Higher School and Tokyo Imperial University, the best that the empire had to offer at their respective levels of education. Among his cohort at the latter two were future luminaries like Abe Jirō and Iwanami Shigeo. As a young student, Mitsui was captivated by the work of Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), a pioneer in Japanese poetry remembered today for establishing the modern genre of haiku. At Tokyo Imperial University, Mitsui studied the Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves (Manyōshu), the ancient classic praised by Shiki as a model for modern poetry. By his first year at the university, he was attending poetry readings hosted by Shiki’s disciples and gaining the respect of more accomplished poets. Mitsui quickly established himself as a young talent. At age twenty-five and as a fresh graduate of the university, he took over as the editor of the newly founded literary magazine Akane, the official publication of Shiki’s Negishi Tanka Society.5 The year was 1908, a mere decade since Shiki had founded the poetry society and only six years since his death from tuberculosis at thirty-three years of age. Having joined the society in 1904, Mitsui never had the chance to meet his idol.6 Nevertheless, as editor of Akane, he was determined to continue Shiki’s project of reforming the literary culture of Japan. Mitsui’s interpretation of Shiki’s literary legacy would eventually split the Negishi Tanka Society in two and go on to serve as the theoretical foundation for the literary and scholarly production of the right-wing Genri Nippon Society. Masaoka Shiki is often credited with modernizing the genre of haiku by freeing it from Tokugawa era conventions and endowing it with modern forms of beauty. His Hototogisu Haiku Society was an important site of experimentation in the genre, while his lesser-known Negishi Tanka Society was instrumental in the development of tanka.7 Tanka, literally “short song,” is a genre of poetry that is in fact slightly longer than haiku and is also known by the name waka, or “Japanese song.” Born into a low-ranking samurai family in 1867, the final year of the Tokugawa reign, Shiki received both a classical samurai education from his family and a more modern education at the Tokyo University Preparatory School (Tōdai Yobimon), the future First Higher School. Thus, his approach to poetry drew from inspirations unavailable to his immediate predecessors. Central to his theory of haiku was the concept of shasei (sketching from life).8 Shiki arrived at this concept through exchanges with the renowned artist, friend, and collaborator Nakamura Fusetsu, a

18

Chapter One

painter trained by Italian painter Antonio Fontanesi, whose short tenure in Tokyo left a tremendous impact on the direction of Western-style painting in Japan.9 For Fontanesi, nature provided the painter with the most complete subject. In its beauty and perfection, nature offered an infinite number of possibilities for a work of art, and it was the artist’s task to imitate nature as closely as possible. Nature was so flawless that the artist never had to add— only subtract—from the scene to create balance and beauty. This ethic of subtraction also resonated with Herbert Spencer’s principle of minimalism as expounded in his Philosophy of Style, a book that left an impression on Shiki during his short-lived attempt to seriously study philosophy as a student. There Spencer writes, “Whatever the nature of the thought to be conveyed, this skillful selection of a few particulars which imply the rest, is the key to success.”10 Spencer’s preference for brevity inspired Shiki to explore the use of, for example, seasonal terms to allude to an array of emotions and settings, and Fontanesi’s teachings of imitation led him to explore directional words to express depth, positionality, and frame. In describing his method of shasei, Shiki noted, “Shasei transcribes nature. However, we artists hope to transcribe something more beautiful than nature. Artists must draw out and transcribe the noble ideal” (kōshō naru risō).11 In his “transcription” of nature, Shiki, like Fontanesi, not only attempted to simply produce a completely identical image of nature but use nature’s perfection to achieve an ideal beauty through the minimalist genre of haiku. Shiki’s innovation found a receptive audience in writers across literary genres in the Meiji era. Natsume Sōseki, an associate of Shiki and one of Japan’s most celebrated novelists, was among many who published short pieces of shasei-bun, or shasei prose. Shiki himself noted that the technique of shasei need not only apply to the genre of haiku nor does the object of transcription necessarily need to be nature. Bedridden with tuberculosis during the last years of his life, Shiki busied himself with a serial that meticulously “transcribed” both the anguish and possibilities of life in a sickbed and began to plot out the means to enact a “reform” of the thirty-one-syllable waka along the same lines as the seventeen-syllable haiku. Shiki’s ambitious critical impulse laid the groundwork for future explorations of Japanese poetic genres and inspired a generation of literary theorists. ¯ SHI’S WAKA: MITSUI KO TRANSCRIBING EMOTION Mitsui articulated his theory of post-Shiki poetics in an article he wrote as a university student in 1906 for Ashibi, then the magazine of the Negishi



From Writing the Self to Reading the Nation 19

Tanka Society and a predecessor to Akane, for which Mitsui would later serve as editor. Titled “Explaining the Impulse and Expressive Methods of Poetry Composition and Exposing the Ills of the Poetry Establishment,” the essay is a study of the genres of haiku and waka from a phenomenological perspective of human subjectivity and art. Mitsui’s perspective is consistent with the German idealist and contemporary psychological sciences that divided phenomena into internal mental phenomena and external physical phenomena perceived through the senses. Under this basic rubric, which he called a “psychological perspective,” Mitsui understood time to be most closely associated with internal psychic experience and space to be more closely associated with external sensory experience.12 Genres of art and literature are best understood through their manipulation of our sense of time and space, which correspond to our internal and external experiences. For example, the art of painting, for Mitsui, was conducive to expressing what the artist perceives in the external world through the senses—particularly things seen in space such as color and shapes. Mitsui declared that if haiku was a form well suited to expressing the poet’s experience of the external world, waka was better suited for expressing internal, affective experiences. Mitsui claimed that both the strength and weakness of haiku lie in its minimalist structure. It is true that the minimalism of haiku is what beckons the poet’s creative use of composition to produce spatial effects (like in a painting), but this minimalism also hinders the poet’s representation of human experience. Seventeen syllables are simply not enough to convey the stream of human emotions through time. Haiku was not only inadequate for expressing human emotions, according to Mitsui, but it was also ill-equipped to surpass visual media in expressing nature. The minimalist structure of haiku made it an abstract form of poetry that elevated composition over meaning. Despite its potential for ingenuity, because words are inevitably mediated by the poet’s mind, it can never approach the optic experience of nature that paintings can reproduce—that is, the nature that the reader of the poem encounters is always mediated by the words the poet has chosen. Mitsui explained that this is what Shiki meant when he once declared the “end of haiku,” or that he would rather be a painter if he only had the talent.13 While nature was better suited to the art of painting since both are experienced visually and spatially, Mitsui believed that psychological phenomena, such as emotions, were better suited for literature because they are experienced internally in temporal succession. Language and emotion, he reasoned, were both predominantly temporal. The waka form

20

Chapter One

is better equipped to convey emotions than haiku because of its relative length—thirty-one syllables is enough to transcribe a complete line of thoughts or emotions as they arise within oneself. Because Mitsui understood language and psychic phenomena as temporal and internal, he believed that language could accomplish a greater degree of directness in its relation to psychic phenomena in comparison to phenomena in space. While the shorter haiku encourages the poet to play with the abstract potential of words through symbolism and composition, the longer waka challenges the poet to directly transcribe his or her emotions. Mitsui’s “psychological approach” in some ways anticipated the so-called stream of consciousness narrative made famous by James Joyce. Mitsui argued that its comparative length made waka a simpler genre than haiku, a point that Shiki had made as well. Instead of seeing waka as a series of spatially arranged lines (5 + 7 + 5 + 7 + 7), poets should think of waka as one continuous line of thirty-one syllables that dictates psychic phenomena directly without interruption. At the same time, this “directness” does not mean that “spatiality” and “relationality” are sacrificed altogether. Mitsui argued that waka truly displays its strength through rensaku, which involves multiple lines of waka in succession. Here a different sort of “space” is accomplished, wherein relationality between multiple poems creates a “landscape” of human emotions that possesses both movement and unity.14 According to Mitsui, from its very inception waka was meant to be a site of juxtaposition, for it was originally a format based upon a call and response between multiple poets. This enabled poets to pursue a spatiality of increased depth in comparison to haiku since the type of space explored here was not simply formal but, more importantly for Mitsui, emotional. In other words, communication, or the goal of mutual understanding (rikai), served as the basis of waka poetry. By placing individual waka poems that directly express certain psychic phenomena alongside one another, Mitsui posited that the genre of waka through rensaku could express the depth and dynamism of the human mind. While haiku poets of the previous generation, like Shiki, looked to the possibilities of portraying the “objective” beauty of nature through their own observations, the next generation would seek to express the “subjective” beauty of human emotions, restoring literature to what Mitsui saw as its proper role. If Shiki’s contribution to Japanese poetics was the technique of “sketching from life,” Mitsui’s was an attempt to lay out a method of transcribing emotions. Mitsui’s manifesto on the methods of waka closes with a call to fellow poets to pursue the true calling of literature:



From Writing the Self to Reading the Nation 21 We must do away with the gate of phenomena and grasp its internal activity. We must observe the motive that lies at the basis of all activity, rather than matter that appear before us. We must understand the indestructible activity that lies at the basis of all activity. Understanding! Ah, this is the core of human activity. It is direct understanding. It is understanding the totality. In other words, it is faith. It is absolute faith. . . . Faith: if we explain this objectively, it is satisfaction in the heart. We must pursue life by externalizing the living emotions that reside in our own chests. We act so that we may satisfy our own emotions. This movement of the heart, this conviction of pursuit becomes the impulse for poetry. Ah, the activity of reality, the representation of force: this is literature.15

Mitsui attempted to decode what he believed to be at the origin of poetic form and authentic representation: the human psyche. According to Mitsui, the waka form carries the potential to transmit the poet’s internal, psychological feelings directly to the reader—waka is the elusive, fully transparent medium that paradoxically does not mediate but achieves unity. His approach echoed the so-called romantic irony of the early German Romantics in that his certainty that such a transparent representation in unity is in fact possible rests on the precarious pivot of faith.16 Romantic irony acknowledges that such a unity may not be possible while simultaneously insisting on it, for such imperfection is the condition of being human and the necessary foundation for creativity. Mitsui’s celebration of individual emotion was consistent with the literary Romanticism popular in the late Meiji period as well.17 His romanticism would later develop into a nationalist one in which the “space” between people mediated by the affective communication of waka is interpreted as a national space mediated by waka, a quintessentially Japanese poetic form. In February 1908, Mitsui became the editor of Akane, the successor of Ashibi, and in September of that same year he was appointed editor of the tanka column in the influential biweekly opinion magazine Japan and the Japanese (Nihon oyobi nihonjin). These were productive years for Mitsui. His new position at Japan and the Japanese gave him a forum to express his opinions, both literary and political, to a wider audience, and soon he was contributing two essays a month in addition to editing the poetry column and the entire journal of Akane. Not all were enamored with the young editor’s approach. By the fifth issue, a mere four months after the inaugural issue of Akane, a mass exodus of its most prominent writers had begun. In October of the same year, Itō Sachio, who had been the editor of Ashibi and the one who selected Mitsui as editor of Akane, founded a new journal for the defected Negishi Tanka Society titled Araragi, a monthly that continued circulation until 1997.

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Chapter One

The reasons for the split seem to be anything but simple. Shiode Tamaki, who has written extensively on Mitsui, suggests two reasons for the split: Mitsui’s disdain for the collaborations between members of the Negishi Tanka Society with a rival group led by Yosano Akiko and Tekkan and the fact that Itō and others did not like the new editorial direction that Mitsui was taking.18 Under Mitsui, Akane had significantly broadened the scope of its contents, reaching beyond tanka poetry to longer genres of literature as well as Western literature and literary criticism. Though attempts were made to reunite the two factions, the differences proved to be irreconcilable. A little less than a year and a half since its first issue Akane ceased publication, and Mitsui returned home to Yamanashi to focus on research and writing.19 FAITH AS THE BASIS OF NATIONALISM: MITSUI’S SHINRAN Like many young intellectuals of his generation, Mitsui was preoccupied by existential questions. By the first decade of the twentieth century, when Mitsui was a university student in Tokyo, there was already a strong tradition of intellectuals exploring Buddhist ideas in tandem with European thought and elaborating on the ideas and possibilities of Buddhism through a European academic language.20 Mitsui’s interest in the medieval Buddhist figure Shinran was sparked by visits to the Center for Seeking the Way (Kyūdō Kaikan), a lecture hall and a student housing unit located a few minutes’ walk from Tokyo Imperial University. The center was run by a Pure Land Buddhist priest of the Ōtani School named Chikazumi Jōkan and was a hub for university students and young Buddhist intellectuals interested in exploring the ideas of Shinran.21 What attracted students to Chikazumi’s weekly sermons, however, was not the prospect of hearing about new directions in the philosophization of the Japanese Buddhist canon but rather of hearing his exhortations against overphilosophization in favor of simply believing. Chikazumi was not always a critic of philosophy. Born to a Pure Land priestly family in 1870 in the midst of state-sponsored persecution of Buddhism in Japan, Chikazumi was identified early on by his sect as a talented potential leader and sent abroad to study the role the Christian Church played in the spiritual life of society in order to assess how Buddhism might be placed at the foundation of Japan’s modernization.22 Like his more famous colleagues Inoue Enryō and Kiyozawa Manshi, whom historians often credit as pioneers of modern philosophy in Japan, early in his career Chikazumi, too, sought to distill the value of Buddhism



From Writing the Self to Reading the Nation 23

through a comparative study with European philosophy. But soon he became disillusioned with this approach and came to regard theory and philosophy as obstacles to experiencing Buddhistic truth. This was clearly reflected in his teachings at the Center for Seeking the Way. A passionate and charismatic orator, Chikazumi’s sermons were known for featuring personal testimonies of religious experience: the despair and anguish he felt in being disillusioned with life and his practice as well as the joy and inspiration he experienced in moments of revelation. For Chikazumi, Shinran’s teachings did not point to any method for attaining enlightenment—they only taught the certainty of uncertainty, that life was difficult and unpredictable, and that humans were too powerless to fathom their own place in the cosmos, much less do something about it. While the name Center for Seeking the Way seemed to indicate that knowledge toward this “way” was hidden behind its doors, Chikazumi offered no such direction. According to his reading of Shinran, all one could do was release oneself to the currents of the world and simply brace for whatever might come one’s way. Shinran taught that because Amidanyorai, its central figure, sought the salvation of all people, the way to salvation is manifested in the world of humans and is presented to them through this act of grace. The way to salvation cannot be attained by actively seeking it; one can only humbly receive it. But because life is full of hardship and despair, this passivity does not come easily. Thus, seeking the way (kyūdō) signified the spirit of perseverance one needed in living the tragedy of life. Crucially, because the experience of the revelation of the way was necessarily personal, one could neither be sure that one had indeed experienced the grace of Amidanyorai nor theorize a coherent explication of the experience in writing. Thus, Chikazumi’s sermons and meetings featured passionate testimonies by him and his members, sharing in the profound experience of revelation as well as the pain in enduring the uncertainty. Chikazumi’s denial of the importance of philosophical expounding in Buddhist practice was provocative and exciting to philosophically minded students. His rebuke of rationalism spoke to youth disillusioned with the prospects of modern life and opened the door to considering life in newly meaningful ways. With that in mind, it might be appropriate to situate Chikazumi’s intervention in the context of contemporary attempts to account for the immediacy of personal experience by philosophers like William James, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Wilhelm Wundt and, in Japan, Nishida Kitarō. There was a great thirst for such works among young intellectuals of the time. Iwanami Shigeo, a classmate of Mitsui at the First Higher School who also found inspiration in Chikazumi, described his student years as

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an era of anguish (hanmon) among youth at the elite schools in Tokyo.23 In 1903 Fujimura Misao, another student at the First Higher School, famously leapt into Kegon Falls to his death after leaving a poem describing his existential angst. The incident led to a series of copycat suicide attempts at the same site and elsewhere, leaving a profound impression on students interested in existential questions and philosophical inquiry. Iwanami himself described Fujimura’s suicide as an object of his envy and longing.24 Intellectuals who came of age during that time noted that students flocked to lectures and events that dealt with questions of religion, which were held frequently near the First Higher School.25 Lectures by Christian figures like Uchimura Kanzō, Ebina Danjō, and Uemura Masahisa were especially well attended, as were those by Chikazumi. Iwanami, too, recalled how he was able to move on from his malaise after meeting Chikazumi, who recommended to him Leo Tolstoy’s A Confession, along with his own writing on faith.26 Chikazumi’s Center for Seeking the Way was not a simple, backward look to a medieval figure; it reflected the cosmopolitan orientation of the Ōtani School of the Meiji period. Its building, the fundraising for which began during Mitsui’s student years when he frequented the grounds, still stands today and embodies the global modernist context of the inquiries that took place behind its doors. Commissioned to architect Takeda Goichi in 1903, it was the first art nouveau structure designed in Japan, though it was not actually built until 1915 due to financial difficulties. Chikazumi’s commission was based upon his experience of visiting the YMCA chapel in Chicago, an institution that impressed him for its commitment to assisting not only the spiritual needs of youth but also the material needs.27 Though Mitsui himself was no longer a student when construction for the newer center was finally finished, he contributed to the fundraising effort, and Shinran remained an important touchstone throughout his life.28 Mitsui’s search for authentic knowledge through poetry also led him to the idea of faith, and true to his time, his reading of Shinran took place alongside books written by European theorists.29 Among them, Mitsui was especially taken by the work of Wilhelm Wundt. Mitsui studied Wundtian psychology at Tokyo Imperial University, where he attended courses taught by Matsumoto Matatarō, who had trained under Wundt in Leipzig.30 Wundt, a prolific explorer of the constitution of the human psyche, developed two approaches to the mind that are relevant to the discussion of Mitsui’s nationalism. First, Wundt held that human psychology is fundamentally complex and full of contingent factors and thus is completely unpredictable on an individual level.31 Second, despite this unpredictability, observers can grasp the context in which this unpredictability arises through



From Writing the Self to Reading the Nation 25

the study of social, or folk, psychology. The first position in many ways echoes Chikazumi’s approach to human experience in that it similarly disputes the idea that one can rationally account for what the human mind has experienced. Mitsui found Wundt’s approach novel and attractive because it suggested that the very grounding for this unpredictability was the ethnos, which included linguistic, religious, and other cultural conventions and practices. Mitsui’s interest in Wundtian psychology increased in the final years of the Meiji era as he began to articulate a theory of nationalism. This engagement with Wundtian thought paved the way for Mitsui to conclude that waka was the site for authentic language and emotion, which were both fundamentally ethnic. For Mitsui, Wundt’s thought provided an exciting way to place the study of language and texts at the basis of understanding the human. Thus, etymological studies could lead to the original impulses that produced the sounds that the “primordial Japanese” made that are today used as words, and the hermeneutics of certain types of poetry could reveal authentically “Japanese” emotional qualities. By bringing Shinran and Wundt in conversation with one another, Mitsui concluded with Shinran that life indeed was uncertain and unpredictable, full of tragedy and despair. But at the same time, this world of human existence possessed an ethnic context that one could understand through hermeneutic scholarship while being certain that the echoes of its origins could be heard in the timbres of one’s own pronouncement of the Japanese language. One could find solace in one’s place within the ethnos, which, like the faith of Chikazumi, entailed giving oneself up to the fate of the nation. Mitsui’s interest in Wundt was nothing out of the ordinary in those days. His project of grasping the totality of experience was one shared by many contemporary writers and philosophers, and the works of Wundt were very much a part of the intellectual culture. Recalling his student years in the early 1910s, the philosopher Miki Kiyoshi recalled: In those days, German scholarship had taken over the intellectual world of our country. In the area of psychology, everyone was clamoring the name of Wundt. I also read Wundt’s shorter work on psychology translated by Professor Sokumizu and a book on Wundt’s Psychology by Sudō Shinkichi, and found the original of Wundt’s Outlines of Psychology at a used book store and studied it.32

Only a few years earlier in 1911, Nishida Kitarō, who later became Miki’s instructor at the philosophy department at Kyoto Imperial University, consulted Wundt’s idea of “immediate experience” in writing his maiden work An Inquiry into the Good.33 This was the beginning of what intellectual

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historians of Japan have called Taisho vitalism (seimeishugi), when philosophers and writers explored broad questions concerning humanity and life in an effort to move beyond the systems of philosophy that focused on the human capacity for reason.34 Indeed, Mitsui’s cosmopolitan mixture of a medieval Buddhist figure and modern German psychological theory was consistent with the intellectual trends of his times. Two points are worth highlighting here. The first is the fact that Mitsui’s project dovetailed with contemporary efforts to locate contingent and immediate individual experience within broader contexts that are more manageable for theoretical treatment and that his toolbox for doing so was strikingly cosmopolitan. Because he himself was drawing upon the social psychological methods of a German thinker, Mitsui believed that this method of hermeneutically assessing the principle of ethnonational essence could be applied outside of the Japanese context as well. If Shinran could be read as a prophet of the Japanese nation, so, too, could Jesus be read as a prophet of Israel. If the Meiji emperor with his profound poems and rescripts was the modern embodiment of Japanese spiritual language, American figures like Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman could also be interpreted as profound creators of a new American national essence. Spiritual authenticity and the experience of it, according to Mitsui, was not the sole property of the Japanese nation. His was an age in which people around the globe were newly “discovering” the essence, or the principle, of ethnic community and its historical trajectory. The second point is that Mitsui’s theory of ethnic identity hinges on a vitalist understanding of human intuition, an approach to understanding the human that was then in vogue among intellectuals in Japan and elsewhere. While his particular definition of the “nation” is based upon a wildly obscure scholarly methodology, at its core is the theory that the ethnos, the nation, is the foundation of individual experience. This link between nationalism and theories of human life and psychology made what we might call “vitalist nationalism” ripe for both appropriation by government agencies interested in suppressing socialist ideas or mobilizing populations for war and as a ground for criticizing the government as unpatriotic. Because Mitsui and the ultranationalist organization that he founded became the face of academic suppression in wartime Japan, it is easy to conflate Mitsui’s brand of nationalism and the ideological program of the government. Though we can rightly conclude that by being a vocal advocate of the national spirit he lent support to the idea of the community united under a national spirit and the emperor in general, at the same time, the bureaucrats and politicians expressed more frustration toward Mitsui’s Genri Nippon Society than admiration. Nationalism was inextricable



From Writing the Self to Reading the Nation 27

from the set of Meiji-era institutional policies that were put into effect for the purpose of uniting the population against the threat of imperialism. Placed in the hands of aggressively militant activists, nationalist ideology threatened to accomplish the opposite, creating antagonism between their particular interpretation of “true” patriotism and that reflected in government policies. Though Mitsui’s ultranationalist group attracted few members and their interpretation of Shinran and nationalism was indeed peculiar, the identification of the national spirit as something affective on a fundamental level, as well as something profoundly personal, was not at all unique, particularly among fervent nationalist activists. Nationalism served as the de facto ideology under which countless nationalist activists worked throughout the early Showa era, but individual manifestations of these nationalisms carried the potential for a schism between them and the orthodox brand of nationalism that government agencies were actively promoting through their institutional programs and passively representing through their collective actions. Just as government officials could pronounce moral guidelines for the ideal imperial subject, individual imperial subjects, too, were free to judge them according to the same guidelines or those of their own concoction. And judge they did, as the government’s inability to respond to many of the political and economic crises led to countless critiques and physical attacks upon the government in the name of the national spirit. By claiming to represent the nation, the government necessarily left itself open to be labeled as treacherous, or a betrayer of the nation, should it fail to maintain a monopoly over interpretations of the nation or keep its population relatively content. While all self-proclaimed nationalists appealed to a universal nationalist ideal because the idea of a national “spirit” suggested a state of consciousness that served as the basis or the motivating force of an individual’s set of actions, like Chikazumi’s idea of “faith,” the concrete manifestation of it hinged upon the personal experience of the individual, however inflected by nationalist education or other disciplinary institutions. Thus, under certain circumstances activists invoked their passionate loyalty to the national polity in critiquing government policies—or even assassinating important politicians, bureaucrats, and capitalists. NATION, LANGUAGE, AND THE CREATIVE ACT OF TRANSLATION After a brief self-imposed exile in Yamanashi following the split of the Negishi Tanka Society, Mitsui returned to Tokyo in October 1910 to take a

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teaching position at Keika Junior High School, his alma mater. He revived Akane the following May and renamed it a year later as Life and Representation (Jinsei to hyōgen), the title of his column in Japan and the Japanese. The title paid homage to Wundt, who declared in his 1889 work System der Philosophie that representation (Darstellung) through a creative process, not mere depiction (Abbildung), was the task of art.35 Indeed, Mitsui’s early career as a poet and theorist was defined by the question of how and what poetry was capable of representing. During the 1910s, Mitsui became interested in the question of how the act of representation was a socially embedded process. Upon returning to Tokyo, Mitsui began to serialize a translation of Goethe’s Faust in Japan and the Japanese, which he continued until the launch of Life and Representation a year and a half later. Citing Luther’s translation of the Bible as the preeminent example, Mitsui argued that national languages were a product of a unification process that developed through the translation of great works.36 By engaging in the translation of Faust in a widely circulated opinion magazine, Mitsui hoped that he could actively participate in the creation of a unified national language. The pages of Life and Representation, too, reflected Mitsui’s editorial direction of looking internationally for inspiration in thinking about the Japanese language. Its issues during the 1910s included translations of works by Goethe and Wundt, as well as Anatole France and Henri Bergson, and essays on Walt Whitman, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Auguste Rodin. His theory of poetry also expanded its scope to the social foundations of language, which he interpreted to be national. Instrumental to this expansion was his engagement with the haiku theory of his friend Ōsuga Otsuji (1881–1920). Otsuji was one of the few members of the Negishi Tanka Society who remained with Mitsui after the split, and his theory of haiku is one of the few intellectual products of the short-lived Akane still discussed in postwar scholarship.37 Historians of literature credit Otsuji with linking the classicist use of time-honored words that carry seasonal connotations (kigo) to the modern forms of symbolism then gaining in popularity. While acknowledging that Shiki’s shasei opened up a method of directly expressing what appeared to the poet (Otsuji called this katsugenhō, literally, the method of expressing that which lives), Otsuji believed that symbolic words and phrases, such as seasonal words, could be used for a more indirect, suggestive expression (anjihō) that would produce far more complex effects than a simple, direct report of the poet’s observations.38 Otsuji’s declaration of a “new tendency” in haiku spawned a series of innovations in the genre, most famously the work of Kawahigashi Hekigotō, who would abandon seasonal words altogether in developing a new naturalist style.



From Writing the Self to Reading the Nation 29

But for Mitsui, it was Otsuji’s focus on seasonal words that led him to reconsider his method of representing what he called internal phenomena, or emotions. In his early writings, he understood haiku to be primarily a spatial genre, where observations of external objects in nature are expressed creatively through formal arrangement. Though he believed it was these spatial characteristics that made haiku interesting and ultimately freed it from the shackles of tradition, he also believed that literature needed to be primarily temporal in order to exhibit its true strength as an art form: the representation of the inner emotional experience. Mitsui sought to incorporate space into his theory of waka through rensaku in order to add depth and context to individual waka representations of emotion. Though “space” continued to be an underlying theme in Mitsui’s poetics throughout the rest of the Meiji period and into the Taisho, its role became one having much less to do with the formal differences in genre and more to do with language itself. The influence of Otsuji’s theory of seasonal words in haiku is evident in Mitsui’s theory of language, which posited that the degree to which certain symbols registered with individuals depended upon their cultural, national upbringing. Consider the following commentary in his 1912 article “New Values in Haiku” on the use of seasonal words: The object of art is real life. The secret to art exists in the representation of real life. Thus, seasonal topics should be seen as representations of real life. They should not simply be seen as classification imposed upon the natural world. . . . Nature, as the abstraction of the discerning subject (ninshiki suru shukan), is not an object of art, but the object of natural science. Thus, haiku takes up the artistic representation of real life again as the object of representation, rather than real life itself. Stated more concretely, “seasonal birds” in the haiku form in no way refers to the zoological or other general seasonal birds. It is the seasonal birds as the representation of our national life. It expresses not the seasonal birds themselves, but our interest in seasonal birds. Thus, the basic secret to the technique of haiku is to take, in this case, seasonal birds as a representation of this inner experience.39

Here, Mitsui sees haiku as doubly expressive. The “material” of haiku poetry, namely highly symbolic words such as those related to the seasons, in themselves already constitute the first stage of representation. This stage occurs somewhat independently of the individual poet because it is an effect produced by years of repeated use by past poets whose works have contributed to building what Mitsui calls the feelings of “our national life.” The importance of seasonal words in poetry lies not in the act of describing the external object in nature itself but in suggesting a type of “inner experience” one has when encountering such an object.40

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The second stage of representation in haiku occurs when the poet invokes these representations (symbols) of collective experience, which are representations of an experience with which the poet identifies, in composing a poem. This shift to the idea of a collective experience as an object of representation is an important moment in the development of Mitsui’s theory of nationalism. If we recall that earlier Mitsui pointed to the existence of an abstract “space” between lines of waka poetry that create a rensaku, here that abstract space is marked as “national,” rather than simply functioning as a site for poetic creativity. For Mitsui, haiku, and, more generally, poetry, is necessarily national in its mode of representation precisely because the “material” used in its creation are words. And these words are a natural part of “national life” because they express the everyday emotional tendencies that the Japanese have developed through their accumulated usage. In “A Psychological Study of Waka,” published a few months after his study on haiku and national sentiment, Mitsui is more pronounced in stating his differences with Shiki. While praising his idol for breaking free of Tokugawa-era practices and championing the creative impulse of the poet, Mitsui suggested that Shiki’s next step should have been a “psychological” examination of these theories that accounted for the historical development of Japanese culture. This representation of fleeting emotion is originally an individual one. Yet, through the pervasive nature of shared affect and the power of traditional teachings, this individual representation becomes social representation and ethnic creation. These and songs of battle, labor, encouragement, joy, sadness, and laughter are expressed through rhythmic language. Hereby it embraces its vitality through the direct representation of truth and the power of unification. . . . All art is based upon the conditions of the culture that give birth to it.41

By placing individual emotive expression in the context of ethnic national culture, an object of modern historical, anthropological, and social psychological analysis, Mitsui attempted to provide a scientific basis for evaluating subjective expression. Significantly, from this perspective such an expression relies on ethnic national mediation for it to be understood at all. Here, Mitsui found Wundt’s methods of psychology to be useful. Though Mitsui did not systematically outline the precise ways in which Wundt’s work informed his own, we can deduce a rough sketch from his writings.42 Wundt held that experience is fundamentally unitary, and the



From Writing the Self to Reading the Nation 31

object of perception and the idea are originally identical. This unitary experience is then divided into two factors through the functions of the human psyche: the subject that experiences and the object that is being experienced. For better or worse, the natural sciences abstracted the subjective factors out of experience, taking objects to exist independently of the subjective experience of it. Strictly speaking, though useful for society in developing new technological and medical practices, natural sciences cannot be methods for uncovering truth since they are mediated by concepts and logic outside of experience.43 Wundt’s psychological method, which he called an “immediate science,” sought to overcome this dualism between subject and object by taking experience as a whole in order to account for the fact that knowledge is inextricable from the subjective factors of experience. For Mitsui, understanding the whole of individual experience necessarily meant understanding it as socialized experience—that is to say, national experience.44 JAPANISM IN MEIJI POLITICAL DISCOURSE Mitsui’s interest in exploring the national foundation of language marked the beginning of his iteration of Japanism, a term that rose to prominence with opinion leader Takayama Chogyū’s 1897 essay “Japanism,” published in Sun (Taiyō). Japanism was a form of nationalism that emerged in response to the changing geopolitical circumstances of the Japanese state as it began expanding its empire through victories in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). Chogyū’s Japanism was a response to prior intellectual currents that aimed to put “Japan” itself at the core of political ideology. Seikyōsha, the publisher of Japan and the Japanese, for which Mitsui began editing the waka section in 1908, was an important predecessor. Borrowing from intellectual historian Komatsu Shigeo’s genealogy of Japanism, we can say that there were three stages in its Meiji-era development.45 The first is the nationality preservationism (kokusui hozonshugi) of the Seikyōsha of the Meiji twenties (1887–1896), the second is the Japanism of Takayama Chogyū of the Meiji thirties (1897–1906), and the third is that inaugurated by Mitsui Kōshi that later evolved into the platform of the Genri Nippon Society. Victory in the Sino-Japanese War in 1895 was an important moment that separated the first two stages, while the Russo-Japanese War separated the latter two. In other words, the evolution of Japanist discourse was concurrent with the development of the Japanese state from one under the thumb of the unequal treaties imposed upon it by the imperial powers to an imperial power in its own right. It was also an evolution from a secular

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nationalist critique of government policies to a mystical nationalist ideology of religious devotion to the figure of the emperor as the embodiment of nationality itself. The Seikyōsha, founded in 1888 by a group of intellectuals critical of the growing Western orientation of the government, advocated the preservation of nationality (kokusui hozon).46 They charged that in attempting to renegotiate the unequal treaties the government had veered too far in adopting Western cultural practices to appease the imperial powers and had accepted too many concessions in shaping Japanese law according to Western principles.47 While the Seikyōsha would go on to establish itself as a leading conservative voice in Japanese political discourse and its founding was based upon a somewhat anti-Western platform, its founders were well versed in Western ideas. The organization was formed through a merger of two groups of intellectuals: those affiliated with the Philosophy Academy (Tetsugakukan), such as Inoue Enryō and Miyake Setsurei, and those affiliated with the Tokyo English School (a precursor to the First Higher School), such as Sugiura Jūgō and Shiga Shigetaka.48 Rather than rejecting Western culture altogether, these intellectuals advocated incorporating aspects helpful to Japan while discarding others. Its members were trailblazers in Japanese interpretations and translations of Western philosophies related to politics, religion, and metaphysics.49 The Negishi Tanka Society was closely related to the Seikyōsha, which shared a building with Japan (Nihon), a daily newspaper edited by Kuga Katsunan. Masaoka Shiki worked for Japan throughout the 1890s, and his school of poetry came to be known as the Japan School (Nihon-ha) because of this affiliation. Japan and the Japanese was a successor of sorts to these two periodicals, having launched in 1907 when Japan merged with the weekly magazine The Japanese, published by Seikyōsha. Kuga’s Japan shared the Seikyōsha’s nationalist platform critical of the government, and the staff of the two periodicals often collaborated on projects. By Kuga’s own count, between the years 1889 and 1896 Japan was ordered by the government to suspend printing on thirty different occasions, totaling 230 days in which a paper was not printed due to censorship.50 These were not mindless mouthpieces of government ideologies. Nationalist discourse reached a new stage after the Sino-Japanese War. Japanese military success led the imperial powers to abandon their extraterritorial rights in Japan, removing a key element of the unequal treaties that infuriated nationalist critics. Through victory, Japan expanded its empire, acquiring Taiwan from the Qing dynasty at the Treaty of Shimonoseki. However, it was humiliated on the global stage when Russia, Germany, and France pressured the Japanese government to return the



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Liaodong peninsula to the Qing in what became known as the Triple Intervention. The incident served as a pretext for the government to reaffirm heavy investments in its military for eventual revenge against the Russian Empire, which had occupied the peninsula. It was in this new geopolitical context that Takayama Chogyū (1871– 1902) popularized the term “Japanism” in 1897.51 Chogyū was an influential opinion leader popular among the young intelligentsia, making a name for himself as a pioneer in modern aesthetic theory, a popularizer of Nietzsche, a theorist of nationalism, and a leader of the important magazine Sun.52 His career was cut short in 1902 when he died of tuberculosis before reaching the age of thirty. The fact that Chogyū’s Japanism was articulated as a critique of the so-called preservationism of the Seikyōsha speaks to the important role that the latter played in the nationalist discourse of the time. Chogyū argued that his predecessors lacked any clarity in what the object of preservation ought to be in their “nationality preservationism.” Like the Seikyōsha, Chogyū advocated a cosmopolitan approach to nationalism: borrow from others what is useful and discard what is not. This knowledge was to be used for what his Japanism advocated: preservation of the kokutai, or national essence, and contentment of the people.53 Despite his charge against the Seikyōsha intellectuals, however, Chogyū’s Japanism itself was full of contradictions. Against claims that his elevation of the state as the highest ideal (kokka shijō shugi) was too autocratic, he explained that of the twin goals of preserving the kokutai and popular contentment, it was the latter that was most important, and the former was merely an expedient means (hōben).54 Critics like the Christian intellectual Uchimura Kanzō dismissed this as a fraudulent position, and he was not too off base in doing so: in other places Chogyū seemed to argue that the nation was something mystical and above criticism. In May 1897, for example, he founded the Greater Japan Association with his teacher and leading conservative philosopher Inoue Tetsujirō. Its monthly periodical Japanism (Nihonshugi) listed “worship the ancestral land” (sokoku o sūhai su) among its organizational principles.55 While the nationalism of the Seikyōsha was openended by design to allow for an evolution of the nation’s characteristics— a process that was often articulated through biological and evolutionary metaphors—with Chogyū and Inoue Tetsujirō, Western-philosophyinflected Japanism came to sit comfortably with religious devotion. By the time Mitsui’s writing was taking a nationalist turn in the final years of the Meiji era, the single most important Japanese foreign policy goal of renegotiating the unequal treaties had mostly concluded. Following its defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, Russia agreed to cease interfering

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with Japanese interests on the Korean peninsula and Manchuria, and Japan’s position as an imperial power was largely cemented. Chogyū did not survive to witness this new geopolitical reality of imperial Japan, but his Japanism was an inspiration to many, Mitsui included. In 1915 Mitsui wrote an extensive (170 pages) introduction and review of the Collected Works of Chogyū that was published by the home of Sun, Hakubunkan, two years after Chogyū’s death. The “Genri Nippon Charter” published in the first issue of Genri Nippon in 1925, which articulated the organization’s basic platform, listed Chogyū as an important trailblazer in its Japanist mission. If Chogyū’s legacy as a Japanist was defined by his ambiguous teetering between Japanism as an “expedient means” for achieving the material satisfaction of the people and Japanism as an elevation of nationalism to the status of religion, Mitsui’s generation of Japanists pushed it once and for all toward the latter. By the 1910s, Japanists were much more confident in the cultural status of the Japanese. While the post–Russo-Japanese War Japanists acknowledged that Japan’s rise as an imperial power was realized by the incorporation of Western practices and systems of knowledge, they argued that it was precisely this ability to absorb new knowledge while retaining a distinct “Japaneseness” that made the Japanese nation unique. Under this new interpretation, the “Japan” of the Japanists was no longer an ideal to be attained in the future through innovation and change but an ideal that had always existed within the Japanese themselves that would one day be achieved and replicated by the rest of the world. MEIJI’S AUGUST COMPOSITIONS AND THE WAY OF SHIKISHIMA Mitsui’s shift from a poetics of individual expression to one of national conventions came to a culmination in his 1925 serialization of essays on the poetry of the Meiji emperor. Though he continued to encourage his readers to privilege personal experience in writing poetry, this was now supplemented with didactic commentary on perceiving and appreciating the ethnic, national characteristics of literature and everyday life. Mitsui called the practice of writing waka poetry imbued with ethnonationalist sentiment the Way of Shikishima, a synonym of sorts for “Japanese poetry” or waka invoked in many classic verses.56 His growing belief that poetic representation was inextricable from national life led him to view the poems of the Meiji emperor as the epitome of national representation, a sacred text that he felt all Japanese ought to read and appreciate. Meiji was a prolific writer of waka poems, writing over one hundred thousand



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over the course of his lifetime.57 Waka produced by emperors were referred to as “august compositions” (gyosei) and were at times released for public edification. Mitsui’s serial on Meiji’s poetry coincided with the founding of the Genri Nippon Society later that year, and the august compositions would serve as a sacred text for many of the contributors to the magazine Genri Nippon throughout its twenty-year run. In fact, the Genri Nippon Society members confounded outside readers, both contemporaries and postwar commentators, by often quoting the waka poems of the Meiji emperor and using them as justification or evidence in building an argument. They explicitly consulted the poems as sacred text, or scripture (keiten), that contained the wisdom necessary for understanding Japan’s particular experience of modernity. This peculiar aspect of their writings probably contributed to the popular notion among postwar intellectual historians that Mitsui, Minoda, and their colleagues were somewhat “shamanistic” in their writing.58 While Mitsui’s use of Meiji’s poetry undeniably possessed a ritualistic, religious quality (after all, he called the readings of this poetry haishō, literally, the act of worshipping and reciting), we must also be attentive to the fact that Mitsui’s interest in the latest developments in Western philosophy and criticism, as well as his ongoing involvement in the field of poetry, served as the basis for his nationalist views on representation. Mitsui and his colleagues came to their position not in spite of, but indeed because of, their critical philosophical investigations. Mitsui’s interest in Meiji’s poetry was evident as early as 1912, the year of Meiji’s death, more than a decade before he began his series on the Studies on the Collected Poems of Emperor Meiji (hereafter Studies) in 1925. As detailed in many studies on Japan during those years, the death of Meiji was a momentous event for many, variously described as an “end of an era” as well as the beginning of a new stage for modern Japan.59 For Mitsui, the death of Meiji was an occasion to reflect on the late emperor’s reign, which he sought to understand through his august compositions. In an essay written less than a month after Meiji’s passing, Mitsui expressed his profound gratitude and joy in realizing that Meiji had composed his waka without dividing them into separate verses. In other words, consistent with Mitsui’s own theory of waka as constituting a singular expression of inner experience and therefore most effective as a single thirty-one-syllable verse, Meiji had written his poems in a way that eschewed pauses or segmentation.60 For Mitsui, this meant that the very thoughts and emotions of Meiji, the emperor who had presided over arguably the most tumultuous decades of the nation’s history, was available for edification by those who could read them.

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Mitsui raised the poems of Meiji to the status of scripture precisely because of the communication of Meiji’s psyche that he thought they enabled. The deceased emperor’s intense pathos transcribed throughout the painful birth of modern Japan served as a vital reminder of what Mitsui came to see as the true meaning of Japan’s modernity. He was especially keen on studying Meiji’s meditations on the life, education, and security of his imperial subjects, which he supplemented with pages of didactic commentaries proclaiming the importance of loyalty to the nation for the sake of ethnic survival and prosperity. The bold calls for personal expression that animated his writings as a university student are here tucked quietly between pages of patronizing lessons on respecting one’s own tradition. Mitsui’s pursuit of cutting-edge scholarship in the hopes for bridging knowledge and creativity had ironically built a theory of poetry that hinged upon the recognition of an authoritative tradition not too dissimilar to the one that he had castigated as a young poet. In Studies, Mitsui also attempted to expand on his historical, anthropological understanding of the link between national language and its poetic conventions and the emotional experiences of its users. Echoing his earlier position, he had this to say on the formal differences between waka and haiku: One poem, one line. This is the fundamental form of waka and the Way of Shikishima. Poems are typically made up of the interplay between short lines and verses. Waka is unique in that it does not allow for reflection and innovation in this regard. People usually understand thought as developing through certain conceptual categorizations. But this should be expressed “forthrightly (sunao),” surrendering (zuijun) to total representation, or total emotion, naturalizing to the point of relinquishing reflection and analysis. . . . This is why haiku abides by the rule of one poem two lines, while waka, which uses a longer form, abides by the rule of one poem one line. . . . This means synchronizing the rhythm of language to the total rhythm of life.61

Here Mitsui argues that waka is the form of poetry that is closest to human life and emotion in their most natural state. The line of poetry is synchronized with the stream of natural human expression, which is breathed out without any “reflection or innovation.” According to Mitsui, even words, which are abstractions created by humans to represent their experience for the purpose of communication, can be traced back to physical actions at the core of everyday life. The arts of primitive men are artistic dances. Dancing is primitive, but it uses the entire body. Furthermore, popular songs (kayō) and music are all contained in dance. Popular songs are the natural sounds of humans that are



From Writing the Self to Reading the Nation 37 voiced in cadence with physical labor such as rowing a boat, pulling a cart, or doing some heavy lifting, and these are subsumed under dance, which is the worship and aestheticization (shūkyōka/geijutsuka) of physical labor.62

Mitsui argues that the songs contained in the foundational myths of ancient Japan, the Kojiki and Nihon shoki, are rooted in such vocal outpouring and celebration of daily labor. The more refined poetry of later ages, especially the Manyōshū, is a product of the evolution of these primitive songs. The repetitiveness of songs that were intrinsic to the repetitious nature of physical labor served as the condition for the development of certain poetic forms, resulting in more self-conscious genres of poetry.63 Thus, Mitsui is able to argue that poetry, through its connection to labor and primitive religion, is at the basis of communal life and that words, despite their abstract nature, are originally one with concrete everyday life.64 As such, the ultimate goal of national education should be to make national language (kokugo) one with these songs of old, bringing it in conformity to the natural rhythms of the mind and body. For him, poetry is the ultimate source of the Japanese language, and it is this shared mode of communication that binds an individual to an ethnic group and, in more modern times, to a society and state. In this all-encompassing theory of the individual and society, poetry is understood as “the fundamental principle of life” and that which “ties the individual to totality.”65 As the poet-ruler who presided over Japan’s modernization, Meiji played a singular role in the ethnic life, rivaled only by the Asuka-era regent Prince Shōtoku, who according to legend oversaw the incorporation of Buddhism and Confucianism into Japanese life.66 According to Mitsui, the Meiji emperor’s gifts as a poet allowed him to produce poems that were a true representation of the founding of modern Japan and offered insights concerning the “true” nature of Japan’s experience of modernity. Mitsui argued that understanding Meiji’s venerable heart (omikokoro) through his poetry was crucial to Japan’s survival as a nation and that elevating the “ancestral nation of Japan” (sokoku Nippon) to an object of worship constituted a new, modern mode of religiosity.67 Mitsui was not alone in his high esteem of Meiji’s poetry. In the months following the emperor’s death, publishers rushed to compile their own editions of his works. Other merchandise, including card games and recordings of recitations, later followed the production of these editions.68 Several historians have noted the ideological function that Meiji’s poems played during his lifetime, especially during the Russo-Japanese War.69 Matsuzawa Shunji, examining commentaries on Meiji’s poetry published in the newspaper Kokumin shinbun in 1904, notes that the poems were read

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as the expressions of Meiji himself and that these verses constituted a medium that tied Meiji’s interiority to that of the “nation.”70 Newspapers at the time reported stories of citizens, inspired by the pathos of the emperor, overcoming economic and psychological hardship during the war. Mitsui’s own commentary after Meiji’s death is consistent with reports of this interpretation of poems as a window into Meiji’s thoughts, and as Matsuzawa notes, publications in the mass media were flooded with these types of commentaries and tributes during those months.71 But if Mitsui’s praise and worship of Meiji’s poetry seems like a product of an ideological apparatus designed to produce and reproduce identification with the imperial institution and the Japanese nation, Mitsui’s praises were also consistent with his theory of poetry. Furthermore, as we will see throughout this book, the ideological framework that Mitsui developed based upon this understanding of Meiji’s poetry was in constant contestation with other self-described nationalists, as well as government agencies. A nationalist disposition and love for the emperor did not automatically equate to being an imperial subject obedient to or in agreement with policies and arguments invoked in the name of the Japanese state or nation. Still, Mitsui’s hermeneutic was of a brand of criticism and art that scholars have described as “aestheticizing” politics, a hallmark of fascist culture.72 In other words, Mitsui’s theories of poetry and nationalism reduced political conflicts that carry material and physical consequences to issues in the realm of ideas and emotions. More specifically, Mitsui’s nationalism attempted to naturalize differences in status and class as natural forms of Japanese “modes of life” (seikatsu keishiki). Take, for example, Mitsui’s analysis of Meiji’s poetry on the topic of soldiers who died in battle. Mitsui argues that the spirits of the dead live on when the living mourn for them, and it is at that moment of mourning that each individual Japanese is immersed (botsunyū) into the greater life of the nation. For Mitsui, this constituted an entrance into faith (nyūshin). He writes: Here the individual will links to the total will, and real life responsibilities are unified with historical spiritual life. Here is realized the life of faith of the entire nation, which brings together all modes of life differentiated by estate, status, occupation, property, ability, etc. It does not attempt to mechanically equalize estate, status, property, etc., but acknowledges discrimination in modes of life conforming to historical tradition and actual ability, and attempts to rectify it based on the principle of the inner inspiration that everyone experiences through the camaraderie of total nationalism, in other words, the feeling of immersion of individual life into total life.73



From Writing the Self to Reading the Nation 39

In this unsubtle critique of socialist theories of inequality, Mitsui claims that differences in socioeconomic life are in fact natural products of history that can be overcome through inspiration and faith. It was hardly a coincidence that Mitsui’s writing was contemporaneous with the passage of the Peace Preservation Law, which essentially made socialism illegal, and the ongoing intensification of farmer tenancy disputes all across Japan, including in Yamanashi Prefecture where Mitsui himself was a landowner. We will turn to the Peace Preservation Law and Japanist prescriptions for the so-called problem of rural villages (nōson mondai) in subsequent chapters. Before doing so, however, it bears pointing out that Tosaka Jun, an early critic of Japanism, argued that Japanist ideologies’ penchant for effacing socioeconomic differences through a language that suggested a national universality was at the core of Japan’s particular inflection of fascism, particularly the militarism underwriting Japan’s imperialist wars. In a 1935 essay titled “A Re-Examination of Japanism” (Nihonshugi no saikentō), Tosaka argued that contemporary slogans such as “a nation of soldiers” (kyokoku kaihei) and the “oneness of soldiers and farmers” (heinō icchi) possessed the ideological function of hiding the fact that military officers were a privileged class solidly in the middle class, while most soldiers by conscription had no such guarantees.74 Still, these differences were elided by appealing to concepts such as bushido (way of the samurai) as being “an ideal of the whole of the Japanese folk,” despite the fact that samurai, too, were a distinct, privileged class of people.75 Mitsui’s study of Meiji’s poetry was one of many works by the Japanese intelligentsia that elevated “Japaneseness” in its analysis of society and explicitly linked it to militarist themes. In doing so, these works helped in rationalizing mobilization for war as a natural duty ordained by the sacred, eternal life of the nation itself. In the decades to follow, Mitsui himself would lose friends and family in Japan’s imperialist wars. THE PARADOX OF FAITH AND PATRIOTISM In brief, the trajectory of Mitsui’s theoretical pursuits can be summed up as an evolution from one that focused on the primacy of the expressive individual to one that privileged an ethnonationalist sentimentalism that assumed the individual’s sympathy a priori. This was a shift from championing the creative poet to demanding that the reader identify with a dogma of national literature in the form of Meiji’s waka poetry. To be sure, Mitsui never completely relinquished the idea of the creative poet; in vitalist nationalism, the ideal image of creativity and strict dogmatism fit

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neatly together. These developments also constitute the theoretical foundations for an explicitly religious Japanism. Holes and leaps of logic abound in Mitsui’s theories of poetry and nationalism, but if we are generous in our reading, we might suggest that through these very holes and leaps Mitsui unwittingly provides us with some insight into an important paradox of the Japanist ideology of this period. This paradox consists of the fact that for a fervent Japanist like Mitsui, nationalism is at once as fundamentally individual and affective as it is social and dogmatic. For Mitsui, what bridges this divide is the romantic notion of faith—faith in the power of language and representation and faith in the fate and destiny of the imperial nation. What seems to have been lost on Mitsui at this early stage of his career was that few would in fact agree with his particular sketch of nationalist dogma based on Wundtian psychology and Meiji’s poetry. This conundrum was not unique to Mitsui’s patriotic hermeneutics. The history of imperial Japan is replete with competing systems of nationalist dogma, often coupled with patriotic passion like that of Mitsui. Of course, the most powerful entity with a stake in the discourse of Japanese nationalism was the Japanese government itself, and when patriotic passion incited by nationalist dogmas peddled by civilian nationalists like Mitsui intensified in the midst of economic and geopolitical crises in the 1930s, government agencies began to examine more carefully the relationship between patriotic passion and nationalist projects. As we will examine in more detail in chapter 4, Japanism itself became an object of scrutiny and suspicion in the eyes of government agencies like the Special Higher Police. We might say that the paradox of Mitsui’s nationalism is reproduced in the curation of the Yūshūkan exhibit that opened this chapter. There the raw emotions of the soldiers, at times expressed through a patriotic idiom, are conflated with an imperialist project led by the government, military, and private enterprises and narrated by the curators of the exhibit. Through this conflation, the exhibit effaces the individual circumstances of those emotions, tangled as they were with personal relationships, economic uncertainty, or colonial subjugation. It is no wonder that it begins by surrounding the visitor with poetry calling for the suspension of these individual circumstances for the sake of an imperialist project disguised in the benevolent figure of the emperor. In articulating this demand, the curators could find no better mouthpiece than Mitsui, the theorist of the Shikishima Way.

CH A P T ER T WO

Japanist Democracies and Taisho Restorations

Like many of the vocal nationalists of the wartime era who advocated the eradication of leftist thought and championed a religious devotion to the emperor, Mitsui Kōshi was purged by the US-led Allied occupation after the war. Barred from taking public office or contributing to public discourse, Mitsui led a quiet life in his native Yamanashi. Many of his closest allies of his generation had already died, and his longtime associate Minoda Muneki committed suicide shortly after the emperor renounced his divinity in January 1946. The Mitsui family, prominent landowners for many generations, lost most of its land through postwar land reforms. Mitsui’s eldest son was killed in action in the Marshall Islands in 1944, while his second son was wounded at the front in Manchuria and did not return until 1946. Mitsui himself suffered a debilitating stroke in 1947 that left half of his body paralyzed, and he died in 1953 a half of a year shy of his seventieth birthday.1 Because Mitsui was barred from writing about political issues during the last decade of his life, it is more difficult to reconstruct the fate of his Japanism following Japan’s defeat than his wartime ideas. However, there is one aspect of his writings, most of them private correspondences and journal entries, that has puzzled scholars: his effusive praise of democracy (demokurashii). The confusion arises from the fact that Mitsui was critical of democracy during the height of his polemical campaigns with the Genri Nippon Society. The question for scholars was whether this was a genuine apostacy of his wartime ideas or a calculated ploy to make Japanism (and perhaps, by extension, the emperor) seem less guilty of the oppressive politics of that era.2 This line of inquiry has been important to 41

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historians seeking to understand what happened to the violent nationalism of the wartime era after the war ended and whether it continued to play an important role in postwar politics. Mitsui’s change in tone is indeed striking, but it is also possible to read his postwar endorsement of democracy as consistent with his interwar positions on popular politics. While it is true that Mitsui often disparaged democracy, writ in katakana as demokurashii, the issue is more complicated when we examine his writings during the era of Taisho democracy, the period in which popular political participation in Japan expanded significantly, giving birth to many democratic institutions. Examining the developments of Japanism during those years of democratic expansion gives us a better understanding of how Japanists viewed nationalism as a populist ideology that would solve the sociopolitical issues that gave rise to popular unrest in the early twentieth century. Though Mitsui’s postwar championing of demokurashii may seem like a striking apostacy considering the tenor of his polemics in the decades prior, on the level of ideas it was not so far of a leap. The nationalist fervor of Showa-era Japanism, after all, was shaped by developments in popular politics during the era of Taisho democracy. It was precisely during these Taisho years that the practice of differentiating political ideas on the basis of the political spectrum of right and left became commonplace. The idea of “Taisho democracy” has been an important organizing category in our understanding of modern Japanese history.3 Developed in the postwar era, Taisho democracy refers to the developments during the years spanning the first few decades of the twentieth century, including the emergence of democratic institutions, ideas, and mass movements that occurred in tandem with the expansion of the Japanese Empire. The time span of Taisho democracy differs depending upon the historian. Most mark the explosive citizen protest movements against the provisions of the treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War (the so-called Hibiya Riots) of 1905 as its beginning and either the 1925 dual passage of the General Election Law and the Peace Preservation Law or the nationalist assassin’s gunshot that shattered the last political party-led cabinet of the prewar era in 1932 (the May 15 Incident) as its ending. The years coincide with the reign of the Taisho emperor (1912–1926), and though Taisho himself played no leadership role in those democratic movements, his reign name has served as a convenient expedient in giving name to the political trends of those years. The age of Taisho democracy was one of citizen movements for political rights and worker’s rights; thus, historians generally associate it with liberalism and socialism. Early postwar studies on the Taisho period coincided



Japanist Democracies and Taisho Restorations 43

with efforts among Japanese intellectuals to explore the successes and failures of democracy prior to the “dark valley” of the Showa tens (1935– 1944), from which they were in the process of climbing out. Since then, historians have become more analytical and less celebratory about the Taisho era, taking care to uncover the complex relationship between the history of emancipatory politics and populism of a more reactionary sort.4 It is important to keep in mind these complexities in reconstructing the history of Japanism during the Taisho years. The ways in which nationalist ideologues participated in the events of Taisho democracy were varied. Some, like Ioki Ryōzō, a Masaoka Shiki disciple and future doyen of rightwing politics, were central figures in the agitation campaign that helped spark the Hibiya Riots—the dawn of Taisho-era populist movements.5 Others, like Kita Ikki and Takabatake Motoyuki, developed theories of state socialism based on their observations of Japan’s evolving political economy and recent developments in socialist theory. The ideas and political trajectories of Mitsui Kōshi and Minoda Muneki, the latter who came of age during that time, were shaped by the discourses of the day. THE IDEA OF A TAISHO RESTORATION The retrospectively applied idea of Taisho democracy has served to illuminate the ways in which democratic institutions expanded in the 1910s and 1920s. At the same time, it has produced an appearance of a sharp divide between the seemingly progressive Taisho years and the oppressive politics of the early Showa years. More recently, historians have voiced skepticism of this apparent divide, proposing new perspectives that highlight the many continuities between the two eras. I would like to add to this discussion by suggesting that the discourse of Taisho Restoration (ishin) helps us to make sense of the intersections between popular politics and nationalism. Compared to other restoration movements of the modern era, the Taisho Restoration has received little scholarly attention. The Meiji Restoration of 1868, which saw the establishment of the Meiji State and the close of over two and a half centuries of rule by the Tokugawa Shogunate, was the foundational moment of modern Japan. The Showa Restoration movement that emerged in the 1930s steered politics toward a nationalist, authoritarian direction in the midst of economic crisis, clashes between imperial powers, and total war mobilization. In more recent years, politicians in and around Osaka have rallied under the banner of a Heisei Restoration, spawning a formidable political party, the Ishin no kai. Taisho Restoration, in contrast, was a vague political idea that never amounted to an actual

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movement and is little more than a footnote in the annals of modern Japanese history despite its potential explanatory power as an analytical tool. The reasons for this partly lie in the power of the concept of Taisho democracy, a concept that paradoxically was not in circulation during the Taisho years. The progressive legacy of that era has led historians to pay relatively less attention to imagery associated with more conservative elements in politics like “restoration.” It is also true that far fewer people referred to “Taisho Restoration” in the periodicals of the time in comparison to the Meiji and Showa iterations. Still, in its time the idea of a Taisho Restoration was a potent rallying cry for those frustrated by the ills of modern society. Like the Showa incarnation, the idea of a Taisho Restoration suggested that political changes put into motion with the restoring of the emperor to power with the Meiji Restoration was either incomplete or required updating to meet the demands of new political realities. The most famous invocation of a Taisho Restoration is probably that of Asahi Heigo (1890–1921), who in 1921 murdered the head of the Yasuda conglomerate, Yasuda Zenjirō. Asahi was an unsuccessful, if ambitious, entrepreneur, investor, and nationalist organizer living a desperate existence bouncing between failed projects. Shortly after losing his limited wealth in an ill-advised stock market investment, Asahi caught wind of a rumor that Yasuda had profited handsomely by buying up the very stock that he had lost money on. Prior to killing Yasuda and taking his own life before the authorities arrived, Asahi composed a will that read more like a manifesto for a revolution that would rein in the capitalist class and spread political and economic opportunity. Asahi described the initial steps toward a Taisho Restoration as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Bury the traitorous millionaires. Crush the present political parties. Bury the high officials and nobility. Bring about universal suffrage. Abolish provisions for inheritance of rank and wealth. Nationalize the land and bring relief to tenant farmers. Confiscate all fortunes above 100,000 yen. Nationalize big business. Reduce military service to one year.6

In achieving these goals, Asahi advised that no organization was necessary—revolutionaries only needed to “be quiet and simply stab, stick, cut, and shoot. . . . Just sacrifice your life.”7 The chilling language of Asahi’s call to arms foreshadowed the bloody politics of assassination



Japanist Democracies and Taisho Restorations 45

that characterized the Showa Restoration movement that came a decade later. Many radical nationalists who actively campaigned for a violent coup d’état in the 1930s echoed Asahi’s basic platform. However, the idea of a Taisho Restoration as it appeared at the beginning of the Taisho reign was linked to more conventional political goals: protecting constitutional politics and expanding popular political influence by dismantling the domain cliques. Invocation of the Taisho Restoration began almost immediately following the death of the Meiji emperor in 1912. The reign of his son, Yoshihito, was unceremoniously ushered in with the so-called Taisho Political Crisis (Taisho Seihen), where a clash between the budget-slashing platform of the new Saionji cabinet and the expansionminded army came to a head.8 Having annexed Korea and expanded into Manchuria following its war with Russia, the so-called Chōshū clique led by leaders of the Imperial Army advocated the expansion of the military to place divisions in those newly acquired territories. At the same time, the government had amassed a considerable amount of debt in fighting the war and faced a catastrophic budget crisis. Army Minister Uehara Yūsaku submitted his resignation when Prime Minister Saionji did not bow to the army’s demands for two additional divisions, and the army refused to nominate a replacement, effectively crippling the cabinet and bringing it to an end. The public largely sided with Saionji. The army’s heavy-handed approach to dismantling a cabinet that disagreed with its direction invited calls to protect the constitution, and animosity against Yamagata Aritomo, the main political force behind the army’s expansionary efforts, took the form of calls to defeat domain cliques. Yamagata hailed from the Chōshū domain, which with the Satsuma domain had helped to defeat the Tokugawa Shogunate and had dominated Japanese politics since the Meiji Restoration. The fact that Katsura Tarō, an army veteran from the former Chōshū domain, was chosen by clique-dominated imperial advisors, or the genrō, to replace Saionji only fed fuel to the flames. When Katsura appeared to abuse his close relationship to the new emperor (he had been serving him as chamberlain prior to his appointment) by requesting an imperial rescript that effectively silenced the more popular navy and proceeded to establish his own political party in a move that appeared to oppose the Seiyūkai, the majority party, the country erupted in popular protest. Popular movements reached a zenith in February 1913, a mere half a year into the reign of Taisho, with violent riots in major Japanese cities, including Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, Hiroshima, and Kyoto.9 The Katsura cabinet fell on February 20, marking the first time that a prime minister resigned due to public protests.

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While this was a watershed moment in the history of popular politics in Japan, loyalty to the imperial cause remained front and center in the writings of those opposed to the Katsura cabinet. An account of the Taisho Political Crisis published by political party activists opposing Katsura framed the event as the first step in the Taisho Restoration and the activists as shishi, or “men of high purpose,” a term commonly used to describe the revolutionaries in the Meiji Restoration.10 Furthermore, it praised the demise of the Saionji cabinet as a case of gyokusai, a conscious self-shattering for a noble cause, noting that this evaluation had risen from public opinion.11 The narrative begins with Saionji dutifully completing his solemn duties of overseeing the funeral of the late emperor before embarking on the project of putting the country’s finances in order, a prerequisite in establishing a powerful empire. Framed as a “restoration,” imperial prestige was necessarily at the heart of programs for political change, even if the expansion of popular politics was the most urgent and concrete manifestation of the Taisho Restoration movements. The emergent political parties did not hold a monopoly over the use of the term “Taisho Restoration,” which served as a useful lens through which a variety of commentators at the time attempted to interpret the events and prescribe a direction for the future of mass politics in Japan. Under this general understanding, if the Meiji Restoration signaled the end of rule by the samurai and the establishment of a nation of Japanese subjects under the emperor’s reign, the Taisho Restoration was meant to be the full realization and maturation of the political subjectivity of individual Japanese (male) nationals. Of course, what the latter entailed was subject to debate, but it is notable that unlike the discourse of Showa Restoration, the idea of Taisho Restoration was not dominated in its use by the so-called right wing. Prominent political theorist Yoshino Sakuzō, for example, equated the term with the movement to protect constitutionalism that had erupted in the Taisho Political Crisis.12 Vocabulary culled from the years spanning from the fall of the Tokugawa regime to the establishment of the new Meiji State was used throughout the Taisho era in imagining a new politics. The Rice Riots of 1918, one of the defining moments among the popular uprisings during those years, drew comparisons to the late Tokugawa uprising of samurai Ōshio Heihachirō, who in 1837 staged a revolt protesting the hoarding of rice by wealthy merchants and the Tokugawa government in the midst of a food shortage among commoners.13 It was the first military conflict against the Tokugawa order in two centuries. Mitsui Kōshi was among scores of intellectuals who opined on the legacy of Ōshio and how those decades preceding the fall of the Tokugawa compared to the class warfare



Japanist Democracies and Taisho Restorations 47

that seemed to be erupting in Japan.14 Others such as Endō Tomosaburō (also known by the penname Musui), a socialist who later became an emperor-worshipping Japanist, advocated a zaisan hōkan, or the return of wealth and property to the emperor, modeled after the Taisei Hōkan, or the return of governing authority back to the emperor, in which the last Tokugawa shogun Yoshinobu had formally ceded power to the institution of the emperor in 1867.15 Deguchi Onisaburō, the leader of the new religion Ōmoto-kyō, also called for a zaisan hōkan as a part of his program for a Taisho Restoration.16 Onisaburō would later go on to found the Showa Shinseikai, which drew upon his vast wealth and manpower in providing funding and a media platform for many radical nationalist organizations clamoring for a Showa Restoration in the 1930s. Programs to abolish economic class, like those of Musui and Onisaburō, hinged on the emperor serving as its leveling mechanism and were therefore nationalist socialism by design. They refashioned ideas of politics and economy associated with socialism as events consistent with the seminal moment of the Meiji Restoration, a trajectory vaguely imagined as the realization of the benevolent paternal bond between emperor and subjects. Though much more conservative in their proposals for changes in the government structure, nationalist pundits like Mitsui also worked under the general rubric of the Taisho Restoration, placing the figure of the emperor at the foundation of popular politics. In Mitsui’s Taisho-era writings, we find a vision for a Japanist democracy of sorts that is consistent both with his repressive Japanism of the 1930s and his democratic “turn” in the early postwar era. MAPPING POLITICAL DIFFERENCE: THE EMERGENCE OF “RIGHT WING” Before taking a deeper look at Mitsui Kōshi’s thought regarding popular politics, I would like to briefly examine the history of the vocabulary that has been used to categorize Mitsui’s thought. We have already surveyed the genealogy of Japanism in the previous chapter. Here we will consider another term: “right wing” (uyoku). This will be useful in considering the various events and debates central to the history of Japanism for two reasons. First, consciously or unconsciously, words like “right wing” and the somewhat related “nationalist” have been used as pejoratives just as often as thoughtful descriptors of political discourse. In order for the present study to avoid devolving into a simple caricature of those who were defeated in the Second World War, it is important for us to be clear about our terms of analysis. Second, it is precisely during the years under consideration

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in this chapter, the era of Taisho democracy, that the term “right wing” rose to prominence in political discourse, solidifying what would become a commonly used taxonomy of political ideologies and its relation to nationalism and conceptions of the state. One parenthetical is in order. Though the term “right wing” is most commonly glossed as uyoku today, the use of this particular Japanese word did not become commonplace until the early 1930s.17 The practice of placing organizations defined by ethnonationalist platforms on the extreme “right” on the spectrum of political ideologies first appeared in essays written in the later Taisho era by writers analyzing the rise of reactionary movements critical of socialist and Marxist thought and was later adopted by government officials who began tracking nationalist movements in the early 1930s. Writers in the later Taisho era generally used the term ukei (right leaning) to describe these movements. By the early 1930s, uyoku had replaced ukei as a commonly used term. The difference between “right leaning” and “right wing” is a subtle but important one, insofar as it coincides with a shift in the way the government approached the socalled Right; that is to say, the use of “right wing” instead of merely “right leaning” was contemporaneous with the government’s appreciation of right-wing domestic terrorism as an existential threat. The government’s intensification of its surveillance and attempts at controlling right-wing thought will be discussed in more detail in chapter 4. Here I would like to simply note the novelty of the political spectrum itself in the closing years of the Taisho era. Tokyo Imperial University political theorist Yoshino Sakuzō was able to remark as late as 1926, the final year of the Taisho era, that programs for social transformation had been illegal only a short time before and that the practice of differentiating among them was a relatively new, and far from settled, practice.18 Writing in the January issue of the opinion magazine Central Review (Chūō kōron) that year, Yoshino attempted to delineate the difference between left and right and ventured that the core issue was not one of private property, as many argued, but had to do with how each side understood what fundamentally shapes humanity (jinsei) in the first place: Is it the material environment (i.e., class), or a more fundamental, developmental process of life itself? These questions, in turn, informed the political strategy of the two sides of the spectrum. Though he was somewhat vague in what he meant by the latter (and perhaps naïve in thinking that revolutionary programs were now more tolerated), as we will discuss in the following chapter, Yoshino’s observation cut to the core of the social theoretical issues that animated debates among Marxists and anti-Marxists during the 1920s. As Marxist theorists explored the historical



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relationship between class struggle and social change and sought to develop a theory of it, Japanists took a more vitalist approach, arguing that history was shaped by factors such as language, religion, and other social practices, which they understood as being primarily ethnic in nature. References to right-leaning (ukei) organizations in Japanese periodicals began a couple of years before Yoshino’s editorial in the Central Review. The earliest I have identified appears in an anonymous column on current events in the May 1923 issue of the Pioneer (Kaitakusha), a monthly organ of the Japanese Young Men’s Christian Association Union. The short piece covered the founding of two major nationalist organizations, the Association of Greater Japanese Moral Suasion Groups (Dai-Nippon Kyōka Dantai Renmei) and an unnamed state socialist organization led by Tokyo Imperial University law professor Uesugi Shinkichi (1878–1929), likely the Scholastic Association for Governance (Keirin Gakumei).19 The first of the two was an association of sixteen different patriotic groups, such as the Japan Imperial Land Group (Nihon Kōkoku-kai) and the Japanese Spirit Society (Nihon Damashii-sha), advertising itself as an association of groups dedicated to an emperor-centric (kōshitsu chūshin) ideology. Though information about these sixteen groups is scarce, they were likely among the many organizations that sought to combat the spread of communism through the propagation of patriotic messages or violence aimed at breaking strikes. In a statement, the association denied any suggestion that it advocated violence. The Scholastic Association for Governance, though short-lived, was notable for being a nationalist revolutionary organization that brought together Uesugi, a jurist known for his interpretation of the constitution that understood the emperor’s political power as absolute, and Takabatake Motoyuki, an influential theorist of state socialism and works of Karl Marx who had just published the first Japanese translation of Capital in June 1920. The association’s early ambitions are evident in the fact that it possessed committees devoted to “ideological action” and “armed action,” though the philosophical differences between Uesugi and Takabatake soon led to its dissolution.20 Members of the Scholastic Association, however, went on to lead notable nationalist organizations in the 1930s. Japan, of course, was not alone in witnessing the increasing prominence of nationalist organizations. Benito Mussolini of the National Fascist Party had just been appointed prime minister the previous October in Italy, and the Nazi Party was growing in membership in Germany. The famous Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923 was only a few months away. The idea of fascism and the figure of nationalist leaders were objects of debate and fascination in the Japanese media and intellectual culture and would

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have important effects on political discourse.21 The developments in Europe were certainly on the mind of the anonymous reporter in the Pioneer, who quoted conservative intellectual Inoue Testujirō’s comments that the rise of reactionary movements was now a global phenomenon, the most extreme of which would be far more dangerous than leftist groups.22 The articles in the Pioneer and Central Review bear witness to the rise of intellectuals and political organizers who perceived the need to develop a program of social change that was different from what the government offered while maintaining a distance from the materialist theories of the Left and its general antagonism toward the imperial institution. In other words, the Right emerged as a counterpoint to both establishment politics and leftist antiestablishment politics. Antiestablishment politics itself was nothing new in the early 1920s, and historians that study the Japanese Right date its origins well before those years.23 Hori Yulcio, a noted historian of nationalist movements and the editor of the authoritative Dictionary of the Right Wing (Uyoku jiten), notes, however, that those years were in fact a watershed moment in rightwing organizing and thought. According to Hori, several factors led to the changing landscape of nationalist organizations. The first was the expansion of industrial capitalism brought on by the economic boom during World War I, which in turn raised the profile of urban wage laborers and their unions. The second was the fall of Czarist Russia. The Japanese government invested heavily in the Siberian Expedition in an attempt to, among other objectives, curb the power of the new Soviet Union and was engaged in an ideological and physical battle with communism.24 Meanwhile, many nationalist political operatives began shifting their focus from Pan-Asianist projects to nationalist revolutionary programs on the archipelago. In 1919 the Pan-Asianist theorist and political organizer Ōkawa Shūmei famously persuaded Kita Ikki, who had been a participant and observer of nationalist revolutionary movements in China, to help organize a revolutionary movement in Japan. Kita would return to Japan a year later having finished his Fundamental Principles for the Reorganization of Japan, an influential blueprint for using the institution of the emperor as the basis for a coup d’état and a state socialist reorganization of politics and the national economy.25 Yoshino Sakuzō’s denial of the issue of private property as the primary topic dividing right and left seems prescient, as attitudes toward capitalism varied among the right wing. The fact that organizations like the Association of Greater Japanese Moral Suasion Groups had no broader program save a vaguely defined emperor-centric polity attests to the fact that there was little consensus among nationalist advocacy groups about what a



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policy platform or revolutionary program would look like. Theorists like Takabatake and Kita sought to harness the productive powers of capitalism while placing caps on individual wealth and increasing the authority of the state. Revolutionary nationalist agrarianists, like Gondō Seikyō and Tachibana Kōsaburō, who would grow more prominent in the early 1930s, imagined utopian agrarian autonomous societies as a counter to the social changes brought by industrial capitalism.26 Others, like Mitsui Kōshi and Minoda Muneki of the Genri Nippon Society, were staunchly antirevolutionary and were often critical of the right-wing intellectuals that I have mentioned in this section. The Genri Nippon Society was founded within this complex, emergent discourse of right-wing thought and politics in the latter half of the Taisho era. Given the brief sketch of this discourse provided above, we might situate the Genri Nippon Society within this discourse by calling it a conservative (i.e., counterrevolutionary) organization interested in eradicating revolutionary thought, which it deemed as immoral ideas aimed at destroying the very foundation of life: the nation itself. Minoda, who together with Mitsui Kōshi founded the Genri Nippon Society and served as its president, came of age as a nationalist opinion leader precisely during the late Taisho years when the discourse of “right-leaning” emerged. He was introduced to his future collaborator and mentor in 1919 by Inoue Ukon, a graduate of the religious studies program Minoda was enrolled in and a collaborator of Mitsui’s. Minoda, like Mitsui, was a product of Japan’s elite institutions of higher education but came from a humbler economic background. Minoda hailed from Kumamoto Prefecture on the southwestern island of Kyūshū, where he had graduated from the prestigious Fifth Higher School in 1917 before moving on to Tokyo Imperial University and completing degrees in both the School of Letters and the School of Law. He lost his father early in life and was raised by both his mother and his older sister, a teacher and supporter of his academic ambitions.27 In 1922 he joined the faculty of Keio University, where he taught courses in its preparatory program (yoka), a position he was nominated for by another collaborator of Mitsui’s, Hirose Tetsushi, a specialist in French literature and arts.28 Three years later in November 1925, he founded the Genri Nippon Society and began publishing its monthly, Genri Nippon. The magazine was fashioned as a successor to Life and Representation, which itself was the successor to Akane, the magazine of the Negishi Tanka Society. In other words, with Mitsui he constituted the more unsavory continuation of the legacy of poet Masaoka Shiki that ran contemporaneous with the celebrated Araragi poets led by Itō Sachio, Saitō Mokichi, Nagatsuka Setsu, and others.

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Minoda’s political activities during his student years at Tokyo Imperial University foreshadowed his rise to becoming the most feared right-wing polemicist of the 1930s. He was a member of the Brotherhood for the Advancement of the State (Kōkoku Dōshikai), a nationalist student organization founded in 1919. The brotherhood was advised by Uesugi Shinkichi, the law professor at the forefront of right-wing organizing in the late Taisho era mentioned above. Despite its brief existence, it is remembered for its campaign against economics professor Morito Tatsuo in what became known as the Morito Incident of 1920. Morito had recently published an essay on the social thought of the Russian anarchist Pjotr Kropotkin, which its critics argued was anarchist propaganda. Minoda was the brotherhood’s representative from the School of Letters when its members, seeking to punish Morito, reached out to government leaders outside of the university, including Vice Minister of Education Minami Hiroshi and Hiranuma Kiichirō, who was then serving as chief of the Supreme Court of Judicature. Morito was soon dismissed by then university president Yamakawa Kenjirō, and charges were also brought to the editor of the journal that carried the essay, Ōuchi Hyōe. Morito was sentenced to three months in prison and a fine, while Ōuchi was ordered to pay a fine and given a suspended sentence.29 Ōuchi would later become the target of Japanists in the late 1930s, this time as professor of economics at Tokyo Imperial University, and was arrested in 1938 in violation of the Peace Preservation Law, described in more detail below. DEMOCRACY IN THEORY: TOWARD A RESTORATION OF THOUGHT Mitsui participated in the political discourse of the Taisho era both as an opinion leader and as a personal stakeholder. He continued as a columnist at the bimonthly Japan and the Japanese throughout the 1910s and early 1920s. In contrast to the previous decade, Mitsui’s essays now focused less on poetry and the genres and forms of literature and more on current events and political theory, which he critiqued from a Japanist position. As a property owner, Mitsui also had a personal stake in the rise of popular politics. The eldest son of a wealthy family near Kōfu, the capital city of Yamanashi Prefecture, Mitsui and his family were prominent landowners, leasing fields to many tenant farmers. Like many tenant farmers throughout Japan, the workers on Mitsui’s land became more organized in the early twentieth century.30 By the early 1920s, Yamanashi Prefecture was home to some of the most intense disputes between landowners and tenants.31 Mitsui’s home in Nakakoma County was no different. His writing



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during those years displays a heavy investment in criticizing land reform proposals that would essentially transfer ownership of land from absentee landowners to tenants. Here we find the seeds for the academic witch hunt that the Genri Nippon Society would lead a decade later: Mitsui believed that the radicalization of farmers was closely related to the growing popularity of progressive and socialist economic research in the imperial universities. His disdain for the academic establishment overlapped with Minoda Muneki’s conservative student activism, and the two began working together during those later Taisho years. We should note, however, that while Mitsui’s anticommunism matched his class status completely, this was not necessarily the case with other members of the Genri Nippon Society. Still, as the ideological pillar of the society, Mitsui’s experience as a landowner was an important foundation of the organization’s approach to issues of class and popular politics. Mitsui spent most of the Taisho years in his hometown of Matsushima in Yamanashi. He had been teaching at Keika Middle School in Tokyo, his alma mater, since 1911, but teaching and editing Akane and Life and Representation, as well as writing at times over a dozen articles a month, proved to be too much. In 1915 Mitsui broke down from exhaustion and moved back to Yamanashi, where he would live for the remainder of his life. Like many owners of large tracts of land across Japan, Mitsui played a significant role in local affairs. He was elected to the village council in 1927 and by his own account endeavored to improve the agricultural infrastructure in the region. One of the more lasting actions of his tenure on the village council was changing the name of his village from “Matsushima” to “Shikishima,” an ancient word referring to Japan itself. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Mitsui called his Japanist theory of poetry the Shikishima Way. At the same time, he maintained a presence in the Tokyo-centric opinion journal circuit, contributing regular articles to Japan and the Japanese and other conservative and right-leaning magazines. The experience of tenancy disputes was clearly traumatic for Mitsui. In the spring of 1929 the confrontation with his tenants became so heated that negotiations ended with Mitsui agreeing to leave his own village in return for a pledge from his tenants that they would not become Marxists. Mitsui would suffer the indignity of living in nearby Kōfu until 1933. While it is difficult to piece together a coherent picture of these disputes, reports in local newspapers from April 1927 paint an unflattering picture of Mitsui as a landowner. Haggling over a lease renewal, a tenant of Mitsui accused him of attempting to force him off the property by sending his lackeys to pull the seedlings the tenant had planted. Reports and quotations

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characterizing Mitsui as a “tyrannical” and “evil” landowner angered and hurt Mitsui, and he attempted to gain sympathy through the national platform of Japan and the Japanese.32 Mitsui had been an advocate for the expansion of political and economic rights throughout the 1910s and early 1920s—at least in theory. He supported universal suffrage for men, which many conservatives feared would give power to proletarian political parties. He also acknowledged the dire political economic conditions of the rural villages and was resigned to the fact that progress would be impossible without the violence and chaos brought on by the tenant disputes, which he likened to the Buddhist notion of gyakuen no onchō, or the paradoxical idea that Buddhahood is achieved through the rejection of Buddhahood.33 Like other participants in the debate over political change in the Taisho era, Mitsui believed that the new age would be founded upon broad participation in politics. “Democracy” writ as minshushugi (lit., people-as-sovereign-ism) was a buzzword of sorts during those years, but one of the chief concerns in political theory at the time was how democratic changes bringing political power to the general populace should be conceptualized in a constitutional monarchy, where sovereignty resides not in the people but in the person of the emperor. The era-defining answer to this conundrum was Yoshino Sakuzō’s suggestion to think of democracy in Japan as minponshugi, or “people-as-the-basis-ism.” Yoshino’s reformulation provided a foundation for theorists, lawmakers, and state officials to consider the improvement of people’s lives without having to work through the thorny issue of sovereignty. Yoshino’s foregrounding of popular government did not necessarily mean that the institution of the emperor, and the idea of nationalism that it implied, was not a crucial component of his minponshugi. In the numerous popular political movements and demonstrations in the late Meiji to early Taisho years, Yoshino observed a budding popular political consciousness that he believed would mature into a national political will that united the interests of the state with those of the people. The guided development of this collective popular will, coupled with the expansion of suffrage rights, would ultimately lead to the realization of a democratic national unity, which he believed to be the destiny of modern nation-states. Yoshino’s belief that the nurturing of national unity and the promotion of a popular government were two necessary aspects of a singular process was, as a general framework, a point of departure for many theorists interested in bridging the new era of popular protests with a nationalist form of popular governance. Here, it is worth highlighting the fact that Yoshino, a progressive intellectual who possessed a reputation as a “liberalist,” framed



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the goals of democratic reforms in terms of national unity rather than the safeguarding of individual liberties or transparency in government procedures. Yoshino’s “liberalism” consisted of an adherence to idealist, universalist principles of progress and democracy within the confines of the nation-state.34 Mitsui’s own conception of popular politics retained the basic features of Yoshino’s minponshugi (i.e., universal male suffrage and the sovereign right of the emperor) while more explicitly foregrounding the necessity of national morality to enable such a polity and, more specifically, the figure of the emperor as a lynchpin for that possibility. That is to say, while Yoshino tended to see the nation as the framework through which the ultimate ideal of a democratic popular will could be realized, Mitsui perceived the incorporation of democratic institutions, such as suffrage and demonstrations, as a means to bring national unity to a government mired by political corruption. While Mitsui tended to belabor some of his more abstract disagreements with Yoshino, he voiced few disagreements on the level of practical policies.35 By 1919 Mitsui began to more forcefully foreground the primacy of national security in his program of popular politics. The impetus for this shift was probably due to several reasons, including the Russian Revolution and the conclusion of World War I internationally and the Rice Riots of the year prior domestically. In an essay titled “The Radicalization of Logicism,” he criticized political theorists that he charged as being “logicist”— that is, prescriptions of political solutions from the standpoint of political theory rather than actual experience. Marxism, with its particular view of historical materialism, and certain interpretations of Wilsonian internationalism were particularly guilty of such faulty politics. In opposition to these logicist universalist politics, Mitsui called for what he termed sokoku minshūshugi, which we might gloss literally as ancestral land populism or, more concisely, as patriotic populism.36 He argued: Japan must greatly reform its political life and systems of moral suasion (kyōka soshiki). This must not be based upon a derivative, armchair theory of democracy, but upon the awareness that Japan has developed a national polity (kokutai) and history that is unique to the world. It will only be realized when the interior, national life has been rendered into a religion through the camaraderie that joyfully unites all Japanese. This is neither based upon theories of class struggle or the materialistic worldview of communism. . . . The democracy articulated by the American president as the principle of his domestic and foreign policy should not be taken straight away as the principle of policy in Japan, which exists and grows under different

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The “systems of moral suasion” that Mitsui refers to here could just as easily be translated as “systems of education.” Earlier in this chapter I translated the right-leaning organization Dai-Nippon Kyōka Dantai Renmei as the Association of Greater Japanese Moral Suasion Groups. There, too, kyōka dantai could be rendered as educational groups, which would perhaps make this association seem less menacing. Kyōiku, a compound of the characters for teach and nurture, is typically used to refer to the English word “education” and was in circulation during the Taisho era. Kyōka, on the other hand, is a compound of the characters for teach and change and is more associated with teachings related to morality or religion. My word choice here, which I borrow from Sheldon Garon’s study of social management in Japan, serves to highlight the fact that kyōka would later be used in government programs for moral suasion carrying a nationalist rhetoric, most notably the Moral Suasion Mobilization Campaign (Kyōka Sōdōin Undō) of late 1929 to early 1930.38 The campaign attempted to assuage class conflict through a message of national unity at the height of the economic crisis following the crash on Wall Street. Programs of kyōka essentially sought to teach people that labor and economic hardship were sacrifices for the good of the nation while also serving as a tool to fight inflation through messages of frugality and savings.39 Mitsui’s championing of democratic reforms, too, were qualified by a moralist call for people to be subservient to the ancestral land. The conservative, moralist trajectory of Mitsui’s program for popular politics is visible in his equally qualified endorsement of the press and academy as important pillars in a new era of politics. In a 1920 article titled “The Corrective for Parliament,” published shortly after the Morito Incident on the Tokyo Imperial University campus, Mitsui argued that a critical press and academy were necessary “corrective” mechanisms to keep parliament from falling into corruption.40 From Mitsui’s perspective, Morito completely failed in this task, as his work on Kropotkin was an example of recent trends in the academy of merely copying the socialist trends of European thought. For Mitsui, intellectuals had the duty to act



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as leaders who would correctly guide the populous toward its awakening as Japanese, which would in turn lead to a stronger nation. In an earlier essay, Mitsui referred glowingly to Columbia University’s firing of professors James McKeen Cattel and H. W. L Dana for the “crime” of publicly opposing American involvement in World War I. Mitsui noted that even a nation whose founding was based upon the principle of freedom needed to censor its professors in matters directly related to national security.41 Mitsui also made his case for abolishing the policy of tying suffrage rights to the amount one paid in taxes and expanding it to all adult men. He arrived at this conclusion not through a belief in natural rights or the inherent value of civil rights but through an argument based upon national security. For Mitsui, the imperative of national survival necessarily called for the expansion of political rights and powers to imperial subjects. This was Mitsui’s basic conclusion after observing the policies of the United States government during the First World War. If Japan were to win, or even survive a war on a similar scale, it would need the cooperation of every member of the nation in a manner similar to that of the war mobilization effort in the United States. As such, imperial subjects would need to have access to rights and powers that appropriately corresponded to the duties they took on—namely, tax payments, conscription, and moral participation in building communities.42 As it stood, participation in popular elections hinged on whether or not a potential voter paid a minimum of three yen in taxes.43 For Mitsui, the leftist sloganeering that equated the movement for universal male suffrage with a battle against class divisions was not necessarily wrong.44 But instead of linking the spread of political rights and powers with the goal of a socialist revolution, Mitsui argued that it must be understood from the perspective of national survival. The question for Mitsui was not whether the expansion of rights and powers was inherently “good” but whether or not the “formal discrimination” of equating the minimum tax amount of three yen with the right to vote in popular elections corresponded to the realistic necessities of the Japanese nation. The answer for Mitsui was “no.” Mitsui always displayed a self-assured tone in his polemics, but the imperial rescript that followed the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923 solidified his conviction that his moral prescription for Japanese society was justified. Mitsui did not ascribe the causes of the earthquake to divine punishment over the moral degeneracy of the Japanese people, as many did. Rather, he blamed Japan’s lack of preparation to handle the calamity to a hedonistic pacifism that he believed characterized the Taisho era. These thoughts culminated in the “Life and Representation Society Statement,” which Mitsui wrote in late 1923 and was later endorsed by other contributing

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members of Life and Representation. As one biographer of Mitsui notes, the statement anticipated the contents of the “Imperial Rescript Regarding the Invigoration of the National Spirit,” which was released to the public on November 10, 1923, two days after Mitsui wrote the initial draft of his statement.45 This was a boost to Mitsui’s confidence about his basic platform. Yoshihito’s rescript, crafted by government officials in consultation with Education Minister Okano Keijirō, Home Minister Gotō Shimpei, and Chief Cabinet Secretary Kabayama Sukehide, called imperial subjects to be steadfast in their patriotism, reminding them of the basic tenets of moral education that Yoshihito’s father, the Meiji emperor Mutsuhito, had pronounced to them through the Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890.46 According to Yoshihito, the moral unity of the nation could pull the country out of the ashes of this disaster, which had claimed over one hundred thousand lives and literally flattened the nation’s capital. Yoshihito called on his subjects to reorient their vision away from decadence and radical thought, to discipline the selfish aims of politics and politicians, and to work toward the “promotion of state, peace of nation, and welfare of society.”47 To Mitsui, the devastation wrought by the earthquake brought to the surface the need for a spiritual reform in Japan that would bring all Japanese to a self-consciousness about their Japanese identity. The “Life and Representation Statement” was a culmination of Mitsui’s intellectual journey to that point and served as a foundation for similar statements describing the philosophy of its successor organizations, such as the Shikishima Way Group and the Genri Nippon Society. In it, Mitsui presents a Japan-centric view of Asian culture that echoed pronouncements by early Pan-Asianists like Okakura Tenshin, who held that it was only in Japan that Asian cultures survived intact and that Japan was privileged precisely because it was where Eastern and Western civilization met.48 Mitsui argued that the continued development of Eastern civilization through Japan was an “absolute necessity” for global human civilization itself and called for Japanese to devote their lives to the protection of Japan. To Mitsui, patriotic devotion was simultaneously an obligation to the world itself. He contrasted this view of Japanese history to the worldview of communism, which he derided as a faulty understanding of history concocted by power-hungry activists. What was instead necessary was a “restoration of thought and scholarship” (shisō gakujutsu ishin) that would stem these rapidly spreading falsehoods and, in turn, prevent a political revolution. Mitsui’s intellectual journey that began with attempts to unlock the secrets of poetic sentiments brought him to the conclusion that the form of restoration needed in the Taisho era did not have to do with economic



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justice or political rights but with the moral disposition of the people, which had to be rectified through the persuasive power of scholarship. The “restoration of scholarship” would become an important rallying cry for the Genri Nippon Society throughout its two decades of political activism and signified the conservative answer to the question of how the framework of “restoration” could help conceptualize the future of popular politics in Japan. As progressive as Mitsui’s advocacy of suffrage rights, a critical press and academy, and sympathy for tenant farmers seemed on the surface, each was placated by a basic position that rights, criticism, and economic opportunity should primarily serve the interests of the nation. His patriotic populism, paradoxically, advocated the expansion of political and economic opportunities for Japan’s lower-class population while defining the arena of those opportunities on the narrow terms of conservative nationalism. Though he argued that the lower class should have a voice in politics, he also held that people had their place in society and that maintaining those societal strata constituted a protection of harmony in Japanese society. In other words, while Mitsui’s patriotic populism theoretically granted people the freedom to participate in politics in more diverse ways, its failure to guarantee freedom from a code of strict moral conduct tethered to an emperor-centric nationalist ideology that emphasized specific norms regarding status, gender, and other social hierarchies forestalled attempts to act upon these theoretical freedoms in ways that did not conform to this ideology. This truncated conception of democratic institutions was neither original nor uncommonly held. In fact, the overall framework of universal male suffrage that the Imperial Diet passed in 1925 consisted of two laws that replicated in general terms Mitsui’s three-part platform of expanding political rights, protecting property owner interests, and championing an emperor-centered nationalism. The General Election Law and the Peace Preservation Law, passed within two weeks of one another, set the basic terms of democratic politics and discourse in imperial Japan. It was the latter that would become the weapon of choice in the Genri Nippon Society’s attacks upon academics over the next two decades. THE PEACE PRESERVATION LAW: THE DAWN OF A NEW DISCURSIVE CONTEXT One of the crucial moments of the Taisho democracy era came in the spring of 1925 in the form of two laws. On April 22, the Peace Preservation Law went into effect, outlawing conspiracy to alter either the kokutai, an ill-defined

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concept associated with the emperor, and the system of private property. Two weeks later on May 5, the Diet passed the General Election Law, granting suffrage rights to men above the age of twenty-five. Both laws were consequential in shaping political discourse over the next two decades. The Peace Preservation Law was clearly intended to curb the scope of electoral politics. Prior to the passage of the General Election Law, voting rights were tied to the amount one paid in property taxes. Over the years the amount was incrementally lowered, raising the number of those eligible to vote and broadening the economic class of the voting public. Many, particularly conservatives, feared that this would lead to the growth of proletarian political parties and perhaps even a revolution like that recently witnessed in Russia in 1917. The Peace Preservation Law essentially made leftist revolutionary politics illegal, eliminating the legal basis of such change before the broadening of suffrage rights. The first article of the initial 1925 version of the law states: Anyone who organizes an association with the objective of changing the Kokutai or denying the private property system, or who joins such an association with full knowledge of its objectives, shall be liable to imprisonment with or without hard labor for a term not exceeding ten years. Any attempt to commit the crime of the preceding clause will be punished.49

As the Marxian social theorist Kazahaya Yasoji would later point out, the wording is striking in its enshrinement of the kokutai and the private property system, or capitalism, as the twin pillars of what constituted the political order of the Japanese state.50 In 1928 this article was split into two separate articles, the first condemning conspiracy toward alteration of the kokutai and the second those who attempted to alter the system of private property, thus legally articulating that the kokutai was indeed separate from and more important than the economic framework mandated by the state. The punishments for these crimes were also made more severe, including the possibility of the death penalty. However, this initial conflation of the emperor system and capitalism carried significant consequences. In terms of the legacy of censorship during the war, this quasi-equation of the Japanese national essence with the capitalist system of property rights served as a justification for Japanists such as Mitsui and Minoda to accuse anyone resembling or defending a socialist as a traitor in the name of “peace” and patriotism. Aside from its effect on electoral politics, the passage of the Peace Preservation Law had a debilitating effect on political discourse. Government agencies tasked with monitoring political movements critical of established powers expanded in personnel over subsequent years, developing



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specialized offices for particular types of thought crimes and draconian methods for forcing suspects to renounce their heretical views. As we will see in the next chapter, intellectuals like Mitsui and the organization that he founded that very year with Minoda, the Genri Nippon Society, played an important role in supplying agencies with a Japanist theoretical apparatus to use in combating leftist thought and organizing. It was also the Peace Preservation Law that significantly raised the profile of Japanist intellectuals like Mitsui and Minoda. The reason for their ascendency was their ability to turn the law into a discursive weapon. The change in the tenor of Mitsui’s polemics before and after 1925 is stark. Though Mitsui at times encouraged authorities to censor his opponents prior to that year, the Peace Preservation Law allowed him to label their position as treasonous and to call for their arrest. A case in point is Mitsui’s treatment of the work of Tokyo Imperial University law professor Suehiro Izutarō, an expert on issues related to agricultural labor policies. The earliest of Mitsui’s criticism of Suehiro occurred over a decade before the 1925 passage of the Peace Preservation Law, when he had accused the professor of challenging the Japanese subject’s right to private property as guaranteed in the Meiji Constitution and also of using major newspapers as a tool to agitate tenant farmers to organize for class warfare. By February 1914, Mitsui had called upon Tokyo Imperial University, as well as the authorities, to “take appropriate measures” in responding to these “irresponsible” publications.51 However, it was not until immediately after the 1925 passage of the Peace Preservation Law that Mitsui began to call Suehiro “disloyal” and “treasonous” (kyōgyaku).52 Suehiro, along with his colleagues at Tokyo Imperial University, was targeted by the Genri Nippon Society for nearly two decades. In June 1934, Minoda took Suehiro to court, accusing him of violating the Publishing Law and Peace Preservation Law. Suehiro was acquitted in December of that year.53 Despite his acquittal, accusations like these—and even the possibility of accusations of treason—were a source of immense anxiety on the part of scholars with sympathies or interests in leftist politics or ideas. Virtually any political position that opposed Japanism could be accused of attempting to “change the kokutai,” and the Genri Nippon Society used this tactic liberally. Beyond the personal abuse academics suffered at the hands of Japanist intellectuals, we can also assume that many practiced some form of self-censorship, consciously or unconsciously. Law professors were not the only targets of the society. The most celebrated academic philosopher in Japan at the time, Nishida Kitarō, confided to his publisher that he had tried to write his treatise on Japanese culture in a manner that would not invite the ire of Japanists.54 Evidently, he did not try hard enough, though

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it is difficult to imagine how he might have accomplished this task. Minoda accused Nishida of failing to critique Marxism, a bizarre accusation given Nishida’s field of metaphysics. This new set of legal circumstances facilitated the establishment of Japanism as the new discursive norm in intellectual culture, and by the early 1930s, in order to be politically correct, intellectuals were compelled to write, as it were, in a Japanist tone. Historians Takeuchi Yō and Satō Takumi called this the “age of Japanist cultural literacy,” noting that intellectuals needed to be literate in the language of Japanism that privileged the nation and state over the individual while citing ancient texts like the Kojiki and Manyōshū.55 In an age where anything remotely resembling “leftist” ideas could invite lawsuits or a visit from the Special Higher Police, many intellectuals were forced to put on airs of being faithful nationalists if they hoped to get their works published in national journals. This did not necessarily mean that they had converted to Japanism. Many tried to appropriate Japanist language to promote critiques of imperialism and economic inequality.56 JAPANIST DEMOCRACIES AND POPULIST RESTORATIONS The Peace Preservation Law’s counterpart, the General Election Law, ushered in the first general election open to all male adults regardless of their tax obligation in 1928, the third year of the Showa reign. The occasion was welcomed with much fanfare—after all, it was the culmination of populist political movements that opened the Taisho era. As a matter of course, many invoked the notion of a “Showa Restoration” to describe the popular politics of this new era. Campaign posters soliciting the “true” (tadashiki) or “noble” (tōtoi) votes of the newly expanded electorate pledged that the candidates would bring to fruition this Showa Restoration by faithfully representing them.57 Leadership from the major parties referenced the Showa Restoration in their campaign pitches. Like the Taisho Restoration, the Showa Restoration invoked in the lead up to the 1928 elections meant different things to different people, with associated platforms including improving the living standards for the proletarian class, expanding political rights, or even wrestling wealth and power from the capitalist class. The political parties were not alone in using the slogan. The Home Ministry, too, invoked the Showa Restoration in its posters urging voters to head to the polls.58 If in 1928 the Showa Restoration referred broadly to improving society through electoral politics and grassroots organizing, today it is associated with the idea of direct imperial rule and the bloody politics of assassination



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that characterized the 1930s and 1940s. Radical nationalists rallied under its banner to call an end to corrupt party politics and its ties to finance capital. For many of them, true representation of the populace only existed in the person of the emperor, the benevolent father of the nation itself. Seen in this way, the difference between the ideological characteristics of the era of “Taisho democracy” and the totalitarian politics of the Showa years seems less stark. Mitsui, too, quickly lost faith in the idea that a broader electorate meant a less corrupt government, and by the beginning of the Showa era, he had abandoned all pretenses of being a progressive opinion leader. Still, this review of his Taisho-era activities demonstrates why his turn to “democracy” in the postwar years may not have seemed contradictory in his own mind. For him, moralist nationalism was not incompatible with the emancipatory politics of the Taisho years. His disastrous attempts to persuade his tenants to accept their place in society for the sake of the nation, however, seemed to prove the opposite. Though from time to time Mitsui expressed sympathy for his economically destitute countrymen, his vision for the new age of popular politics in the Taisho era was based upon a literary and vitalist understanding of Japaneseness, outlined in the previous chapter. When he examined the state of popular politics in Japan, what he saw first were people who did not conform to his understanding of the Japanese as people who faithfully followed the fate of the nation, a view based on his hermeneutic study of texts like the Manyōshū and the poems of the Meiji emperor.59 It followed that prescriptions for remedying social unrest and political corruption would be moral in nature. For Japanists like Mitsui in the late 1920s and 1930s, democracy, writ in katakana as demokurashii, came to symbolize attempts by the Left to find cures for social ills in theories developed in ivory towers in the West. However, Japanist proposals were not developed in isolation from the discourses that historians today call Taisho democracy. Mitsui’s “patriotic populism” shared many basic features and assumptions with his more progressive contemporaries, even while their legacies could not be more different. With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that Mitsui would speak approvingly of democracy in the postwar era. Individual rights to participate in government were something to be celebrated and expanded, as long as they remained subservient to a greater national character—in his case the paternalistic figure of the emperor. Whether hidden from view, as in Yoshino’s minponshugi, or displayed in full view, as in Mitsui’s patriotic populism, the figure of the emperor was a key cornerstone in Taisho-era imaginings of a liberal political order.

CH A P T ER T H R EE

International Nationalisms and the Suppression of Socialism

Of the numerous Japanese intellectuals of the early twentieth century who have been associated with the repressive political climate of those years, there is perhaps no single person with as sordid a reputation as Minoda Muneki. The biographical accounts of Minoda that emerged in the postwar period were not flattering and were, at times, slanderous. A typical example is that of Okuno Shintarō, a Sinologist and a former colleague who shared an office space at Keio University with other faculty members, including Minoda. In a 1955 essay published in a special issue of the magazine Bungei shunjū featuring “firsthand accounts” of the wartime era, Okuno describes Minoda as a dark-skinned, diminutive bumpkin from the countryside with a “fanatical” way of talking that made him wonder whether his heart was going to burst.1 Minoda apparently had a reputation as an eccentric nationalist throughout campus. Okuno recalls there being rumors that Minoda loudly celebrated the 1930 assault of Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi by the right-wing assassin Sagoya Tomeo. The day after Hamaguchi was shot, the blackboards in several classrooms were vandalized with the four-kanji compound kyōki ranpu (the lunatic wildly dances).2 Kyōki (lunacy) is a homonym of Minoda’s given name, Muneki, and was reportedly a word that students often scribbled on the blackboards in Minoda’s classroom. When confronted at a faculty meeting, Minoda vehemently denied the allegations, but he was never able to shake the label of lunacy. To this day, there are library databases that record the pronunciation of Minoda’s given name as Kyōki rather than Muneki. 64



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To be sure, Minoda himself was relentless and unfair in his own diatribes against fellow academics during his lifetime. However, if we are to make sense of the rise of right-wing thought to a place of prominence in Showa-era political discourse, we ought to be mindful of the layers of caricatures that can potentially impede that process. Okuno’s oddly racialized picture of Minoda perhaps reveals more of the Tokyo-born prejudices of Okuno and a majority of the Japanese academy of those years.3 Indeed, few treatments of Minoda, Mitsui, and the Genri Nippon Society in the early postwar years displayed any serious engagement with the issue of the rise of Japanism. This tradition of ad hominem caricatures of Minoda has led to two misconceptions about the Genri Nippon Society and Japanism more generally. The first is the common assumption that Japanists only appreciated Japanese ideas or institutions. For example, Minoda’s frequent and unrelenting labeling of foes as “traitors” has at times led observers to understand him as a xenophobe with an aversion to all things non-Japanese, particularly Western.4 However, such an understanding of the so-called Japanist movement carries the risk of misidentifying right-wing intellectual currents of imperial Japan as domestically insular and antithetical to the growing interconnectedness of ideas across the globe. Nationalist critics of leftist thought like Minoda were strikingly cosmopolitan in their writing and part of a global reckoning emerging in reaction to World War I and the October Revolution in Russia. Part of the project of this chapter will be to situate the ideas of one of the most notorious nationalist ideologues of imperial Japan in the international antisocialist discourse of the era from which he partook. The second common misconception is the notion that Japanists shared the political agenda of the Japanese state and worked to forward its programs by helping to stamp out opposition. While there is some truth to this, it only tells part of the story. There is no question that Minoda’s ideas became useful to those government agencies and politicians aiming to curb the influence of socialist ideas or at least deploy the rhetoric of anticommunism for political gain. At the same time, his particular form of nationalism also took aim at figures in the government who he deemed to be insufficiently patriotic. Over the next three chapters, I will examine the circumstances behind his rise as a significant player in the discourse of nationalism in the 1930s and detail how Japanism converged and diverged with the priorities of various interests within the state. Theories of nationalism traversed national boundaries, as did critiques of Marxist theories and internationalist politics, which is to say that nationalist anti-Marxists like Minoda participated in a global discourse that

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unfolded in concert with transnational developments in Marxist theory.5 This means that as nationalist theorists labored to formulate their own conceptions of the ethnos as a counterconcept to the Marxist notion of class, they often engaged with similar sets of theoretical issues with their Marxist counterparts. Nationalist theorists in Japan shared with their Marxist opponents a similar set of philosophical inspirations and historical circumstances, albeit with different interpretations. Japanists and Marxists shared a concern for a nondeterministic theory of historical change that accounted for the individual agency of actual living humans—a concern that arose as they sought to critique iterations of historical materialism of past generations of Marxists. As Japanese Marxists grappled with the task of articulating an understanding of class and capitalist modernity that merged theory with a concrete course of action that incorporated a living, historically situated proletarian class, Japanese nationalists sought to position the ethnos in the place of class as the chief engine behind historical change. Like his mentor Mitsui’s vitalist nationalism, Minoda theorized that the nation was a more authentic aspect of humanity embedded in the everyday life of the individual, while “class” constituted a problematic category distilled from an analysis of circumstances alien to Japan. All of this is not to say that the Japanist intellectual tradition warrants reconsideration based on the substance of its ideas or that Japanist conceptions of history were more sophisticated than those of the left. Neither, I believe, is true. My aim is to take seriously currents of thought often dismissed as fanatical gibberish and to develop ways to account for the process through which they obtain political power. With regard to the latter point, I will recount the process through which Minoda’s ideas gained the power to shape the academic discourse of the 1930s despite near-unanimous claims among fellow academics that his theories were indeed fanatical gibberish. Those years witnessed the intense political suppression of leftists in Japan. Government agencies, including the Home, Justice, and Education Ministries, carried out the surveillance, censorship, incarceration, and forced reeducation of Marxists and socialists. In articulating the reasons for their assault on leftists, these agencies relied in part on nationalist critiques of Marxism and socialism produced by intellectuals with only loose institutional affiliations with the government. The production of an archive of anti-Marxist nationalist thought was crucial to training government personnel charged with the task of containing Marxists and socialists. Many government personnel shared with nationalist intellectuals the view that radical leftist thought posed a risk to the government and its nationdefining imperial institution. The fear that domestic leftists could be acting according to directions provided by Moscow and the Communist International raised the stakes of the project.



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What set Minoda’s theories apart from other contemporaneous engagements with the question of historical agency was the fact that his was directly linked to the political powers of the state, which unleashed its police powers in physically limiting the scope of arguments that could be made publicly, especially by leftist intellectuals. Though Minoda’s theoretical positions had no lasting effect in terms of the substance of his ideas, they were powerful in their physical effect, silencing their opponents through the unspoken threat of violence. His studies and translations of European critiques of Marxism proved useful to bureaucrats in the Ministry of Education intent on eliminating socialism from among its student population, and Minoda himself became one of the loudest voices lobbying for the censorship of what he perceived to be treacherous social theories. In this sense, Minoda’s was an important voice in shaping the academic discourse on social theory in imperial Japan. MARXISM AS SOCIAL THEORY IN THE 1920s During the mid-1920s when Minoda was composing his counterarguments to Marxist theory, he was teaching at Keio University in Tokyo, the oldest private university in Japan. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1919 after studying German at the Fifth Higher School in his native Kumamoto Prefecture—both prestigious institutions, though Minoda himself came from a humble socioeconomic background. While his ideas were far from mainstream, Minoda was a product and a member of the best education that the empire had to offer. In late 1925 he founded the Genri Nippon Society, and the organization’s monthly, Genri Nippon (1925–1944), became the main forum for his writing. By the mid-1930s, Genri Nippon was one of the most notorious political magazines in Japan; academics unfortunate enough to be targeted by Minoda and his allies on its pages had legitimate reason to fear for their jobs.6 Compared to its personally inflammatory and sensationalist contents of the 1930s, however, Genri Nippon between 1925 and 1928 was more abstract and, relatively speaking, more collegial in its tone.7 By coincidence, it was also during this time that Japanese Marxism, which informed much of the debate in social theory in Japan at the time, went through major organizational and theoretical changes. As an intellectual who rose to prominence through his criticism of Marxism and communism, Minoda’s own theoretical interests could not help but be shaped by these developments. In other words, a study of Japanist intellectual trends must also inevitably be a study of developments in the intellectual history of Marxism.8 These early years of the Genri Nippon coincided with the arrival of “Fukumoto-ism,” a theory-driven reform movement within Japanese

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Marxist circles that sought to refine what was until then a moralist argument for political economic change into a scientifically rigorous theory— to replace economic determinism with historicism and parliamentary solidarity with an intellectualist vanguard leadership. Soon, students across Japan were organizing study groups, inspired by the movement’s polemical instigator Fukumoto Kazuo, urging that intellectuals must retheorize the methods of the revolution and the structure of capital from the historically grounded standpoint of the proletariat.9 Fukumoto became the leading Marxist theoretician in Japan for a short period until the Communist International denounced him in 1927 for his divisive methods and criticism of leading Russian theorists, much like it denounced Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness, the main inspiration for Fukumoto’s theoretical interventions. Fukumoto had studied with early shapers of Western Marxism such as Lukács and Karl Korsch, and he encouraged in Japan an orientation toward a philosophical Marxism in ways similar to how Lukács and Korsch influenced Western Marxism.10 Minoda’s study and criticism of Marxist theory largely took place during this rise and fall of what is now known as Fukumoto-ism, which prompted a reappraisal of what it meant for socialism to be “scientific” and to build an account of the proletariat grounded in history. Minoda harbored two misgivings about contemporary trends in Marxist and socialist discourse: its claims to the epistemological authority of “science” and its pretenses of presenting a universal, transnational schema at the neglect of national particularity. For Minoda, Marxist theory was both wrong and dangerous. It was wrong because it misunderstood the methodological particularities of the various sciences and was dangerous because it threatened to poison Japan’s young elite and future leaders at the imperial universities, where its theories seemed to be most popular. Minoda often noted that the imperial universities were founded to preserve national security and not necessarily for the pursuit of knowledge alone, much less potentially dangerous knowledge. Thus, in critiquing Marxist theory, Minoda took the dual approach of theoretical engagement and practical measures by writing theoretical critiques to assist state authorities in their suppression of Marxists. “SCIENCE” AND THE METHODS OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Like many intellectuals concerned with social issues in Japan during the 1920s, Minoda approached these problems through an interrogation of the theoretical methods applied to the examination of society. He was not alone



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in looking to Germany for inspiration. Japanese students interested in these epistemological questions flocked to German universities, where inquiries into the possibility of the “human sciences” had been developed by Wilhelm Dilthey late in the previous century and were then coming to a culmination of sorts through the works of the so-called Neo-Kantian Schools.11 Heinrich Rickert, inspired by the work of Dilthey and Wilhelm Windelband, attracted students such as Miki Kiyoshi and Hani Gorō to Heidelberg, both of whom became important Japanese Marxist theorists.12 Historical and cultural particularity was indeed a point of interest for Japanese Marxists as well, as they sought a means to understand the range of possible political action within Japan’s particular inflection of capitalist modernity. Though Minoda was sympathetic to the Neo-Kantian effort to separate the methods of the science of culture from that of nature, he believed that Rickert’s attempt to formulate concepts of cultural value was just as much of an abstraction from actual life as were the natural sciences.13 Instead of constructing a new metaphysic of culture, Minoda argued that social scientists should once again go back to the arguments of Dilthey and, more importantly, Wilhelm Wundt. Minoda argued that Wundt’s idea of “folk” was a category far more grounded in the actual experience of people than was the Marxist notion of “class.” It is noteworthy that Minoda countered Marxist diagnoses of economic issues in Japan on methodological grounds rather than on more personal grounds of loyalty to the nation, as he would tend to do later in his career. He was particularly interested in three aspects of Wundt’s work: the taxonomy of sciences and the place of psychology within it; his principles of psychology; and Völkerpsychologie, or the psychology of the folk. Minoda was not the only member of the Genri Nippon Society with interests in Wundt. He owed much of his understanding of Wundt to his mentor and fellow founder of the Genri Nippon Society, Mitsui.14 Mitsui first encountered Wundtian psychology at Tokyo Imperial University as a student when he was enrolled in courses taught by Matsumoto Matatarō, who trained under Wundt at Leipzig. As noted, Life and Representation (Jinsei to hyōgen), a magazine Mitsui edited and a precursor to Genri Nippon, took its title from a line in Wundt’s System der Philosophie, which declared that representation (Darstellung) through a creative process, not mere depiction (Abbildung), was the task of art.15 The passage neatly captured Mitsui’s critical approach to Japanese naturalist literature. He extensively reviewed Wundt’s Elemente der Völkerpsychologie (1912) in the November 1913 issue of Life and Representation, and Wundtian folk psychology became an important touchstone in the Genri Nippon line of Japanism, including for Minoda.16 Aside from Minoda’s studies on scientific methodology, the early years of

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Genri Nippon featured translations from Wundt’s System der Philosophie, Völkerpsychologie, and Logik prepared by other contributing members. Of the many European writers referenced in Genri Nippon during those years, we might say that Wundt was the most important. Minoda’s interest in Wundt stemmed from his belief that Wundt’s conception of psychology as a form of science could serve as a foundation for debunking the claim made by Marxist theorists that their theories constituted a science. Drawing from Wundt’s taxonomy of sciences, Minoda essentially argued that Marxists were wrong because their methods of inquiry were flawed.17 His argument was best laid out in a March 1926 article on the methods of the social sciences. While the essay was aimed at Morito Tatsuo and Ōyama Ikuo, two social scientists associated with proletarian movements but not usually categorized as Marxists, Minoda’s appropriation of Wundtian thought formed the basic blueprint for his critique of Marxism. There Minoda argues that psychology is the study of “immediate experience” that examines the elements and processes of consciousness. Since everything in the world only exists to us as it is perceived through our five senses, it cannot be anything other than the contents of our consciousness of experience. Psychology, according to Minoda, provides a foundation for the human sciences because it studies human reality as it is produced in consciousness. This is different from the study of “mediated experience,” which “posits that these contents of consciousness exist in themselves independent of the aforementioned subjective cognition.”18 These mediated approaches, most common in the natural sciences, are useful in examining society only to a certain extent because societies are composed of “the communal life of feeling, willing, and acting humans,” rather than “natural phenomena that do not possess consciousness.”19 That social scientists often confused the methods of the human and natural sciences is a problem because these sciences are governed by different principles of causality, according to Minoda. Referring again to Wundt, Minoda argues that observers of human societies must recognize the principles of creative synthesis, the heterogeny of ends, and increasing contrasts (sōgōteki sōzo, mokuteki bunka, taishō kyōka no shogenri).20 Minoda does not define these principles, only noting how they imply that “in psychic processes, cause and effect do not correspond in terms of quantity; not only is there a quantitative flux, but a qualitative change can occur spontaneously.”21 Here he is referring to several of Wundt’s laws of mental causality, which hold that the products of mental processes are qualitatively different than the sum of their parts, that the results of human actions are often products of differently imagined goals, and that contrasting experiences tend to intensify one another.22



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For Minoda, these principles of human psychology undermined the efficacy of the Marxist idea that the category of “class” grasped the motivations and desires of a large group of people. In the February 1927 issue of Genri Nippon, Minoda accused leading Marxist theorist and Kyoto Imperial University professor Kawakami Hajime of “completely misunderstanding the differences between the natural sciences and social sciences.”23 Kawakami had used the analogy of scientific and medical progress in arguing that his colleague Watsuji Tetsurō, an academic philosopher, had resorted to a conservative form of common sense in uncritically dismissing Marxist theory.24 Minoda repeated this criticism of Kawakami on several occasions over the course of the next two years and also directed it toward the philosopher Miki Kiyoshi, who at the time was gaining attention for his synthesis of academic philosophy and Marxist theory.25 The common thread in these critiques was the idea that Marxism’s pretentions as a science took for granted the applicability of class and historical materialism to contexts far removed from those that determined the observations made by Marx. From Minoda’s perspective, if the category of class seemed to reduce all human motivations to material concerns, social theory needed a more nuanced tool for understanding historical change that accounted for all motivations of human beings. Wundt’s idea of Völkerpsychologie (folk psychology) supplied Minoda with a framework for critiquing the universalist claims of historical materialism. Though developed as a complement to the psychological study of the individual, Wundt’s psychology of groups of individuals took a completely different approach. Wundt’s psychology divides the field of psychology into two major disciplines: physiological psychology, which examines the psyche of individuals through its relation to physiological sensations in a laboratory setting, and Völkerpsychologie, which studies the development of the psychology of groups of people through anthropological, historical, and linguistic approaches. Despite his ambitious, pioneering work in the field, Wundt was skeptical of the precision and breadth that could be expected from experimental, physiological psychology, particularly in accounting for complex mental contents.26 There the psychologist was able to develop experiments that could measure simple mental phenomena such as reactions and sensations, but the more complex activities of the mind remained out of reach. In studying the more intricate processes of the human psyche, Wundt proposed that the psychologist would be better served by examining the products of the human psyche instead of attempting to reach into the psyche itself through external stimuli. Minoda was particularly fond of citing the tenth and final volume of Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie, which opens with an exploration of the relationship between agriculture (cultus agri) and worship (cultus deorum) through their

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Latin etymological root, colere.27 To Minoda, this provided a powerful argument against the Marxist notion that religion and art were mere byproducts of labor and historical modes of production.28 Agriculture, or labor, and religious worship were originally identical, Minoda argued, and served as the foundation for modern-day national cultures. While “class” was nothing more than an abstraction developed by the German Marx observing the British economy and then applied to people around the world, ethnos was a category that lent itself to a more nuanced understanding of societies. It bears noting, however, that neither Minoda nor his colleagues at the Genri Nippon Society ever developed a coherent theory that defined the category of folk, or minzoku, as it was usually translated. They could not rely on Wundt in this regard, as he was himself vague in his definitions.29 Critics of Wundt have called his Völkerpsychologie “armchair” scholarship that merely synthesized the more empirical studies of other researchers, at times quite uncritically, and the same applies to Minoda.30 He tended to recycle basic ideas from Wundt with which to critique a wide range of scholarship, albeit with few citations. In this regard, Minoda’s “folk” and “nation” were just as much abstractions as the “class” invoked by the targets of his polemics. While Minoda’s adaptation of Wundtian psychology did not necessarily gain currency among intellectuals in Japan, the issues of historical determinism and national particularity were critical topics among academic philosophers and political theorists alike. Minoda’s incorporation of Wundtian epistemology in critiquing Marxist theories of society and scientific methodology drew the attention of antisocialist policy-makers as well as civilian and military nationalist leaders, and it was among them that his scholarly work would find a more receptive audience. CLASS AND NATION IN INTERNATIONAL MARXIST AND ANTI-MARXIST DISCOURSE In borrowing from Wundt’s individual and folk psychology to critique Marxist theory for dismissing national particularity, Minoda was essentially arguing that ethnos (minzoku) was a more historically grounded category than class. Contemporary Marxists disagreed with that assessment, though many would later be forced to reconsider nationalism under duress by the Japanese thought police.31 Perhaps the most relevant example is the aforementioned Fukumoto, who quickly rose to a leadership role in the Japanese Communist movement through his theorization of the proletariat precisely when Minoda was penning his critiques. Like Minoda, Fukumoto



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was acutely aware of the international context of these debates and drew extensively from his European contemporaries. Fukumoto dismissed the dialectical materialism of his predecessors as being nothing more than a simple moral prescription for political engagement rather than a true, scientific understanding of political economy. All but explicitly drawing from his former interlocutor Georg Lukács, Fukumoto argued that the complete knowledge of society necessary for the ultimate task of revolution could only be gained from the perspective of the proletariat, whose social position embodied the structure of social relations of production at the core of capitalist exploitation.32 Earlier theories of social formation, change, and revolution had fallen into the trap of teleological fatalism, which could only be overturned by returning to the “socialized human being” at the core of history.33 Fukumoto proposed a new understanding of the dialectical method. Going beyond the simplistic understanding of dialectics as a process of synthesis emerging from the opposition of a thesis and antithesis, Fukumoto argued that dialectics was a method for capturing the totality of the political economic situation in its formative process. Such a method takes reality to be the unification of subjective and objective knowledge. Thus, the proletariat, which is conscious of its own historical significance, at once embodies subjective and objective knowledge since it stands in relation to bourgeois society as the exploited class; from this position it obtains an objective view of its own place as a class within the totality of the capitalist system. For Fukumoto, this understanding of dialectical materialism needed to serve as both the basis of Japanese Marxist theory and to shape the strategy of the proletarian movement. For our purposes here, it is interesting to note the similarity in motivation between Minoda and Fukumoto. Both of their critiques were founded upon the distrust of an objective view of social reality in the natural scientific sense, and both called for a more historically situated understanding of society that accounted for the subjective experience of history by actual human beings.34 The crucial difference is that for Fukumoto dialectical knowledge of the totality of society (in capitalism) could only be apprehended through the experience of the proletariat, while for Minoda the primary factor that shapes the lived experience of humans is an ethnic “national” experience—one available as an analytic object in the form of language and cultural practices. Interestingly, Minoda never directly referred to Fukumoto’s dialectical materialism.35 His absence of criticism could be because Fukumoto was not an Imperial University professor—like most of Minoda’s targets— or because Minoda had difficulty developing a critique of this more

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sophisticated materialist dialectic.36 Though it is tempting to overestimate the parallels between these “left” and “right” critiques of the pseudoscientific, deterministic interpretation of historical materialism, the similarities are limited to a common call for the investigation of historically determined subjective agency. Still, Minoda was certainly familiar with the European iterations of this debate. In the fall of 1925, he had published an essay that introduced a critique of Lukács’ reinterpretation of class consciousness by the German sociologist Werner Sombart.37 The essay quoted Lukács’ piece on “What Is Orthodox Marxism” from History and Class-Consciousness at some length and argued that Lukács’ conception of the dialectical method was just as flawed by abstractions as was the so-called vulgar Marxism that Lukács criticized. Sombart argued that Lukács’ ideas of “totality” and the “ultimate goal” of the proletariat were similar to the mechanistic “laws” of economic history that the latter dismissed. Since they were not grounded in reality, they could not provide the basis for an authentically scientific approach to political economy.38 Minoda’s publications on Sombart and his criticism of “scientific socialism” were mostly translations or transliterations, and it is thus unclear whether Minoda in fact read Lukács. Even so, Sombart’s criticism of Lukács’ approach to socialism is consistent with Minoda’s critique of Marxism and its intellectual debt to German idealist philosophy. Minoda disputed the applicability of the conceptual dichotomy of capitalist/proletariat to the reality of Japanese society, and he was skeptical about the possibility of abstracting universal laws of economic change from reality, much less of deducing socialist “goals.” For Minoda, these Marxist theories applied “mediated” methods like those of the natural sciences to the realm of humanity, which called for the “immediate” approach of psychology. While Minoda’s criticism of the Japanese Marxist idea of the dialectic did not address Fukumoto’s more nuanced account of the historical significance of the proletariat, we might infer from his discussion of Sombart’s work that he would have found the former’s concepts to be abstractions divorced from reality. This view would not have been an uncommon one since the Communist International had admonished Fukumoto for being overly theoretical. Historians of Japanese Marxism also point to Fukumoto’s emphasis on theory as a weakness.39 HENDRIK DE MAN AND THE LIMITS OF INTERNATIONALISM In contending that nationality served as a more accurate framework for understanding human historical agency than did class, Minoda found an



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ally in his Belgian contemporary Hendrik de Man. In contrast to Minoda, who never became a socialist, de Man was a veteran of the Second International prior to the outbreak of World War I. The war, and the rise of nationalism among European workers, led de Man to question the feasibility of an internationalist proletarian project. These concerns became the topic of his 1926 tome The Psychology of Socialism, a work that made de Man “the most talked-about and controversial political writer of the decade,” according to historian Zeev Sternhell.40 Sternhell argues that de Man was a key figure in the intellectual history of fascist ideology who attempted to go “beyond” Marxism by imbuing it with nationalism, a project that seemed to legitimate the politics of Benito Mussolini, an admirer of de Man.41 Mark Neocleous echoes these charges in his study of fascist thought, noting that de Man’s psychology of instinct reformulated socialism’s economic class struggle into a struggle between wills representing different sets of ethical values.42 Minoda’s work in the late 1920s was in concert with de Man and his contemporaries, who were developing a political ideology based upon conceptions of life, will, and the process of struggle as a means to critique what they perceived to be the positivist weaknesses of Enlightenment thought. His appropriation of de Man’s work, however, had little to do with any desire to build a nationalist socialism; rather, it was in service to his project of discrediting Marxism as a flawed science. Minoda published translated excerpts from The Psychology of Socialism and published them in three consecutive issues of Genri Nippon beginning in October 1926, the year of the book’s publication. The titles of the installments, “A Spiritual Autobiography of a Socialist: Escape from Marxism,” “The Rationalism of Marxism,” and “Marxism, the State, and Nationality,” are illustrative of what Minoda found compelling about The Psychology of Socialism. In de Man, Minoda perceived a case study of a celebrated thinker who abandoned Marxism in favor of nationalism. The October 1926 installment, “A Spiritual Autobiography of a Socialist,” presented excerpts from the introduction and first chapter of The Psychology of Socialism, in which de Man explained that his experience as a volunteer in the First World War catalyzed his skepticism toward Marxism. For de Man, the war was nothing short of traumatic. As soon as the conflict began, many German socialists voiced support for their government’s declaration of war; the workers’ cry for international solidarity had been converted into a rallying cry for nationalism overnight. To add insult to injury, the same German workers who stood by him in the international socialist movement were now volunteering to invade Belgium, his homeland. De Man, by his own measure a pacifist and an internationalist, suddenly found himself in the trenches defending his own country.

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These personal experiences of the failure of international socialism led de Man to conduct his reappraisal of socialist theory.43 For Minoda, it was de Man’s reasoned apostacy of Marxism that appealed to him most; more than any passage from de Man’s writing, Minoda would later repeatedly refer to de Man’s experiences in arguing that Marxism had grown obsolete. There was also much in de Man’s writing that resonated with Minoda’s theoretical explorations of societies and their progression through history. In his November 1926 installment, “The Rationalism of Marxism,” Minoda focused on de Man’s critique of Marxist rationalism. It bears noting that de Man was educated in Leipzig under the guidance of Wilhelm Wundt.44 Like Wundt’s enthusiasts in Japan, de Man argued that the Marxist theory of knowledge owed its foundation to the German idealist tradition of metaphysics and sought to reevaluate it from the standpoint of immediate experience. Echoing Oswald Spengler’s declaration that the twentieth century was to be “the century of psychology,” de Man argued that the new generation of intellectuals sought “a conception of the world which, instead of being based upon the indirect experience of the conceptual universe, shall derive from the direct experience of the real universe of feeling and will.”45 In a manner similar to Minoda’s critique of Japanese Marxist theory, de Man suggested that the assumption that humans act according to the “knowledge of rationally conceived ends” was misleading.46 For de Man, the theoretical rigidity of Marxist theory prevented socialist organizers from predicting the collapse of a brittle international solidarity among workers that the war had provoked. Any new political program needed to be built upon the foundation of a new epistemology that accounted for the vital capacity of humans to confound the rational categories that theorists had used in attempting to determine and predict their actions. Minoda’s final installment of translations from de Man, “Marxism, the State, and Nationality,” focused on passages in which de Man argued that nationalism, rather than class, served as the new, affective foundation for the politics of the masses. De Man observed that new social institutions such as “popular education, popular equality, the cheap press, the growth of communication, etc.,” as well as “discoveries of wireless and aviation,” did more to strengthen national culture than to foster an internationalist spirit.47 These new institutions were the fruits of workers’ struggles to achieve better lives. Much had changed in the conditions of the proletariat since Marx and Engels had famously called the workers of the world to unite in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, declaring that they had nothing to lose but the chains that imprisoned them.48 In retrospect, the history of the worker in the twentieth century was largely a national one, where the



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working class in one country struggled over legal issues that bore the marks of their own local histories of business management and labor policy in a particular language that possessed its own unique connotations linked to emotions and ideas.49 The hard-fought prizes of these struggles, the aforementioned “popular education, popular equality, the cheap press, the growth of communication, etc.,” were also conditioned by national circumstances, carrying “the stamp of a particular national culture, and transmit(ting) this culture to the masses which participate in the evolution.”50 De Man saw socialist movements as active participants in the construction of a hegemonic order of nationhood that paradoxically made the previous generation’s international socialist ideals increasingly difficult to realize. For socialists of this new era, the political imperative was no longer to transcend the hegemonic power of the nation but to work within it to create a more peaceful, egalitarian world. In de Man, Minoda found not only an intellectual who shared his enthusiasm for psychology as the basis for a new science for understanding the varieties of human experience but also a veteran of the Second International who had abandoned internationalism.51 He frequently raised this latter point when arguing that figures such as de Man and Mussolini were proof that enlightened ex-socialists now understood how obsolete Marxist thought was.52 He was silent, however, on de Man’s subsequent career as the leader of the Belgium Labour Party and author of the controversial “Plan de Man,” which Minoda most likely would have found a distasteful reformulation of a communist-planned economy. Minoda’s references to de Man cease after 1934, shortly after the plan was put into effect. Nevertheless, these studies of de Man and his European contemporaries led to Minoda’s emergence as a leading figure among Japanese anti-Marxists. JAPANISM AND THE STATE: AN AD HOC RELATIONSHIP There was a crucial difference between the Japanism of Minoda Muneki and such earlier iterations as the Japanism of Takayama Chogyū (1871–1902) and Iwano Hōmei (1873–1920). Minoda and his Genri Nippon Society had a far greater impact than previous Japanists, due in part to the application of their ideology to the social engineering efforts of the Japanese government. The influence of Chogyū and Hōmei was, to a large extent, limited to their own realms of literary magazines and novels. In that context they can be seen as prototypes for the new Japanese nationalist intellectual in the age of imperialism following the Sino-Japanese (1894–1895) and RussoJapanese Wars (1904–1905). At the level of ideas, they provided early sketches

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of what Japanese nationalism might look like given the debts Japanese modernism owed to Western intellectual traditions. Minoda and his colleagues were inheritors of this tradition of Japanism. Events in 1928 served as the occasion for the affirmation of alliances between Japanist intellectuals and bureaucratic agencies within the Japanese government. On March 15 of that year, hundreds were arrested for suspicion of violating the Peace Preservation Law, a law passed in 1925 that in effect made socialism an illegal ideology by outlawing groups that sought to alter two foundations of the Meiji State: the kokutai, a term associated with the imperial institution, and the system of private property.53 The fact that a significant percentage of those detained under the law were students was reason enough for much of the blame to be directed toward the Ministry of Education. Even prior to the “3.15 Incident,” students of Japan’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning were linked to socialist movements and to persistent attempts to establish a Japanese Communist Party. By 1928, the consensus among those in various branches of the government was that the Ministry of Education needed to plan a course of action to prevent the nation’s brightest from joining the ranks of those threatening the nation. The most significant step taken by the ministry in approaching this problem was the establishment of the Student Division (Gakusei-ka) in its Bureau of Professional Education Affairs (Senmon Gakumu Kyoku), an office charged with the surveillance of university students. The Student Division monitored student activity through the placement of student managers (gakusei shuji) on campuses, which one critic pointedly called a form of “thought police.”54 The ministry, on the other hand, chose to frame this as part of an educational program. This program, which came to be known as the movement for Thought Guidance (shisō zendō), was designed to educate both students and society at large in ways that would dissuade them from what it called the “false” premises of materialist thought associated with communism. Its tactics also included promoting and soliciting intellectual and artistic creations that would help combat the spread of materialist thought through the establishment of scholarships, official commissions, and endorsements of especially effective texts. The work of Minoda and his colleagues critical of Marxist methodologies of social science and politics aligned with the goals of this project. In 1928, the year of the mass arrests of socialists, Genri Nippon reinvented itself as a current events opinion magazine under the Newspaper Law, shifting away from the more academic content of its first three years.55 This new direction for Genri Nippon coincided with the growing educational concerns of the Japanese government, and its content began to reflect this



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convergence. The year 1928 also saw the long-awaited publication of Mitsui Kōshi’s Studies on the Collected Poems of the Meiji Emperor, initially serialized in Japan and the Japanese (Nihon oyobi nihonjin) beginning in February 1925, and the aggressive advertising campaign in national newspapers touted it as a study that provided the principle for solving the “national crisis in thought” (shisō kokunan).56 The Ministry of Education had identified Minoda, early on, as an able critic of socialism and materialist theories. His activism as a student in the infamous campaign against Tokyo Imperial University professor Morito Tatsuo and his work on Kropotkin in 1920 likely helped to establish his reputation, but his prolific production of critical essays and translations cemented it.57 He became an obvious choice as a speaker for the lecture events organized as part of the Thought Guidance campaign that brought Japanism to university campuses. Like the work of his mentor Mitsui, Minoda’s 1927 translation of excerpts from Karl Muhs’ Anti-Marx was promoted as providing answers to the “national crisis in thought” and went through several printings in its first few months, with the first printing of two thousand copies selling out within three days. Minoda thanked, among others, Ministry of Education Accounting Section Chief Kimura Masayoshi for assisting in its dissemination.58 Kimura would go on to head the Student Department of the ministry after the office was elevated from the level of division. In 1928 Minoda transformed his lectures on Marxist theory into the monograph The Intellectual Culture of Germany and Russia and Marx-Leninism (Dokuro no shisō bunka to Marukusu-Leninshugi), which aimed to educate “well-meaning youth, students, and educators, military personnel, politicians and official leaders” who wished to know the “true” academic value of Marxism and Leninism.59 The Ministry of Education consulted Minoda’s translations of European critics of Marxism and materialism and published them internally as materials useful for the study and surveillance of subversive thought. Source Materials for the Investigation of Thought (Shisō chōsa shiryō) was published between 1928 and 1934 in thirty-three installments, each stamped with the cautionary character of hi to indicate its classified status. These volumes collected primary sources ranging from proletarian pamphlets and textbooks to critiques of Marxism, such as those translated by Minoda, to aid education bureaucrats in their campaign against the spread of communism. The ministry sponsored scholarships promoting the production of materials useful for combating communism, and Minoda was a recipient of such monies for his research on the human sciences on at least one occasion.60 These early collaborations between members of the Genri Nippon Society and the Ministry of Education were likely facilitated by personal

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connections between the two organizations. Genri Nippon issues between 1928 and the early 1930s feature instances of mutual praise between key bureaucrats in the Ministry of Education and members of the society.61 Yet it should also be pointed out that these moments of alliance between members of the Genri Nippon Society and the Ministry of Education neither indicated any shared political visions nor signaled lasting channels of communication. Whether or not these personal connections led to institutional collaboration or not, many of them were short-lived. Hashida Tōsei, who worked closely with Minoda during his tenure at the Thought Research Section of the ministry, left his government position shortly after meeting Minoda and passed away in 1930.62 Kimura, like many of his colleagues, was appointed to his position in the Ministry of Education through his connections at the Home Ministry, where he returned after a short stint as head of the Student Division.63 Furthermore, there is scant evidence of collaboration between Minoda and longtime education bureaucrat Awaya Ken, who had close ties with several members of the Genri Nippon Society and later became the director of the infamous government organ, the Institute for the Research of National Spirit Culture (Kokumin Seishin Bunka Kenkyūjo). Minoda tended to express more in the way of disagreement than agreement when referring to Awaya. Finally, the Ministry of Education never included Minoda’s books on its list of publicly recommended readings, which instead featured books written by Imperial University professors targeted in Genri Nippon, such as Watsuji Tetsurō, Nishida Kitarō, and Tanabe Hajime, who had been targets of the Genri Nippon Society. All of this is to caution against simply equating the ideological projects of the Japanese government and the socalled Right. The “student problem” (gakusei mondai) for the Ministry of Education was a battle about ideology, to be fought in the trenches of the universities. As such, most of its efforts were focused on the establishment of a reservoir of knowledge that could be deployed in the debunking of materialist and Marxist ideas of supranational ideologies so that intellectual activities on campus could be redirected toward the education of loyal and productive members of Japan’s empire. Thus, the convergence between the education bureaucrats and Japanist activists was a narrow one, occurring only among the Japanist intellectuals specializing in the types of cultural studies that claimed to disprove class analysis, particularly those studied on campuses. It was by no means the intention of the Ministry of Education to promote all types of Japanist and nationalist arguments as a more general attack against Marxist and materialist intellectual and political trends but to develop a practical, tactical alliance.



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It was probably around this time that the Genri Nippon Society developed relationships with members of the military, though these too were ad hoc. As we will see in the next two chapters, the politics of the Genri Nippon Society was at times aligned with those of the so-called Imperial Way faction (Kōdō-ha) of the army, which advocated a Japanist ideology similar to that espoused by Minoda and Mitsui. Satō Takumi has observed that the military’s purchase of hundreds of copies of pamphlets and books published by the Genri Nippon Society amounted to a form of financial assistance.64 In fact, the society was in dire financial straits in the early years, during which we can find Minoda in the editor’s notes begging his readers to pay their subscription dues. It was not until around 1928, with the publication of Minoda’s anti-Marxist works and translations, that the society began to stabilize financially, as the Education and Home Ministries, too, purchased a large number of these publications. General Masaki Jinzaburō notes in his diary that Minoda visited him in August 1934 to ask for financial assistance, though it is possible that such assistance between figures in the Imperial Way faction and the Genri Nippon Society began earlier.65 At the same time, an entry in Masaki’s diary a year later notes his distaste for the personalities in the Genri Nippon Society, writing that while he agreed with their ideas, he disliked the individual people. There he somewhat cryptically writes that Minoda was someone who had “fallen to hell.”66 Still, collaboration between the Genri Nippon Society and Imperial Way faction leaders in the army continued at least into the late 1930s, when General Araki Sadao was appointed education minister under the Konoe cabinet. In the meantime, the issue of receiving financial assistance was a touchy one among members of the Genri Nippon Society. Surviving personal correspondences between members indicate they discussed refusing monetary assistance in order to maintain the society as an independent organization of like-minded thinkers.67 The Genri Nippon Society was not a simple mouthpiece of the army or any particular government body, but financial assistance in the form of cash donations and book purchases allowed its members to maintain their publications and buy advertising space for their books in prominent newspapers. THE “COMMUNIZATION” OF THE IMPERIAL UNIVERSITIES Central to the Genri Nippon Society’s narrative of the academic crisis that had befallen Japan was the argument that the faculty of the Imperial Universities were turning “red” (sekka), or at least contributing to communism

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taking root in Japan. Minoda emerged as the poster boy of academic censorship in the mid-1930s when conservative members in the Imperial Diet employed his talking points against the Imperial Universities as the basis for curbing their academic autonomy. The stage for Minoda’s rise was set with what came to be known as the Communization of Judicial Officers Incident (Shihōkan Sekka Jiken), where between late 1932 and early 1933 nine judicial bureaucrats, including four judges, were arrested under suspicion of being members of the Japan Communist Party. Minoda wasted little time in offering his opinion of the situation. Writing a serialized essay published in the newspaper Nippon shinbun, he was especially critical of the State Higher Examination Committee (Kokka Kōtō Shiken Iinkai), the primary body that examined and selected candidates for placement in prestigious positions within the bureaucratic system.68 The committee consisted of members of the academic elite, including Minobe, fellow Tokyo Imperial University law professor Makino Ei’ichi, and Kyoto Imperial University law professor Takigawa Yukitoki. According to Minoda’s logic, though none of these professors claimed to be communists themselves, by openly displaying sympathy toward domestic socialist movements, Marxist theoretical trends, and, most importantly, selecting communists to high-level bureaucratic positions, they had become worthy of being called communization professors (sekka kyōju).69 As a response to the Judicial Officers Incident, Minoda proposed that the selection process of judicial officers be made independent of the Imperial University system. The first step would be the removal of scholars sympathetic to socialism and Marxism from the examination committee.70 Furthermore, he derided the wording of the Court Composition Law (Saibansho Kōseihō), which explicitly linked the elite status of the Imperial Universities with those of the judicial bureaucracy by making those with teaching experience at the Imperial Universities, but not those from other universities, automatically eligible for elevated ranks. Minoda argued that it was inexplicable that such perks were not extended to professors of other universities, especially those like his former academic home, Keio University, which was at the forefront of anti-Marxist theories.71 Minoda’s denunciation of Imperial University professors and their relation to the Ministry of Justice was published in the New Year’s issue of Genri Nippon in 1933. Although the first round of arrests in the Judicial Officers Incident had occurred in late October of the previous year, the media was not allowed to report on the incident in any detail until a few months later on January 18, which was, incidentally, the opening day of the Diet session.72



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While there is no known evidence that points to a decisive reason as to why the media was allowed to begin reporting on the arrests on this particular day, historian Matsuo Takayoshi has suggested why the government might have wanted to shift public attention to the problem of the “spread of communism.”73 First, this was the first Diet session since the May 15 Incident of the previous year, in which Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi of the Seiyukai party was murdered by nationalist military officers seeking a radical reform in the government. Though the Seiyukai party maintained a parliamentary majority and it was a Seiyukai prime minister who was murdered, much to the surprise of the two major parties, Genrō Saionji Kinmochi recommended that unaffiliated admiral Saitō Minoru form a cabinet as the new prime minister. According to Matsuo, the Saitō cabinet had an interest in keeping the Diet session from focusing on the legitimacy of this nonparty cabinet and may have attempted to shift attention toward a nonpartisan issue—namely, the domestic and international threat of communism. Second, the Japanese government’s decision to officially recognize the state of Manchuria was rebuked by the Lytton Report commissioned by the League of Nations, which had been released in October of the previous year. The next session of the league was scheduled for that February, and though lead delegate Matsuoka Yōsuke’s dramatic exit from the session would ultimately be met with high public praise, at this juncture the government was likely interested in diverting attention from this issue as well. In other words, it was an auspicious time for attention to be focused on the ostensibly shared threat of communism that would allow politicians to deploy the popular rhetoric of patriotism. Regardless of the various political interests behind the sudden fascination with the “spread of communism” in various institutions, this particular Diet session began with the necessary preconditions for the emergence of Minoda’s thought within the wider discourse on politics and academia, bringing devastating consequences. On February 1, Minoda’s polemics against “treacherous” professors leapt from being reading material for a small circle of nationalist intellectuals to legitimate ingredients for national education policy when Seiyūkai representative Miyazawa Yutaka cited Minoda’s arguments concerning the law faculty of the Imperial Universities and the “communization” of the bureaucracies almost verbatim in a three-hour tirade on the communist threat among public servants at a meeting of the Diet Budget Committee. This was no coincidence, as Miyazawa’s father-in-law, Ogawa Heikichi, ran the daily newspaper Nippon shinbun, an ally of Genri Nippon, and Miyazawa seems to have known Minoda well enough to call him his “friend” during the speech.74 As noted earlier, it was this Nippon shinbun that ran Minoda’s long essay that

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became Miyazawa’s script.75 A month later on March 8, House of Peers member Kikuchi Takeo called upon the Ministry of Education to deal with the problem of communization in the Imperial Universities. Education Minister Hatoyama Ichirō was present on both occasions and promised a prompt and effective solution. In this way, the issue of communization in the Imperial University and its effects on the bureaucracy became an issue of public debate in the Diet, and the first victim of this witch hunt was Takigawa Yukitoki of Kyoto Imperial University. The ministry had recently founded the Institute for the Research of National Spirit Culture (Kokumin Seishin Bunka Kenkyûjo) in response to student activism but still could not shed the reputation of being one step behind in containing the spread of communism among students. Soon after, the ministry opened an investigation into the claims against the professors. It eventually concluded that Takigawa violated the duties of his occupation as stated in the first article of the University Edict, which called for professors to encourage the “cultivation of character and the fostering of national thought (kokka shisō).”76 Although there is little doubt that Minoda’s essays played a considerable role in these matters by supplying a detailed list of professors and their alleged violations against the nation, Minoda’s previous encounter with Takigawa has complicated how historians have interpreted the magnitude of Minoda’s actual personal involvement in this incident. Four years previously in 1929, a student group advised by Takigawa invited Minoda to Kyoto Imperial University to speak on contemporary criticisms of Marx and the Russian Revolution.77 Minoda was apparently heckled by the students in attendance, and some have suggested that Takigawa’s dismissal was motivated by Minoda’s personal grudge against him for not intervening.78 By all accounts Minoda’s visit to the university was an animated one, with sharp attacks and counterattacks from both Minoda and his hosts, and it seems that his interest in Takigawa was indeed initiated by this event.79 Within a couple of months, Minoda had researched the writings of the Kyoto law professor and had published a public challenge to him in the August issues of Genri Nippon and Sokoku, a monthly edited by frequent collaborator Kita Reikichi.80 Yet, despite this volatile history between Minoda and Takigawa that makes for tantalizing academic gossip, nearly four years had elapsed since that incident, and in Minoda’s eyes Takigawa was only one of many professors who required state intervention in their academic output and not necessarily the most important. During those intervening four years, Minoda wrote many scathing attacks of Imperial University law professors, and his polemics were typically aimed at Tokyo Imperial University



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faculty members such as Minobe, Suehiro Izutarō, and Makino, who were all also listed in Minoda’s analysis of the “spread of communism” read in the Diet by Representative Miyazawa. Though Minoda may have had a personal grudge against Takigawa, the law professor’s fate as the scapegoat of the issues stemming from the Judicial Officers Incident likely had more to do with the fact that it was politically complicated to indict a member of the law faculty at Tokyo Imperial University, the alma mater of many politicians and government bureaucrats. Read in the context of the history of academic freedom in imperial Japan, the Takigawa Incident (also known as the Kyoto University Incident, or Kyōdai Jiken) brought massive consequences, entrenching state bureaucratic control over personnel issues and, as a result, scholarly and curricular content within the Imperial University system. The law faculty at Kyoto reacted strongly to the dismissal of Takigawa, ultimately resigning en masse.81 The ministry’s firm position on the issue reversed a precedent set earlier in 1914 in an incident also involving Kyoto Imperial University, in which faculty successfully protested then newly appointed president Sawayanagi Masatarō’s attempts to fire other faculty members.82 With the power of decision in faculty appointments and other personnel issues now shifting to the Ministry of Education, more professors came to fear for their own academic careers, even with noted liberal Hatoyama Ichirō at the helm of the ministry. Two years later in 1935, Minoda emerged as one of the leaders of a massive campaign against Tokyo Imperial University professor Minobe Tatsukichi, whose interpretation of the constitution became the basis for the expansion of parliamentary politics in Japan in the Taisho years (1912– 1926). The so-called Campaign to Clarify the Kokutai (Kokutai Meichō Undō) mobilized nationalist protestors by the thousands, eventually prompting the cabinet of Prime Minister Okada Keisuke to publicly denounce Minobe’s theories, marking a decisive end to the growth of democratic institutions in the interwar era. In this incident, too, Minoda’s sway over key officials did not tell the whole story about the relationship between Japanism and the government. While conservative politicians aligned themselves with Minoda, branches of the police were becoming increasingly wary of Japanist activists as the number of figures in government and finance murdered by patriotic assassins grew in the first half of the 1930s. Like the socialists of decades prior, many Japanists came under the surveillance of thought police branches like the Special Higher Police. In that context, Japanist ideologues like Minoda had to toe a delicate line between an advocacy of national unity and a brand of fiery nationalism that accused even the government of

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abandoning its obligations to patriotism. Delicacy, however, was not Minoda’s forte. As war broke out with China and eventually with the United States, Minoda became increasingly hostile toward government leadership; in turn, he and his organization were marginalized to the extent that some of his allies were arrested for their active dissent against the government.83 A RELATIONSHIP OF CONVENIENCE We can draw two important conclusions from Minoda’s activities in the first decade of the Showa era. First—his reputation as an ultranationalist fanatic notwithstanding—the epistemological basis of Minoda’s nationalism was strikingly cosmopolitan and self-consciously so. This suggests that a proper history of the illiberal politics and ideas of the interwar and wartime eras must necessarily be a global intellectual history, even if its protagonists appear to be antithetical to notions of internationalism. Second, Minoda’s career demonstrates that even the most reviled advocates for government political surveillance had ambiguous relationships with powerful branches of the government. Indeed, they, too, became targets of political surveillance. While from the perspective of those persecuted it may well have seemed that Minoda and the government epitomized the same authoritarian ultranationalist ideology (an important fact, since many of them would go on to write the first intellectual histories of this era after the Second World War), the relationship between forms of nationalism and the state was far more complex. From the perspective of the government, Minoda embodied the doubleedged sword that was nationalism: a necessary basis for the organization of the population that also possessed the capacity to erupt into a populist movement for wresting the banner of patriotism from the hands of officials. Minoda’s polemics against the law faculties of the Imperial Universities had a certain utility for government agencies charged with the task of surveilling political dissidents as well as Seiyūkai politicians aiming to wrestle back the prime ministership. The Takigawa Incident, however, also had the effect of amplifying the voice of Minoda and the Genri Nippon Society in the academy, which carried unintended consequences. Their polemics against Minobe Tatsukichi’s imperial organ theory, a key interpretation of the Meiji Constitution that served as the foundation for parliamentary politics, would go on to become the theoretical backbone of antigovernment demonstrations beginning in 1935. As I will discuss in more detail in the next chapter, framing the antiorgan theory as an attack



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on the sovereignty of the emperor became the means to unite proemperor conservatives, critics of parliamentary politics, and other noncommunist nationalist organizations. The prospect of a unified antiestablishment right-wing front alarmed bureaucrats in agencies throughout the Japanese government, leading to a shift in the way government officials dealt with nationalist political discourse.

CH A P T ER F O U R

Surveilling the Right

The controversy surrounding the Takigawa Incident raised the profile of Minoda Muneki from a little-known philosopher in the preparatory program at Keio University to an influential ideologue on the national stage. It was the Imperial Organ Theory Incident that occurred two years later in 1935, however, that cemented his legacy as the most feared Japanist polemicist of his time. Kyoto Imperial University law professor Takigawa Yukitoki ultimately took the fall in the controversies of 1933 that began with the accusation that communists were infiltrating the Justice Ministry, as conservatives focused blame on Imperial University law professors who were ostensibly responsible for training and selecting them. But Minoda’s main target had always been Tokyo Imperial University, the crown jewel of the empire’s higher education system. The Imperial Organ Theory Incident came to a culmination when the cabinet of Prime Minister Okada Keisuke denounced the imperial organ theory, an interpretation of the constitution offered by retired Tokyo Imperial University law professor Minobe Tatsukichi, as heretical and inappropriate for continued publication in academic literature. As in the Takigawa Incident, Minoda’s framing of issues played a key role in how the matter was debated in the Imperial Diet and in public. Observers then and now saw Minobe’s improbable fall as a punctuation of sorts to the oft-discussed demise of liberalism in Japan.1 These were catastrophic times for those who harbored progressive and leftist political beliefs. By then the Japanese government had largely succeeded in stamping out the Japanese Communist Party and other socialist movements. Now, a vocal core of aggressive nationalists led by 88



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intellectuals like Minoda were leading the purge of progressive voices from university positions. Books and articles written by liberal academics were not only censored but banned from publication. These developments seemed to clearly indicate that the right wing had vanquished the left. Matters, however, were far more complex than a question of right versus left. Minoda’s prodigious rise to prominence in the academic world coincided with the rise of right-wing terrorism against leaders in government and finance.2 The government responded by applying the same institutional methods it used in stamping out the Left: increasing surveillance and producing an archive of information related to right-wing thought and behavior. Especially revealing is the coverage of the Imperial Organ Theory Incident in the Monthly Bulletin (Tokkō geppō) of the Special Higher Police, the government agency tasked with policing seditious political organizations and individuals. The March 1935 issue, the first issue in which its coverage of the controversy began, opens not with a discussion of the “dangerous” or “heretical” nature of Minobe’s organ theory, as the Japanists would frame it, but with the dangers posed by Minoda himself. It reads: Kokushikan University professor Minoda Muneki and a segment of rightwing organizations argue that there are passages within the works of Tokyo Imperial University professor emeritus and member of the House of Peers law professor Minobe Tatsukichi and Tokyo Imperial University professor and dean of its Law School Suehiro Izutarō that ought to be construed as lèse-majesté, and have been working to sway public opinion through the publication of critical works. On June 6, 1934, Minoda Muneki filed a complaint with the Procurator Bureau of the Tokyo District Court, alleging that Suehiro’s books were in violation of the Peace Preservation Law, Lèse-majesté Law, and laws against high treason (kokken binran-zai), though Suehiro was acquitted of these charges on November 28 of that same year. [Brief description of strategies deployed against Minobe and his allies by right-wing organizations] Of course, since any attempt by the Special Higher Police to repress these movements would have the effect of magnifying these storms, it must proceed with an attitude of caution. However, there have been incidents such as the violent trespassing at the residence of Chairman Ichiki of the Privy Council, so there must be increased focus on surveillance, as it is of paramount importance that these types of unlawful, aggressive conspiracies are reduced and eliminated.3

The passage gives us a hint of the complexities of the events that were about to unfold. Particularly noteworthy is the precise language that the Monthly Bulletin uses in describing the leaders of prodemocratic political

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theory in Japan. Minobe is no ordinary law professor but one at the very top of his field, worthy of nomination to the House of Peers, an honor that is bestowed by the emperor himself. The lone victim of a violent crime that the Bulletin mentions is Ichiki Kitokurō, who as chairman of the Privy Council was one of the primary advisors to the emperor. A former law professor, none other than Ichiki mentored the younger Minobe and trained him in constitutional theories that defined the emperor as an organ of the state. The short passage informs the reader that the courts have already ruled against Minoda in his crusade against the progressive academicpolitical establishment. The most interesting aspect of the passage is the fact that the Special Higher Police explicitly targets the right wing as the object of suppression while also acknowledging the difficulty in achieving that task by warning officers against “magnifying” the controversy. At the core of this controversy was the nature of patriotism and loyalty to the emperor. Minobe Tatsukichi was a highly decorated jurist with connections that led to the highest level of the state, while his accusers were a vocal set of political activists using language that echoed the patriotic rhetoric of recent highprofile assassinations. As the unit charged with the task of policing crimes of thought and political ideology, the Special Higher Police was no stranger to the business of being an arbiter of patriotism itself. But the surveillance of right-wing organizations was a relatively new assignment to the organization, which was founded for the purpose of suppressing socialism, an ideology by its standards unpatriotic by definition. As the police succeeded in effectively silencing socialism and Japanist rhetoric rose to hegemonic status, the work of the Special Higher Police did not disappear—we might say that it became more difficult. The Home Ministry, in which the Special Higher Police was housed, was not the only arm of the government that found itself confronting right-wing movements in the 1930s. The Ministry of Justice, too, faced the need to reorient its approach to crimes of thought. Speaking at a meeting initiating younger cohorts to the work of the ministry in October 1938, public procurator Sano Shigeki, a specialist in right-wing thought crimes, spoke to the unpleasantness of the task, confessing that “we are battle-weary, and at times we would rather pass the baton on to you sooner rather than later.”4 Like his colleagues in the Home Ministry, Sano was experiencing the shock that came with the change from the previous paradigm of loyal nationalist public servants fighting heretical socialist internationalists. In a sense the table had been reversed: the new generation of thought criminals were now appointing themselves as the arbiters of patriotism, placing the loyalty of the procurators and police under a microscope.



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This new generation of thought criminals did not shy away from throwing this contradiction in the face of their captors, either. Bakuri, the choice insult hurled at officials like Sano, was one way in which this contradiction was expressed. What was implied in this word was that Sano was comparable to an official of the bakufu, the early modern government ruled by the Tokugawa samurai family and, more importantly, not by the imperial family. It implied that bureaucrats like Sano did not exist to protect the emperor and his loyal subjects but rather a privileged class of politicians and capitalists that ruled in their stead.5 Sano wrote, “It makes me angry. I am selflessly working as hard as I can, and they say that they won’t speak to a bakuri? It would actually make anyone angry.”6 Sano no doubt saw himself as a devoted patriot and public servant. But as the primary focus of the divisions of the police apparatus devoted to thought crimes shifted from socialism to radicalized patriotic organizations, patriotism itself ceased to be a viable marker for distinguishing between friends and enemies of the state. As in the era of the Taisho Restorations examined in the second chapter, participants in the political turmoil of the 1930s looked to the Tokugawato-Meiji transition for inspiration in articulating the political stakes as they saw them. The notion of a Showa Restoration served as a rallying point for many discontented with the political status quo. Skepticism toward the patriotism of government officials, also expressed in the pejorative use of the word bakufu, continued throughout the 1930s and 1940s, as patriotism itself became one of the most politically charged issues during those years. Read in this context, Minoda’s campaign against his most hated target, Minobe Tatsukichi, reveals the intense politics of nationalism as right-wing intellectuals and politicians, liberal intellectuals, and government officials jockeyed over claims of representing true loyalty to the nation. Minoda, too, often invoked the imagery of the bakufu in criticizing political leaders and bureaucratic agencies. Most scholarly treatments of the Imperial Organ Theory Incident focus on its significance as an egregious act of academic censorship on the part of the government and a symbol of the fall of political liberalism in imperial Japan.7 The fall of Minobe and the organ theory was nothing short of astonishing, given the fact that his interpretation of sovereignty and the state had served as the commonsense foundation of the practical functioning of the government. But when we examine the documents produced by branches of the government dealing with political criminals, we find that they were far more concerned about radicalized nationalism and its campaigns against Minobe than they were about the law professor himself and the liberalism that he espoused. Althought Minobe and the

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broader “liberal” academy ultimately did find themselves in an antagonistic relationship with the government, the greater adversary and threat (from the perspective of the government) was a radicalized version of the very nationalism that it had nurtured since its Meiji inception. Nationalist organizations were now organizing by the thousands, producing leaflets, engaging in public demonstrations, and calling for the government to once and for all clarify the position of the emperor and the nature of the kokutai. Much to the consternation of the police, the patriotic language used by these organizations echoed the political rhetoric used by the assassins and would-be assassins they were apprehending in recent years. The framework of left/right falls short as a lens for understanding these events because it was during this time that “right wing” became the standard term among police bureaucrats for categorizing potentially seditious individuals. In the term “right wing,” the police found a useful way to mark the individuals as suspect without having to deal with the thorny issue of defining the content of their political ideology that was suspect. The fact that “right wing” was a directional word that measured distance and degree of threat also meant that the police did not have to specify what lay at the center that the term in fact implied; the right wing—and therefore dangerous—nature of the individual could be taken for granted. These characteristics of the term “right wing” lay bare the paradoxically hegemonic yet ultimately arbitrary nature of the content of Japanist ideology. While on the individual level, bureaucrats like Sano expressed consternation at being called unpatriotic, on a broader plane government agencies and administrations sought to recapture their monopoly over patriotic language. This meant surveilling over the newly termed “right,” on the one hand, while selectively adopting their rhetoric of Japanism, as the Okada cabinet did in denouncing the organ theory, on the other. “THOUGHT CRIMES” AND RIGHT-WING TERRORISM One of the themes that characterized the Japanese domestic political scene during the tumultuous decade of the 1930s was the constant threat of assassinations perpetrated by those whom the police would come to categorize as “nationalist movements” and “right wing” in their record-keeping. The targets were usually politicians, bureaucrats, and leaders of major conglomerates accused by their assailants of being motivated by profit or political gain rather than the interests of the nation. Some of these cases are well known. In 1930 Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi was attacked by gunman Sagoya Tomeo, a member of a nationalist group known as the



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Patriot Society (Aikokusha). Hamaguchi died from those wounds the following year. The year 1932 witnessed a series of assassinations, including two murders jointly called the Blood Pledge Corps Incident, which claimed the lives of former finance minister Inoue Junnosuke and head of the Mitsui Conglomerate Dan Takuma, and the May 15 Incident, in which Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi was gunned down in his home by military officers. The most famous of these is the February 26 Incident of 1936, an attempted coup that claimed the lives of two sitting ministry heads, a general, an admiral, and a colonel in the army (whom the assailants mistook for the prime minister) in a series of coordinated attacks. The surge in assassination attempts was a symptom of what was called a “time of crisis” (hijōji) in the political economy, characterized by the global economic crisis and a population increasingly frustrated by the grim prospects for relief.8 The military officers involved in the May 15 Incident, which also attempted to discharge explosives at the residence of the home minister, Seiyūkai party headquarters, and the Metropolitan Police, left political leaflets condemning political parties “blinded by political power and party interests” and the zaibatsu that fed on the “blood of the people.”9 The leaflets called for kakushin (reform or renovation), a word that historians associate more today with the technocracy of the reform bureaucrats who would rise to prominence later that same decade but which then echoed the more leftist concept of kakumei, or revolution, in its call for farmers, laborers, and the entire nation to grab the reins of their own destiny.10 Civilians who conspired with the military officers on that day attempted, unsuccessfully, to throw the national economy into chaos by detonating explosives at the Bank of Japan and strategic points on the power grid.11 The stated political motives of nationalist activists and assassins were often linked to widespread poverty in the rural areas of the country. Members of the Blood Pledge Corps declared that their direct action was an attempt to purge the government of the liberal-capitalist ruling class, which out of self-interest had sacrificed the masses, particularly the rural villages. Several of its members hailed from impoverished regions of Ibaraki Prefecture hard hit by the Great Depression.12 Published statements by the perpetrators of the May 15 Incident, too, noted the dire situation among farmers and the alliance between politicians, capital, and the press that prevented their rescue from becoming a matter of high national priority.13 These sentiments attracted wide public sympathy that led to campaigns calling for the charges against the perpetrators to be reduced or even dropped.14 The corruption of public officials had always been a topic of interest in the popular press, but the aftermath of the May 15 Incident

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inserted the plight of the rural villages into the public consciousness, and though many thought that the assassination of public figures stepped over a line of decency, many also found it easy to sympathize with the issue of social inequality. The idea that issues of poverty and inequality contributed to this socalled thought problem was nominally acknowledged by two of the major targets of the assassinations, the Minseitō and Seiyūkai, the two major political parties. They each drafted “Basic Outlines for a Policy on Thought” in 1933, both of which called for greater attention to, in the words of the Minseitō document, the “stability in the economic life of citizens” (kokumin no keizai seikatsu no antei).15 At the same time, their diagnoses followed patterns established by past government policies toward radical thought and political activism that pinned much of the blame on the citizens themselves. The Minseitō document declared that thought among the nation (kokumin shisō) needed to be “adjusted (chōsei) through the study of national history, education reform, critique of radical thought, and the cultivation of a spiritual life.”16 The Seiyūkai document similarly claimed that tendencies toward “blind copying of foreign thought” or citizens’ failure to “recognize the constitution as their highest imperative,” as well the “manipulation of the simplistic nationalist thought of citizens,” were the intellectual and political causes of their “thought problem.”17 For many nationalist activists, on the other hand, the solution to the problems that maligned the nation and its governance was a completion of the process of imperial “restoration” inaugurated at the onset of the Meiji era. This idea of a “Showa Restoration” meant different things to different people, but it essentially laid the blame for widespread poverty and political uncertainly on party politicians who failed to faithfully represent the interest of the nation due to their political ambition and financial greed. If the neorestorationist agenda of the Taisho era often retained a system of a democratically elected representational government, the Showa inflection tended to call for the reestablishment of the emperor’s authority in the governance of the empire, a position underscored by the conviction that the paternal relationship between the emperor and his subjects necessarily meant that an emperor-led form of governance would be guaranteed to reflect the interest of the nation. From this perspective, restorationists interpreted the Meiji Restoration as an incomplete project that could only be completed once impure elements of self-interest (certain party politicians and capitalists) were eliminated from leadership positions. While the impetus for individual involvement in radical nationalist activism varied, police bureaucrats like Special Higher Police chief Abe



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Genki pointed to the London Naval Treaty of 1930 as a watershed moment in the rise of nationalist radicals.18 These were a series of treaties signed by major imperial powers that attempted to slow the arms race by setting limits on arms production. The signing was controversial in Japan because the arms limits to the Japanese Imperial Navy were roughly 70% of that of the United States and Britain. The Hamaguchi administration of the Minseitō party pushed ahead with the treaty despite strong opposition from the Navy General Staff.19 As noted earlier, Hamaguchi was later attacked by a gunman and suffered wounds that would ultimately take his life, and his party was accused of usurping the emperor’s prerogative as supreme commander (tōsuiken kanpan). The idea that the signing of the London Naval Treaty constituted a usurpation of the emperor’s authority hinged on the notion that the Navy General Staff was delegated by the emperor to decide upon the size and composition of the navy and was independent from the Ministry of the Navy and, by extension, the prime minister and his cabinet. Under this interpretation of the organizational structure of the state, the Navy General Staff reported directly to the emperor, and the cabinet had no business meddling in its design of the Imperial Navy. Thus, Hamaguchi had overstepped the emperor’s ultimate authority over his military for partisan reasons. Such an interpretation of the treaty signings possessed two difficulties. The first was the fact that the idea that the Navy General Staff reported directly to the emperor was not supported by the constitution. Famed constitutional theorist and renowned champion of parliamentary politics Minobe Tatsukichi defended the Hamaguchi administration’s signing of the treaty on these grounds, arguing that it was well within the cabinet’s power to do so. Minobe’s interpretation of the constitution, and the role of the emperor within it, would go on to become the core issue in a series of major campaigns against the government by nationalist organizations in 1935. The second difficulty was that Emperor Hirohito and his Privy Council both gave the treaty their stamps of approval, which was a requirement for the treaty to become official state policy. If Hirohito felt that Hamaguchi had overstepped his authority as supreme commander, he made no attempt to withhold his approval. Nevertheless, the usurpation of imperial power would become one of several rallying points for radical nationalist critics of parliamentary politics, often appearing in mission statements and manifestos penned by their organizations. The stated goals of alleviating poverty and restoring imperial authority served as a legitimizing rhetoric for attacks upon government officials and private businessmen.

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It would be a mistake to treat these attacks upon the government, both physical and vocal, as emerging from a unified conception of grievance or program of revolution. There were many nationalist organizations throughout the country, and they did not necessarily share the same beliefs or political goals. Acts of violence against government officials in the name of nationalist goals were often perpetrated by individuals without coordination with a larger organization. What we can say with some confidence is that by the early 1930s many within the government identified nationalist movements and sentiments as an imminent threat to the state, posing unprecedented problems for the police. The fact that the emergence of this form of violent nationalism was largely decentered in its organization only added to their difficulties. The police were not spared blame in the radical nationalist diagnosis of a corrupt state. Like procurator Sano Shigeki’s experience cited above, police officials noted with dismay that Showa Restorationists associated them with “capitalists and the ruling class,” going so far as to call them their “guard dogs.”20 Attacks on the police went beyond name-calling. The Home Ministry and the Metropolitan Police headquarters were targeted in the May 15 Incident, and in the February 26 Incident of 1936 both were attacked and occupied by rebel troops. Most bureaucrats did not share with their accusers the view that they had thrown patriotism out the window to become “dogs” of the ruling class; in fact, statements from the police and the Home Ministry from the era suggest that officials were sympathetic to the patriotic sentiment of nationalist activists and their frustrations with the status quo. Where they differed with radical nationalists was in their tendency to imagine a close equivalence between interests of the kokutai, state, nation, and emperor. We can observe such sentiments in publications like the Special Higher Police Handbook carried by its officers. The edition published immediately prior to the May 15 Incident opens with a short essay on the relationship between the “Incomparable Kokutai and the Police Officer,” calling on its personnel to protect the kokutai for the happiness of its people and the benefit of the state.21 In the aftermath of the high-profile assassinations in the 1930s, there was a concerted effort on the part of police leadership to rehabilitate the public image of its organization by engaging in self-reflection and public relations campaigns. A major component of these efforts was what some of its more vocal membership called a “movement to promote police spirit” (keisatu seishin sakkō undō), which called for its leadership to expunge itself of its partisan reputation and to reclaim its role as His Majesty’s Police (heika no keisatsu).22 Others, like Katō Yūzaburō of the Ibaraki Special Higher Police, proposed a series of slogans, including “Promoting the



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Kokutai Spirit,” “Controlling Radical Violence,” “Guidance towards Wholesome Progress,” and “Joining the People.”23 These proposals reflect an organizational desire to recapture the mantra of patriotism as well as a leadership role in nurturing progress and national morality among the populace. On an individual level, the degree to which police bureaucrats publicly articulated their interpretations or feelings of nationalism varied. For example, Matsumoto Gaku, head of the Police Affairs Bureau for two years following the May 15 Incident, was a close associate of the influential nationalist intellectual Yasuoka Masahiro and founded the Japan Culture League in 1933, devoted to propagating the virtues of Japanese culture. Matsumoto was of the belief that the propagation of correct nationalist ideology was useful in fighting incorrect ones, communist ideology in particular. Others took a drier approach to the use of nationalist rhetoric in policing. In reference to the notion of “His Majesty’s Police,” Abe Genki noted in retrospect that he was opposed to the label, as it was merely an attempt by police bureaucrats to compete with the idea of “His Majesty’s Military” (heika no guntai). According to Abe, such a label was a misnomer for an administrative body charged with maintaining public security and protecting the people, a function completely different from the military that literally served the emperor, its commander in chief.24 The rise of radical nationalism forced branches of the police to identify thought criminals based on their threats to domestic security rather than offense to the national ideology, as they had in policing socialists and communists. At the same time, this confrontation with radical nationalism had the effect of magnifying the nationalist rhetoric among the police, as it sought to harness the discourse of nationalism in order to justify its policing of antistate nationalism. SHOWA RESTORATIONISM AND THE GENRI NIPPON SOCIETY It is difficult to know for sure what Minoda and his colleagues thought of the violent manifestation of restorationist politics. As noted, a postwar essay on Minoda’s career at Keio University written by former colleague Okuno Shintarō refers to rumors that Minoda was visibly happy following the 1930 attack on Prime Minister Hamaguchi, an accusation he denied at a subsequent faculty meeting.25 At least publicly, Minoda was firmly opposed to the terrorist tactics of the Showa Restoration movement. He was critical of the popular campaign to reduce the sentences of the defendants of the May 15 Incident and insisted that they receive a fair trial and punishment. Dedicating nearly a

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hundred pages of his seven-hundred-page opus, The Restoration of Scholarship and the Principle of Japan (Gakujutsu ishin genri Nippon, 1933), on the topic of the May 15 Incident, he admonished the popular tendency to reduce the incident to the drama and pathos of the patriots whose nationalist spirit forced them to break the law.26 For Minoda, the actions of the officers were an intervention from outside of the law that attempted to impress upon the Japanese nation that the constitution was grossly misrepresented by the political leadership—an illegal act that paradoxically attempted to affirm imperial law. If this significance was to be preserved, the crime had to be prosecuted to its fullest extent. The diaries and testimonies of the perpetrators were published in various periodicals in the months following the incident. Minoda was especially interested in the account of Gotō Eihan, a student at the Imperial Japanese Army Academy who was among the group that murdered Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi. According to Gotō, the Japanese government had been taken over by a network of alliances composed entirely of the ruling class of politicians and capitalists. The national media, charged with the duty of casting a critical eye upon state power, had been bought by the political establishment, resulting in national embarrassments like the London Naval Treaty. Gotō writes that it was at that moment that he realized that “there were no adequate legal methods” for correcting the situation.27 Immediate, direct action was necessary in not only bringing an end to the power of the ruling class but also awakening the nation to the imperative of the Showa Restoration. We are imperfect. But in this time of crisis, especially when there is no one to count on but yourself, there is no time to ponder our imperfection. We believed that our patriotic passion would not allow it. . . . We believed that if we presented our awakened selves to our ninety million comrades, our comrades would also awaken. . . . However, we were also painfully aware of the grave sins of trampling upon our law and military regulations, which are in reality the most important of all. Thus, our goal was to make amends through our deaths, even if it may be deemed worthless in comparison.28

Minoda took issue with many aspects of Gotō’s testimony, arguing that he was applying a “class” analysis to the political situation and that he was mistaken in his ultimate decision to forego the law in murdering Inukai. But rather than blame Gotō and his coconspirators, he lamented the shortcomings of the “war of thought” (shisō sensō) that he and his colleagues were waging against the supporters of party politics: had he and the Genri Nippon Society been more successful in their moral education campaign, Gotō and his comrades would not have been compelled to sacrifice



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their lives. For Minoda, the May 15 Incident signified a failure of society and its system of governance, not an isolated instance of violence. From his point of view, it was important for society to use the tragedy as an opportunity to reconsider what Japanese society ought to look like, following the stated wish of the coconspirators. Minoda quoted Ikematsu Takeshi, a coconspirator and classmate of Gotō, as saying, “They say that there are a million petitions calling for the reduction of our sentence. If these people abandon the sentence reduction campaign to join the reform movement I would be able to thank them kindly, but without this I cannot truly thank them.”29 As Minoda understood it, the point of the assassination was not to simply murder Inukai but to produce a moment of national reflection and determination to finish what the Meiji Restoration set out to accomplish: the creation of a truly prosperous society for all Japanese under the rule of the emperor. Minoda agreed with most other Showa Restorationists on the basic premise that the movement’s ultimate goal was to complete the Meiji Restoration, but he believed that some had confused this with a more Marxian idea of “revolution.” Though “restoration” was indeed based upon the idea of the equality of all Japanese, this was a spiritual equality, or shared passion of being Japanese, not a socialist revolution aimed at toppling the “ruling class.” The network of politicians and capitalists that Gotō had labeled the “ruling class” that had usurped power from the throne were most often educated in the Imperial Universities. Minoda maintained that if these universities committed themselves to creating moral, upright leaders as the Meiji emperor had intended, a truly unified national politics would be created, in effect “restoring” imperial rule. In this theory of restoration, nationalist intellectuals, not assassins, took on the role of the vanguard. This reasoning is most visible in his criticism of the young officers’ decision to shoot Inukai as he offered to sit down and “talk it out.” In an exchange that has since become legendary in its representation of the officers’ decision, one of the lieutenants responded by hollering, “No need for arguments! Shoot! Shoot!” Inukai died the next morning from gunshot wounds to the head. To Minoda, this exchange revealed how woefully underdeveloped the arguments for restoration had become since the original restoration of 1868. RIGHT-WING TERRORISM AND THE POLICE Government authorities, too, were dismayed by the violence of Showa Restorationism. By their own admission, the various branches of the police

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system were blindsided by the surge in radical nationalist activity that emerged in the 1930s. The policing of political activities in the early twentieth century, particularly since the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, had been aimed at containing socialism. In this effort, nationalism had served as the antidote for revolutionary politics. But by the 1930s the cure served as the poison—nationalism was now “revolutionary,” at least in the sense that it was a threat to the government. Ōno Rokuichirō, superintendent general of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police (Keishichō) during the especially bloody months of early 1932, was among those surprised by the sudden emergence of nationalist groups as a primary target of the police. Ōno was appointed to the position, which also oversaw the Tokyo unit of the Special Higher Police, in January 1932, only months prior to the Blood Pledge Corps Incident and the May 15 Incident. In a postwar interview he recalled: Politicians back then had an extremely tolerant approach towards the so-called right wing. They were deluded by their calls to “Protect the kokutai” (kokutai goji) and failed to consider what an enormous threat they posed to social order. They only considered the right as allies in opposing leftism. And so, while surveillance and policing of the left wing were conducted thoroughly, there was basically no surveillance of the right wing. . . . There was absolutely no information related to the right wing given to me when the duties of Superintendent General were transferred to me.30

As Ōno suggests, nationalist organizations were not generally identified as threats by the police apparatus until after the 1932 assassination of Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi. The end of the Inukai cabinet led to the appointment of Saitō Minoru to lead a nonpartisan “national unification” cabinet, which in turn led to new leadership in the police apparatus with dramatic changes in its approach to policing nationalist organizations. The Special Higher Police (Tokkō), which specialized in crimes of thought, was elevated from division (ka) to department (bu) and now carried an entire unit devoted to policing right-wing thought. That same unit was significantly expanded in personnel and elevated in position within the bureaucratic hierarchy from unit (kakari) to division (ka) in the wake of the February 26 incident. Prefectural Tokkō units, too, underwent changes to adjust to the shifting political landscape. In December 20, 1934, the Police Affairs Bureau (Keihokyoku) announced four key principles in its approach to right-wing movements: first, a shift in its primary focus from left-wing movements to right-wing movements; second, the complete suppression of illegal aspects of right-wing activities (tetteiteki ni dan’atsu) while assisting those that are



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legal; third, an increase in the research personnel of the Peace Preservation division (Hoan-ka), with a focus on incorporating the experiences of officers stationed abroad; and finally, an increase of right-wing specialists in the Peace Preservation division.31 By the summer of 1936, partly in response to the February 26 Incident of that year, Section Two of the Tokkō (the section charged with surveillance of the right wing) had more than twice the personnel of Section One (specializing in leftist criminal activity) with access to specially allotted financial resources.32 The Tokkō, a unit founded primarily to suppress left-wing movements, was now proclaiming as its chief target right-wing movements. The use of the word “right wing” (uyoku) by the Tokkō to refer to radical patriotic groups was a departure from past procedure and a striking testament to the historically contingent nature of the usage of the political spectrum in describing political beliefs. In the past, during the height of arrests of leftists in the late 1920s, the Tokkō used “right wing” as a subcategory within the category of leftist movements for the purpose of differentiating between scores of proletarian organizations, referring to self-identified socialist groups that also carried a nationalist rhetoric.33 Groups that would come to be referred to as right wing or nationalist groups in the aftermath of the 1932 assassinations were then referred to as reactionary groups (handō undō), a procedural convention shared by the Ministry of Justice. While it is common for historians and postwar commentators to refer to the Japanese wartime government as right wing, this does not necessarily mean that the Tokkō use of the term was a skewed or incorrect appropriation. Rather, in the midst of the challenge to delineate a “correct” nationalist ideology, embodied in Sano Shigeki’s unease at being labeled a bakuri, the seemingly neutral markers of left, right, and center served as ready expedients that swept aside the uncomfortable possibility that radical nationalism’s indictment of the government’s relationship to capitalism was a more “correct” form of patriotic service. Here the label “right wing” serves not to describe a specific ideological content but to mark an ideological distance to a center assumed to be occupied by the authorities that only becomes apparent with the decision to use violent force against the state as a means of political expression. The fact that nationalist activism was now under the jurisdiction of the Tokkō was a significant development that marked nationalism as a potential locus for crimes of thought and ideology. This shift did not occur overnight. The investigation and arrests in the Blood Pledge Corp murders and May 15 Incident of 1932, for example, were carried out by police officers in the Criminal Affairs Department (Keiji-bu). With the expansion of the Tokkō shortly after these incidents, there was a brief period when the

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two departments jockeyed over jurisdiction, a situation that was finally resolved with the Shimpeitai Incident in July 1933, when the Tokkō uncovered a coup d’état attempt by members of several major radical nationalist organizations.34 Nationalist movements (kokkashugi undō) had already been added to the categories of thought crimes under watch by the Tokkō in their internal publication Tokkō geppō, beginning with the January issue in 1932, months after Hamaguchi Osachi died of injuries sustained in the attack by Sagoya of the Patriot Society.35 This coverage expanded after the high-profile assassinations of that year and reveal that there were numerous attempts at the lives of politicians, bureaucrats, and capitalists throughout the 1930s that were intercepted by the police. For example, the July 1932 issue details uncovered plans to assassinate Prime Minister Saitō Minoru. Shortly after the Shimpeitai conspiracy in 1933, there were also plans to kill several heads of conglomerates in retribution for what was perceived by the would-be assassin as price gouging against struggling farmers. The November issue of that same year indicates that there were plans to assassinate Seiyūkai head Suzuki Kisaburō and others, as well as a separate attempt on the life of Wakatsuki Reijirō, who led the London Naval Treaty delegation. Such attempts continued throughout the 1930s, serving to justify the continuing expansion of the Tokkō personnel devoted to the policing of right-wing activities. The Tokkō were not the only ones charged with dealing with radical nationalist terrorists. Thought policing was carried out by several branches of the government—namely, the Police Affairs Bureau of the Home Ministry, the Ministry of Justice, and the military police (Kenpeitai). These branches were not necessarily known for their cooperation. For example, though it was the procurators of the Ministry of Justice, like the aforementioned Sano Shigeki, who worked closely with police officers of the Home Ministry in investigating thought criminal activity, there was a significant amount of rivalry and bad blood between the two ministries.36 The military police were notoriously resistant to cooperating with civilian police officials, especially when investigations involved military personnel, as they often did. While the Tokkō was able to uncover civilian nationalist plots like that of the Shimpeitai Incident prior to the conspirators taking direct action, they were shut out of investigating military officers, even if there was a clear indication that something was amiss. Civilian police officials claimed that the February 26 coup attempt in 1936 was largely anticipated, save for the date of its execution.37 Still, radical nationalist organizations drew the attention of the military police, as a great many radical nationalist activists were members of the military themselves. Several of the major assassinations that occurred



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in the early 1930s were perpetrated by military personnel angered by poverty in farming communities, corruption in the Diet, and the perceived overstepping of the emperor’s authority in the signing of the London Naval Treaty. Naturally, the military police force was greatly interested in the public opinion concerning these incidents and gathering intelligence that would help in exercising greater control over the political actions of its personnel.38 Thought Reports (Shisō ihō), an internal document of the military police force produced by its Department of Command (Shireibu) studying security issues related to thought, displayed considerable sympathy toward the type of youth that it profiled as a potential participant of direct action against the government. The June 1933 issue was devoted to the study of right-wing publications designed to agitate its readers toward direct action. It opened with a meditation on the kind of patriotic youth who was most likely to be moved by such articles: Let us imagine a person. He is young and full of energy and patriotic sentiment. He was born in an ideal nation, filled with the spirit of patriotism. A youth with true concern for the unsatisfactory state of the present day, let us say that as he fixes his eyes on the so-called “crisis” condition of the nation today he thinks the following: “In our nation today, politics, economy, diplomacy, education, thought, and the military all have reached a dead end. The political parties have colluded with the financial conglomerates in pursuing their own interests, officials protect this collusion and their own private interests, and the national spirit, too, has receded. The nation is in an unprecedented crisis, and will surely fall to ruin without breaking through these present conditions.” As he entertains such thoughts, he might hear or read something along the following lines: “A social revolution can only arrive through the hands of those with purpose who walk the great path of rescuing the nation and saving the people (kyūkoku saimin) in accordance with the will of heaven. . . . We place our hope and trust in you. If you rise up, we will rise with you, as will scores of others who will follow. We ask you to ponder this deeply and come to an iron-clad resolve. We hope that you rise through your own death!” The result is clear. Thus, the youth loses the opportunity to calmly decide. Surely his fervor ought to be encouraged, and the present conditions are truly lamentable, but agitators and instigators are what send him in the wrong direction. Most do not have confidence in their own judgments, but when they align with the perspective of others, their confidence is multiplied a hundredfold. Agitators use this to their advantage. Is this not why they can proceed with action without any fear? It is agitation that we must rebuke.39

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In a profile of a hypothetical young radical activist that resembles the rhetoric of Gotō Eihan of the May 15 Incident, Thought Reports imagines a patriotic and well-meaning, if naïve, youth ready to throw down his life for the purpose of saving the nation and its people. Strikingly, what dooms this youth in the eyes of Thought Reports is his inability to calmly deliberate on the correct course of political action, for he is too overtaken by his passionate impulse to act on behalf of his nation. Thought Reports does not suggest any solution to the “crisis” befallen the state nor does it suggest an alternative course of action for patriotic youth, save perhaps a levelheaded meditation on the issue. Instead, it aims to study the technology of right-wing agitation literature to thereby train its military police personnel in an attempt to prevent right-wing direct action, which now appeared to threaten the reputation of the military with unpredictable violence. The rest of the issue provides a broad sampling of radical nationalist mottos and exhortations to action, providing military police officers with a set of guideposts in their task of identifying and removing potential threats to the military and the government. The organizational changes and research into the right wing undertaken by the various arms of the police system reflect government-wide efforts to come to terms with the sudden emergence of a new threat to its own existence. What made this task so difficult was the fact that the received system of surveilling, detaining, and “rehabilitating” thought criminals— what Max Ward has called the “Peace Preservation Law apparatus”—was tailored to dealing with leftist political activists.40 Since the Meiji Restoration of 1868, nationalism had served as the unifying ideology through which the newly founded modern Meiji State attempted to shore up the resources and personnel needed to establish its military and economic foundation. The status system that elevated the samurai class above commoners was abolished, granting nominal equality to the male population as fellow subjects of what would become a constitutional monarchy. The status as equal subjects by no means meant economic equality, however. The rural agricultural populations were already overburdened with tax obligations to their local lords under the Tokugawa Shogunal order, but they were squeezed even harder under the Meiji State’s efforts to quickly achieve a position of military and industrial strength that would allow them to renegotiate the economically crippling and racist unequal treaties with the imperial powers. Voting rights were linked to how much one paid in land taxes to the government, a policy that kept much of even the male population disenfranchised for the first few decades following the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution in 1889.



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As in the Tokugawa era, farmers organized to make their grievances heard, as did certain sectors of the urban working population, which had grown exponentially through the industrialization of the Japanese economy. The ideology of nationalism served as a salient framework through which these grievances could be expressed. Farmers calling for greater autonomy of the peripheries from Tokyo or relief for tenant farmers argued that it was the agricultural sector that served as the foundation of the empire, providing both its rice and its frontline soldiers.41 Factory workers, too, staked their claim on economic equity by arguing that they were an essential part of the industrial strength of the empire.42 The international discourse of socialism played a significant role in these developments, as did the state’s heavy-handed response to it. By the mid-1920s, socialism was effectively outlawed in Japan through the arrest or murder of vocal leaders and thousands of rank-and-file members of proletarian parties and unions, as well as various laws designed to eliminate the possibility of a mass proletarian movement and socialist activities. The Peace Preservation Law (1925) played a crucial role in the effective removal of socialism as a possibility through which proletarian concerns could be articulated, and by the early 1930s, socialism had ceased to be a realistic threat to the Japanese state. The Peace Preservation Law made illegal any attempt at forming an organization for the purpose of altering the so-called kokutai, a notoriously vague concept denoting something that might be called the national essence, or the system of private property. Following its 1928 reform, a conviction for a Peace Preservation Law violation of attempting to alter the kokutai carried a possible death sentence. As we saw in chapter 2, this law also served as the basis for Mitsui Kōshi and Minoda Muneki to accuse their opponents of treason. In considering the official state ideology of the period insofar as it was codified into law, the stakes of which carried the possibility of death, the Peace Preservation Law is striking in its binding together of emperorcentric nationalism and the ethos of capitalism. The mere hint of equating loyalty to the emperor to loyalty to capitalism made nationalist legal scholars of the time very uneasy, but this conflation remained largely intact until language concerning private property was dropped through a major revision of the law in 1941, save for the nominal change of separating the stipulations concerning the kokutai and the system of private property into separate articles in 1928 and making the former carry the harsher punishment. When violent opposition to the government and its allies in finance capital on the part of nationalist activists and organizations rose at an

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alarming rate in the 1930s, lawmakers and bureaucrats naturally looked to the Peace Preservation Law, their primary weapon against revolutionary political opposition. In April 1933, the Saitō cabinet established a committee to consider ways of reforming the nation’s “thought policy” to better accommodate the rapidly changing landscape of thought policing. Though the development of an approach to “right-wing social movements” was one of the initial tasks listed among the priorities recommended to the committee, the issue was conspicuously missing in the Peace Preservation Law reform bill drafted by the Home and Justice Ministries and submitted to the Imperial Diet in 1934.43 This issue became a heated point of debate in the deliberations between Diet members and the bureaucrats representing their respective branches, but the idea of expanding the Peace Preservation Law to include right-wing thought crimes was ultimately abandoned. In explaining the omission to the Diet, Justice Minister Koyama Matsukichi noted the difficulty of incorporating concepts of “rightists” or “extreme right” into legal language and advocated using preexisting laws dealing with explosives, murder, arson, and conspiracy to incite civil discord (nairan).44 He offered that the law was originally written to control leftists and that revision to include rightists would change the character of the law, turning it into an antiviolence law. Home Ministry Police Affairs Bureau Chief Matsumoto Gaku articulated his ministry’s position, which aligned with that of the Ministry of Justice, explaining that expanding the Peace Preservation Law to include radical nationalism simply was not practical. While the law was originally written to suppress communism, right-wing ideals included patriotism and emperor-centrism, and equating these with communism under the umbrella of the Peace Preservation Law would only anger the nationalists further, or worse, turn them into martyrs.45 The Home Ministry’s position was that such an expansion of the law would force radical nationalists to go underground, making them even more difficult to track and ultimately hindering police efforts to prevent further attacks. The failed attempt to incorporate right-wing movements into the Peace Preservation Law reflected the complicated task of reconciling the kokutai discourse of the Peace Preservation Law system with the need to apprehend prokokutai activists. The representatives of the Home and Justice Ministries at the Diet themselves defended the prokokutai stance of rightwing activists while standing firm on the need to police their violent tactics. Justice Ministry Chief of Criminal Affairs Kimura Naotatsu spoke positively about the perceived desire of right-wing groups to reform Japan’s economic system and bring about an egalitarian society. Matsumoto, too,



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argued that policing their ideas instead of their violent action would be tantamount to a violation of their free speech.46 These deliberations and institutional adjustments described above reveal a government struggling to define the parameters of nationalist ideology they sought to harness, a difficulty brought on by the bureaucrats’ personal thoughts on the nature of patriotism and the practical need for the ideology for maintaining order. While the Special Higher Police and the thought police apparatus tended to conflate the state and the kokutai in articulating the object of their protection, the challenge brought by radical nationalism disrupted this equation. As indicated by the fact that officials in the Home and Justice Ministries were sometimes referred to as “dogs” of the ruling class or compared to bakufu officials, the way in which the concept of kokutai was deployed by bureaucratic institutions clashed with that of the radical nationalist activist. Tokkō chief Abe Genki noted after the war that it was much more difficult policing the right wing than it was leftists because of their variation—they did not fit into a particular mold of ideology or organization.47 We might take issue with Abe’s insinuation that leftists were less varied in their ideology and organization, but from the perspective of the Peace Preservation Law, this makes sense— as long as leftists could be categorized under the heading of communism, Marxism, socialism, and anarchism, the police had no problem marking them as suspect. But because the unifying umbrella category marking the equally varied radical nationalist ideologies and organizations was the same category of kokutai that also underwrote the institutional direction of the police and the government as a whole, it was difficult, if not impossible, for these institutions to use nationalist ideology as the basis for distinguishing friend from foe. The decision on the part of the Home and Justice Ministry to use existing criminal laws in prosecuting radical nationalist terrorists instead of attempting to legally define “right wing” through a revised Peace Preservation Law was a pragmatic one made to avoid further complicating a task already mired in complications.48 Despite its omission from the final drafts of the 1934 Peace Preservation Law reform proposals, the containment of right-wing organizations was a priority for the Japanese government and its secret police force by the early 1930s. Various branches of the government figured that the failure to develop a successful containment strategy could not only lead to more assassinations of its members but also legitimize an alternative narrative of Japanese nationalism that positioned the current composition of government as illegitimate. This was the context behind the naming of Minoda Muneki as a person of interest in the Monthly Bulletin of the Special Higher Police examined at the beginning of this chapter. Minoda was

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at once a contributor to the government’s campaign against socialism and a target of surveillance for his potential to help ignite a nationalist campaign against the government. This complicates our understanding of the significance of major events that have been interpreted to signal a rightward shift on the part of the government during the wartime era. The Imperial Organ Theory Incident of 1935, which saw the Japanese government officially renounce the principles of parliamentary politics and popular sovereignty in favor of an emperor-centric polity, is a case in point. GENRI NIPPON SOCIETY AND THE IMPERIAL ORGAN THEORY INCIDENT The Imperial Organ Theory Incident takes its name from a theory developed by Tokyo Imperial University jurist Minobe Tatsukichi, which held that the sovereignty of the nation lay in the state itself, of which the emperor was merely an organ, albeit the most important one.49 This interpretation served as the foundation for the rise of parliamentary politics in the Taisho era. The controversy was ignited on February 7, 1935, when member of the Lower House and friend of the Genri Nippon Society Etō Genkurō pressed Home Minister Gotō Fumio on why the ministry had failed to suppress the writings of Minobe. From his point of view, calling the emperor an “organ” of the state was a heresy of a horrifying magnitude, for the emperor was the reason for the existence of the state itself. Ten days later, the newly formed League for Protecting the Kokutai (Kokutai Yōgo Rengōkai), an alliance of nationalist organizations, released a statement detailing the heretical nature of Minobe’s constitutional theory. The next day the case was brought before the Diet again, this time in the House of Peers by Baron Kikuchi Takeo, who had called for the banishment of Minobe’s writings a year earlier. The Baron, too, was a friend of the Genri Nippon Society, and his statements closely resembled Minoda’s criticism of Minobe. The two worked together in a leadership capacity for the League for Protecting the Kokutai. Minobe responded in the House of Peers a week later, delivering a speech defending his academic integrity and loyalty to the emperor. Described by many as a moving speech that convinced even Kikuchi, the general reaction seemed to have signaled Minobe’s victory. Two days later, on February 27, Prime Minister Okada told the Lower House that Minobe’s works would not be banned from publication. Yet the campaign against Minobe did not end there. The following day, Etō submitted a formal complaint to the Tokyo District Court accusing Minobe of lèse-majesté. Organizations such as the League for Protecting the



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Kokutai and the Imperial Military Reserve Association (Zaigō Gunjinkai) ramped up their activism against Minobe, organizing lecture events and rallies aimed at influencing the government into action. Minoda, the key theorist behind the attacks against Minobe’s organ theory, framed his argument as a defense of the constitution: the rejection of Minobe’s theory of constitutionalism meant a return to a legal reading of the constitution. While some liberal intellectuals suggested that the defeat of the imperial organ theory would signal the dawn of a fascist era, Minoda shrugged off this notion. In a short editorial in the April 1935 issue of Genri Nippon, he turns the table on this interpretation, proclaiming that it was in fact the organ theory that resembled fascism, albeit indirectly. There Minoda defines fascism as a violent takeover of the government by nationalist movements exasperated by the corrupt rule of the established political parties.50 He explicitly distances himself from “fascism” defined as such and notes that methods of direct action, exemplified by the perpetrators of the May 15 and Blood Pledge Corp Incidents, were no different from adherents of the organ theory in that they bypass the authority of the emperor in pursuing their political goals. Minobe’s interpretation of the constitution exclusively assigned the power of shaping the budget and legislation to the Lower House and protected their powers to such an extent that even he admitted that the political parties could only be challenged by “illegal means.”51 For Minoda, this guaranteed the appearance of violent fascist opposition because there were no other means to redirect political power to the benefit of the nation as a whole. In Europe, the three powers of governance and control over the military were essentially placed in the hands of the ruling political party, and this was why violent fascist revolutions were becoming increasingly visible in that part of the world. Minoda argued that fascist takeovers could be avoided in Japan since the monopolization of political power by the parties was merely guaranteed by Minobe’s false reading of the constitution. If the “cloudy mists of confused constitutionalism” were simply “blown aside, the bright sun will shine as bright as that day of creation, penetrating and purifying all evil barriers with godly illumination.”52 If all authority were returned to the emperor, the embodiment of national unity, it would guarantee the promotion of unselfish, righteous rule. Parliamentary party politics, as stipulated in the constitution, would continue to take place under this “correct” interpretation of the emperor’s powers, and the righteous guidance of the emperor would facilitate the realization of its ideal form. Minoda shared with the assassins involved in the May 15 and Blood Pledge Corps Incidents his hopes of restoring the authority of the emperor.

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The Movement for the Clarification of the Kokutai that emerged out of the antiorgan theory movement was also largely sympathetic to the motives of the officers, whose tales of intense poverty and family plights had been circulated widely through various media outlets. While the movement has been generally characterized as one that simply sought to end liberalist intellectual production, there were also personal experiences of poverty and hardship that motivated the activism against party politics and the ideology underwriting its legitimacy, as well as genuine attempts at imagining an alternative political arrangement.53 While the nationalist sloganeering that accompanied the Campaign to Clarify the Kokutai carried the nationalist rhetoric that was quickly establishing itself as the state-enforced orthodoxy of the age, making it an easy movement for politicians and other public figures to declare support, the implicit critique of political parties with their already bankrupt reputation was appealing to a wider audience. It was for this latter aspect of the movement that most of the grassroots activism was mobilized. That is not to say that the Campaign to Clarify the Kokutai should be interpreted as a progressive attempt for social change or understood as a movement with a unified social vision. The motivations behind it were not so clear-cut, and this is what complicates any attempt to interpret it as a monolithic movement toward anti-intellectual nationalism. Like the Takigawa Incident, the Campaign to Clarify the Kokutai and the related Imperial Organ Theory Incident were the result of the momentary convergence of a number of often competing interests, all of which saw the ousting of Minobe as an important first step in realizing their individual goals. For example, Minoda was clearly motivated by an idealistic, if not naïve, political vision of the ideal nationalist democratic society under the watchful guidance of the sovereign emperor. The Imperial Military Reserve Association (IMRA), another major player in the movement, also had a specific set of interests and political context to their involvement.54 The political activities of the IMRA were in close, but by no means entirely dependent, relation to the headquarters of the military establishment and its priorities, and throughout the 1930s the IMRA was engaged in a public education campaign to combat budget cuts related to global support for arms reduction. Its national network of three million members made it the most sizable organization involved in such matters. It hosted lecture events and rallies throughout the country, and the Tokyo branch in particular invited specialists and leaders, such as Etō and Minoda, to address its members. Particularly active in the movement was the so-called 36 Club, an organization of reservists named for the crisis that members predicted at the expiration of the London Naval



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Treaty in 1936. Its leaders, with close connections to the Imperial Way (Kōdō-ha) faction in the army, sought to mobilize reserve officers everywhere in propelling the faction to the top of national politics. The 36 Club was one of the most closely watched organizations by the Tokkō during the height of the Campaign to Clarify the Kokutai. The IMRA’s plans to conduct a national rally in Tokyo protesting the government’s implicit support of the organ theory was perceived as a threat to rival Control Faction (Tōsei-ha) leaders in the army, and this led Army Minister Hayashi Senjūrō to negotiate a response from the Okada cabinet to pacify the growing restlessness among reserve officers.55 The cabinet’s official statement on August 3, which essentially denied the administration’s support of the organ theory and communicated its intensions to “clarify the kokutai,” failed to satisfy the leaders of the IMRA. The national rally, attended by 1,200 IMRA delegates from around the country, declared that the statement did nothing to “clarify” the cabinet’s position on the issue of imperial sovereignty and its relation to the parliamentary system. Disagreements within the army turned from bad to worse. Imperial Way faction leader General Masaki Jinzaburō, whom Control Faction leaders privately accused of promoting the Campaign to Clarify the Kokutai out of political opportunism, was removed from the position of inspectorate general of military training, one of the top three positions in the army. Days later, an angry officer with ties to the Imperial Way faction responded by assassinating Control Faction leader Nagata Tetsuzan, leading to the resignation of Army Minister Hayashi. Alarmed by the violence and the escalation of the controversy, on October 12 the Okada cabinet released a second statement, this time explicitly condemning Minobe and the organ theory. The army and navy headquarters then negotiated with the IMRA, calling for a pacification of their activities. Though there were personal relationships between leaders of the Imperial Military Reserve Association and the Genri Nippon Society, as well as those who belonged to both organizations, the political premises of their respective courses of activism were far from identical. Whereas Minoda approached the organ theory from a theoretical perspective, the IMRA, though often echoing Minoda’s arguments, was also operating within the political jockeying that plagued the military. Both army factions had set their eyes on gaining control of the cabinet, and though on an abstract level Minoda’s theories tended to resonate with the political statements issued by the Imperial Way faction, this did not mean that Minoda and the Genri Nippon Society shared their political ambitions. Aside from the IMRA, the Seiyūkai also played an aggressive role in bringing the case of Minobe’s constitutionalism to the Diet. Although its

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rival Minseitō avoided involvement in the issue, the Seiyukai decided to officially criticize the organ theory, working together with two major factions within the House of Peers: the Kōseikai and the Kenkyūkai.56 The Seiyukai’s incentive for involvement in the organ theory was related to its desire to regain control over the cabinet that it had lost in the name of a “national emergency” following the assassination of party leader and prime minister Inukai in the May 15 Incident. It viewed the Okada cabinet as illegitimate, given that the Seiyukai continued to hold a majority in the Lower House. Any political scandal portraying the Okada cabinet as losing control, or worse, usurping the power of the emperor, was a welcome opportunity to restore the cabinet to the elected majority. Some observers wondered whether criticism lodged against Minobe by members of the Seiyūkai party and the military had more to do with discrediting powerful figures within the government who had been major proponents of the organ theory, particularly Ichiki Kitokurō and Kanamori Tokujirō.57 Both had previously held professorships in law at Tokyo Imperial University, and at the time of the incident, Ichiki was the president of the Privy Council while Kanamori was head of the Cabinet Legislation Bureau, both extremely powerful positions. Ichiki, in particular, was not only a proponent of the organ theory but also Minobe’s mentor, and it was an open secret that the vice president of the Privy Council, Hiranuma Kiichirō, coveted Ichiki’s position and had many allies among fellow conservative nationalists in the military and civilian organizations.58 In short, the “success” of the Campaign to Clarify the Kokutai, here defined as the public discrediting of Minobe and the imperial organ theory, was not a result of a widespread adoption of Minoda’s Japanism. While the rhetoric adopted by each party involved in the movement may have echoed the basic language that Minoda laid out, at the organizational level, each acted according to its own political interests for ends that did not necessarily converge. What made the movement a success in terms of its stated goals was that each major participant recognized, correctly or incorrectly, that the public discrediting of Minobe was a useful step in realizing its own longer-term agenda. Despite the singular, chilling effect they had in the academy, the political motivations of the individuals involved were far from uniform, and their ideas of how the kokutai might be “clarified” diverged as well. While each operated according to different political ambitions, they all made use of the vague language of patriotism and allegiance to the kokutai. Taken all together, the organ theory controversy and its offspring, the Movement to Clarify the Kokutai (Kokutai Meichō Undō), might appear as a surge of nationalism sweeping the country. But upon closer examination,



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the situation is in fact more reminiscent of the frustrations that procurator Sano would express three years later to his junior colleagues in the Ministry of Justice introduced at the beginning of the chapter: though the majority of the participants proclaimed the glory of the kokutai as the noble principle underlying their politics, the variance in their political programs produced a situation in which there were as many labeled “heretics” as there were self-described “patriots.” Here nationalism served not as a monolithic unifying force but as a rhetoric through which different players clashed over claims of political authority and personal ambition. The possibility of unpredictable violence raised the stakes of these clashes. The approach that the police took against these movements was informed by their experience with nationalist organizations during the years prior. THE IMPERIAL ORGAN THEORY INCIDENT AND THE POLICE If the Imperial Organ Theory Incident signaled a certain intensification of fascist trends against those contemporaneous intellectuals threatened by the proliferation of nationalist rhetoric in the academy, for officials working within the police apparatus the increasingly amplified opposition to Minobe and his theories posed a potential security nightmare. But the target of the police was not Minobe, who would ultimately be publicly disavowed by the government and remembered by subsequent generations as the target of state censorship. Rather, the police viewed the patriotic groups attacking Minobe to be a greater threat to security. An example of this can be found in the Monthly Bulletin of the Special Higher Police, whose monthly reporting on the incident and its related developments focused almost exclusively on nationalist and right-wing movements. From the perspective of the police, it was these nationalist organizations, not Minobe or the “liberalism” for which he was a reputed exemplar, that needed to be scrutinized for potential thought criminal activities. In accounts produced by the police, the Imperial Organ Theory Incident fits squarely within the narrative of the growing menace of radical nationalist organizations. All of this is not to say that the attack upon Minobe’s scholarship did not have the effect upon academic freedom and political liberalism that historians have attributed to it. Minobe’s works were banned from publication, and this removal of scholarship from circulation was by no means an isolated incident. The totality of the effects of such academic “scandals” is hard to track, and personal diaries of scholars of the time are replete with expressions of anxiety over what can and cannot be said while protecting

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one’s own academic reputation, not to mention one’s own life. But the Imperial Organ Theory Incident was far more complicated than an instance of the state stamping out the last vestiges of liberalism in its ongoing creep to the “right.” Behind the scenes were cadres of police bureaucrats frantically trying to keep together a national order that could no longer be maintained by simply finding those who were “antikokutai.” The Special Higher Police began tracking the developments surrounding the anti–organ theory campaigns as early as March 1935, as various nationalist organizations started mobilizing around the issue. The Monthly Bulletin of the Special Higher Police began featuring an entirely separate section devoted to coverage of the developments, a rare gesture that illustrates the urgent attention that the situation required from the perspective of the police. These special sections would continue on a monthly basis for an entire year, tracking the activities and public statements of major nationalist organizations and other institutions of interest. They were only halted by what the police had feared all along: a coup attempt in the name of patriotic intervention—that is, the February 26 Incident of 1936. The first of such issues, the March 1935 edition of the Monthly Bulletin tracked the activities of 122 nationalist organizations across the country, noting publications, letter-writing campaigns to the government, poster campaigns, pamphlets and flyers sent out to members, lecture events, and meetings organized around the issue.59 Among those holding meetings were major organizations like the Kokuryūkai; the IMRA; and new coalitions of nationalist movements organizing around the organ theory issue, such as the ninety-group League for Protecting the Kokutai, as well as minor organizations with more modest operations. The Tokkō also tracked the activities of various individuals acting independently in protest of Minobe and the organ theory, making note of private petitions, letters to the editor printed in newspapers, and menacing words that hinted at planned physical attacks upon individuals. The information that the Tokkō deemed noteworthy reveals that it was more focused on locating threats of direct action rather than the contents of political and ideological theories expressed by individuals and organizations. The reports were especially sensitive to comments that could be construed as threats to the safety of individuals, suggestions of dismantling the Okada cabinet, calls for military action against the government, and language suggesting that the kokutai controversy was related to unfinished business dating back to the Meiji Restoration, exemplified by the motto “Showa Restoration” and suggestions that the current government resembled the bakufu of old.60



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The government’s containment strategy of the developments did not stop at surveillance. On May 2, 1935, when the Okada cabinet was in the midst of receiving enormous pressure to publicly renounce the organ theory, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department launched an all-out assault against violence groups (bōryokudan), arresting 1,650 individuals on the first day and 8,153 by year’s end. The campaign aimed to put a stop to criminal activity such as members of organized crime extorting legitimate businesses to fund their activities but also had the fortuitous outcome of apprehending many right-wing activists who filled the ranks of nationalist organizations surveilled by the thought police. This, of course, was by design. Looking back at the campaign, Karasawa Toshiki, who succeeded the aforementioned Matsumoto Gaku as Police Affairs Bureau chief in 1934, noted in a postwar interview that he considered the Imperial Organ Theory Incident as a “prelude” to the February 26 coup attempt that came a year later. He went on to say that all the senses of the Police Affairs Bureau (Keihokyoku) were directed towards preventing a violent revolution (bōryoku kakumei). . . . So, we raised hell by using the pretense of hunting violence groups to try and take out the right wing. And we got quite a few of them. But it wouldn’t have sat really well with some if we went out and said that we were going to take out the right wing. Since they would violently extort people in groups, we simply hauled them all in with illegal gamblers and the lot.  .  .  .  I don’t think the Imperial Organ Theory itself was such a big deal, but it served as an issue (for right-wing groups) to rally around.61

For Karasawa, the violence group campaign served as a convenient label to work around the fact that the Peace Preservation Law could not be used to apprehend potential nationalist conspirators against the government.62 An explicit campaign against the right wing or nationalists carried the risk of having the police portrayed as unpatriotic, further fueling the attacks upon the government, but the stated goal of the elimination of violence groups brought an air of legitimacy to their attempt to slow down those organizing around the imperial organ theory. This marks a significant shift in the way the police approached crimes of thought, where in the case of socialism the enemy could be identified as the ideology itself, allowing the perpetrators to be framed as lost kin waiting to be rehabilitated with the correct nationalist education. With nationalism serving as the foundation for the new generation of antigovernment activism, the police were forced to be more creative in their handling of threats, for its monopoly over nationalist ideology was now being challenged. Accusing nationalist activists of antisocial activities such as violence was one such method.

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These campaigns were accompanied by subtle attempts to discredit those who used violence as a means of political action. Referring to members of the so-called violence groups, Justice Minister Ohara Naoshi stated: “Hiding behind the pretext of emperorism and patriotism, they make the world a sullen place by illegally suppressing the freedom of speech of others and constraining their actions, privileging a violent demeanor, and bringing about a social environment in which the general citizen cannot say what they wish to say. This is a major cause of social anxiety. We must suppress these unjust, unlawful movements with a stalwart and resolute attitude.”63 Ohara’s claims of protecting the freedom of speech are thick with irony given the context of the era, but the idea that there were fake patriots lurking about and creating commotion in society through the threat of violence gave the police license to apprehend potential thought criminals in numbers rivaling those during the height of the arrests of socialists. Meanwhile, the more practical reasons behind the pretext of hunting “faux patriots” were not lost on nationalist activists. Said one anonymous contributor to the nationalist media watchdog magazine Newspaper and Society (Shinbun to shakai), a publication with ties to the Genri Nippon Society: Though (the government) publicly says that it must protect the development of a pure and true patriotic movement from being hindered by a fake patriotic movement, what it is most afraid of is neither fake patriotic movements nor goons on the streets. The fact that it really fears ideological organizations (shisō dantai) moved by true patriotic sentiment is readily apparent from its policy of suppression against right-wing groups ever since the May 15 and Blood Pledge Corps Incidents. Yet, as the government struggles to enact a direct suppression of pure and true patriotic activists and instead arrests street goons from the illusory standpoint equating the right wing with violence groups, it is possible that it is hoping to invite the interpretation that this is in fact the true identity of the right wing.64

From the perspective of this observer, the so-called hunt for violence groups was nothing more than a publicity ploy on the part of the government to link the category of “right wing” to illegitimate forms of violence and patriotism in an attempt to discredit expressions of nationalism not sanctioned by the state. While the so-called hunt for violence groups was no doubt more than a simple appeal by the police to reclaim the mantra of orthodox nationalism (the campaign appears to be well received by the public65), these comments in Newspaper and Society magazine underscore the sensitive nature of employing the rhetoric of nationalism, as the police struggled to find ways to contain the Movement to Clarify the Kokutai.



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Genri Nippon opened its June 1935 issue with the government’s response to the Imperial Organ Theory Incident as well. Minoda quoted Ohara as arguing that fake patriots were “hiding behind the name of protecting the kokutai, revering the emperor, and patriotism,” which was clearly a reference to the League for Protecting the Kokutai, to which the Genri Nippon Society belonged.66 Minoda responded with his trademark combative rhetoric, calling for Ohara to “aggressively reflect” (mōhan) upon his words and recall that the Justice Ministry had followed the advice of Imperial University law professors in hiring officers who turned out to be “red.”67 Mitsui, too, protested the implicit link between Japanism, violence, and fake patriotism that the authorities seemed to be making. In his customary comments contributed to the back of every issue, he noted that the Genri Nippon Society did not condone physical attacks and that it limited its attacks to the level of academic discourse because its primary goal was to “guide thought” (shisō zendō) and provide “thoroughgoing moral suasion” (kyōka).68 As noted earlier, Minoda and Mitsui were both critical of the violent tactics exemplified by the May 15 Incident. Yet, as historian Uemura Kazuhide points out, it would be disingenuous to suggest that the society was innocent of personal attacks.69 Advocates of the organ theory like Minobe and Ichiki were victims of physical violence, and the writers in the Genri Nippon Society had been agitating for action against them for years, at times calling on them to conduct jiketsu, a word that literally means “self-decide” but also refers to the act of taking responsibility through suicide.70 It was no accident that the Tokkō began monitoring the rhetoric of organizations like the Genri Nippon Society as the incident developed into a full-fledged nationalist movement. The League for Protecting the Kokutai, too, voiced its skepticism about the true motives behind the government’s hunt for violence groups, releasing a statement decrying the police’ tactics as an attempt to wrongfully equate, in the eyes of the nation, “protecting the kokutai and patriotic reverence for the emperor” with “cowardly actions.”71 The official history of the league boasts that it was unaffected by the hunt, adding that the authorities “really must have lost their minds” in thinking that such a tactic could stop the movement.72 Meanwhile, the Monthly Bulletin of the Tokkō published after the first wave of the “hunt” noted that the efforts contributed to momentarily slowing the anti–organ theory movement.73 The flurry of nationalist organizing around the kokutai issue slowed to a simmer late in 1935 as it became apparent that the leadership of the massive IMRA would not mobilize its membership to become the vanguard of a national revolutionary force. It was around this time that the Tokkō

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struck another blow to the radical nationalist movement: in early December of that year, it launched a major assault on the religious sect Ōmoto-kyō, the parent organization of the Showa Shinseikai, a patriotic organization that was among the core groups that the Tokkō was tracking in relation to the Campaign to Clarify the Kokutai. Nancy Stalker notes that by 1934, only months after its launch, the Home Ministry identified the Showa Shinseikai as one of fourteen powerful right-wing organizations in the country, fueled by the massive membership and financial clout of the Ōmoto-kyō and its leader Deguchi Onisaburō.74 Its political platform echoed those of many patriotic organizations, citing rural poverty and the politics of the London Naval Treaty as proof that change was needed in the government’s leadership. Deguchi himself had personal connections to radical elements in the military and to leaders of influential patriotic organizations and provided both funding and a media forum for their work. According to Police Affairs Bureau chief Karasawa Toshiki, the authorities worried that the Showa Shinseikai was not only funneling money to right-wing organizations but also seemed to be conspiring toward a social revolution.75 Like the case of “violence groups,” the attack on Ōmoto-kyō was easy to justify to the greater public, as the group had already been a target of suspicion in major newspapers, and Deguchi had a penchant for using imperial imagery in promoting himself, which the police used as evidence of lèse-majesté. The attack by the police had been meticulously planned since early 1935, as the issue of the imperial organ theory started to demand the attention of the Tokkō. In eliminating the Ōmoto-kyō as a player in politics, the police were able to stamp out a threat monitored from its inception while cutting off a major source of funding and logistical support to the growing menace of revolutionary nationalism that threatened the operations of the state.76 There is some irony in the fact that as Police Affairs Bureau chief Karasawa Toshiki was away in Kyoto with his lieutenants overseeing the suppression of Ōmoto-kyō, radicalized army officers in Tokyo were mobilizing troops for a coordinated attack on Prime Minister Okada, Interior Minister Saitō Minoru, Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo, Army General Watanabe Jōtarō (an organ theory supporter), major media outlets, and a series of government buildings, including the Metropolitan Police Headquarters, in what would become known as the February 26 Incident of 1936. Karasawa made a harried return to the capital, a trip in which he and his men were constantly worried about being apprehended by military personnel sympathetic to the uprising and perhaps killed in the process. Back in Tokyo, police leaders were debating whether to deploy a threehundred-man-strong suicide mission to retake headquarters. Karasawa



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would be relieved of his duties in the aftermath of the incident in what was at that time the most significant incident of domestic terrorism in the history of modern Tokyo. Still, it is difficult to lay blame on Karasawa for the premature end to his tenure as Police Affairs chief. His string of success in cutting off personnel and resources to nationalist movements through his violence group and Ōmoto-kyō campaigns did not change the fact that he faced immense difficulty in policing conspiracies among military personnel, which had been the most fertile breeding ground for Showa Restoration terrorists. Karasawa’s downfall from the top of the police bureaucracy is a testament to the impossibility of his task of policing nationalist movements in the complex political context of the 1930s. CONTAINING AND HARNESSING THE NATIONALIST MESSAGE The association of “true patriotic sentiment” to activist groups made by the aforementioned anonymous writer who lambasted the violence group campaign in Newspaper and Society magazine in many ways echoes the thought criminal suspect, referred to earlier, who chastised procurator Sano Shigeki as being a servant of the bakufu. As the mainstream media coverage of the incident focused on the plight of Minobe Tatsukuchi and the Okada cabinet’s approach to his theories, behind the scenes was a struggle over legitimate ownership of the august mantra of patriotism. This struggle constituted another dimension of the Japanese government’s attempt to control political discourse that remains invisible so long as we focus on its suppression of left-wing activism. Indeed, what we see in these moments in the 1930s is a destabilization of the discourse of nationalism enabled by the rise of patriotic movements antagonistic to the government and offering alternative visions of nationalism. While it is true that nationalism was and remained a core component of the self-identity and rhetoric of police organizations and the state itself—perhaps even more so after the emergence of nationalist terrorism—allegiance to the kokutai ceased to be the primary marker in identifying thought criminals. Government agencies systematized their methods of surveilling and controlling nationalist groups following the failed coup d’état of the February 26 Incident. The Tokkō, for example, ramped up its surveillance efforts in order to study which organizations were most likely to engage in illegal political activity or pose challenges to the state.77 While the rhetoric of nationalist ideology continued to play a central role in mobilization policies and constructing an image of a unified and resolute nation,

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the degree of threat to the security of the state became the most important measure of differentiating between legitimate and illegitimate forms of nationalist expression. As we have seen, the Genri Nippon Society did not escape the police’s scrutiny in the contentious events surrounding the Imperial Organ Theory Incident. Naturally, it, too, became an organization of interest in the investigation in the aftermath of the February 26 Incident. Though the Campaign to Clarify the Kokutai achieved its goal of publicly discrediting Minobe Tatsukichi and the organ theory, it also had the effect of reinforcing the government’s suspicion toward right-wing movements. This did not prevent the Genri Nippon Society from continuing to build and maintain ad hoc relationships with government agencies and individual politicians, depending upon their mutual interests. From the perspective of the government, regaining monopoly over patriotic rhetoric meant not only policing the “right wing” but also selectively employing the rhetoric of Japanism. Minoda and the Genri Nippon Society were solicited on many occasions to provide their input on a number of government projects in preparation for engagement in total war as the war in China intensified. Even as police surveillance of the right wing became the norm, so, too, did the rhetoric of Japanism, which rose to the status of the new political correctness of the day. Far from cowering to police scrutiny, Minoda’s crusade against the Imperial Universities intensified in the early years of the second Sino-Japanese War. Even with the organ theory toppled from the status of political orthodoxy, Minoda did not believe that the kokutai had been “clarified.” Until his brand of Japanism became common sense among leaders in and outside of government, Japan would not be able to achieve the imperial utopia envisioned at the onset of the Meiji Restoration. As the Marxist and liberal scholars whom the Genri Nippon Society had initially targeted lost their place of prominence in the Japanese academy, the polemicists turned their attention to the government’s leadership and mobilization policies. Their mission was to prevent the Japanese government from becoming yet another bakufu that blocked the emperor from realizing his authority.

CH A P T ER FI V E

The Dream of Intellectual Leadership

In the fall of 1938, several editors of noted periodicals gathered with a few of their frequent contributors to take part in a roundtable discussion hosted by the school newspaper of Tokyo Imperial University, the Imperial University Newspaper (Teikoku Daigaku shinbun). Present at the meeting were philosopher and critic Miki Kiyoshi, journalist Abe Shinnosuke (Tokyo Nichi Nichi Newspaper), political pundit Kaji Ryūichi (Tokyo Asahi Newspaper), and scholars Imai Toshiki and Tatsuno Yutaka (both professors of literature at Tokyo Imperial University), as well as magazine editors and executives Haruyama Yukio (Serupan), Matsushita Hidemaro (Chūō kōron), Murobuse Kōshin (Nihon hyōron), Yanagisawa Hikosaburō (Bungei shunjū), and Yamamoto Sanehiko (Kaizō). Accompanied by food and drink, these participants representing the opinion leaders of Japan were asked to discuss the current situation of the sōgō zasshi, the opinion and literary magazines exemplified by titles such as Chūō kōron, Bungei shunjū, and Kaizō. In particular, they were to weigh in on the status of the sōgō zasshi as the leader of public opinion, a status that some argued had been on the wane in recent years. With Miki acting as master of ceremony, the participants exchanged opinions and observations concerning changes they saw in intellectual trends and the market for opinion journals. The consensus was that the time was ripe for reassessing the political function of intellectuals. Over a year had passed since the Marco Polo Bridge Incident that signaled the beginning of the war in China, which for many intellectuals called for a renewed political engagement of “thought.” The so-called China Incident was an event of historic proportions, and intellectuals were among many who attempted to understand 121

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its geopolitical consequences as well as its impact on their own daily lives. Since that incident, the Konoe cabinet announced that it would not negotiate with the Nationalist Party government in China and instituted the State Mobilization Law (Kokka Sōdōin Hō) in the spring of 1938, both of which hinted at the anticipated duration of the conflict. The government’s efforts to mobilize human and material resources were becoming more pronounced and systematic, and many educators and public intellectuals were enlisted in planning and instituting new mobilization policies. Politicians and government officials appointed intellectuals and opinion leaders to take leadership positions in the process of bureaucratizing local and national organizations to facilitate the mobilization of patriotic sentiment.1 As discussed in previous chapters, this was hardly the first time that intellectuals were appointed (or appointed themselves) as the vanguard in shaping new social and political relations. In this instance, too, intellectuals sought to articulate how they could best respond to what was generally understood as a moment of great change in the trajectory of world history. Naturally, their theories of political leadership and multiethnic empire would take shape through an engagement with literary and philosophical issues that characterized the various scenes of intellectual production at the time. The theories imagining new types of political leaders and a Japanese-led utopian empire in East Asia came to reflect particular sets of ideals associated with Japanese intellectual culture. Despite enthusiastic efforts to bring the fruits of intellectual culture to geopolitics, however, many of these projects met disappointing ends. For the intellectuals that we will focus on in this chapter, Minoda Muneki and Miki Kiyoshi, these disappointments had less to do with the government’s desire to implement the intellectual ideals of the intelligentsia than the overall difficulty of, in effect, “intellectualizing” political leadership and the empire itself. The eventual disappointment of many of these projects does not take away from the fact that such attempts to articulate the political function of intellectuals contained many interesting and fruitful exchanges that hint at the rich context that shaped the various visions of the ideal, politically engaged intellectual. The discussion sponsored by the Imperial University Newspaper sought to tease out the role that opinion journals would play in providing a forum for the engagement of intellectuals to the contemporary situation. Though the participants to the roundtable offered diverging opinions on the current state of sōgō zasshi, they all agreed that they were witnessing significant shifts in its status as a leader in public opinion and that its editors were facing new challenges in planning its monthly content. The reasons for this were several. First, the readership had changed



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significantly. Tatsuno Yutaka, professor of French literature and frequent contributor to opinion journals, pointed out that in the early years of the opinion journal in the late nineteenth century, there were a few journalist intellectuals like Miyake Setsurei, Kuga Katsunan, and Tokutomi Sohō who offered their opinions to the general reading public without receiving significant criticism.2 In contrast, in the late 1930s there were no longer any journalists and critics who enjoyed the same authority as those giants of the Meiji era. Moreover, the tastes of readers had grown more sophisticated, with readers becoming producers of opinions themselves. They no longer simply consumed the “leading opinion” that was available through a few titles, as was the case in the Meiji years, but chose from a much wider array of options one that best fit their own taste. In keeping up with these changes in readership, opinion journals were compelled to offer content that matched the tastes of a variety of readers, a shift that in Imai Toshiki’s view made it impossible for magazines to enjoy the same reputation of authority they once had. The diverse range in readers (or consumers) had forced opinion journals to become more consumer oriented while also relativizing the once towering figure of the public intellectual. Tatsuno and Imai were suggesting that the sōgō zasshi were no longer comprehensive, or sōgōteki, and were instead shifting toward specialization based on consumer taste. At the same time, the participants in the roundtable agreed that the relation between commercialism and the content of opinion journals was by no means a new one.3 Matsushita from Chūō kōron (Central Review) pointed out that his magazine had started out as a journal of religion, an editorial direction that it soon abandoned in favor of a wider audience interested in politics, economy, and literature, and it was this shift made due to commercial concerns that led to its status as a respected purveyor of sophisticated opinion and taste. Similarly, Kaizō’s “golden age” as the opinion leader of the 1920s would not have been possible without the high demand for Marxist and socialist literature and criticism. At the height of the commercial demand for Marxist and socialist essays, other opinion journals like Central Review showed no hesitation in expanding their repertoire to include pieces written by Marxist and socialist writers. The difference between the editorial decision-making of that era and the one they were now experiencing was related to the fact that in the past Marxism, and liberalism before it, had served as the singular pivotal issue for a wide range of debates that took the intellectual community by storm. Yet as the visibility of Marxism waned, no dominant paradigm had replaced it as the center of debate. Whether one agreed or disagreed with the tenets of Marxism and socialism, however they may be defined, they emerged as the

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dominant issues of the era for which every participant had an opinion. The participants of the roundtable agreed that in 1938 such a dominant trend was nonexistent. Instead, editors organized their pages according to the ad hoc demands of their increasingly diversifying readership. Observing this shift in the editorial realities of opinion journals, Miki Kiyoshi lamented that the sōgō zasshi were becoming indistinguishable from more vulgar periodicals, such as newspapers and weekly rags, sacrificing intelligence (shisōsei) and leadership (shidōsei) for news coverage and fads. The roundtable provides a look into an important moment in the history of the opinion journals in which editors and writers were confronted with the relation between ideas and the complexities of capitalist societies defined by mass politics, consumerism, and mobilization for total war. Particularly striking is the frank discussion of the commercial concerns that are involved in planning the content of opinion journals. The magazine editors and executives are honest about the commercial concerns that lay at the foundation of their editorial strategies but also express their desire and determination to provide their readers with first-rate material that will play an active and positive role in shaping society. Nowhere is the balance between the pursuit of knowledge and commercialism more apparent than the layout of the roundtable itself in the pages of the Imperial University Newspaper. With the feature taking up a two-page spread on pages 4 and 5, the bottom quarter of the pages were reserved for advertisements aimed at the newspaper readership, which was composed of not only Imperial University students, faculty, and staff but also readers interested in the political and literary news and opinions of the elite university culture. Page 4 featured an advertisement from Maruzen Booksellers listing forty-seven English-language titles providing the “basic resources for the construction of the New East Asia,” ranging from Abend and Billingham’s Can China Survive? to Yang Ch’eng-yu’s Groundnuts Production and Trade in China. Below Maruzen’s ad was that of Daigaku Shirin booksellers listing German titles, including Japanese translations of Dilthey, Mann, Sombart, Weber, and Hitler, as well as manuals on German grammar. The right-hand side of the spread, or page 5, featured the largest advertisement provided by none other than Kaizō Publishers, whose ad for Hino Ashihei’s best seller, Wheat and Soldiers, announced: “What a surprise: the unbelievable truth. Reprints upon reprints!! As much as we reprint more, the booksellers keep telling us there is not enough. To our surprise this has continued for two months!!”4 It was no wonder that Murobuse from Nihon hyōron chuckled that the “golden age” of Kaizō was hardly over. Kaizō had seamlessly adjusted to the new demands of the intellectual market by offering war stories as its newly featured product



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while continuing to act as a forum for a wide range of opinion on political economy. The advertising section of Kaizō Publishers also recommended two volumes of reportage covering goings-on in China by the head of the company himself, Yamamoto Sanehiko, proudly proclaiming that they contained the blueprint for the construction of the “new” East Asia. Quite appropriately, the only nonprint media advertised in the two-page spread were eye exams offered by the Tokyo Institute of Eyeglasses. Yet this frank discussion did not necessarily mean that the roundtable participants believed that intellectual culture was shaped solely by the commercial interests of the editors and owners of publishing companies, nor was it merely a cynical stance toward the belief in the intrinsic value of intellectual production that transcended commercial value. All participants in the discussion seemed to agree that intellectual production and its dissemination to the public had served an important role in the direction of society and the nation and that the continuation of this trend was not only desirable, but necessary. At the same time, they left unresolved the relation between commercial interests and new theoretical developments, exposing a sense of tension between the unpredictable demands of their customers and the expectation that they were to lead this mass of unpredictability. Taken for granted in this conversation is the vague notion that intellectuals and the literary forums provided by these publishing houses were to serve in some leadership capacity for the general course of society. Left particularly ambiguous in this assumption is the question of who these intellectuals were called upon to lead. Other intellectuals? Politicians? Bureaucrats? The masses? These ambiguities reflect the struggles of intellectuals as they sought to articulate a way for them to engage in the impasse brought on by Japanese imperial ambitions in China. INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTION IN LIGHT OF THE KOKUTAI The political function of the intellectual is a recurring topic of interest among intellectuals across many eras and geographies, and post-1937 Japan was no exception. While many studies evaluating the political engagement of intellectuals have tended to focus their energies on discussing the careers of past intellectuals and the merits of their theories, here I cast a broader net in an attempt to articulate a type of consensus that existed among intellectuals of varying political affiliations. Even for radical Japanists like Minoda, who left behind a legacy as the “Joseph McCarthy of Japan,” the vocation of the politically engaged intellectual was less about censorship of offensive thought than developing

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the best theoretical tools for producing effective leaders and politicizing the population. Intellectuals of all stripes shared the fundamental faith in the power of ideas to articulate a new system of social relations. Their role as intellectuals consisted in articulating the ideal form of the modern intellectual so that it could be presented as the model toward which leaders and citizens could strive. In this theoretical project, no potentially useful hint went unchecked; even Minoda himself crossed established boundaries of political alliances to borrow from figures as diverse as Lenin to Ludendorff to Hitler, although this seeming hodgepodge of influences is perhaps better described as symptomatic of an almost universally shared conviction among these figures that the effective deduction of ideology from political reality would have the power to move society in a new and enlightened direction, rather than a mere political crossover. For Minoda, who had already spent a greater part of two decades writing about the nationalist vocation of the intellectual and the universities that train them, this issue was of particular concern. If Miki Kiyoshi, the emcee of the roundtable on the sōgō zasshi and one of the key figures behind the Konoe cabinet’s development of an ideology for the expanding Japanese Empire, called for a new paradigm of political philosophy that succeeded Marxism, as well as for a reorganization of intellectuals around such a paradigm, Minoda, too, shared this desire for dramatic change. While some historians have argued that the success of nationalist movements like the Campaign to Clarify the Kokutai produced a rigidly nationalist orthodoxy, Minoda himself did not believe that to be the case. Minoda’s campaigns against university professors continued into the late 1930s and later extended to the bureaucrats who were the architects of Japan’s empire. State control and agitation by anticommunist figures like Minoda played a significant role in limiting the range of discussion.5 In the Imperial University Newspaper roundtable, Yamamoto Sanehiko and Imai Toshiki both suggested that ideological repression contributed to the intellectual stagnation among the opinion journals. As the chief executive of the opinion journal most associated with socialism, Yamamoto had seen many of his writers arrested, silenced, and even murdered by the police. Likewise, as a professor at Tokyo Imperial University, where the purge of faculty members had become a regular occurrence, Imai was no doubt sensitive to the ideological debates that in some cases led to the ruin of otherwise exemplary academic careers. Others noted that the removal of freedom for some was a more liberating environment for others. Murofuse Kōshin countered the laments of Yamamoto and Imai, arguing that the freedom of expression among intellectuals ought to be seen in more relative terms. In his view, while Marxists had succeeded in expanding their forum of



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discourse at the height of Kaizō’s popularity in the 1920s, intellectuals of other ideological persuasions had experienced a lack of freedom. Though the new ideological climate was influenced by power wielded by the government, Murofuse wondered whether intellectuals of the “Kaizō era” had buried themselves beneath the rhetoric of socialism and liberalism, in effect relinquishing to the technocratic “renovationists” (kakushin-ha) in the military and bureaucratic agencies their status as the vanguard in imagining new social relations. Murofuse held that intellectuals themselves shared the blame in the political impotency of contemporary intellectual culture, arguing that the shift away from Marxist and socialist theory actually enabled a reengagement of theory with reality. Murofuse’s comments reflect a renewed focus among professional intellectuals making a living between the opinion journal circuit and the education system in rethinking their status as leaders of opinion and society. An important subtext to this focus was the notion that the technocrats actively designing the empire in the military and other bureaucratic agencies had taken over the helm. The issue of intellectual leadership was not a new one; it was an important cornerstone of Leninism that animated, among other positions, the Fukumoto-ism of the mid-1920s that had a profound impact on Japanese Marxist theory. In literature and literary criticism, an important component of the opinion journals, proletarian literature became a productive forum to explore the role of writers in politics, society, and revolution.6 By the mid-1930s, when Marxism had largely been suppressed by the authorities, writers were debating the role of the intellectual in the context of fascism and the decline of liberalism.7 The war in China and the prospect of mobilizing human and material resources through massive political projects brought a new set of variables to the issue. In this chapter, we will focus on two important intellectuals of the 1930s, Minoda Muneki and Miki Kiyoshi, the emcee of the roundtable and a public intellectual actively involved in drafting cultural policies. Many intellectuals at the height of Japan’s imperial expansion sought to recapture the moral and intellectual authority of the nation’s trajectory, a desire rendered impossible by the growing diversity and complexity of the intellectual community and market, its media outlets, and the global situation that they sought to interpret. RESISTING OBSOLESCENCE: THE CREATIVE LEGACIES OF INTELLECTUAL CULTURE Minoda read the roundtable with great interest, remarking that it was a chance to gain insight into the prevailing opinions of leaders within the

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academy and mass media, two institutions that he had devoted his career to rectifying for the benefit of the nation. He shared with his mentor Mitsui Kōshi the view that the duty of these institutions was to use their critical power as a “corrective” to the inevitably self-serving motives of government officials and representatives, particularly party politicians in the Imperial Diet. This standpoint had been at the core of Mitsui’s polemics since the late Meiji era and is evident in Minoda’s review of the roundtable in 1938.8 In that article, which he titled “On the Re-education of the Intellectual Class,” Minoda writes: They must exhibit their “leadership (shidōsei),” here understood as offering fundamental criticism toward government policies and general public opinion, as well as the actions and statements of China, third parties, and the rest of the world, given from a fundamental and comprehensive (sōgōteki) worldview and a historical philosophical perspective. This is the duty of journalism, the frontline soldiers serving national security in the broad sense. If they cannot articulate with scholarly conviction and demonstrate through their essays and proposals what the principle of ideological battle, the criterion for this critical leadership, ought to be, we must say that their journalism does not possess leadership.9

Though Minoda, as we will see, differed from the roundtable participants in his belief of what constitutes the “principle of ideological battle,” he shared with them the basic premise that the duty of journalists is to articulate such an ideology through critique and cultured perspective. Miki Kiyoshi, for example, argued that an unprincipled movement toward mass mobilization and the construction of a new order in East Asia would fail to convince the world of the legitimacy of Japan’s actions. In the context of the problem of the sōgō zasshi, the opinion journal, Miki called for editors to return to a comprehensive (sōgōteki) approach to intellectual production, in order to add meaning to the specialized tendencies. Because the cultural literacy (kyōyō) of the writers is not comprehensive, the journals come off as being just bunched together. I think this lack of comprehensiveness points to a general lack in the culture of Japan today. Writers for opinion journals need to think about this issue, and I think that editors should think about this as well. Particularly in light of this transitional era of historical culture, specialization is not enough—in everything we do, I think that we must have comprehensive knowledge.10

Like Minoda, Miki takes a word from the opinion journal genre, “sōgō,” and foregrounds it as the ideal toward which editors must strive. Here



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and in other moments Miki expressed his wish that the opinion journals would lead the reengagement of intellectuals, the primary readers of opinion journals, in the contemporary political situation, a movement that would necessarily be the “reorganization” (saisoshiki) of intellectuals. Minoda employed a similar language of “comprehensiveness” (sōgōteki) in his call for reform among intellectuals, which he framed as a “reeducation” of intellectuals. We will discuss in more detail below how Minoda and Miki differed in their conception of a “comprehensive” intervention to intellectual culture in post-1937 Japan, but here it must be pointed out that their calls for “comprehensiveness” echo one of the primary points of discussion among the so-called reform bureaucrats, the technocratic specialists designing the theory and infrastructure of the Japanese Empire. Here we see Minoda and Miki, two very different intellectuals specializing in philosophy, appropriating the concept of comprehensiveness in calling for intellectuals versed in the humanities to reengage themselves in political debate. I have translated sōgō as “comprehensive” here, following recent scholarship on Japanese engineers and reform bureaucrats.11 In his study of how engineers imagined the idea of technology, Aaron S. Moore describes comprehensiveness as “a perspective of integrated, rational planning and coordination of expertise for comprehensive development projects,” for which engineers advocated starting in the early 1930s.12 The basic idea was to coordinate specialists of various kinds to tackle complex projects of building infrastructure and social engineering. While Minoda and Miki use the same word, likely as a way to address the rise of the technocrats, sōgō carried a different connotation in the humanities: the intellectual power of synthesis, or the ability to combine different elements to produce knowledge that is more than the sum of its parts. Humanists like Miki and Minoda suggested that the totalizing comprehensiveness aimed for by the renovationist policies was merely a gathering together of policies drawn up by specialists without any comprehensive principle that truly unifies the individual policy outcomes in a way that spiritually mobilizes the populace or convincingly articulates the world-historical significance of Japan’s stated goal of unifying greater East Asia. Intellectuals as diverse as Miki and Minoda were quick to assert the prestige of traditional institutions of intellectual production, exemplified by the opinion journal (sōgō zasshi) and the university (sōgō daigaku), as the agents of producing the synthesizing (sōgōteki) principles necessary for both domestic mobilization and international propaganda.13 Both the roundtable discussion and its critical review by Minoda yearn for a return of the synthesizing, comprehensive intellectual, equipped with new

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concepts and methods capable of shedding light on ways to understand the tumultuous historical juncture that they were now experiencing. This beckoned different methodological approaches to the problem. For Miki, it marked a new philosophical direction that combined the philosophical sophistication sharpened during his training at the Kyoto Imperial University Philosophy Department and his political sensibilities developed through his engagement with Marxist theories. What set his new philosophical project apart from those of the past was his decision to actively engage institutions associated with state power and join Prince Konoe Fumimaro’s brain trust, the Showa Research Association. Miki attempted to bring synthetic unity and direction to bureaucratic specialization by joining the ranks of technocrats and thereby physically adding the element of comprehensiveness through his very presence. Minoda would take a different path, choosing ultimately to distance himself from official attempts at total mobilization, a move ironic in the sense that it is the political activities of “rightists” like Minoda that are often associated, if not conflated, with mobilization policies. Like other Japanist activists, Minoda would become increasingly critical of the government’s attempt to bureaucratize service to the nation and intellectual production. Though the pages of Genri Nippon continued to be a storehouse of nationalist, even jingoistic, arguments throughout the war in East Asia, this did not preclude its contributors from being vocal critics of the government’s policies for human and material mobilization. BEYOND SPECIALIZATION: MIKI KIYOSHI AND THE “COMPREHENSIVE” HUMAN Like many intellectuals, Miki believed that the rapidly changing geopolitical situation needed to be confronted with a vigorously theoretical intervention that would both articulate the essential meaning of the situation and provide a new political ethos robust enough to withstand criticism.14 Of all intellectuals in Japan at the time, Miki was in an especially advantageous position to construct and popularize such an ideology. Through a series of scandals, including an arrest for suspicion of aiding the Japan Communist Party, Miki was unable to keep a university position and from the year 1930 on had to earn a living primarily as a freelance writer. Through his connections with influential publishers such as Iwanami Shigeo, his broad knowledge of global philosophical trends, and his sharp sense of taste, Miki was able to establish himself as one of the most influential opinion leaders of the 1930s.15 Miki’s writing style appealed to a wide range of editorial strategies, and the appearance of his essays in



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newspapers, literary publications, and opinion journals, as well as more abstract philosophical journals and monographs, made him a new type of intellectual with a high level of visibility. His cultural sensibilities also influenced the editorial and marketing strategies of a new line of affordable classics offered by Iwanami Publishers, and it is well known that Iwanami’s mission statement expressing its commitment to the spread of a refined cultural literacy among the masses at an affordable price was originally drafted by Miki himself.16 Miki was already an established purveyor of cultured opinion and taste to the masses. Yet it is clear from the 1938 roundtable on opinion journals that Miki was dissatisfied with intellectual culture as a source of leadership. As an active participant in the lively debates over Marxist theory in the late 1920s, Miki’s philosophy never strayed far from the idea of political praxis. The February 26 coup attempt in 1936 marked a new beginning in Miki’s diagnosis of the intellectual’s mission in society. He interpreted the moment as a decisive shift in the mode of Japanese fascism (which he also called “Japanism”) characterized by the “rationalization” (gōrika) of reactionary elements critical of capitalism and “Westernization.” This shift signaled a changing of the guard in terms of the chief ideologues of Japanese fascism from Japanist agrarianists and xenophobes to technocratic experts of organization, propaganda, and control, as well as the evolution of Japanese fascism to a form more closely resembling those in Europe.17 Miki viewed this as a moment of decision for liberals, particularly those who had been noncommittal in their political engagement and commitment to liberalism. As he saw it, fascism in Japan would continue its trend toward greater control and organization, and intellectuals who had postponed an articulation and action defining their political ideology would now be forced to do so. Miki’s prediction of this day of reckoning was also a call for intellectuals to take a more active role in engaging the rapidly maturing system of political power and control. Arakawa Ikuo has argued in his study of Miki that this moment marked a new departure in Miki’s career that would be dominated by the theme of “politics and the intellectual,” culminating in his active participation in the development of cultural policy proposals.18 But as would become more evident following the outbreak of the war with China in November 1937, Miki was not simply calling intellectuals to voice their opposition to fascism or to advocate a more thorough political liberalism. Rather, Miki’s intellectual activities during the late 1930s and early 1940s focused essentially on mobilizing all of the tools that Japanese academic and literati culture had amassed since the Meiji period for the purpose of guiding the future direction of the Japanese nation in a palatable

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direction. The essay “Japan’s Reality” (Nihon no genjitsu), which appeared in November 1937 in Central Review, was a challenge to Japanese intellectuals to provide a theoretical foundation for Japan’s ambitions in East Asia that would be convincing not only to the Japanese themselves but to those in China and East Asia, where anti-Japanese nationalism seemed to be strengthening by the day. The essay caught the attention of the members of the Showa Research Association, the think tank of Prince Konoe Fumimaro primarily consisting of technocrats specializing in political economy. The association invited Miki to lecture to its members and soon brought him on board to chair its Culture Section.19 Miki’s decision to join the Showa Research Association suggests that he did not intend to fight the technocratic trends that were occurring at the intersection between politics and the intelligentsia but rather hoped to guide them through his learned intervention. Notably, the technocrats within the Showa Research Association had in fact approached Miki first; in other words, the cultural literacy that Miki embodied and claimed to bring to the analysis and guidance of the political economy of East Asia possessed considerable currency among engineers and social scientists as well. What Miki tried to accomplish both in theoretical articulation and dayto-day active engagement was the unification of what he called the logos and pathos—the rational and emotional capacities of the human. Arakawa Ikuo described Miki’s project as an attempt to develop a “total human technocrat” (zenjin-teki tekunokuraato), a new archetype of intellectual for whom techne is understood at its most basic level: the creative intervention that is embodied in the human acting upon nature.20 Through this theorization of techne as human creativity, Miki attempted to guide the technocrat beyond specialization, changing it into an actor that consciously created new forms of community and economic exchange. Miki’s theory of the new intellectual can be found in the discussion of the “leader” in the pamphlet Philosophical Foundations of Cooperativism (Kyōdōshugi no tetsugakuteki kiso) released by the Showa Research Association in 1938. “Cooperativism” was the central concept of the association, charged with the task of endowing the aggressive expansion of Japanese imperialism with philosophical meaning.21 There, Miki writes: Cooperativism is not founded upon abstract democracy, but rather acknowledges the crucial significance of leaders. The leaders that cooperativism seeks are not totalitarian dictators, nor are they disengaged from the people (kokumin). Rather, they go among the people, educate its members, and gather up the desires of the people and take leadership in (shidōteki ni) organizing them.22



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Later he goes on to say: On the one hand, the idea of the leader recognizes the significance of the individual in history, especially those excellent individuals, as in the historical view of heroism, and values their creative will. On the other hand, however, the leader cannot be detached from the masses, and must be someone strongly tied to the masses. He must not be a mere dictator, but rather must represent the masses. History is made by the power of the masses. Yet, the organization of the masses’ desires and their endowment with a certain direction requires the power of the leader, and without the leader, the masses are not able to truly exercise their power. The relationship between the leader and the masses must be educational at its core.23

One can see in these passages regarding the “leaders” in the framework of “cooperativism” both Miki’s basic idea of the world-generating power of human action, as well as his call for intellectuals to take action. Yet it is also here where Miki’s descriptions are most vague, and his comparison of the new leaders to the political system of democracy and his language of representation (daihyō) invites one to assume that he is imagining the new leaders to be representatives of various communities in some official capacity. Though the ascendance of the intellectual leader as the ideal representative of the nation may have been the expected outcome of the merging of his theory of the intellectual with his political activism, this conclusion was fraught with difficulties that permeated the idealism of “Taisho democracy.” Miki’s vague notion of leadership and representation drew the ire of Minoda, who was relentless in his polemics against Miki and the Showa Research Association. Minoda’s criticism echoes Miki’s almost obligatory denunciation of “democracy,” which characterized the political discourse of the era, but at the same time accuses Miki of reproducing the same problematic representational arrangement that Minoda argues made the name Democratic Party (Minseitō, or literally, People’s Governance Party) a farce.24 For Minoda, Miki’s outline of the new political leadership simply replaced the parliamentary politicians with an arbitrary set of intellectuals, presumably the members of the Showa Research Association. There was no guarantee that these new leaders would be able, or even willing, to gather all the voices of protest. Characteristically, Minoda raised his own protest as a case in point: Would the Showa Research Association hear and incorporate his critique? From there, Minoda’s line of argument follows his oft-repeated thread, contending that the emperor, being the embodiment of Japanese history and culture, was the only figure capable of truly representing the needs and direction of the Japanese nation.

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While the state administrations of other nations, such as Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, relied on a popular cult of leadership similar to that designed by the Showa Research Association, Minoda contended that the Japanese nation was hierarchical by its very nature, a notion summed up in the phrase attributed to the nineteenth-century patriot Yoshida Shōin: “One sovereign, ten thousand subjects” (ikkun banmin). To Minoda, it was untenable that the Showa Research Association maintained that a leader of the nation ought to emerge from among the populace when in fact the legacy of corruption and ineptitude of the Imperial Diet had already demonstrated the difficulty of achieving a political leadership that consistently put the interest of the nation beyond that of its own. The historical moment called for the direct rule by the emperor as the only way to have his sovereign will reflected in the nation’s politics.25 JAPANISM AND MOBILIZATION POLICIES Minoda continued his rhetorical assault on the Showa Research Association until its dissolution in November 1940, when it was nominally absorbed by the Imperial Rule Assistance Association. Savaging Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro’s think tank, however, did not preclude Minoda from building a relationship of his own with the popular politician. Indeed, Minoda’s role in the Movement to Clarify the Kokutai made him an important Japanist ideologue to reckon with. Like Miki, Minoda held reservations about the rise of technocracy in the government and sought to intervene, both as an outside critic and an advisor to the government. While the police surveillance of right-wing organizations continued into the late 1930s and beyond, the Movement to Clarify the Kokutai brought the rhetoric of Japanism to hegemonic status. In light of the intense scrutiny and criticism of the Imperial Universities since the Takigawa Incident, the Communization of Judicial Officials Incident, and the Imperial Organ Theory Incident, the Ministry of Education formed a task force called the Committee for the Renewal of Morality and Scholarship (Kyōgaku Sasshin Hyōgikai) to explore ways to bring the Japanese academy more in line with what they called “the spirit of the kokutai and Japan.”26 In October 1936, the committee announced a set of guidelines aimed at increasing moral education in the schools of all levels. This renewal of the “spirit of education” would be based upon “our beautiful tradition of respecting the gods and worshiping our ancestors” and realizing on campuses the “familial spirit of our nation.”27 Though short on specifics, the committee’s program in many ways mirrored the moralistic individualism that Mitsui and Minoda had advocated since the Taisho era.



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Emboldened with a renewed sense of legitimacy, Minoda and the Genri Nippon Society appropriated the motto of “renewing morality and scholarship” (kyōgaku sasshin) in intensifying its campaigns against Imperial University professors. Their criticism was instrumental in the so-called Popular Front Incidents of December 1937 and February 1938 that saw the arrests of hundreds of leftist scholars and organizers, including Imperial University professors Ōuchi Hyōe, Minobe Ryōkichi, and Uno Kōzō. Economist Yanaihara Tadao was also forced to resign from his professorship at Tokyo Imperial University in December 1937 after receiving an intense barrage of criticism from Minoda and Mitsui.28 Attacks upon Imperial University professors extended to those in the humanities as well, including Miki Kiyoshi’s own former instructors at Kyoto Imperial University, Nishida Kitarō and Tanabe Hajime, the two giants of the so-called Kyoto School.29 In May 1938, Konoe appointed General Araki Sadao, a noted Japanist and ally of nationalist organizations like the Genri Nippon Society, as minister of education, further cementing the trajectory toward emperorcentric nationalism in Japan’s education policy.30 Two months into his tenure, Araki summoned the presidents of the Imperial Universities and decreed that since professors at the Imperial Universities were technically bureaucrats, it was his duty as the emperor’s education minister to take charge of personnel decisions.31 The announcement broke the long tradition of relative autonomy from the state that the Imperial Universities enjoyed, beginning a standoff between the universities and the ministry. In September of that year, Minoda and other like-minded nationalists formed the Alliance for the Purification of the Imperial Universities (Teidai Shukusei Kisei Dōmei), an organization led by Peers Ida Iwakusu and Kikuchi Takeo, who played important roles in sparking the Imperial Organ Theory Incident by confronting fellow member Minobe Tatsukichi.32 The Alliance aimed to purge the Imperial Universities of intellectuals sympathetic to leftist thought and kicked off its campaign with a lecture event at Hibiya Hall that drew an overcapacity audience of twenty-eight hundred.33 Minoda and Mitsui were among the speakers at the event attended by scores of university students.34 The Alliance played a major role in manufacturing academic scandals over the next several years. The so-called Hiraga Incident of 1939 led to two economists at Tokyo Imperial University being placed on administrative leave after an intense feud between the liberal and statist factions in the department.35 Araki’s role in doling out the punishment sparked thirteen members of the faculty to submit their resignation letters. That same year, Minoda and Mitsui accused historian Tsuda Sōkichi of lèse-majesté

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for arguing that the events recorded in the ancient classic The Chronicles of Japan (Nihon shoki) were not historical facts. The government responded by banning Tsuda’s books and forcing Waseda University to fire him. After a prolonged court battle, Tsuda and his publisher Iwanami Shigeo were given suspended sentences for violating the Publishing Law.36 In 1941 Minoda published three books that, in part, gathered his polemical essays of those years: State and University: A Public Challenge to the Law Faculty of Tokyo Imperial University, Philosophy of National Defense, and The Restoration of Scholarship. The government’s efforts to endow its citizens with a sense of nationalism in the Japanist mode continued throughout these years. In March 1937, the Ministry of Education published Essence of the National Polity (Kokutai no hongi), a pamphlet that attempted to articulate an orthodox dogma of how the imperial subject was to understand the kokutai, an official response of sorts to the Campaign to Clarify the Kokutai. Later that year in September, the new cabinet of Prince Konoe Fumimaro announced the National Spiritual Mobilization Campaign, a government-led program of mobilizing imperial subjects for total war with China. As its name would suggest, the campaign aimed to solicit the material sacrifice of imperial subjects by appealing to their “national spirit,” which would ostensibly be aligned with the goals of the military and the government. Many of the nationalists involved in the Campaign to Clarify the Kokutai were incorporated into the government’s mobilization campaigns. Within a few months, the Imperial Military Reserve Association, arguably the most powerful player in the Campaign to Clarify the Kokutai, announced its participation in the National Spiritual Mobilization Campaign. The League for Protecting the Kokutai, the umbrella organization of approximately ninety nationalist groups at the center of the Campaign to Clarify the Kokutai, followed suit, bringing its members into the fold as well. In effect, the nationalist critics had been assimilated into the bureaucracy and handed the task of wielding the power of the national spirit—the very spirit they had invoked in attacking the Okada cabinet. Minoda himself availed his services for the National Spiritual Mobilization Campaign, representing the League for Protecting the Kokutai. In 1937, he joined the Committee on Social Climate (Shakai Fūchō ni Kansuru Chōsa Iinkai) and received appointments to serve on special committees on morality in society and reforming the universities.37 Minoda’s ally in the campaign against Minobe, House of Peers member Ida Iwakusu, served as chair of the committee as well as board member of the National Spiritual Mobilization Campaign itself. Later in 1939, Minoda joined the Imperial Land Studies Committee (Kōkokugaku Iinkai), which produced



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scholarship on Japan that placed the imperial institution as its core element.38 There he was joined by Mitsui Kōshi, as well as a host of other emperor-centric Japanist scholars such as Satō Tsūji, Kanokogi Kazunobu, and Hiraizumi Kiyoshi.39 In participating in the mobilization campaign, Minoda played a central role in producing policy recommendations given directly to the prime minister and his cabinet and occasionally met with ministers himself. Perhaps no other politician than Konoe Fumimaro could have so seamlessly turned the harshest critics of the government into its own deputized agents. When he formed his cabinet in June 1937, many hoped that his outsider status would bring order to a government in disarray, characterized by low public approval of the major political parties and the military in the public relations crisis following the February 26 coup attempt the year earlier. Konoe belonged neither to a political party nor the military and came from an aristocratic family that traced its lineage to the imperial house itself. He was an intellectual educated by the famous Kyoto School philosopher Nishida Kitarō and a cosmopolitan figure who had dabbled in socialism as a youth and was fresh from a tour of the United States, where he had observed the effects of the New Deal policies. Yet he had also been a vocal critic of American and British imperialism since the days when he had attended the Paris Peace Conference. Konoe also possessed a reputation for being sympathetic to Japanist ideals. His father, Konoe Atsumaro, was involved in a number of PanAsianist projects, for which he collaborated with some of the elder statesmen of the Japanese nationalist movement who were still active in the 1930s, including leaders of the Dark Ocean Society and the Amur River Society, Toyama Mitsuru and Uchida Ryōhei. Ioki Ryōzō, a veteran of the first Sino-Japanese War and a major figure in the nationalist Pan-Asian movement, was another close confident of Atsumaro and a mentor of sorts to Konoe Fumimaro.40 Ioki was a disciple of the poet Masaoka Shiki and became editor of the magazine Japan and the Japanese, for which Mitsui Kōshi served as a longtime columnist and poetry editor. Konoe also served as a senior advisor to the International Anti-Communist League that was founded in April 1937. In a word, Konoe was the rare outsider candidate for leadership that seemed to have the social capital to unite political differences of all types. Minoda was a member of the International Anti-Communist League and may have had some contact with Konoe there. The prime minister’s appointment of Araki to the education ministership was a boost to Minoda’s program of reinventing the Imperial Universities as a Japanist institution. Konoe’s association with Minoda and affiliated organizations continued

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into 1940, when he formed his second cabinet in July of that year. He agreed to serve as a senior advisor to the Japan Student’s Association (Nihon Gakusei Kyōkai), a Japanist student organization with close ties to Minoda, Mitsui, and the Genri Nippon Society.41 The organization was founded in May 1940, and it was around that time that Minoda was consulted by Konoe in drafting his declaration of a “New Order” (Shintaisei) in Japanese politics. It would be a mistake to understand Konoe’s proximity to Minoda in these affairs as a sign that the prime minister held the same Japanist beliefs as Minoda. Konoe consulted a wide range of intellectuals in building the foundational policies of his governments, including most famously the Showa Research Association, which included several communists and Marxist sympathizers among its ranks. Rather, Konoe had attempted to synthesize the numerous competing voices into a unified national movement that would assist the government in managing and mobilizing the Japanese Empire for total war. Konoe was the embodiment of the project of “comprehensiveness” himself. One fascinating document from the planning stages of Konoe’s New Order is a draft of his proclamation of a New Order from August 1940.42 The uniqueness of this particular draft (Konoe drafted several versions) lies in the handwritten edits and commentary offered by three reviewers with competing political ideologies: Yabe Teiji, a law professor at Tokyo Imperial University and a close advisor to Konoe and the author of the original draft; Mutō Akira, an army general and chief of the Military Affairs Bureau; and Minoda, the Japanist polemicist. Yabe was a frequent target of Japanist intellectuals, including Minoda and his allies in the Japan Student’s Association, and Mutō was an army officer with allegiances with the so-called Control Faction of the military, which was more technocratic than the Imperial Way Faction allied with Japanists like Minoda.43 It is unclear if Minoda had a relationship with Konoe outside of crossing paths at the meetings of organizations for which they both served as members or advisors. Still, Minoda’s commentary was useful for Konoe, as it allowed him to adopt the Japanist rhetoric. His proclamations and policy drafts came to take on a more Japanist tone as he entered his second stint as prime minister in July 1940, and Minoda’s edits to his proclamation ensured that he was using the appropriate Japanist rhetoric that was now the hegemonic lexicon in the wake of the Campaign to Clarify the Kokutai, shielding him from the criticism that his policies were contrary to the kokutai.44 Yabe, who became a widely read biographer of Konoe after the war, speculated that Konoe feared being criticized as a bakufu-like figure, which could invite the wrath of terrorist assassins.45



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TECHNOCRACY AND THE IMPERIAL SUBJECT Despite these instances of collaboration with Konoe’s mobilization policies, Minoda was skeptical of their effectiveness. He was already referring to the movement with some disdain by the time he was reviewing the roundtable on opinion journals in the Imperial University Newspaper in January 1939. When the Yonai administration announced the organization of a Council for Commodity Price Policy (Bukka Taisaku Shingikai) in February 1940 in response to dramatic cuts in U.S. exports to Japan, Minoda interpreted the announcement as a sign that the National Spiritual Mobilization Campaign was a failure. If individuals and corporate bodies involved in commodity transactions could not be trusted to place the interests of the nation above their own profits, then the movement had failed to sufficiently mobilize the national spirit. According to Minoda, commodity price controls and the like could only be a half measure; true mobilization could only be achieved through the proper education of the population. The main concern Minoda harbored was that while these policies aimed to move the bodies of imperial subjects and their material resources, this did not translate to moving their “spirits.” Taking the oftused shorthand for the National Spiritual Mobilization Campaign, Seidō, Minoda frequently referred to the campaign derisively as a butsudō, or a “thing-mover,” as opposed to a “spirit-mover.”46 He charged that the campaign failed to truly mold the population into genuine Japanists who would act for the emperor and the nation out of their own free will. Mobilization policies, from the perspective of Japanist ideologues like Minoda, were based on an incomplete understanding of the Japanese people, and this was the shortcoming of the technocratic approach to mobilizing the national spirit. Minoda summarized his critique of mobilization policies in his Philosophy of National Defense (Kokubō tetsugaku), published in July 1941. There he developed the arguments that he made against Marxists in the 1920s into a call for a program of social engineering informed by the human sciences. Referencing the German general Erich Ludendorff, Minoda described modern warfare as taking place not simply in combat on the battlefield but also in the arenas of foreign policy, economy, and ideology, with the latter being its most important aspect. The success of the system of total warfare hinges on the successful unification of its various aspects through the development of its spiritual basis that will guide the effort of the entire nation-state in a direction consistent with its interests. The leaders and planners of mobilization campaigns needed to understand the targets of their mobilization as human beings, who by virtue of their thoughts,

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emotions, and traditions were distinct from natural resources. The mobilization policies were currently based upon economic goals, according to Minoda, and this risked mistaking the purpose of the mobilization policies as mobilization itself and not the success of the nation and the reign of the emperor. This carried the danger of turning the state into something that resembled the bakufu of the early modern era.47 Minoda’s suggestion can be boiled down to two points, both aimed at criticizing a system of economic planning that did not account for human psychology. The first was to remind economists that humans tend to be unpredictable. Repeating an argument that he employed against early forms of historical materialism in the mid-1920s, Minoda called for a new perspective on historical change that accounted for the unpredictability of human behavior, a position clearly at odds with his rigid conception of “correct” ideology. Minoda assumed that even if one cannot with any certainty control how humans will act, one can at least educate them to be loyal to the community to which they belong, ensuring that though people will continue to act in unpredictable ways, they will more than likely do so within the parameters of respectable citizens (or in Minoda’s lexicon, imperial subjects, or shinmin). Second, Minoda disagreed that such education/propaganda should call for imperial subjects to abandon their material desires for the sake of state mobilization of resources. The government was already implementing propaganda strategies urging subjects to be frugal in their consumption habits, going so far as to proclaim that “luxury was an enemy.” Instead, Minoda submitted a more economically liberal position, for which he enlisted the authoritative language of science in proclaiming that the desire for material possessions was a natural, “biological instinct” among humans and that the forceful curbing of this by the state could only lead to chaos and revolt. Minoda dismissed those who argued that material interests were strictly modern phenomena particular to capitalism, proposing that primordial notions of private property were already detectable in ancient texts such as the Records of Ancient Matters (Kojiki).48 Interestingly, in calling for a more spiritual foundation to the mobilization efforts, Minoda drew upon Lenin, the founder of his most hated enemy, the Soviet Union. This association did not preclude him from admiring the intellectual power of the Russian revolutionary or stop him from attempting to cull lessons from the establishment of the Soviet Union and its process toward becoming the antithesis of what he desired to see in Japan. Minoda argued that toward the end of his life, Lenin grew to regret his lack of attention on matters concerning the education of the Russian population—that the management of the Soviet State would have



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been much more efficient had citizens been better equipped with the sensibilities and education that would have allowed them to totally commit to the state’s goals.49 Minoda was especially critical of Sugihara Masami, who was vice director of the East Asia Department in the Imperial Rule Assistance Association. In his Political Power of the Organized Nation, Sugihara argued that Japan’s particular form of dictatorship, the decisive leadership necessary for “comprehensive change” (sōgō henkaku), would be created through the delegation of the emperor, producing a leader of the highest order who possesses the highest authority by virtue of being the representative of the emperor.50 Minoda argued that this revealed the ideological character of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, which was no different from the Diet and the political parties in usurping the power of decision-making from the emperor. Utilizing what had become by then his signature rhetoric, Minoda charged that the line of thinking resembled the “organization of the Communist Party” and that the pattern of hiring personnel with “anti-kokutai thought” was typical of the former head of the East Asia Department, Kamei Kan’ichirō.51 Minoda’s solution was to return to what he understood as the original premise of the National Spiritual Mobilization Campaign: ridding Japan of politics poisoned by the imperial organ theory. He argued: The New Order and Imperial Rule Assistance Association Movements were launched because until then, the Diet and the political parties had failed to accomplish their original duties of assisting imperial rule. But this was not because there was an issue in the system as stipulated by the constitution, but because the Diet and the political parties were led by the democratic “organ theory” in struggling over political power, which is in complete opposition to the spirit of “imperial rule assistance.” Since the issue was the unconstitutionality and anti-kokutai nature of the thought animating the Diet and political parties, the fundamental issue is reforming this thought—the grave importance of the Campaign to Clarify the Kokutai and the National Spiritual Mobilization Campaign lay in the renewal of morality and scholarship of the academic climate of the imperial universities that is most evident in the “organ theory.”52

In short, Minoda argued for the establishment of an ideological orthodoxy and ensuring that the nation and its leadership put “assisting the imperial rule” ahead of all self-interest. Once these basic goals are accomplished, the Diet could be restored to its constitutionally mandated role, and the Japanese state would be unified as the constitution had intended.53 It is unclear from Minoda’s writing how he imagined that nonconforming imperial subjects would be converted to self-sacrificing Japanists

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aside from a vaguely suggested process of reeducation. One clue might be found in his interest in the concept of leadership (shidōsei), much like his target of criticism Miki Kiyoshi and a host of other contemporaries. Consistent with the rest of his career, Minoda drew upon contemporaries outside of Japan. One of his favorite figures to cite in the early 1940s was Karlfried Dürckheim, a Nazi intellectual sent to Japan by Hitler to promote cultural exchange between the two Axis nations. Writing in Central Review in June 1940, Dürckheim appealed to his Japanese allies, saying that just as Japan desired to be recognized as a formidable power in the East, Europeans, especially Germans, wanted to be recognized not only as nations of machines and rational organization representing “scientific thought” but also as possessors of a rich cultural tradition. Dürckheim expounded on the dangers of relying too heavily on scientific and technological thought, a danger purportedly faced by Germans and Japanese alike. While science and technology are in themselves not opposed to the life of the community, Dürckheim argued, when these take over as the leading principles of life, they become a threat to traditional order and faith-based values, and this had already led to the deterioration of European civilization. But the Japanese would be foolish to think of Europe simply as a rational civilization without understanding its mystical aspects, which stem from their ethnic spirit. In a rhetorical turn that echoed what many Japanese intellectuals were at the time suggesting, Dürckheim suggested a synthesis of the utilitarian virtues of science and technology with the sensibility of the traditional literati: “When we look to the future of Germany, we place our hope in the unification of the character of the poet and the soldier, the union of ethnic vitality and formal state power, and the fusion of technical ability with living faith. For contemporary Germans, the essence and development of this unification is embodied and guaranteed in ‘Nazi Germany.’”54 Though the perceived crisis in articulating the political function of the intellectual among intellectuals in Japan, as we have seen, seems to have had local roots related to the growing influence of the technocrats in shaping sociopolitical policies and the changing realities of the market for opinion journals, the parallel discussions in Germany lend credence to the perception that the new synthetic, or comprehensive, intellectual was a concern among intellectuals across national lines. While Dürckheim voiced caution against the tendency to think of Europeans as purely “rational,” he shared with intellectuals in Japan the view that scientific rationalization and specialization had detrimental effects on civilization. Minoda praised Dürckheim’s suggestion of the synthesis of poet and soldier, as it neatly fit the intellectual trajectory of the Genri Nippon



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Society from its origins as a poetry society of the Shikishima Way to its concerns about national security. Indeed, the idea that the perfect embodiment of Japaneseness was found in the person of the Meiji emperor, who was both the supreme commander in the victorious Russo-Japanese War and a master poet, served as the foundation of the Genri Nippon Society’s Japanism. Dürckheim was not the only Nazi figure whom Minoda looked to in developing his own image of the ideal leader in total war. The members of the Genri Nippon Society had a long-standing respect for the political accomplishments of Hitler and Mussolini, praising what they perceived as their ability to resurrect the folk consciousness of their people en route to building formidable national powers in Europe. If conceived of as the successful merging of state power and ethnic ideology, one could say that the Genri Nippon Society was quite sympathetic to the so-called fascist European powers. At the same time, it bears noting that the pages of Genri Nippon also featured celebrations of the nation-unifying deeds of figures as diverse as Abraham Lincoln and Mahatma Gandhi, praising them as true patriots contributing to ethnic awakening in their respective countries as well. In fact, Minoda often referred to Jesus as representing an early form of Israeli nationalism, which he called “Genri Isuraeru.”55 Still, since the two leaders of the magazine, Minoda and Mitsui Kōshi, had backgrounds in the study of German literature and philosophy, Genri Nippon had most prominently featured translations and discussions of German works since its earliest issues in 1925. Their interests in figures such as Goethe, Fichte, and Wundt made them especially receptive to the literary and political criticism produced in Germany at the time. Of course, it was no accident that Minoda thought to take up examples from Nazi Germany in developing his ideas.56 If 1938 marked a height in the discussion of intellectual leadership in Japan in the aftermath of the 2.26 Incident and the outbreak of the war with China, it also marked a moment in which Nazi culture and rhetoric achieved a new level of visibility in Japan. That year, the publishing house Chūō Kōron released a translation of the German best seller The Myth of the Twentieth Century by Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg, to which Minoda offered a positive review in Genri Nippon, highlighting its similarities to the Genri Nippon Society’s elevation of nationalism to faith.57 This coincided with the media circus surrounding the tour of Japan by the Hitler Youth in August of that same year. While the Nazi Party had garnered the attention of journalists and scholars in Japan from its very inception, especially in terms of its political economic policies, curiosity had now expanded to also include the cultural aspects of Nazi rule. Indeed, the very engineers that Minoda

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criticized also looked to Nazi Germany for both technological and ideological inspiration as well.58 For Minoda the ideal leader (shidōsha) resembled a Hitler-like charismatic. This was perhaps because the word Führer had often been translated as shidōsha, as in the case of Hitler’s famous slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!” (One folk, one state, one leader!), which Minoda took to be one of the central principles of Nazi ideology. As we saw earlier, Minoda considered the one-party state to be opposed to the ideal of direct rule by the emperor and, as we will see later, counter to the cosmopolitan ideals of true Japanism.59 Still, Minoda was attracted to Nazi intellectuals who expressed ideas concerning a new type of human who combined the rational and emotional elements of human capacity with the cultural literacy of the humanist intellectual. It is worth noting that Minoda also held deep reservations about some aspects of Nazi ideology, particularly its rhetoric of racial superiority and its often-demeaning discussion of the Japanese race. Though Minoda praised the Nazi conception of folk, he was also critical of what he considered to be misconceptions that Germans held in their view of the Japanese. In a number of essays, he notes that he contacted the German Embassy in Japan, requesting that it consider revising the works of Hitler and Rosenberg to reflect the truth of Japanese culture.60 Minoda was particularly critical of Hitler’s views on the superiority of the Aryan race, as described in Mein Kampf. Minoda grants that Hitler likely knew little about Japan when he was writing in 1925, but he is especially critical of Hitler’s essentialist views on the relation between race and culture, arguing that cultural development occurs as a result of exchange. Aryan culture, Minoda argued, benefited from contact with Egypt and Greece. Though Minoda was certain that Hitler’s views on Japanese culture had likely changed since he had written Mein Kampf, he was alarmed by the fact that its global best seller status continued without its racial views revised.61 CULTURE AS INTELLECTUAL HISTORY: PHILOSOPHIZING “JAPAN” Intellectuals of the late 1930s developed a theory of political leadership that privileged the virtues of intellectual culture as a crucial component of developing the future direction of the nation and the Japanese Empire. Naturally, their understanding of the historical development of the modern Japanese intellectual also played a substantial role in theorizing the cultural trajectory of the developing imperial order in East Asia, which many viewed as the necessary foundations of the imperialist project.



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These intellectuals drew on the popular notion that the uniqueness of Japanese culture lies in its purported ability to incorporate elements of foreign cultures most crucial for its own development without losing its essential identity. Here, the Pan-Asian ideologues imagined the expansion of the Japanese Empire to be an inherently cosmopolitan project that paralleled what they believed was the “inclusive” legacy of Japanese culture itself, assimilating various cultures into its imperial project without damaging their respective essence. This tendency to think of the imperial project from the perspective of the cosmopolitan narrative of Japanese culture had reasons beyond the mere desire on the part of intellectuals to make a case for the relevance of their work to the “contemporary situation,” or jikyoku, a word that came into increased prominence in print media following the outbreak of the war with China. The issue of anti-imperialist nationalism in Asia had been a pressing issue from the earliest stages of Japanese expansion into the Korean peninsula and China.62 Seen in this light, the vagueness of Miki’s theory of leadership in his Showa Research Association writings owed more to the fluid state of political institutions in the Japanese Empire than a lack of theoretical precision on his part. The challenge of his project was the goal of imagining a political framework that would be inclusive of non-Japanese populations in a way that replaced the anti-imperialist threat of nationalism with the “cooperativism” that literally called for cooperation with the empire in building a regional political economic bloc. The imperialist project also posed challenges to Japanist attempts to establish ideological hegemony.63 The state-sponsored efforts to articulate the orthodox interpretation of the Japanese political system that came in the wake of the Movement to Clarify the Kokutai also came under fire for their failure to account for the problem of anti-imperialist nationalism. Critics charged that official ideological tracts, such as the infamous Essence of the National Polity of 1937 proclaiming the superiority of the Japanese cultural tradition, were impractical in light of Japan’s ostensible duty to unify East Asia under a new regional order.64 In the age of empire, a merely insular Japanism was obsolete because its exclusive language was in contradiction to the rhetoric of Pan-Asianism that permeated the Japanese government’s efforts to project an image of an equal partnership in the building of a new East Asia. Indeed, Japanese propaganda of the time tended to focus more on the glorious future of the Japanese Empire rather than Japanist ideals such as loyalty to the emperor.65 While some Japanists attempted to build a more cosmopolitan vision of Japan’s East Asian policy in the late 1930s, this did not necessarily signal a radical change in their views concerning the cultural superiority of

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the Japanese. Yet, tempting as it may be to label Japanists as anti-Western xenophobes in the most banal sense, this was far from the case, and by this time there was already a rich tradition of interpreting Japanese culture as a synthetic product of a host of other traditions, including those in the West. Japanists such as Minoda and the Genri Nippon Society stood firmly in this tradition as well. Historians of Japan often trace the history of modern Japanese Pan-Asianist discourse to the writings of Okakura Kakuzō (1863–1913), who argued that traditions such as Buddhism and Confucianism from Asian regions traveled across the continent to Japan, where they were incorporated into what constitutes Japan today. Minoda, Mitsui, and the members of the Genri Nippon Society also operated under this interpretation of Japanese culture, putting forward the belief that what made Japanese culture Japanese was its unique ability to “absorb” (the word they often used was sesshu) crucial elements of foreign cultures and make them its own without losing its essential Japanese character. In this line of historical argument, the notion of culture carried much of the rhetorical weight. In the case of the Genri Nippon Society, culture is defined by intellectual tradition and literati practices. In fact, despite its almost repetitive approval of Wundtian folk psychology and its interest in the sociocultural aspects of the historical development of language, the official Genri Nippon Society view of Japanese cultural history, expounded briefly in its organizational charter, reads like a “great man” history of intellectual history. After describing the history of Japanese culture as a series of “victories” in which its essence held strong through countless encounters and exchanges with foreign cultures, the third article of the charter reads: As intellectual heroes and warriors of Japanese cultural history as understood above, we revere as ancestral nation-protecting demigods Prince Shōtoku, Hitomaro, Sanetomo, Shinran, the author of the Gukanshō, Sokō, Shōin, and of more recent times Inoue Kowashi and Masaoka Shiki. Further, we also revere Dōgen, Nichiren, Bashō, Norinaga, and Fukuzawa Yukichi, yet believe that these various intellectual spirits (shisō seishin) of our ancestors are all without exception contained in the poetry of his majesty the Meiji Emperor. We go forth and recite The Collected Poems of the Meiji Emperor. In addition, more recently Takayama Chogyū and Iwano Hōmei, as well as Ōsuga Otsuji and Ōtsu Yasushi were pioneering brethren who fought and perished in the name of “Japanism.” We remember them with somber hearts as we begin this work anew.66

The basic framework of cultural development presented here reflects the common proposition that Japanese cultural history consists of a series of encounters between a self-contained Japanese culture and foreign cultures



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that enrich Japanese culture without threatening its most basic identity as Japanese.67 In the version articulated by the Genri Nippon Society, literati and intellectuals play the important role of mediators in these cultural encounters. Culture here is conceived of as the various, often foreign, conceptual frameworks with which gifted individuals grappled en route to articulating their own intellectual intervention. Though some of the figures listed are medieval founders of religious sects that remain important in the modern era (Shinran, Dōgen, and Nichiren) and some are credited with major innovations in legal frameworks that structured the lives of populations to significant effect (Shōtoku, Inoue, Meiji), the tract does not elaborate the way in which “culture” is related to broader populations in Japan outside of the intelligentsia. More than anything, the figures are selected on the basis of the perceived merits of their intellectual interventions in constructing modern Japanism as exemplified by the more recent figures Takayama, Iwano, Ōsuga, and Ōtsu, who participated in the literati culture of the late Meiji to early Taisho era as editors, poets, and translators. For members of the Genri Nippon Society, the history of Japanese culture is best told as a history of significant intellectual interventions from the perspective of modern Japanism. Consistent with discourses of Japanese nationalism that focus on the so-called unique peculiarities of Japanese culture, in the Genri Nippon Society creed, this ability of the Japanese to essentially “change without changing” is held up as the principle factor in Japan’s successful rise to its status as a Great Power and is subsequently prescribed as the intellectual principle that will carry the culture of the world into its peaceful, cosmopolitan future. In comparison to that of the Genri Nippon Society, the picture of East Asia presented by the Showa Research Association presents itself as a more inclusive intercultural arrangement, explicitly arguing that all nationalities within the “East Asian Cooperative Body” ought to be respected and maintained. It repeatedly suggests that though Japan was presently in a leadership position on account of its early modernization, it was also simply another member of the Cooperative Body that would participate in the unification of East Asia and the creation of a new East Asian culture. Though given the actual circumstances of Japan’s imperial domination of East Asian populations, this could easily be dismissed as mere semantics, the relative modesty in the association’s description of Japan vis-a-vis the other East Asian nations stands in stark contrast to those presented by organizations like the Genri Nippon Society.68 The Showa Research Association tracts on the principles of the new East Asian order, widely believed to be written by Miki, also take on a more anthropological language, describing Eastern nations as possessing

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a Gemeinschaft culture that emphasizes ethical relations over the individualism of Western Gesellschaft culture. What is striking in the context of our discussion here is the resemblance between the changes Miki prescribes to East Asian people and that which he does to intellectuals. He envisions the new East Asian culture to be a synthesis (sōgō) of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft cultures; a culture standing at a higher level (kōji no bunka) than its predecessors. Here, too, the resulting East Asian Cooperative Body is figured to be based upon a “rational cooperativism” (gōritekina kyōdōshugi) that is not simply rational in the abstract sense, as seen in modern Gesellschaft in the West, but rather contains the “intuitive” aspects of the Gemeinschaft of the East. In fact, the new “rationalism” is figured to be a synthesis of traditional rationalism and antirationalism (hi-gōrishugi), an argument that recalls his theorization of the new technocrat discussed above.69 Miki is not explicit about how he envisioned the conceptual framework of East Asian cooperativism would be implemented, but the tracts argue that it had the potential of serving as a basis for a new system that surpassed the commercialism of the capitalist economy, as well as a foundation for a new regional culture that transcended ethnic differences. The Showa Research Association did not survive long enough to achieve Miki’s lofty goals. The association disbanded in November 1940 amid criticism that its “communist” members were attempting to create a Sovietstyle economic order and that its patron, Prince Konoe, was conspiring to create a modern bakufu akin to the early modern political system that ruled in place of the emperor.70 Minoda, as we have seen, was among the many who criticized Konoe and the Showa Research Association from this perspective. One of the most obvious, if not effective, rhetorical strategies taken by Minoda was to label the political economic planning of the government and its bureaucracies as “the ghosts of Marxism” (Marukishizumu no bōrei). To this end, he became a stalwart for free trade capitalism, joining forces with Yamamoto Katsuichi, a staunch critic of the planned economy and a researcher at the Institute for the Research of National Spirit Culture (Kokumin Seishin Bunka Kenkyūjo), a branch of the Ministry of Education.71 Japanist activists like Minoda also argued that the New Order movement of the Konoe administration was unconstitutional, arguing that it shifted powers away from the emperor and into the hands of the bakufu-like organizational structure. Fellow members of the Showa Research Association recall that Miki was resistant to the decision to disband to the end, hoping to continue the reorganization of intellectuals and East Asia according to the philosophical principles that he developed.72 Though Miki would soon be sent to the Philippines to serve in the army, his attempt to theorize a new human



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type and regional order would have a lasting effect on the intellectual culture of wartime Japan. Studies of Showa intellectual history generally agree that Miki’s interpretation of the world historical significance of the “China Incident” and his theorization of a new East Asian culture influenced later attempts to theorize the “overcoming of modernity” in the 1940s.73 THE PERSISTENCE OF INTELLECTUAL CULTURE In his various treatments of the state’s mobilization policies, Minoda lambasted what he viewed as an incomplete approach to total warfare in typical ruthless fashion. Like many of his contemporaries steeped in the intellectual culture of the 1910s and 1920s, Minoda’s criticism foregrounded the perceived lack of the humanistic values of “spiritual” sensibilities on the part of the technocratic planners, calling for a more holistic, synthetic approach to ensure that the populace would be mobilized from the very core of their beings. While Minoda’s critique fell neatly into a pattern of critiques launched by participants of intellectual culture of all political stripes, this did not necessarily indicate an opposition between a more traditional group of intellectuals trained in the humanities versus a newly emerging group of specialist technicians active in the bureaucratic capillaries where the state encountered its populations. Though to be sure, there was a strong sense among the intelligentsia that the political influence of “thought” was on the wane, the prestige of intellectual culture still carried a significant amount of currency even among the so-called reform bureaucrats. The fact that the arguments of Minoda and Miki were well received by some of the leaders of these planners is an indication of this persistence of intellectual prestige. The October 1941 issue of Genri Nippon listed several of the more favorable reviews that Minoda received for two of the books he published that year, The Philosophy of National Security and the Restoration of Scholarship. The four reviewers listed were quite impressive: legendary journalist and critic Tokutomi Sohō; head of the General Affairs Bureau of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association Kumagai Ken’ichi; and two lieutenant generals, Suzuki Tei’ichi and Iimura Jō. Most notable of the four, perhaps, is Suzuki Tei’ichi, who was director of the Cabinet Planning Board (Kikakuin). A serious student of the methods of national defense and the theories of total war, Suzuki was well read on the topic. As the director of a bureaucratic organization dealing with issues related to interest groups including capitalists, the military, politicians, and others, Suzuki was quite a politician, and there was likely some political interest behind Suzuki’s praise of Minoda since he had by now cultivated a reputation for stirring up negative press.

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At the same time, Suzuki believed that the development of exemplary human beings through education was one of the two chief pillars, along with the maintenance of health standards, of a successful model of national defense.74 In his recommendation, Suzuki notes that the strength of Minoda’s Philosophy of National Defense lies in its attempt to incorporate political, economic, and cultural issues into a comprehensive national policy (sōgō kokusaku).75 Another notable recommendation came from the head of the Research Institute for Total War, General Iimura Jō. Iimura, also a student of theories of total war, famously conducted a detailed simulation of a war against the United States and concluded that Japan would most assuredly lose. Like Suzuki, Iimura expressed interest in Minoda’s framing of total war as a war of ideology and worldview, noting that this was an area in which he was now deeply interested as well. Iimura’s review of Minoda’s work appeared in Genri Nippon a couple of months following the simulation conducted in the summer of 1941, and it is not hard to imagine that he was already attempting to find ways to most efficiently use the various resources they were lacking compared to rival empires. Interestingly, both generals expressed sympathy to the idea that the spiritual development along the lines prescribed by Minoda was desirable, if not necessary, in the planning of a system of total war capable of taking on the United States.76 This perceived need for an intellectual principle of mobilization was not unlike what moved the members of the Showa Research Association to invite Miki Kiyoshi to join the association and head the Cultural Bureau after reading his call for a new philosophical principle that would bring people across national differences to embrace a new East Asian order. In that instance, too, specialists of economics and management reached out to a spokesman of intellectual culture, perceiving their input as a necessary component of national and regional unity and mobilization. This fact is perhaps predictable, given that many of the members of the Showa Research Association were products of the Imperial University System in a generation in which the intellectual and literati culture was especially highly regarded among its students. More research on the student culture of the military universities is needed in order to better grasp how the celebration of intellectual culture then enjoyed in the Imperial Universities was experienced across town at the Army War College in Aoyama. In the meantime, however, we can at least note that much like students in the humanities and social sciences in the Imperial Universities who studied abroad in Europe, placing their intellectual output in the context of international discourses of philosophy, poetry, and politics, the most promising of young military officers, too, were sent abroad



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to study the best of organizational and combat techniques, becoming a crucial component of the international discourse on total warfare. The exchanges between the likes of Minoda, Suzuki, Iimura, Miki, and the members of the Showa Research Association suggest a greater overlap between the discourses of more abstract topics such as philosophy and literature with the seemingly more concrete issues of mobilization and the tactics of warfare. THE DEMISE OF JAPANISM The difference in their approaches notwithstanding, the projects of intellectual leadership of Miki and Minoda both ended in failure. Miki’s intervention into government policies of ideology effectively ended with the dissolution of the Showa Research Association. After a short stint abroad in the military, Miki was arrested in 1945 for allegedly aiding a communist. He remained in prison for over a month after the war ended, ultimately dying from an illness contracted due to poor sanitary conditions. Today his legacy is a mixed one; some praise him as one of the greatest intellectuals of his generation, while others deem him a collaborator to Japanese imperialism. Minoda, too, became marginalized soon after the events discussed in this chapter. The pages devoted to his career in the annals of Ryūhoku Village, his hometown in Kumamoto, note that on September 13, 1941, two months after the publication of Philosophy of National Defense, the leadership of the Genri Nippon Society had a meeting in which Minoda appeared to be notably anxious.77 Soon after he grew ill, and half of his face reportedly became inflamed. His production rapidly declined as he apparently suffered from depression. The censorship and suppression of right-wing thought and political movements intensified once Japan began its war with the Allies. Within two weeks of the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the Tōjō administration enacted the Temporary Regulations of Speech, Publications, Assembly, and Association Law. Two months later on February 24, 1942, the Special Wartime Criminal Law was passed, the second article of which stipulated that all political organizations required permission from the government, including those that already were in place.78 Meanwhile, Minoda was apparently worried that he and his allies would become targets of censorship. Fukumoto Ryūichi, who served in the Information Bureau, reports that Minoda would visit his office from time to time to explain the essays of his allies, hoping to avoid censorship.79 Fukumoto adds that Minoda never asked others to be censored during these visits, a notable

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change from his years in the 1930s as the most feared polemicist of his era. Already in July 1941, Genri Nippon became subject to the rationalization of the publishing industry under the government’s mobilization policies. Paper rationing severely limited the society’s ability to publish during the Pacific War, and the total pages of Genri Nippon in 1943 were under half of those during its height in 1936.80 As if to announce that it was withdrawing from political engagement, the February 1943 issue of Genri Nippon published a new mission statement explicitly calling the Genri Nippon Society a research organization, much like it was in its early years prior to receiving a permit under the Newspaper Law in 1928.81 Minoda’s worries were not unfounded. That month in February 1943, several of his allies in the right-wing student organization at Tokyo Imperial University, the Japan Student Association, were rounded up by the military police and incarcerated for over three months.82 Since Minoda had begun his campaign against the Imperial University professors, Japanist student organizations had formed at various universities, and the Tokyo Imperial University chapter was especially active. Though they were only loosely affiliated with the Genri Nippon Society, Minoda and Mitsui were mentors to these students, often attending their events as invited lecturers or referring to their work in Genri Nippon. Like Minoda, they had grown increasingly skeptical of the state’s mobilization efforts, and their criticism of the Tōjō administration as the most recent manifestation of the bakufu had pushed the authorities’ patience to the limit. Odamura Torajirō, one of the leaders of the student organization, recalls that Minoda came to meet them upon their release from custody and remarked: A Japan in which you all are arrested will certainly lose. I was mistaken. I’m not at all saying that it was wrong that we took down the scholars at Tokyo Imperial University. That was in every sense the right thing to do. But the fact that we did not correct the soldiers and bureaucrats who were supposed to control such incorrect thought, in other words those who possess power at the root, was a lack in judgment and a tactical error on my part. In the end, what I accomplished only went half-way, and this had a negative effect. I’m sorry.83

Though Minoda expressed regret to Odamura, the error he perceived was in his selection of the appropriate target for moral rectification, not his basic premises on the relation between ideas and politics. In the end he never relinquished the belief that if only the right people had the right ideas, a nationalist utopia led by enlightened leaders would be possible. Minoda stopped writing later that year, and Genri Nippon ceased publication



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in January 1944. Once Tokyo became subject to bombing by the United States, Minoda fled to Kumamoto, where he suffered from beriberi, which severely limited his mobility.84 We cannot be sure how much Miki actually believed that his development of the principles of leadership through the Showa Research Association would help make Japan’s empire one truly devoted to the equal prosperity of its subjects. It would be foolish to think that all public intellectuals shared this approach, for there were certainly those who explicitly contested this kind of privileging of the traditional intellectual mold.85 Nevertheless, such a perspective is instructive for our understanding of early Showa intellectual history for several reasons. First, it allows us to evaluate the activities of wartime intellectuals through a framework other than the traditional political factionalism. The frameworks of “right wing” versus “left wing” and “resisters” versus “collaborators” in many ways dominated the postwar analysis of wartime intellectual culture. The weakness of these approaches is that they tended to treat political categories such as “right” and “left” as self-evident markers, masking some of the common trends that underlie the political positions often presented as polar opposites of one another and their relation to the power of the state. By focusing on issues of leadership/mobilization and culture/empire, I have sought to reveal themes in intellectual culture that cut across factions often considered to hold nothing in common. Regardless of how we categorize these thinkers today, many were interested in exploring the nature and contours of political participation as well as the issue of what might be called the “utility” of the humanities. The idea of pursuing a new intellectual spirit that unified the rational spirit of modern scientific thought and the sensibilities and impulses of the poet and transplanting these characteristics to leaders and populations through education was attractive not only to those trained and nurtured in the intellectual culture of the greater Taisho era but also to the so-called technocrats and bureaucrats who were perceived by many to be the antithesis of such “synthetic” or “comprehensive” ideals. But while the relation between intellectual production and its receivers became increasingly framed by the state, as its efforts to mobilize all available resources expanded throughout the war years, as the Teikoku Daigaku shinbun roundtable indicates, debates over the political function of the intellectual were shaped by a vast array of forces, including the commercial concerns of publishers, the increasingly diversifying taste of consumers of intellectual production, the perceived threat of specialized “technocratic” thinking, and the state-sponsored wane of Marxist and other “subversive” thought,

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not to mention the accumulation of past and contemporary intellectual production both domestic and international. That in the midst of all these issues intellectuals of diverse political backgrounds chose to pursue the unification of the populace through the power of new political ideas attests to their enduring faith in ideology as a viable tool in unifying and mobilizing a population.

Epilogue

As if to punctuate the end of an era, Minoda Muneki took his own life on January 30, 1946. He retreated to Yatsushiro in his home prefecture of Kumamoto in mid-1944 to avoid the air raids on Tokyo. Having ceased contributing articles to Genri Nippon over a year earlier, he left editorial duties to his younger protégés Takiguchi Takashi, Abe Ryūichi, and Saitō Ryūji.1 Occasional updates in the back pages of Genri Nippon indicated that Minoda had grown ill. By the final years of the war, he had become increasingly depressed, withdrawing not only physically, but mentally as well. It is difficult to say with any certainty why any individual decides to take his or her own life, and the same holds true for a public and notorious figure like Minoda. But his decision to die, which prompted one individual who often found himself on the receiving end of Minoda’s venomous writings to confirm that “he was the real thing,” provides us with an opportunity to ponder the intensity of that immediate postwar moment—a moment often remembered as a transition from one era to another.2 Important in the context of the present study, the end of the war is often associated with the end of a particular form of Japanism that characterized Japan’s age of imperial expansion. As if to confirm such a view, the accounts we have of Minoda’s final days tell us that he was troubled by the transition he perceived to be underway; one imbued with the very “communist” characteristics that he sought to combat throughout his career.3 Given this, we might say that Minoda sought to synchronize his own demise with the end of a certain set of possible futures that came as the result of the surrender, for this end was at once the beginning of a 155

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new trajectory toward something else, something he found to be contrary to what it meant to be Japanese. But if Minoda’s death seemed to mark an end of sorts, we are left to answer the question: The end of what? Minoda’s death was not reported by the Asahi Newspaper until February 20, but a survey of the page carrying his obituary reveals how much life in Japan had changed since the surrender. Perhaps most striking is a photo of Hirohito himself in a simple business suit, peering into one of the temporary housing units in Yokohama and speaking to a commoner who is on her knees, head lowered. The article follows the emperor as he speaks to individual survivors in what the reporter calls a “feminine manner,” inquiring about their war experience and their specific losses. Such a characterization of Hirohito would have been unthinkable several months prior.4 Elsewhere on the page are job advertisements seeking able-bodied individuals to provide forms of labor that the circumstances of the immediate postwar period required. At the lower-right corner of the page is an advertisement placed by the Occupation forces seeking translators, typists, telephone operators, and automobile drivers for immediate employment. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department sought candidates for police officers, perhaps in reaction to the new uncertainties that included American troops on the ground and a rapidly growing black-market economy in the wake of urban destruction, or perhaps in anticipation of purges in units such as the Special Higher Police. Also mixed among the employment advertisements are notices of supplementary payment for former union members of local armories, giving readers an acute reminder of the ongoing project of liquefying the remaining assets of the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy, the pride of the country only a few months before, and the resulting effects on the lives of workers. Indeed, much had changed since Minoda, in the words of his obituary, “led the Imperial Organ Theory Incident.” Of particular relevance to the history of Japanist intellectuals were the purges conducted by the General Headquarters of the Allied Forces (GHQ) that barred individuals belonging to organizations that had collaborated in the war effort from holding positions in public service and other occupations stipulated by the edict. The immediate postwar period marked the end to the predominance of Japanist rhetoric as the orthodox political language and a shift to an age in which words such as “democracy” carried a renewed legitimacy. But as we have seen, particularly in the later chapters of this book, the relation between the end of Japanist organizations and the end of the war is a rather murky one. At least in the case of the Genri Nippon Society, we

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know that the dissolution of the organization and its magazine had more to do with state censorship, strict paper rationing, and the failing health of its leader Minoda Muneki than the defeat of the Japanese Empire. Thus, if we are to consider the surrender of imperial Japan and the subsequent Allied Occupation of Japan as a transitionary period for Japanist discourse, we must be careful in how we link this situation to the dismantling of the empire and its institutional apparatus. Proclaiming the “return” of militarist Japan or a “rightward” shift in Japan following the all-toofrequent gaffes by Japanese politicians has become a cottage industry of sorts among Japan watchers in the international media. No doubt, journalists and academics alike must be vigilant in analyzing and detecting the types of inequality and participation in war that animated the history of imperial Japan and have continued in new forms in the postwar era. The analysis of Japanism and the politics of nationalism provided in this book demonstrate how the content of nationalist ideologies realized their destructive potential when it aligned with efforts to mobilize populations and their resources while silencing critics of these policies. Unique among the generally predictable takes on the legacy of Minoda and the Genri Nippon Society written during the Cold War is Genri Nippon (1970), written by dramatist Hisaita Eijirō. The play tells the story of Saruta, an academic and nationalist critic modeled after Minoda. Saruta’s personal project of criticizing Imperial University professors Takigawa Yukitoki and Minobe Tatsukichi (whose names are unchanged in the script) is presented in its complex relationship to parliamentary and military politics and the publishing world, as well as other conceptions of Japaneseness. Though the picture we get here is explicitly fictional, this approach forces the audience to confront Saruta/Minoda as more than a stand-in for an unknowable “fanatic,” as is often the case in works of intellectual history, and account for the meaning of his life and work as existing within professional, personal, and political contexts. This presentation of the Genri Nippon Society prepares the occasion for an engagement with the issues that the legacy of the organization raises to us, and this is nowhere more productive than the final scene of the play. Like Minoda, Saruta places the noose around his neck, but the rope inexplicably breaks, and Saruta survives the suicide attempt. In a matter of seconds, Saruta grabs his unpublished monograph and scampers offstage. One critic has suggested that Hisaita kept Saruta alive at the end of the play in order to make the point that even after Minoda’s death and the end of the war, right-wing ideologues still remain.5 In the immediate context of the production of the play, perhaps this reading makes a certain amount of sense. Yet a broader reading is possible as well, which is to say,

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by leaving the postwar life of Saruta ambiguous (the script ends immediately after the failed suicide scene), Hisaita provides space to reconsider the “break” between the war and the postwar and between the era of Japanism and the democracy that ostensibly followed. In suggesting that Saruta/Minoda may have survived the end of the war, continuing to live among other survivors, the play urges its audience to reconsider what unsavory aspects of the prewar era survived, even if they remain hidden from view. ••• In Arbiters of Patriotism, I have attempted to bring to the study of wartime intellectual history the thought and activism of the “right wing”—that is, the work of intellectuals often disowned by historians as unworthy of serious study. My reasons for this were twofold. The first was to scrutinize the reputation of Minoda and Japanism as fanatical and to reconcile it with the fact that Minoda and Mitsui were products of the elite academic institutions they attacked and labeled fanatics. I sought to uncover the shared intellectual assumptions that underlay the clashes between the Genri Nippon Society and its targets. Second, I found it necessary to untangle the relationship between the so-called right wing and the power of the state to provide a clearer view of important elements in the politics of imperial Japan that are often conflated. Though the Japanese government shared with many Japanists the use of various slogans imbued with nationalist language as well as a general patriotic disposition toward the war effort, many Japanists viewed the government with suspicion, just as the government agencies took nationalistic activists to be a potential threat. One of my chief aims in this book was to detail the dynamic between Japanist ideologies and government policies, as politicians and bureaucrats sought to harness the rhetoric of patriotism. Addressing these issues also meant addressing the history of the left/ right political spectrum. The history of the Genri Nippon Society was concurrent with the birth and development of the Japanese Right. This of course does not mean that Japanese nationalists sought to import the political spectrum itself and mimic the nationalist positions articulated elsewhere. Rather, as popular politics gained force in the Taisho era, patriotism emerged as a useful rhetorical tool through which one could articulate criticism of the Japanese state while remaining ideologically distinct from socialism. Later, “right wing” became a means for police agencies to mark nationalist individuals as thought criminals while remaining ambiguous

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about the nature of correct nationalist ideology. In this book, I have attempted to approach the category of right wing as one determined by its own historical context of deployment and not as a transhistorical category with the ability to account for all the myriad examples of political engagement it has been used to describe across time and geography. This historical approach to the right wing has, I think, allowed me to probe the underlying issues shared by the so-called Left and Right in the early Showa era, as well as problematize the relationship between the right wing and the state. From our vantage point in the early twenty-first century, it is clear that we have not seen the end of xenophobic nationalism and the manipulation of patriotic discourse for political ends. If the case of Minoda and the Genri Nippon Society is any indication, accounting for the genesis of these trends and the destruction they cause will require a sober approach to the so-called fanatics of history.

Notes

Introduction  1. Nishida Kitarō, Nishida Kitarō zenshū (Collected works of Nishida Kitarō), vol. 19 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1966), p. 30.  2. Hosokawa Ryūgen, “‘Nihon Makkāshii’ shimatsuki,” Bungei Shunjū 32, no. 9 (1954): 14–29.  3. Hashikawa Bunsō, “Showa shisō,” in Showa nashonarizumu no shosō (Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku shuppan, 1994), p. 237. Cited in Uemura Kazuhide, “Minoda Muneki no Nishida Kitarō hihan: Ronriteki kaiseki 1,” Sandai Hōgaku 39 (March 2006): 33–48.  4. Minoda Muneki zenshū (Collected works of Minoda Muneki), 7 vols. (Tokyo: Kashiwa shobō, 2004), 2:564–565. The background and fate of this infamous tract will be considered in more detail in chapter 4.   5.  Consider, for example, Minamoto Ryōen, “The Symposium on ‘Overcoming Modernity,’” in Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, ed. James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994). Minamoto attempts to situate the members of the Kyoto School as a middle road between Marxism and the right-wing nationalism of intellectuals like Minoda. Minamoto comments that he once picked up Minoda’s Gakujutsu ishin but could not “make heads or tails of it” (p. 202). The other intellectuals that he situates to the “right” of Nishida, Saitō Tadashi, Saitō Shō, Toyokawa Noboru, and Satō Tsuji, and so on, he admits that he has not actually read. Andrew Barshay examines the writings of Minoda a little more closely in State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), but the discussion on Minoda is situated within the work in a way that relativizes the nationalism of his own subject of inquiry, Nanbara Shigeru, and to some extent Hasegawa Nyozekan, both of whom were also targeted by Minoda.   6.  Many of the more journalistic writings on Minoda in opinion journals written after Minoda’s death are quite slanderous. Among the many unhelpful studies on Minoda, an exception is Funayama Shin’ichi’s comparative study on Minoda and other Japanist intellectuals of the wartime era. Among English-language scholarship, F. Curtis Miles’ 1989 dissertation, “Traditionalist Responses to Modernization in Japan: The Case of Minoda Muneki (1894–1946) in Showa,” is also a serious take on Minoda that builds off of Funayama’s study.

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Notes to Pages 3–9

  7.  The obvious breakthrough in this process was the publication of the Collected Works of Minoda Muneki (Minoda Muneki zenshū) in 2004. The edition was edited by a group of established scholars in the fields of intellectual and media history and published by Kashiwa shobō, an academic press known for its publication of critical studies on nationalism and fascism, as well as translations of works on fascism and nationalism by authors such as George Mosse, Robert Paxton, Kevin Doak, and Frank-Lothar Kroll. In fact, one of the editors mentioned to me that the group took pains not to be seen as being right wing themselves, as there was still a “taboo” of sorts in studying the Right at major universities. The Collected Works was published in tandem with an anthology of critical essays on the Genri Nippon Society and its allies, titled Nihonshugiteki kyōyō no jidai: Daigaku hihan no kosō. There were several notable scholarly works immediately prior to these developments, including essays by intellectual historian Katayama Morihide and scholar of religion Ishii Kōsei, as well as a doctoral dissertation by Shiode Tamaki.   8.  Alberto Toscano’s book Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea explores this issue by surveying political movements and ideas, often revolutionary in nature, that were labeled as fanatical in the Western philosophical and religious tradition. Though the “fanatics” that appear in Toscano’s study differ from mine in terms of their relation to political power and legacy, Fanaticism is instructive in its exploration of the ideological character of this label, as well as the role concepts such as fanaticism, enthusiasm, and emotion played in the history of Western philosophy.   9.  The progressives sat on the left side of the assembly, while the conservatives sat to the right, a split that occurred over the issues of granting the king veto power over the assembly and whether to have one or two chambers of parliament. Asaba Michiaki, Uyoku to sayoku (Tokyo: Gentōsha, 2006), p. 53. 10.  Dick Pels has approached the problem in a similar manner, bending the political spectrum in the shape of a horseshoe and thus creating a more two-dimensional plot chart. Pels’ work deals with Western European intellectuals, including Hendrik de Man, whose historical analysis of nationalism Minoda drew from extensively. Minoda’s work on de Man will be examined in greater detail in chapter 3. 11.  Ibid., p. 154. 12.  The “fascist minimum” was proposed by Ernst Nolte. Stanley G. Payne describes Nolte’s minimum as a “set of negatives, a central organizational feature, a doctrine of leadership, and a basic structural goal, expressed as follows: anti-Marxism, antiliberalism, anticonservatism, the leadership principle, a party army, and the aim of totalitarianism.” Payne, who produces a list of his own, provides a concise overview of these debates in the introduction to his A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). The quote above is taken from page 5 of that volume. 13. Payne, History of Fascism, pp. 328–337. Robert O. Paxton attempts to move away from list building, choosing instead to see “fascism in action,” though he ultimately concludes in similar manner that imperial Japan is “better understood as an expansionist military dictatorship with a high degree of state-sponsored mobilization than as a fascist regime.” See Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), pp. 20–23, 197–200. 14.  For a discussion on the issue of authoritarianism, see, for example, the introductory essay by Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Kevin Passmore’s brief treatment in Fascism: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 11–16; and Harry Harootunian, “The Future of Fascism,” Radical Philosophy 136 (March/April 2006): 23–33. 15.  Tosaka Jun, “The Fate of Japanism: From Fascism to Emperorism,” trans. John Person, in Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader, ed. Ken C. Kawashima, Fabian Schäfer, and Robert Stolz, pp. 59–68 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell East Asia Program, 2014).



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16.  See, for example, Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Grassroots Fascism: The War Experience of the Japanese People, trans. Ethan Mark (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), especially chapter 2, which explores a wealth of personal accounts to describe the many ways in which people responded to imperial Japan’s wars and mobilization policies. 17.  Harry Harootunian has been at the forefront of this revival of Tosaka. Harootunian has written extensively on Tosaka in many places, most notably in his analysis of interwar Japan in Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), where he builds upon Tosaka’s analysis in studying the effects of capitalist modernity in interwar Japanese society and the varieties of responses by intellectuals. Since then, Ken Kawashima, Fabian Schafer, and Robert Stolz produced an anthology of critical essays and translations—see Tosaka Jun, Tosaka Jun. 18.  Here I cite the study of right-wing thought crimes prepared by the Ministry of Justice in 1939. Uyoku shisō hanzai jiken no sōgōteki kenkyū: Ketsumeidan jiken yori Niniroku jiken (Kyoto: Shakai mondai shiryō kenkyūkai, 1975), p. 350. For a broader discussion of this issue, see chapter 4. 19.  I borrow this notion of moral individualism from Tetsuo Najita’s treatment of the broader history of restorationism in his Japan: The Intellectual Foundations of Modern Japanese Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 116. 20.  See, for example, Mark Neocleous, Fascism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

Chapter One: From Writing the Self to Reading the Nation   1.  See, for example, Yuki Miyamoto, Beyond the Mushroom Cloud: Commemoration, Religion, and Responsibility after Hiroshima (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2012). For a history of Yasukuni Shrine and its related issues, including the history of Yūshūkan, see Akiko Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending War (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015). Nathanial Michael Smith, “Right Wing Activism in Japan and the Politics of Futility” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2011) provides an exploration of the significance of the shrine for contemporary right-wing activists.   2.  The translations of the exhibit names and poetry displayed at the Yūshūkan museum are taken from the exhibits themselves.   3.  In the later stages of completing this book, I learned that the historian Nakajima Takeshi also begins his chapter on Mitsui with the waka that appears at the Yūshūkan museum. Given the fact that the museum is perhaps the only contemporary location where Mitsui’s legacy can be found, save for his hometown in Yamanashi Prefecture, this coincidence is not surprising. Nakajima’s book is a fascinating study of Japanist appropriations of the thought of Shinran, a figure who Nakajima himself has considerable personal investment in as a Buddhist. See Nakajima Takeshi, Shinran to Nihonshugi (Tokyo: Shinchō-sha, 2017).   4.  For example, Kageyama Masaharu recalls reciting this poem to himself in jail during his interrogation by the police following his failed attempt to enact a nationalist revolution in 1933 in the so-called Shimpeitai Incident. See his Hitotsu no senshi zōho gohan (Tokyo: Daitōjuku, 1975), p. 139. Kageyama became an accomplished poet in his own right, collaborating with members of the Japan Romantic School and leading the Fuji Poetry Society until his death by patriotic suicide in 1979.  5. Tanka, literally “short song,” refers to a genre of Japanese poetry that is short in length. The Negishi Tanka Society was so named because its founder, Masaoka Shiki, lived in the Negishi neighborhood. Akane, the title of the journal edited by Mitsui, refers to a species of the plant rubia (also known as madder), a flowering herb whose roots are used for producing red dyes.

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  6.  One might wonder why the young, virulent Mitsui was entrusted with the reins of Akane in the first place. Shiode Tamaki, who has written extensively on the subject, concludes that it was likely a combination of respect for his literary accomplishments and the financial difficulties of Akane’s predecessor Ashibi. Mitsui had already published his own collection of poems, and his knowledge of the Manyoshu was highly respected among his peers. See Shiode Tamaki, “Genri Nipponsha no kenkyū: Kajin Mitsui Kōshi to Minoda Muneki” (PhD diss., Kobe University, 2003). Itō Sachio, the founding editor of Ashibi, praised Mitsui’s grasp of “taste” in constructing his poems, going so far as to say that he was “our only successor” who could be entrusted with carrying out the vision of the Negishi Tanka Society. See Fujioka Takeo, Saitō Mokichi to sono shūhen (Tokyo: Shimizu kōbundō), pp. 72–73.  7. Janine Beichman, Masaoka Shiki (Boston: Twayne, 1982), p. 79.  8. See Beichman, Masaoka Shiki, p. 27, and William Sibley, “Naturalism in Japanese Literature,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 28 (1968): 157–169. Matsui Takako discusses the use of shasei and “sketch” in the lectures of Fontanesi and the writings of Shiki in much detail in her book Shasei no henyō: Fontaneji kara Shiki, soshite Naoya e (Tokyo: Meiji shoin, 2002). Takahama Kyoshi, a fellow poet who worked closely with Shiki, described Shiki’s notion of shasei as being similar to the idea of a “sketch,” an interpretation that Matsui sees as the possible source for why the two terms are often used interchangeably. Her study details how the terms were actually differentiated by both Shiki and Fontanesi, with “sketch” usually referring to a preliminary study of an object, while shasei refers to a more complete technique of representation.   9.  John M. Rosenfield, “Western-Style Painting in the Early Meiji Period and Its Critics,” in Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture, ed. Donald H. Shively (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 199–200. 10. Shiki was especially interested in Spencer’s “principle of economy applied to words,” which privileged brevity over length and detail. Herbert Spencer, The Philosophy of Style (New York: J. Fitzgerald, 1882), p. 590. 11.  Quoted in Matsui Takako, Shasei no henyō, p. 239. The quote is taken from “Meiji nijūkyūnen no haiku (4),” Shinbun Nihon, January 6, 1897, reprinted in Shiki zenshū 4, p. 506. 12.  Mitsui Kōshi, “Shika seisaku no shōdō to sono hyōgenhō o ronji genji kadan no byōheki o shiteki su,” Ashibi 3, no. 5 (July 1906): 81. 13.  Ibid., 84. 14.  Ibid., 88. 15.  Ibid., 89. 16.  See, for example, Frederick C. Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 128–130. 17.  On romanticism in Japanese literature, see Donald Keene, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984), pp. 22–29, 516–531. 18.  Details of the split are discussed in Shiode Tamaki, “Genri Nipponsha no kenkyū,” pp. 19–31. 19.  The reasons for Mitsui’s return to Yamanashi are not entirely clear, but it seems that Mitsui was under the impression that the reconciliation between Akane and Araragi was successful. In the end, however, Warabi Shin’ichirō, the financial backer of Araragi and the unofficial mediator between the two rivals, failed to convince Itō and Saitō Mokichi that they should reunite with Akane. Shiode notes that by the time Mitsui realized this, he was already in Yamanashi, and the difficulty of maintaining publication from such a location proved to be too much. Akane briefly returned to publication in 1910 before it was rebranded to Life and Representation (Jinsei to hyōgen) in 1912. Shiode points out that the first issue of Life and Representation is counted as vol. 4 no. 1, continuing where Akane left off. Many of the contributors of the Araragi faction are still remembered today as canonical figures in the



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history of Japanese literature. The list includes major figures such as Itō Sachio, Saitō Mokichi, and Nagatsuka Setsu. Though the standard genealogy of Negishi-style short-form poetry is usually understood as the line from Shiki to Sachio to Mokichi, the actual ownership of the name “Negishi Tanka Society” was not entirely clear during the first two decades of the twentieth century. When Akane was still in publication, Araragi was published under the name Hanioka Tanka Society, while Mitsui and his faction continued to use the Negishi name. Even after Akane temporarily withdrew from circulation, the factions still quibbled over the use of the name. 20.  See, for example, the work of Kiyozawa Manshi and Inoue Enryō, available in translation in Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, ed. James W. Heisig, Thomas P. Kasulis, and John C. Maraldo (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011), pp. 262–272, 619–630. For an overview of the role of Buddhism in modern Japanese thought, see Sueki Fumihiko, Kindai Nihon to Bukkyō (Tokyo: Transview, 2004). Mitsui’s linking of faith, literature, and Shinran in some ways anticipated the work of Kamei Katsuichirō of the Japan Romantic School during the Second World War. See Kevin M. Doak, Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 101–106. 21.  For a discussion of the various ways in which Shinran was discussed by Japanese intellectuals in the modern era, see Koyasu Nobukuni, Tannishō no kindai (Tokyo: Hakutakusha, 2014) and Nakajima Takeshi, Shinran to Nihonshugi, who discusses Shinranism’s intersections with Japanism. Not all enthusiasts of Shinran in the twentieth century were Japanists, however. Miki Kiyoshi, who is discussed in more detail in chapter 5, also visited the Center for Seeking the Way and consulted Shinran in developing a theory of history. See Viren Murthy, “Critical Theories of Modernity,” in A Companion to Global Historical Thought, ed. Prasenjit Duara, Viren Murthy, and Andrew Sartori, pp. 228–242 (Chichester, UK: WileyBlackwell, 2014), and Melissa Anne-Marie Curley, “The Subject of History in Miki Kiyoshi’s ‘Shinran,’” in Neglected Themes and Hidden Variations, ed. Victor Sōgen Hori and Melissa Anne-Marie Curley, pp. 78–93 (Nagoya: Nanzan, 2008). 22.  There has been a wealth of recent scholarship on Chikazumi Jōkan. See Iwata Fumiaki, Kindai Bukkyō to seinen (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2014) and Ōmi Toshihiro, Kindai Bukkyō no naka no Shinshū: Chikazumi Jōkan to kyūdōsha tachi (Kyoto: Hōzōkan, 2014). On the persecution of Buddhism and its response, see James E. Ketelaar, On Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). 23.  Earl H. Kinmonth links this hanmon seinen (anguished youth) phenomenon to the declining occupational prospects of students graduating from elite institutions during this time. See chapter 6 in The Self-Made Man in Meiji Japanese Thought: From Samurai to Salaryman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 24.  Nakajima Takeshi, Iwanami Shigeo: Riberaru nashonarisuto no shōzō (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2013), p. 43. 25. Iwata, Kindai Bukkyō to seinen, pp. v–vi. 26. Ibid. 27.  My discussion of the history of the Kyūdō Kaikan here owes much to what I learned from Chikazumi Jōkan’s grandson, Chikazumi Shin’ichi, who is a professional architect and leads a tour of the building once a month. 28.  The first issue of Kyūdō, printed in January 1904, notes that Mitsui contributed two yen to the fundraising campaign. First Higher School schoolmate Iwanami Shigeo is also listed among the contributors. Mitsui entered Tokyo Imperial University later that September, where Iwanami joined him a year later. 29.  As Ishii Kōsei has pointed out, members of the Genri Nippon Society had a broad interest in Buddhism, and though Mitsui tended to focus on the thought and legacy of Shinran, other members produced studies on figures such as Dōgen as well. See Ishii Kōsei, “Shinran o sangyō shita chōkokkashugisha tachi (1): Genri Nippon-sha no Mitsui Kōshi no

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bawai,” Komazawa Tanki Daigaku Bukkyō ronshū, no. 8 (October 2002): 45–70 and “Shinran o sangyō shita chōkokkashugisha tachi (2): Kimura Shigeyuki no Dōgen Shinran hikakuron,” Komazawa Tanki Daigaku kenkyū kiyō, no. 34 (March 2006): 27–48. 30.  Mitsui Kōshi, Shinran kenkyū (Tokyo: Tokyodō, 1943), p. 2. Matsumoto (1865–1943) studied under Wundt at Leipzig University before going on to Yale University and is regarded as one of the founders of the discipline of psychology in Japan. It is difficult to definitively say how much Mitsui owes to Matsumoto in his application of Wundtian theories to his study of Japanese poetry since most of Matsumoto’s published works on psychology and art were printed years after Mitsui had attended Tokyo Imperial University. Shominzoku no geijutsu, published in 1930, is a good example. Gendai no nihonga, published in 1915, was written closer to Mitsui’s time at Tokyo Imperial University, though still almost a decade later. 31.  Wundt called this the “heterogeny of ends.” See Wilhelm M. Wundt, Outlines of Psychology, trans. Charles Hubbard Judd, 3rd. ed. (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1907), pp. 230–231. 32.  Miki Kiyoshi, “Dokusho henreki,” in Miki Kiyoshi zenshū, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1966), p. 394. 33. For example, in the opening pages of An Inquiry into the Good, Nishida explores Wundt’s taxonomy of the sciences, which will be discussed in more detail in chapter 3. Nishida’s early work on “pure experience,” the central concept of exploration in An Inquiry into the Good, is more closely associated with William James, who Nishida more frequently cites. Yet Nishida’s project of describing human experience prior to subject/object dualism is similar to Mitsui’s pursuit of an “unmediated” representation of experience. See Nishida Kitarō, An Inquiry into the Good, trans. Masao Abe and Christopher Ives (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 4. 34.  Suzuki Sadami has produced many studies on Taisho vitalism. For a range of studies, see his edited volume Taisho seimeishugi to gendai (Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha, 1995). 35.  Mitsui features Wundt’s quote alongside a photo of his hero in the September 1913 issue of Life and Representation. The original German reads, “Darum Darstellung, nicht Abbildung des wirklichen Lebens ist die Aufgabe der Kunst” and can be found in Wilhelm Wundt, System der Philosophie (Leipzig: Verlag Von Wilhelm Engelmann, 1889), p. 664. The word hyōgen today is frequently translated as “expression,” while the word “representation” as it is used in literary and media studies is today translated as hyōshō. Still, I have chosen to translate hyōgen as “representation,” as Mitsui’s word choice is inspired by the German word Darstellung, a key concept in German philosophy often translated as “representation.” See Yaku Masao, “‘Jinsei to Hyōgen’ sōkan zengo,” Ajia Daigaku Kyōyōgakubu kiyō 6 (November 1971): 3. 36.  Mitsui Kōshi, “Jinsei to hyōgen,” Nihon oyobi nihonjin, November 1, 1910, p. 95. If Mitsui’s idea that he could contribute to the creation of a national language sounds strange today, in 1910 this may not have been so absurd. The genbun-icchi movement, which sought to vernacularize writing by streamlining spoken and written Japanese, was still fresh in memory, and Mitsui’s project of national language was deeply entrenched in this movement. 37. Keene, Dawn to the West, pp. 109–111. 38.  Ōsuga Otsuji, “Haikukai no shinkeikō,” Akane 1, no. 1 (1908): 57. 39.  Mitsui Kōshi, “Haiku no shinkachi,” Jinsei to hyōgen 4 no. 3 (1912): 99. 40.  Mitsui credits Ōsuga Otsuji for paving the way in investigating the role of human perception in the relation between words and external phenomena (i.e., objects in nature). 41.  Mitsui Kōshi, “Waka no shinriteki kenkyū,” Nihon oyobi nihonjin, April 1, 1913, p. 104. 42.  I have relied on the following studies in writing about the work of Wilhelm Wundt: Egbert Klautke, The Mind of the Nation: Völkerpsychologie in Germany, 1851–1955 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013); Robert W. Rieber, ed., Wilhelm Wundt and the Making of a Scientific Psychology (New York: Plenum Press, 1980); Martin Kusch, Psychological Knowledge: A Social



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History and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1999); and Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology; Outlines of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1916). See also my more extensive discussion of Wundtian psychology and its relation to Minoda’s criticism of Japanese Marxism in chapter 3. 43.  See, for example, Mitsui Kōshi, “Seishin kagaku no shōrai,” Nihon oyobi nihonjin, January, 1913, 77. 44.  Mitsui’s shift in focus from Wundt’s individual psychology to social psychology shares some common ground with Yanagita Kunio’s criticism of Tayama Katai’s Futon as described by Ōtsuka Eiji. According to Ōtsuka, Katai’s naturalist approach to the novel involved sketching not simply a landscape but the “I” who saw and felt the landscape. Thus, for Katai, naturalism was not a practice of an objective sketch but rather an attempt at a more thorough representation of the subject (tettei shita “shukan” no hyōshutsu). This approach resembles Wundt’s idea of the psychological method, and it is worth noting that Mitsui was quite sympathetic to Katai’s work, going so far as once proclaiming that he was one of the only novelists worth reading. See Mitsui Kōshi, “Jinsei to hyōgen,” Nihon oyobi nihonjin, March 1, 1910, p. 84. Ōtsuka’s note on Yanagita’s criticism is also quite illuminating. According to Ōtsuka, for Yanagita “landscape” was not simply a method for representing the subjective view but a way to “see ‘landscape’ as a product of customs (shūkan), and to record the history, the accumulation of customs, that lies behind it.” Though Mitsui would eventually foreground the perceived need for national unity in his analysis of literature and language, his theoretical shift toward the societal aspects of knowledge is quite similar to this critique. See Ōtsuka Eiji, Kaidan zengo: Yanagita Minzokugaku to Shizenshugi (Tokyo: Kadokawa gakugei shuppan). I was made aware of Ōtsuka’s discussion through reading Ohsawa Nobuaki, “Shishōsetsuteki rōdō to kumiai: Yanagita Kunio no datsu ‘hinkon’ ron,” Shisō chizu 2 (2008), which also discusses these issues. 45.  Komatsu Shigeo, Rekishi to tetsugaku tono taiwa: Dōjidai hihan no shiza o motomete (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1974), pp. 65–129. 46. Though kokusui hozon is sometimes translated as “preserving the national essence,” Shiga Shigetaka glossed kokusui as “nationality” in English in his essay featured in the inaugural issue of the Japanese. Shiga Shigetaka, “‘Nihonjin’ ga kaihō suru tokoro no shugi o kokuhaku su,” in Seikyōsha bungakushū, ed. Matsumoto Sannosuke (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1980); Kenneth Pyle, “Meiji Conservatism,” in Modern Japanese Thought, ed. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 116. 47.  Pyle, “Meiji Conservatism,” p. 114. 48.  Matsumoto Sannosuke, “Kaidai,” in Matsumoto Sannosuke, Seikyōsha bungakushū. 49.  See, for example, Gerard Clinton Godart, “‘Philosophy’ or ‘Religion’? The Confrontation with Foreign Categories in Late Nineteenth Century Japan,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 1 (January 2008): 71–91. 50.  Matsumoto Sannosuke, “Kaidai,” p. 426. 51.  Prior to this there was a monthly magazine titled Japanism (Nihonshugi) published by Kairansha, a society of scholars studying China. The first issue was published in 1890 and lasted at least three issues but did not reach as wide an audience as the Seikyōsha and Chogyū. 52.  See, for example, Watanabe Kazuyasu, “The Aesthetician Takayama Chogyū,” in A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics, ed. Michael Marra (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001), pp. 114–132. 53.  Hashikawa Bunsō, “Takayama Chogyū,” in Takayama Chogyū, Saitō Nonohito, Anezaki Shōfū, Tobari Chikufū shū, ed. Senuma Shigeki (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1970), p. 390. 54. Ibid. 55.  Miyanishi Kazumi, Kindai shisō no Nihonteki tenkai (Tokyo: Fukumura shoten, 1960), p. 204.

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56.  Roger K. Thomas, for example, offers an overview of how the term was invoked by scholars and poets in the Tokugawa era in his The Way of Shikishima: Waka Theory and Practice in Early Modern Japan (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2008). 57.  Donald Keene, Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852–1912 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. xii. Keene suggests that unlike the imperial rescripts, which were generally composed by state officials, Meiji wrote his own waka, which thus contain “bits of autobiographical interest.” 58.  Hashikawa Bunsō has used this term to describe the writings of Minoda. Quoted in Uemura Kazuhide, “Minoda Muneki no Nishida Kitarō hihan,” 34. 59.  See, for example, Carol Gluck’s discussion in chapter 7 of her Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). 60.  Mitsui Kōshi, “Sentei no gyosei,” Nihon oyobi nihonjin, August 15, 1912, p. 49. Note that the actual authorship of Meiji’s poetry is in fact disputed today. For more on Meiji and his poetry, see, for example, Keene, Emperor of Japan. 61.  Mitsui Kōshi, Meiji Tennō gyosei kenkyū (Tokyo: Tokyodō, 1928), p. 214. 62.  Ibid., p. 234. 63. Ibid. 64.  It is interesting to note that Mitsui comes close to linking “labor” to literary representation as a privileged position of authentic experience. Much earlier, in 1909, Mitsui noted the importance of examining labor as an example of “real action in which we concentrate the totality of our power.” Needless to say, as the connection between labor and literature became increasingly associated with the proletarian literature movement, Mitsui’s own explorations pertaining to this link ceased. See “Bungei zakkan,” Nihon oyobi nihonjin, October 1, 1909, p. 83. 65. Mitsui, Meiji Tennō gyosei kenkyū, p. 56. 66. This view of the importance of Meiji and Shōtoku would later be developed by Kurokami Shōichirō (1900–1930), whose short life did not stop him from inspiring a significant number of university students, especially at Tokyo Imperial University, in organizing around ideas developed by Mitsui and his brethren. See Kurokami Shōichirō, Shōtoku Taishi no shinkō shisō to Nihon bunka sōgyō (Tokyo: Daiichi Kōtōgakkō shōshinkai, 1935). For a recent study on Japanist student organizing at Tokyo Imperial University and its relation to Mitsui’s ideas, see Inoue Yoshikazu, Nihonshugi to Tokyo Daigaku: Shōwaki gakusei shisō undō no keifu (Tokyo: Kashiwa shobō, 2008). 67. Mitsui, Meiji Tennō gyosei kenkyū, p. 11. 68.  Matsuzawa Shunji, “Meiji tennō “gyosei” no politikusu,” Nihon kindai bungaku 79 (2008): 66. 69.  See, for example, Matsuzawa’s article cited in the above footnote. Matsuzawa also lists Irokawa Daikichi’s Meiji Culture and Ohama Tetsuya’s Tennō no guntai as other works that have dealt with this issue. 70.  Matsuzawa, “Meiji tennō “gyosei” no politikusu,” p. 66. 71. Ibid. 72.  The German critic Walter Benjamin described modern forms of media such as film and photography as capable of “aestheticizing” politics. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 4 1938–1940 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 269–270. His analysis has been influential in cultural studies, including those with a focus on interwar Japan. See, for example, Leslie Pincus, Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shūzō and the Rise of National Aesthetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 121, 232. 73. Mitsui, Meiji Tennō gyosei kenkyū, 30.



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74.  This essay was republished as the eleventh chapter of Nihon ideorogiiron (The Japanese ideology) in the same year. There the title is “The Fate of Japanism.” My citations rely on a translation of that chapter. 75. Tosaka Jun, “Fate of Japanism,” p. 63. Mark Ravina discusses the broadening of Bushido as a national ideal in the late Meiji era in his article “The Apocryphal Suicide of Saigō Takamori: Samurai, Seppuku, and the Politics of Legend,” Journal of Asian Studies 69, no. 3 (August 2010): 703–706.

Chapter Two: Japanist Democracies and Taisho Restorations  1. Shōwa Joshi Daigaku, “Mitsui Kōshi,” Kindai Bungaku Kenkyū Sōsho 73 (1997): 331.   2.  There are two notable discussions of this issue. The first is Yoneda Toshiaki’s third essay of his three-part series on Mitsui’s career. Yoneda is skeptical of what he sees as Mitsui’s sudden turn. Yoneda Toshiaki, “Jojōteki nashonarizumu no fukkatsu: Mitsui Kōshi (kan),” Bungaku 29, no. 3 (1961): 70. After a careful analysis of drafts of his eulogy for Minoda and other private writings, Konno Nobuyuki sees Mitsui’s praise of democracy as a genuine attempt to reform his politics. Konno Nobuyuki, Kindai Nihon no kokutairon: ‘Kōkokushikan’ saikō (Tokyo: Perikansha, 2008), pp. 275–307.   3.  Jung-Sun N. Han, An Imperial Path to Modernity: Yoshino Sakuzō and a New Liberal Order in East Asia, 1905–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2012), pp. 3–8.   4.  See, for example, the essays included in Bernard Silberman and Harry D. Harootunian, eds., Japan in Crisis: Essays on Taishō Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), especially the introductory essay by Harootunian and concluding essay by Silberman. Andrew Gordon’s reframing of Taisho democracy as “imperial democracy” in his study of interwar labor movements has also broadened the discussion of the ideologies of this era. See his Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Jung-Sun N. Han’s introduction in her An Imperial Path to Modernity provides a concise overview of the historiographical issues related to the concept of Taisho democracy, as does Arima Manabu, “‘Taisho demokurashii’ ron no genzai: Minshuka, shakaika, kokuminka,” Nihon rekishi, no. 700 (September 2009): 134–142.  5. Matsumoto Ken’ichi, Showa-shi o kage de ugokashita otoko: Wasurerareta ajitētā Ioki Hyōtei (Tokyo: Shinchō-sha, 2012), pp. 229–241.   6.  Translation of Asahi Heigo’s nine points from Wm. Theodore De Bary, Carol Gluck, and Arthur E. Tiedemann, eds., Sources of Japanese Tradition: Second Edition Volume Two: 1600 to 2000, Abridged, Part Two: 1868 to 2000 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), p. 268. Sources of Japanese Tradition only contains a partial translation. A full text can be found in Hashikawa Bunsō, ed., Chōkokkashugi (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1964), pp. 61–66.  7. Ibid.   8.  For a discussion of the political stakes of the Taisho Political Crisis and its consequences, see chapter 7 in Danny Orbach, Curse on This Country: The Rebellious Army of Imperial Japan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017).  9. Tsurumi Shunsuke, Nihon no hyakunen, vol. 6 (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1962), p. 46. 10.  Mokugaku Sanjin, ed., Taisho ishin seihen no shinsō (Tokyo: Gakkai Shishinsha, 1913), p. ii. 11. Ibid., p. 1. During the desperate years near the end of the Second World War, gyokusai was commonly used to describe the complete annihilation of Japanese military units. 12.  Yoshino Sakuzō, “Seishinkai no Taisho ishin,” Chūō Kōron, no. 1 (1916), reprinted in Sekai heiwashugiron (Tokyo: Shinkigensha, 1947), p. 14. Some conservative pundits were more critical of the use of the term “restoration” to describe the expansion of political

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rights. Journalist Asahina Chisen cited Yoshihito’s rescript in arguing that Yoshihito saw as his mission the continuation of imperial rule, not a new revolution. See Asahina Chisen, “Taisho Ishin,” Sandee, September 1913, p. 10–11. 13.  The legacy of Ōshio’s revolt also had an impact on those who took direct action under the banner of Showa Restoration. Onuma Shō (1911–1978), who assassinated former finance minister Inoue Junnosuke in the Blood Pledge Corps murders of 1932, noted in a postwar interview that his father was a strong admirer of Ōshio and speculated that the Rice Riots of 1918 may have led him in that direction. Onuma notes that his father also taught him that “if a man fails to die when he must, it is an embarrassment greater than death itself.” See his interview with historian Takahashi Masae in Showa shisōshi e no shōgen (Tokyo: Mainichi Shinbun-sha, 1968), p. 188. Michael Lewis offers an overview of the scope of the nationwide riots in the first chapter of his Rioters and Citizens: Mass Protest in Imperial Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 14.  Mitsui Kōshi, “Ōshio chūsai no kinnō shakai shugi,” Nippon damashii, no. 9 (1918). The existence of this article is reported in Shōwa Joshi Daigaku, “Mitsui Kōshi,” Kindai Bungaku Kenkyū Sōsho 73 (1997): 360, but neither the editors of that study nor I have examined an actual copy. 15.  Miyazawa Seiichi, Meiji ishin no saisōzō: Kindai Nihon no “kigen shinwa” (Tokyo: Aoki shoten, 2005), pp. 72–73. Miyazawa’s study offers a rich history of how the Meiji Restoration was reimagined in different historical contexts as well as a conceptual history of “Taisho Restoration.” 16. Ibid. See also Ōmoto Nanajūnenshi Hensankai, ed., Ōmoto Nanajūnenshi jō-kan (Kyoto: Ōmoto nanajūnenshi hensankai, 1968), pp. 364–371. Nancy Stalker discusses Onisaburō’s Taisho Restorationism in more detail in the second chapter of her book, Prophet Motive: Deguchi Onisaburō, Oomoto, and the Rise of New Religions in Imperial Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008). 17.  It should be noted that this is technically untrue, though my basic narrative here is factual. Besides denoting positions on the political spectrum, right wing and left wing also denote positions of troops on a battlefield or player positions on a field of sports (i.e. right fielder and left fielder in baseball). These uses of the term uyoku and sayoku predate the spread of its use in differentiating political positions. My narrative in this section is based upon the holdings of the National Diet Library. 18.  Yoshino Sakuzō, “Ukei sakei no ben,” Chūō kōron, January 1926, p. 104. 19.  Anonymous, “Shakai jisō toiu hanashi,” Kaitakusha 18, no. 5 (May 1923): 55–56. I have translated keirin as “governance,” but it is worth noting that the same compound is used in Nakae Chōmin’s classic Sansuijin keirin mondō, or A Discourse by Three Drunkards on Government. The compound refers to the methods of bringing order to the state or government. Walter Skya discusses this short-lived organization in Japan’s Holy War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 160. 20.  Hori Yukio, Senzen no kokkashugi undō shi (Tokyo: Senrei shobō, 1997), pp. 54–55. 21.  See, for example, Reto Hofmann, The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915–1952 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); and Fuke Takahiro, Nihon fashizumu ronsō: Taisen zenya no shisōkatachi (Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha, 2012). 22.  Anonymous, “Shakai jisō toiu hanashi,” p. 56. 23.  Christopher Szpilman, for example, shows how the influential right-wing philosopher Kanokogi Kazunobu began writing about ideas often associated with fascism in 1917. See Christopher W. A. Szpilman, “Kanokogi Kazunobu: Pioneer of Platonic Fascism and Imperial Pan-Asianism,” Monumenta Nipponica 68, no. 2 (2013): 233–280. 24.  Hori Yukio, Senzen no kokkashugi undō shi, pp. 39–43. 25.  See Brij Tankha’s translation of the text in Brij Tankha, A Vision of Empire: Kita Ikki and the Making of Modern Japan (New Delhi: Sampark, 2003).



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26.  See Thomas R. H. Havens, Farm and Nation in Modern Japan: Agrarian Nationalism, 1870–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974). 27. Ryūhoku-mura Kyōiku Iinkai, ed., Ryūhoku shonshi (Ryūhoku: Kumamoto-ken Yatsushiro-gun Ryūhoku-mura yakuba, 1973), p. 456. 28.  Takeuchi Yō, “Teidai shukusei undō no tanjō, mōkō, satetsu,” in Nihonshugiteki kyōyō no jidai: Daigaku hihan no kosō, ed. Takeuchi Yō and Satō Takumi (Tokyo: Kashiwa shobō, 2006), p. 26. 29.  Byron K. Marshall, Academic Freedom and the Japanese Imperial University, 1868–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 104–105. 30. Historian Ōkado Masakatsu notes that tenant farmer unions in Matsushima Village were one of many such organizations that produced financial statements to support their arguments for more favorable agreements. Ōkado gives three reasons for the Matsushima tenancy disputes that erupted in the fall of 1921. First, the economic boom from World War I brought prosperity but also crippled higher production costs. Second, farmers now compared their profits in the farming villages with what they believed other industries might offer. Third, many were influenced by the ideas of liberty and equality referenced in speeches given by labor activists. See Ōkado Masakatsu, Kindai Nihon to nōson shakai: Nōmin sekai no henyō to kokka (Tokyo: Nihon keizai hyōron sha, 1994), p. 94. 31.  For this reason, as well as the fact that Yamanashi was home to a highly developed commercial farming and sericulture economy, there are several studies that focus on rural villages and tenancy disputes in Yamanashi, as well as Nakakoma County, where Mitsui resided. See, for example, Richard J. Smethurst, Agricultural Development and Tenancy Disputes in Japan, 1870–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986) and Ōkado Masakatsu, Kindai Nihon to nōson shakai (Tokyo: Nihon keizai hyōron sha, 1994). Though it does not focus on Yamanashi, Ann Waswo’s work on landlords is a helpful guide in reconstructing their role in rural villages. See Ann Waswo, Japanese Landlords: The Decline of a Rural Elite (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). 32.  Mitsui’s own version of the incident can be found in the May 1, 1927, issue of Japan and the Japanese. According to this interpretation, Mitsui had received word from one of his tenants, the Yamadas, that since their son had decided to enter the navy, they would not be needing the land anymore. After Mitsui arranged to rent the land to another family, Yamada came back to Mitsui and said they would like to cultivate the land after all since their son had failed the entrance exams for the navy. The original April 5 newspapers reports (Yamanashi Jiji Shimpō, Tokyo; Asahi shinbun, Yamanashi edition; and Hōchi shinbun, Yamanashi edition) indicated that Yamada had received an eviction notice from Mitsui on March 26, and when he refused Mitsui told his lackeys to pull the seedlings. The police backed up his story, saying that no forced attempt to regain the land had been made, though historians of rural communities point out that the police often defended landowners instead of tenants, so we cannot take that endorsement at face value. 33. Mitsui Kōshi, “Zenkoku kosaku jinushi shokun ni gekisu,” Nihon oyobi nihonjin, no. 45 (April 1, 1924): 7–13. 34. Tetsuo Najita has noted the following concerning Yoshino’s views: “Despite its theoretically being aimed against extreme nationalism, it dovetailed, much more closely than he probably realized, with the view of some prominent nationalists of his day who also viewed rational organization with disdain, as corruptive of the individual’s moral worth, and who urged protest based on the traditional intuitionist theory of the absolute moral autonomy of all individuals.” See Tetsuo Najita, “Some Reflections on Idealism in the Political Thought of Yoshino Sakuzo,” in Silberman and Harootunian, Japan in Crisis, p. 42. 35. Jung-Sun N. Han also notes that Yoshino’s publicized debate with members of the right-wing organization Rōninkai revealed few differences between the two, despite the fact that Yoshino was widely viewed as the winner. Han, Imperial Path to Modernity,

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pp. 14–20. Tetsuo Najita also notes how more moderate nationalists, like Miyake Setsurei of the Seikyōsha mentioned in the previous chapter, held similar perspectives to Yoshino. See Tetsuo Najita, “Some Reflections on Idealism in the Political Thought of Yoshino Sakuzo,” p. 65. 36.  Mitsui Kōshi, “Ronrishugi no kagekihaka,” in Mitsui Kōshi zaikō: Taishoki shozasshi yori no shūroku (Tokyo: Mitsui Kōshi Ikō Kankōkai, 1969): 66–75. The volume notes that the essay was originally published in Sekai kōron in its March 1918 issue. This date is nominally confirmed by the authoritative list of Mitsui’s publications in Kindai bungaku kenkyū sōsho, published by Shōwa joshi daigaku. The latter notes that the editors did not see an actual copy of the magazine, and I believe the date is in error, perhaps based on the information given in Mitsui Kōshi zaikō. The essay was more likely published a year later in 1919, since Mitsui refers to Woodrow Wilson’s comments at the Paris Peace Conference, which did not begin until 1919. Furthermore, Mitsui refers to an essay on Yoshino Sakuzō that he wrote for the New Year’s edition of the same magazine that year. Kindai bungaku kenkyū lists that essay as being published in 1919. I will note here that my analysis at times relies on incomplete information, as I have not been able to locate many of the conservative and right-wing magazines carrying Mitsui’s essays. 37.  Mitsui Kōshi, “Ronrishugi no kagekiha,” p. 75. 38.  Kimbara Samon, “Showa kyōkō to kyōka sōdōin undō: Seijishiteki shikaku kara no nōto,” Hōgaku shinpō 75, no. 1/2 (February 1968): 115–143. Kinbara discusses the meaning of kyōka and the issues of translating the term as “indoctrination,” as is often done. Here I have followed Sheldon Garon’s work in translating kyōka as “moral suasion.” See Sheldon Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 7, as well as Max Ward’s engagement with Garon’s discussion in Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), pp. 5–7. See also Barak Kushner, The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), pp. 21–26. 39. Garon, Molding Japanese Minds, pp. 8–15. 40.  Mitsui Kōshi, “Gikai no korekutivu,” Shinjidai, May 1920, reprinted in Mitsui Kōshi zaikō: Taishoki shozasshi yori no shūroku (Tokyo: Mitsui Kōshi Ikō Kankōkai, 1969), pp. 371–388. 41.  Mitsui Kōshi, “Minponshugi no bunkashiteki kachi,” Bunshō Sekai, April 1918, reprinted in Mitsui Kōshi zaikō, p. 95. 42.  Mitsui, “Gikai no korekutivu,” p. 385. 43.  The three-yen standard was set during the Hara administration in 1918, but it had been as high as fifteen yen in the past. More concretely speaking, in 1917, 1,422,118, or 2.6 percent of the total population, were eligible to vote in 1917. In 1889, the year in which the Meiji Constitution was promulgated, 450,872 people, or 1.1 percent of the population, were eligible to vote. Kōza Nihon kindaihō hattatsushi: Shihonshugi to hō no hatten, vol. 4 (Tōkyō: Keisō shobō, 1958), pp. 208–209. 44.  Prime Minister Hara Takashi, whose party spearheaded the expansion of voting rights, also famously expressed these sentiments, arguing that though suffrage ought to be eventually extended to everyone, the movement to do so should not be framed as a class issue. Ibid., 212. 45.  Shiode Tamaki, “Genri Nippon-sha no kenkyū,” p. 105. 46.  On the creation and reception of the rescript, see J. Charles Schencking, The Great Kantō Earthquake and the Chimera of National Reconstruction in Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), pp. 228–233. 47.  Kindai Shiryō Kenkyūkai, Meiji Taisho Showa sandai shōchokushū (Tokyo: Hokubōsha, 1969), pp. 363–365. 48.  The statement was composed by Mitsui and circulated among the leaders of Life and Representation and was later printed in several places. See, for example, Mitsui Kōshi, Shikishima no michi genron (Tokyo: Genri Nippon-sha, 1934), pp. 135–143.



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49.  Translation of this article quoted from Elise K. Tipton, The Japanese Police State: The Tokkō in Interwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1990), p. 62. 50.  For a discussion of Kazahaya’s 1930 critique of the Peace Preservation Law, see Max Ward, “The Problem of ‘Thought’: Crisis, National Essence and the Interwar Japanese State” (PhD diss., New York University, 2011), pp. 97–103. 51.  Mitsui Kōshi, “Suehiro hakase no tochi mubaishō bosshū kyōsanshugi senden ni tsuite seifu oyobi daigaku tōkyoku no seitō shochi wo kitaisu,” Nihon oyobi nihonjin, no. 41 (February 1, 1924). 52.  See the May 15, 1925, and September 15, 1925, issues of Nihon oyobi nihonjin, respectively. The latter term, kyōgyaku, went on to become one of the most used words to describe the intellectual enemies of the Genri Nippon Society. 53.  Takeuchi Yō, “Teidai shukusei undō no tanjō, mōkō, satetsu,” p. 33. 54.  Nishida Kitarō, Collected Works of Nishida Kitarō, vol. 19, pp. 52, 107. 55.  See Takeuchi’s introduction and Satō’s epilogue in Takeuchi Yō and Satō Takumi, Nihonshugiteki kyōyō no jidai. I have translated Takeuchi and Satō’s term Nihonshugiteki kyōyō no jidai as “age of Japanist cultural literacy,” but it should be noted that by kyōyō Takeuchi and Satō are referring to the project of self-cultivation popular among intellectuals during the early twentieth century. Kyōyō, therefore, might more accurately be translated as “selfcultivation,” and Takeuchi and Satō use the term to refer to the German word Bildung. Here I wanted to foreground the fact that not all intellectuals who used Japanist concepts were cultivating themselves as Japanists, sometimes appropriating the terms critically or ironically. A certain degree of literacy in the culture of Japanism was necessary for intellectuals to engage in critical debates, as well as the knowledge that Japanism constituted a political correctness of sorts during those years. See also Takeuchi’s history of kyōyō-ism in modern Japan in Kyōyōshugi no botsuraku (Tokyo: Chūō kōron shinsha, 2003). 56. The example that Takeuchi and Satō gives is the Marxist intellectual Funayama Shinichi, who wrote some of the foundational texts of intellectual history in the postwar era. Another example is philosopher Nishida Kitarō. Against the accusation that Nishida had succumbed to nationalism in his wartime writing, Ueda Shizuteru has argued that Nishida was in fact involved in a “tug of war over meaning,” through which he attempted to subtly change the way nationalist words were used in public discourse. See Shizuteru Ueda, “Nishida, Nationalism, and the War in Question,” in Rude Awakenings, p. 90. 57.  For examples of posters, see Tamai Kiyoshi, Dai-ikkai fusen to senkyo posutā: Showa shotō no senkyo undo ni kansuru kenkyū (Tokyo: Keiō gijuku daigaku hōgaku kenkyūkai, 2017). For Tamai’s discussion of “Showa Restoration” as a common campaign slogan, see pp. 132–137. 58.  See figure 2–5 in the unpaginated plates at the front of Tamai Kiyoshi, Dai-ikkai fusen to senkyo posutā, and the cover of the present volume. 59.  In this sense, Mitsui Kōshi was a paradigmatic Japanist under Tosaka Jun’s formulation in his famous study on the topic, The Japanese Ideology (1935), though he does not mention Mitsui there. Tosaka argued that his liberal contemporaries tended toward a moralistic liberalism that was substantively different from the previous forms of liberalism that championed economic and political liberties. See Tosaka Jun, “Liberalist Philosophy and Materialism,” in Tosaka Jun, Tosaka Jun, pp. 81–96.

Chapter Three: International Nationalisms and the Suppression of Socialism  1. Okuno Shintarō, “Gakuhi Minoda Muneki no anyoku,” Tokushū Bungei shunjū, December 1956, p. 52.   2.  Ibid., p. 55.  3. Takeuchi Yō speculates that a resentment of sorts against the Tokyo-centric academy was an important factor in Minoda’s attack on the imperial universities. See Maruyama Masao no jidai: Daigaku, chishikijin, jyānarizumu (Tokyo: Chūō kōron shinsha, 2005), p. 88.

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  4.  For example, one of the memories of Minoda that Okuno recalls is catching wind that Minoda was planning to lecture on Faust. Okuno only mentions that he found it surprising that the ultranationalist was lecturing on such a topic and simply attributes it to the overall eccentricity of Minoda. Okuno Shintarō, “Gakuhi Minoda Muneki no anyoku,” p. 53.   5.  Reto Hofmann makes a similar point about the discourse of fascism in Fascist Effect.  6. Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan, pp. 36–39; Takeuchi Yō, Maruyama Masao no Jidai; Uemura Kazuhide, ‘Nihon’ e no toi o meguru tōsō: Kyotogakuha to Genri Nippon-sha (Tokyo: Kashiwa shobō, 2007).  7. Satō Takumi, “Kaidai,” in Minoda Muneki zenshū, vol. 7.   8.  On the developments in Marxist theory in Japan during these years, see Gail Lee Bernstein, Japanese Marxist: A Portrait of Kawakami Hajime, 1879–1946 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Harvard East Asian Monographs, 1990); Germain A. Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986) and The State, Identity, and the National Question in China and Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Tosaka Jun, Tosaka Jun; Gavin Walker, The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Katsuhiko Endō, “The Science of Capital: The Uses and Abuses of the Social Sciences in Interwar Japan” (PhD diss., New York University, 2004); Atsuko Hirai, Individualism and Socialism: The Life and Thought of Kawai Eijirō (1891–1944) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).   9.  For an overview of Fukumoto’s criticism of Kawakami and Yamakawa Hitoshi, see Itō Akira, Tennōsei to shakaishugi (Tokyo: Impakuto shuppankai, 2002), especially chapters 6 and 7. The political consequence of this theoretical position was that Yamakawa’s “change in direction,” which called for a legal political party formed out of a unified front of a range of political interests, was criticized for distracting from the goal of revolution. Fukumoto instead argued that Marxists should first “divide” out the nonproletarian, counterrevolutionary voices before reunifying a purely revolutionary vanguard party. 10.  Fukumoto was a participant in the Marxist Study Week, the intellectual predecessor to the famous Frankfurt School, organized by Felix Weil and Karl Korsch. There he discussed the material of Korsch and Lukacs along with other participants, including Karl August and Rose Wittfogel, Friedrich Pollock, Julian and Hede Gumperz, Richard and Christian Sorge, Eduard Ludwig, Alexander and Gertrud Alexander, and Bela Fogarasi. The intercontinental legacy of this embryo of the Frankfurt School has been mostly ignored by intellectual historians writing in the English language. For a more thorough account of Fukumoto and his impact on the Japanese Marxist movement, see Katsuhiko Endo, “Science of Capital,” especially chapters 7 and 8. 11.  Charles R. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 12.  Kevin M. Doak, “Under the Banner of the New Science: History, Science, and the Problem of Particularity in Early Twentieth-Century Japan,” Philosophy East and West 48, no. 2 (1998): 232–256; Robert W. Adams, “The Feasibility of the Philosophical in Taisho Japan: Nishida Kitarō and Tanabe Hajime” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1991); Michiko Yusa, “Philosophy and Inflation: Miki Kiyoshi in Weimar Germany, 1922–1924,” Monumenta Nipponica 53, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 45–71. 13.  Minoda Muneki, Gakujutsu Ishin (Tokyo: Genri Nippon-sha, 1941), p. 49. 14.  Katayama Morihide, “Shasei, zuijun, haishō: Mitsui Kōshi no shisōken,” in Takeuchi Yō and Satō Takumi, Nihonshugiteki kyōyō no jidai, pp. 91–128. 15. Wundt, System der Philosophie, p. 664. See Yaku Masao, “‘Jinsei to hyōgen’ sōkan zengo,” 3. 16.  Shiode Tamaki, “Genri Nipponsha no kenkyū,” pp. 70–72.



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17.  On Wundt’s system of science, see Martin Kusch, Psychologism: A Study in the Sociology of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 125–134. 18.  Minoda Muneki, “Shakai kagaku kenkyū hōhō,” in Minoda Muneki zenshū 1:300. 19. Ibid. 20.  Ibid., p. 301. 21. Ibid. 22. Kusch, Psychologism, p. 132; Wilhelm Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, vol. 3, 5th ed. (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1903), pp. 778–790. 23. Minoda Muneki, “Shakai kagakusha to tetsugakusha to no ronsō: Benshōteki yuibutsuron o chūshin to suru Kawakami, Watsuji ryōshi no ronsō o hyōsu,” Genri Nippon 3, no. 2 (1927): 14. 24.  See Christopher W. Oakes, trans., “Watsuji Tetsurō/Kawakami Hajime Exchange (1926),” in From Japan’s Modernity: A Reader (Chicago: Center for East Asian Studies, University of Chicago, 2002), pp. 91–123. 25.  Minoda refers to these in “Mikishi no yuibutsushikan to gendai no ishiki o hyōsu,” Sokoku, October 1928, p. 2. 26. Klautke, Mind of the Nation, p. 58–59. Kusch, Psychological Knowledge, p. 99–100. 27. Wilhelm Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythus und Sitte, Zehnter Band Kultur und Geschichte (Leipzig: Alfred Kroner Verlag, 1920), pp. 3–15. 28.  Minoda Muneki, “Markusushugi yuibutsuron no kongenteki bunseki: Fu Lenin no Wunto hyō hihan,” Genri Nippon 4, no. 1 (1928): 10–11. 29. Klautke, Mind of the Nation, p. 69. 30.  Ibid., pp. 86–93. 31. Patricia G. Steinhoff, Tenkō: Ideology and Societal Integration in Prewar Japan (New York: Garland, 1991); Ward, “Problem of ‘Thought’”; and Takaaki Yoshimoto and Hisaaki Wake, “On Tenkō, or Ideological Conversion,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 20 (December 2008): 99–119. 32. Itō Akira, Tennōsei to shakaishugi, p. 200. 33.  Ibid., p. 201. 34.  The similarity between the Left and Right in their “standpoint” critique of orthodox Marxism has been argued in the context of Minoda’s contemporaries in Western Europe by Dick Pels, and my interpretation of the affinities between Minoda and Fukumoto have gained much from his analysis in The Intellectual as Stranger: Studies in Spokespersonship (New York: Routledge, 2001), as has my analysis of Minoda’s interpretation of Hendrik de Man in this chapter. 35.  Minoda Muneki, Minoda Muneki zenshū 2:370–371. 36.  For example, Yamakawa Hitoshi, a leader in the Marxist movement before and after Fukumoto-ism took center stage, was also rarely criticized by Minoda. Still, Fukumoto did wield a tremendous amount of power within the Imperial University system, influencing many students to organize according to his theoretical foundations and even famously criticizing Kawakami in front of his own students at a lecture at Kyoto Imperial University. 37. Minoda Muneki, “Shakaishugi no kihonteki shokatei,” in Minoda Muneki zenshū 1:230. 38.  The quote in question is as follows: [Thus dialectical materialism is seen to offer the only approach to reality which can give action a direction.] The self-knowledge, both subjective and objective, of the proletariat at a given point in its evolution is at the same time knowledge of the stage of development achieved by the whole society. The facts no longer appear strange when they are comprehended in their coherent reality, in the relation of all partial aspects to their inherent, but hitherto unelucidated roots in the whole (!): we then perceive the tendencies which

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strive towards the centre of reality, to what we are wont to call the ultimate goal (!). This ultimate goal is not an abstract ideal opposed to the process, but an aspect of truth and reality. It is the concrete meaning of each stage reached and an integral part of the concrete moment. Because of this, to comprehend it is to recognize the direction taken (unconsciously) by events and tendencies towards the totality (!). It is to know the direction that determines concretely the correct (!) course of action at any given moment—in terms of the interest of the total process, viz. the emancipation of the proletariat. Adapted from Lukács, Georg, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972), with exclamation points added at points corresponding to those found in the Sombart quotation in Werner Sombart, Der Proletarische Sozialisumus (“Marxismus”), Jena, Germany: G. Fischer, 1924, p. 301. The first sentence in brackets was included in Sombart’s quotation but not in Minoda’s translation of Sombart. It is curious that Minoda left out this sentence. We might read this as Minoda’s attempt to evade the rapidly changing discourse on dialectical materialism since he also neglects to address the subsequent changes in Kawakami’s understanding of dialectical materialism that followed Fukumoto’s Lukácian criticism. Minoda’s translation of Sombart’s quotation of Lukács was likely one of the first instances of Lukács’ writing appearing in Japanese in whatever length. 39. Itō Akira, Tennōsei to shakaishugi, p. 304; Iwasaki Chikatsugu, Nihon Markusushugi tetsugakushi josetsu (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1971), pp. 68–69. 40.  Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 125. 41.  Ibid., pp. 20–22. 42. Neocleous, Fascism, pp. 9–10. 43.  Hendrik de Man, The Psychology of Socialism, trans. Eden Paul and Cedar Paul (New York: Henry Holt, 1928), p. 12. This did not mean that de Man had parted ways with socialism entirely. As Peter Dodge explains, “Rationalization of his commitment to participate in the defense of Belgium provoked a profound re-evaluation of the significance of political institutions: for in contrast to Germany, where the impotence of socialism had just been demonstrated, the structure of Belgian democracy, however imperfect, gave hope for the effective realization of socialism.” See Peter Dodge, Beyond Marxism: The Faith and Works of Hendrik de Man (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), p. 39. 44.  In addition to Wundt, de Man was also instructed by the historians Karl Bücher and Karl Lamprecht. Among socialists with whom de Man worked during his youth were Kautsky, Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luzemberg, Robert Michels, and Ludwig Frank. See Dodge, Beyond Marxism, pp. 22–24. 45. de Man, Psychology of Socialism, p. 334. Minoda Muneki, “Marukishizumu no gōrisei,” Genri Nippon 2, no. 10 (November 1926): 17. 46.  de Man, Psychology of Socialism, pp. 316, 332. 47.  de Man, Psychology of Socialism, p. 315; see Genri Nippon 3, no. 1 (1927): 4. 48.  It should be noted that de Man’s book is not short of praises for Marx, who he in fact credits with “freeing him from Marxism.” He argues that even for this synthesis of materialism and idealism alone, Marx ought to be praised as a genius. Yet the fact that Marx was a genius for his own time did not mean that Marxists should only exegetically regurgitate Marx’ words. For de Man, “What matters is: What of Marx is alive today?” See de Man, Psychology of Socialism, p. 16. Interestingly, Minoda did not include in his translation this call to reconsider the significance of Marx in his own time. 49.  de Man, Psychology of Socialism, p. 313. 50. Ibid. 51.  Minoda Muneki, “Dokuro no shisō bunka to Marukusu/Lenin-shugi,” in Minoda Muneki zenshū 2:113.



Notes to Pages 77–79

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52.  Minoda Muneki, “Sovieto Roshia no kyōsanshugi no kakumei o ronjite Nihon kokutai narabini Nihon rōdō rippō ni oyobu,” Kōjō kenkyū, September 1930, p. 13, reprinted in Minoda Muneki zenshū 1:568. 53.  See the discussion in the previous chapter on the role the Peace Preservation Law played in transforming the rhetoric of figures like Mitsui Kōshi. 54. Yamamoto Senji (1889–1929), one of the few representatives in the Diet who belonged to a proletarian party, was a vocal critic of all state forms of ideological suppression. Kuroda Hokuji, a member of a nationalist labor association, assassinated him before Yamamoto had reached the age of forty, though the details behind the murder still remain a mystery. A biologist by training, Yamamoto’s political campaign had the support of many Imperial University professors, a fact often brought up in the polemics penned by Minoda and his colleagues. A more detailed context of Yamamoto’s criticism can be read in Ogino Fujio, Senzen Monbushō no chian kinō: “Shisō tōsei” kara “kyōgaku rensei” e (Tokyo: Azekura shobō, 2007), pp. 38–39. 55.  See Satō Takumi, “Kaidai,” for a history of the journal Genri Nippon. 56.  The publication of the Studies was noticed by several important media outlets and government officials. Letters of approval flooded the Genri Nippon office, including from Hashida Tōsei, an officer in the Bureau of Professional Education Affairs, then at the center of the recent Ministry of Education policy of ideological surveillance, as well as from Inoue Kameroku, owner of the Japan and the Japanese (Nihon oyobi nihonjin) publisher, Seikyōsha, who offered to advertise the book free of charge. Hashida, a poet and officer in charge of researching the “problem of ideology,” wrote to Genri Nippon to praise Mitsui’s project. It also bears noting that Inoue was the uncle of the famous historian Maruyama Masao, whose father, Inoue’s brother-in-law, was a journalist for the Asahi newspaper. As noted in chapter 1, Mitsui was responsible for the tanka column in Japan and the Japanese during this time and was also a regular contributor of political opinion pieces. 57.  The Imperial Universities and their feeder Higher Schools were an important place for building lasting connections, and for Minoda these would become particularly helpful in finding forums for his intellectual products as well as getting acquainted with the intellectual and political elite of the time. As a student at Tokyo Imperial University in 1920, Minoda was among the leaders of the nationalist student group called the Kōkoku Dōshikai (Brotherhood for the Promotion of the Nation) that competed with the more socialist-oriented Shinjinkai (New Man Society). Minoda took the lead among the students of the School of Letters in speaking out against the publication of a study on Kropotkin by economics professor Morito Tatsuo in a university publication, a scandal that came to be known as the Morito incident. Although the brotherhood disbanded due to disagreements within the organization as a result of this incident, many of the members remained close, even while going on to form different organizations. Among them, Takeuchi Kakuji and Ōta Kōzō, who published the official periodical of the brotherhood, Kokuhon, went on to found the Kokuhon Society in 1921, which would three years later be reorganized into a national society with Hiranuma Kisaburō as president. Hiranuma, who was one of the Privy Council members who attempted to block the London Naval Treaty signing in 1930, was an advisor to the Privy Council at the time of the reestablishment of the national Kokuhon Society in 1924 and was tremendously well connected. Minoda associated with this society from very early on, publishing many essays critical of leftists in Kokuhon. Incidentally, Mitsui Kōshi also contributed an essay to the first issue of Kokuhon that was published before the reorganization of the Kokuhon Society under Hiranuma. On the history of the Kōkoku Dōshikai and the founding of the Kokuhonsha, see Christopher W. A. Szpilman, “The Politics of Cultural Conservatism: The National Foundation Society in the Struggle against Foreign Ideas in Prewar Japan” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1993) and Yaku Masao, “Ōta Kōzō sensei to Kōkoku Dōshikai no hitobito,” Ajia Daigaku Kyoyobu kiyo 29 (1984): 107–118. The Kokuhon

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Society, which according to one estimate carried 110,000 members, counted among its leaders several of the key players in the move toward academic repression in the 1930s. This estimate comes from a government survey of nationalist and state socialist organizations published in 1935. See Kokkashugi naishi kokka shakaishugi dantai shūran. Zōtei kaihan: Shakai mondai shiryō sōsho (Kyōto: Tōyō bunkasha, 1974). Among the board members of the Kokuhonsha were future prime ministers Saito Minoru and Koiso Kuniaki, as well as army officers from both the Imperial Way faction and Control faction, such as Araki Sadao, Masaki Jinsaburō, and Nagata Tetsuzan. Katō Kanji, who was chief of the Navy General Staff during the London Naval Treaty negotiations, was also a member. 58.  One of its early advertisements in fact notes that the first printing of two thousand copies sold out within three days without any advertisements. See the back-page advertisement in Genri Nippon 4, no. 1 (1929). 59.  Minoda Muneki, Minoda Muneki zenshū 2:7. 60. Monbushō Shisōkyoku, “Shisōkyoku yōkō,” in Monbushō shisōkyoku shisō chōsa shiryō, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Shisō chōsa shiryō shūsei kankōkai, 1981), p. 87. 61.  For example, Awaya Ken, who was vice minister of education (monbu jikan) when Takigawa was ordered to leave Kyoto Imperial University, had worked closely with Kawamura Mikio, a respected member of the Genri Nippon Society and professor of geology at Kyushu Imperial University. Kawamura assisted in the Ministry of Education’s early attempts to understand the student socialist movements and served as student supervisor for the ministry as well. Awaya notes that Kawamura was consulted as early as 1922 and served as supervisor from 1922 to 1925; see Genri Nippon 8, no. 2 (1932): 8. Awaya represented the Ministry of Education at many of the meetings between the ministry and Kyoto Imperial University throughout the negotiations associated with the Takigawa Incident and was one of the key players in the ministry’s attempt to wrest control over personnel decisions from the faculty. Awaya (1884–1938) went on to become the first head of the Institute for the Research of National Spirit Culture (Kokumin Seishin Bunka Kenkyūjo), founded by the Ministry of Education for the purpose of bolstering the academic goals outlined at the founding of the Student Division within the ministry. Nishiyama Masai, who served as student supervisor at Tokyo Imperial University with Kawai and went on to oversee the founding of the Student Division, also frequently exchanged ideas with Kawamura. In his eulogy to Kawamura published in Genri Nippon, Nishiyama recalls intense debates and conversations with Kawamura over the problem of thought (shisō mondai), one of which lasted for six hours. 62.  Minoda wrote an obituary for Hashida in Genri Nippon 7, no. 1 (1931). 63. In fact, there were complaints within the Ministry of Education concerning the Home Ministry’s control over its own personnel issues, going so far as to say that it had become “colonized” by the Home Ministry. Awaya was particularly incensed about this. Ogino, Senzen monbushō no chian kinō, pp. 119–120. 64. Satō Takumi, “Kaidai,” pp. 757–771. 65.  Shiode Tamaki suggests that it may have begun in 1933 through Mitsui Kōshi’s connections. See his discussion in Shiode Tamaki, “Genri Nipponsha no kenkyū,” pp. 204–209. 66.  Quoted in Fuke Takahiro, “Niniroku jiken zenya ni okeru kokka kaizōan: Ōgishi Yoriyoshi ‘Gokuhi kōkoku ishin hōan zenpen’ o chūshin ni,” Bunmei kōzōron: Kyoto Daigaku Daigakuin Jinbun Kankyōgaku Kenkyūka bunmeiron kōza bumei kōzōron bunya ronshū, no. 8 (2012), p. 21. 67.  See Takeuchi Yō, “Kaidai,” Minoda Muneki zenshū 3:980–981. 68.  The essay was serialized from November 29 to December 23, 1932. It was republished as a single essay in Genri Nippon the following January. 69.  Many historians who mention the writings of Minoda in their work often express confusion about why Minoda called noncommunist scholars, like Minobe, “communists,”



Notes to Pages 82–84

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but by “communizing” (sekka), Minoda seems to be referring to the role of these professors in the construction of Japan’s bureaucratic and political institutions, not the content of their academic writings. 70.  For details on Minoda’s accusations of these “sympathies,” see his “Nihon sōsekka chōkō Shihōbu fukei jiken: Kain konzetsu no gyakuen Showa ishin no seiki,” in Minoda Muneki zenshū 2:557–647. Minoda was particularly critical of Minobe’s defense of recently murdered socialist politician Yamamoto Senji, as well as his criticism of the censorship and propaganda policies of the state. Makino was similarly criticized for his protest of laws aimed at suppressing socialist movements and his “disavowal of the system of private property.” Minoda likened Takigawa’s theory of criminal law to anarchism. 71.  Minoda, “Shihōbu fukei jiken,” pp. 604–605. Minoda’s criticism of Marxism and socialism owed much to his senior colleagues at Keio, such as Koizumi Shinzō and Abe Hidesuke, though Minoda was no longer employed at Keio by this time. Minoda was appointed professor at Kokushikan University shortly before writing this article. It is interesting to note that Minoda was also critical of the founding of the Institute for the Research of National Spirit Culture (Kokumin Seishin Bunka Kenkyūjo) by the Ministry of Education, which incidentally employed several figures close to the Genri Nippon Society, including Fujisawa Chikao and Kihira Masayoshi. Minoda claimed that the founding of the research institute proved the ministry’s own lack of faith in the Imperial University system, whose Schools of Letters were founded for the task of such research in the humanities. 72.  As such, Minoda’s own article, which was published before this date, refers to the incident only as the “treason incident in the judicial branch,” without any details such as names and positions of the accused. 73.  Matsuo Takayoshi, Takigawa jiken, p. 81. The details and analysis of the Takigawa Incident that I provide in this chapter owe much to Matsuo’s research and insight in this definitive study of this event and its context in the history of academic freedom in Japan. 74.  Ibid., p. 83. Ogawa was justice minister in 1925 when the Peace Preservation Law was passed and was long interested in curbing the threat of socialism in Japan. Ogawa’s grandson, Miyazawa Kiichi, would go on to have an illustrious bureaucratic and political career in the postwar period, capped by a stint as prime minster in the early 1990s. Ogawa notes in his journal that sources for Miyazawa were supplied by his newspaper office. See Ogawa Heikichi, Ogawa Heikichi kankei bunshō I, ed. Oka Yoshitake and Ogawa Heikichi Bunshō Kenkyūkai (Tokyo: Misuzu shobō, 1973), p. 284. 75.  Nippon shinbun was a different newspaper than the more famous daily Nippon, ran by Kuga Katsunan, that was mentioned in previous chapters. 76.  See Matsuo Takayoshi, Takigawa jiken, pp. 133–134. 77.  It was at this lecture that Minoda first met Takigawa Yukitoki, and the event is often cited as the origin of Minoda’s antagonism toward Takigawa. Debate clubs had been identified by the Ministry of Education as organizations that attracted socialist students in universities everywhere, and it is said that the ministry pressured the club to invite Minoda to speak. 78.  My sense is that this is no longer the accepted view by historians today, however. The greatest factor in this change in view is likely Matsuo’s thorough analysis of the various interests that formed the context of the incident. See Takigawa jiken, pp. 142–149. The fact that Minoda was invited to the event hosted by the Lecture Club at Kyoto Imperial University (a haven for left-leaning students) at all seems a bit strange. In an autobiography published after the war, Takigawa writes that this was forced upon them from outside the university. Matsuo speculates that this was the Ministry of Education. As noted earlier, Minoda’s translations and essays critical of Marxism and the Russian Revolution received the official recommendation of the ministry in the mid-1920s. It should be noted that Takigawa’s representation of the incident differs considerably from the school newspaper coverage of the event. The latter paints a more respectful picture of Minoda, who is said to

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have stayed for additional questions and answers after the initial lecture. See Takikawa Yukitoki, Gekiryū (Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha, 1963), pp. 107–108; Matsuo, Takigawa jiken, pp. 88–89. For the coverage in the Kyoto Imperial University Newspaper, see the June 17, 1929, issue. Many of the primary sources surrounding this incident are compiled in Takigawa jiken. 79.  There is in fact very little mention of this incident in the pages of Genri Nippon. Minoda’s criticism of Takigawa in the August issue of that year focuses mostly on Takigawa’s scholarship and his reliance on the category of class in his analysis of criminal law. Minoda does briefly mention his own lecture at the university, only to remark that neither Takigawa nor university president Shinjō Shinsuke, who was also in attendance, made any effort to interrupt the introductory remarks made by the Oratory Club president Irokawa Zenkichi, which apparently focused on the need for a Communist Party in Japan and referred to Russia as the fatherland (sokoku). See “Takigawa Yukitoki kyōju no sekinin o tou,” Genri Nippon 5, no. 8 (1929): 8. 80.  Kita Reikichi (1885–1961) was a politician, philosopher, and political activist whose prolific body of work has been overshadowed by that of his more famous brother Ikki. Though Minoda and Reikichi did not necessarily agree on all issues, they collaborated on a number of projects. On Kita Reikichi, see Takeuchi Yō, Kakushin gensō no sengoshi (Tokyo: Chūō kōron shinsha, 2011). 81. Many of the professors took up positions at various private institutions, though others ultimately returned to Kyoto Imperial University, drawing criticism from those who “remained loyal” to their wronged colleague by staying away. The controversy would live on through the postwar era, when Takigawa would go on to be rehired at Kyoto University and later serve as university president. 82.  On the so-called Sawayanagi Incident and its significance to the Takigawa Incident, see Matsuo, Takigawa jiken, pp. 17–70; Marshall, Academic Freedom and the Japanese Imperial University, pp. 68–72. 83.  Inoue Yoshikazu, Nihonshugi to Tokyo Daigaku.

Chapter Four: Surveilling the Right   1.  On the decline of liberalism in Japan, see, for example, the April 1934 special issue on the “Extinction of Liberalism” in Chūō Kōron.   2.  For a discussion of these assassins, see, for example, Richard Storry, The Double Patriots: A Study of Japanese Nationalism (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1956).  3. Keiho-kyoku Hoan-ka, Tokkō Geppō, no. 3 (1935): 1–2.  4. Sano Shigeki, “Saikin no uyoku shisō undō ni tsuite,” in Shakai Mondai Shiryo Kenkyūkai, ed. Showa 13-nen 10-gatsu Shisō jitsumuka kōen sono ichi, Shakai mondai shiryō sōsho (Tokyo: Tōyō bunkasha, 1978), p. 97.   5.  It was not uncommon for nationalist critics to accuse the Japanese imperial government of resembling the bakufu in its alleged usurpation of power from the emperor. See, for example, Minoda Muneki, Gakujutsu ishin (Tokyo: Genri Nippon-sha, 1941), p. 346; Inoue Yoshikazu, Nihon Daigaku to Nihon shugi Nihonshugi to Tokyo Daigaku: Showaki gakusei shisō undō no keifu (Tokyo: Kashiwa shobō, 2008), pp. 213–214.   6.  Sano, “Saikin no uyoku shisō undō ni tsuite,” p. 87.   7.  A notable exception is Gregory Kasza, who examines the tightening censorship of right-wing discourse that occurred during this time. See Gregory J. Kasza, The State and the Mass Media in Japan, 1918–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 137–148.  8. Kerry Smith, A Time of Crisis: Japan, the Great Depression, and Rural Revitalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).  9. Kempei Shireibu, Nihon Kempei Showa shi (Tokyo: Gannandō shoten, 1970), pp. 632–634.



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10.  On the reform bureaucrats, see Janis Mimura, Planning for Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). 11.  Kempei Shireibu, Nihon Kempei Showa shi, p. 636. 12.  Stephen S. Large, “Nationalist Extremism in Early Showa Japan: Inoue Nisshō and the ‘Blood-Pledge Corps Incident,’ 1932,” Modern Asian Studies 35, no. 3 (2001): 544. 13.  Statement made by Gotō Eihan, a student at the Imperial Japanese Army Academy who was among the group that killed Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi. Quoted in Minoda Muneki, Gakujutsu ishin genri Nippon (Tokyo: Genri Nippon-sha, 1933), p. 650. 14. Smith, Time of Crisis, pp. 80–83. 15. Minseitō, “Shisō taisaku yōkō,” in Chian iji hō, ed. Okudaira Yasuhiro (Tokyo: Misuzu shobō, 1973), pp. 198–199. 16.  Ibid., p. 199. 17. Seiyūkai, “Shisō taisaku yōkō,” in Chian iji hō, p. 201. 18.  Abe Genki, Showa dōran no shinjitsu (Tokyo: Hara shobō, 1977), pp. 1, 17–30. See also Ito Takashi, Shōwa shoki seijishi kenkyū (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku shuppankai, 1969), which examines the political history of the 1930s through the issue of the London Naval Treaty. 19. Tetsuo Kobayashi, “The London Naval Treaty, 1930,” in Japan Erupts: The London Naval Treaty and the Manchurian Incident, 1928–1932, ed. James William Morley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 12–25. 20. Katō Yūzaburō, “Hijōji to Tokkō Keisatsu,” Keisatsu kyōkai zasshi, no. 4 (1935): 24; Kanbayashi Mikio, “Keisatsu seishin sakkō no ninmu,” Keisatsu kyōkai zasshi, no. 5 (1935): 19–20. Both the above cited in Hayashi Hirofumi, “Nihon fashizumu keiseiki no Keihokyoku kanryō,” Rekishigaku kenkyū, no. 541 (1985): 3. 21.  Aketa Takumi, Tokkō hikkei (Tokyo: Shinkōkaku, 1932), pp. 1–4. 22. Tipton, Japanese Police State, p. 131. 23. Katō, “Hijōji to Tokkō Keisatsu,” p. 26. 24.  Abe Genki, Showa dōran no shinjitsu, p. 101. See also Naiseishi Kenkyūkai, ed., Abe Genki-shi danwa sokkiroku (Tokyo: Naiseishi kenkyūkai, 1977), pp. 82–83. 25.  Okuno Shintarō, “Gakuhi Minoda Muneki no anyoku,” p. 52. 26.  Minoda Muneki, Gakujutsu ishin genri Nippon, pp. 656–657. 27.  Quoted in Minoda, Gakujutsu ishin genri Nippon, p. 650. 28.  Ibid., p. 652. 29.  Quoted in Minoda, Gakujutsu ishin genri Nippon, p. 710. Minoda quotes an article from the Tokyo Nichi Nichi shinbun, October 29, 1933. 30.  Ōno Rokuichirō, “Sōkan zaishoku jidai no omoide,” Jikei, no. 8 (1957), as quoted in Taikakai, ed., Naimushōshi, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Chihō zaimu kyōkai, 1970), pp. 885–886. 31.  Reported in Osaka Mainichi shinbun, December 21, 1934. 32.  This is according to Miyashita Hiroshi, who was one of many officers reassigned to Section Two from Section One around that time. Section Two carried eight squads (han); the first six were assigned to nationalist and right-wing movements, while the other two were assigned to religious movements. See Miyashita Hiroshi, Tokkō no kaisō: Aru jidai no shōgen (Tokyo: Tahata shoten, 1978), pp. 140–141. 33.  See, for example, Tokkō keisatsu shiryō, no. 12 (1929): 151. The issue contains a chart of principal groups of social movements. A thorough study on the history of the word “right wing” is yet to be written, though Asaba Michiaki’s Uyoku to sayoku (Tokyo: Gentōsha, 2006) is informative. Asaba places the earliest known usage of “right wing” to refer to Japanese “reactionary groups” or “anticommunism” in 1930, which is contemporaneous with Sagoya Tomeo’s attack on Hamaguchi Osachi (p. 128). The word was used in reference to political movements abroad (as well as positions in team sports), particularly in the context of the French Revolution, at a much earlier date.

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Notes to Pages 102–109

34. Tipton, Japanese Police State, p. 97; Naiseishi Kenkyūkai, Abe Genki-shi danwa sokkiroku, p. 56. 35.  While it may seem more accurate to gloss kokkashugi undō as “statist” organizations, as kokka is generally translated as “state” in the social sciences, the organizations and individuals that the Tokkō was tracking in these publications more accurately fit the label of nationalists. In fact, more often than not these organizations and individuals were not only opposed to the Japanese state and its leadership but possessed no clear idea of what a postrevolutionary/restoration state would look like. 36.  For example, for many of the top-level police bureaucrats in the Home Ministry relevant to this study, the Home Ministership of Suzuki Kisaburō under the Tanaka cabinet of 1927 was still fresh in memory. Suzuki, a longtime official in the Justice Ministry and a Seiyūkai party leader, appointed Justice officials with Seiyūkai affiliation in top positions in the Home Ministry, shocking many veteran bureaucrats of the latter. Matsumoto Gaku, a Home Ministry veteran who was appointed Police Bureau chief after the assassination of Inukai, was a case in point. Matsumoto, who was generally seen as affiliated with the opposition Minseitō (though he claims this was not intentional on his part), was demoted and ultimately relieved of his duties under the Tanaka cabinet. When Suzuki returned to the head of the Justice Ministry and the Home Ministry under the Inukai cabinet in 1932, Matsumoto submitted his resignation in protest. On Matsumoto’s discussion of these personnel issues, see Naiseishi Kenkyūkai, ed., Matsumoto Gaku-shi danwa sokkiroku jō (Tokyo: Naiseishi kenkyūkai, 1967), pp. 128–131, as well as Matsumoto Gaku Nikki (Tokyo: Yamakawa shuppansha, 1995), p. 52. 37.  See Abe Genki, Showa dōran, pp. 150–151. 38.  For example, the issue of the military police Thought Reports immediately following the May 15 incident of 1932 is devoted to analyzing responses to the incident as expressed in printed materials. See Shisō ihō, no. 30 (1932), reprinted in Shisō ihō (Tokyo: Fuji shuppan, 1990). 39.  Shisō ihō, no. 34 (1933), reprinted in Shisō ihō (Tokyo: Fuji shuppan, 1990), pp. 451–452. 40. Ward, Thought Crime, pp. 3–15. 41.  For an overview of some of the representative figures of agrarianism (nōhonshugi), see Havens, Farm and Nation in Modern Japan. 42. Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan. 43.  For more on this process and its context in the broader history of the Peace Preservation Law, see Nakazawa Shunsuke, Chian iji hō: Naze seitō seiji wa “akuhō” o undaka (Tokyo: Chūkō shinsho, 2012), pp. 145–167. 44.  Ogino Fujio, ed., Chian iji hō kankei shiryōshū dai ni kan (Tokyo: Shin Nihon shuppansha, 1996), p. 54. 45.  Ibid., p. 53. 46.  Ibid., pp. 51, 53–54. 47.  Naiseishi Kenkyūkai, Abe Genki-shi danwa sokkiroku, pp. 67–68. 48.  We might say that the publication of Kokutai no hongi (The essence of the national polity) by the Ministry of Education in 1937 was an attempt by the government to once and for all articulate an orthodox definition of kokutai. For a detailed analysis of the disagreements and conflicts that ensued in putting together that project, see Konno Nobuyuki, Kindai Nihon no kokutai-ron. See also chapter 4 in Alan Tansman, The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 49.  For more thorough treatments of Minobe’s position and the controversies surrounding his theories, see Frank O. Miller, Minobe Tatsukichi: Interpreter of Constitutionalism in Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965); and Skya, Japan’s Holy War. 50.  Minoda Muneki, “Kikansetsu to fasshizumu tono shisōteki jissaiteki kankei,” Genri Nippon 11, no. 3 (1935): pp. 31–32. Also included in Minoda Muneki zenshū 6:545.



Notes to Pages 109–116

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51.  Here Minoda cites Minobe’s essay “Gendai seikyoku no tenbō,” published in the Tokyo Asahi Newspaper, January 3, 1935. There Minobe speaks of selfishness and corruption as the essential weakness of party politics, going so far as to say that this weakness had been displayed in plain view to the public over the past ten or so years. 52. Minoda Muneki, “Kikansetsu to fasshizumu to no shisōteki jissaiteki kankei,” Genri Nippon 11, no. 3 (1935): 32. 53.  Though not specifically in reference to the movement, Fuke Takahiro refers to rightist and state socialist thought as searching for an “ultrastate” (chōkokka), or an alternative vision of the state beyond what existed in reality. In doing so, Fuke is drawing from Hashikawa Bunsō’s discussion of ultrastatism, an alternative gloss on Maruyama Masao’s chōkokkashugi, which is often translated into English as “ultranationalism.” See the discussion in the introduction and conclusion of Fuke Takahiro, Senkan-ki Nihon no shakai shisō: “Chōkokka” eno furontia (Kyoto: Jinbun shoin, 2010), as well as Hashikawa’s commentary in Hashikawa Bunsō, Chōkokkashugi. 54.  For a history and account of activities of the IMRA, see Richard J. Smethurst, A Social Basis for Prewar Japanese Militarism: The Army and the Rural Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). Smethurst briefly discusses how exreservists remember the organ theory incident, pp. 176–178. 55.  Tobe Ryōichi, “Teikoku zaigō gunjinkai to seiji,” in Senkanki Nihon no shakai shūdan to nettowāku: Demokurashī to chūkan dantai, ed. Takenori Inoki (Tōkyō: NTT shuppan, 2008), p. 71. 56.  Shakai Mondai Shiryō Kenkyūkai, ed., Iwayuru “Tennō Kikansetsu” o keiki to suru Kokutai Meichō Undō (Kyōto: Tōyō bunkasha, 1975), p. 115. 57.  See Kanda Akifumi, “Kokutai meichō undo to Seiyūkai,” Nihon Rekishi 672 (2004) for a more detailed analysis of the relation between the Kokutai Meichō movement and the political parties. 58.  Hiranuma was a longtime leader of the Kokuhon-sha, a nationalist organization with a massive membership. Minoda got his start as a Japanist intellectual through Kokuhon-sha networks and publications. On Hiranuma and the Kokuhon-sha, see Szpilman, “Politics of Cultural Conservatism.” 59.  Keiho-kyoku Hoan-ka, Tokkō Geppō, no. 3 (1935): 2–35. 60.  The Tokkō was especially attuned to those labeling the “crimes” of Minobe’s theories and the leniency of the Okada cabinet as deserving of capital punishment. For examples of the use of the bakufu imagery by nationalist activists, see especially the October 1935 issue of the Monthly Bulletin following the second statement by the Okada cabinet. 61. Miyazawa Toshiyoshi, ed., Tennō kikansetsu: Shiryō wa kataru (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 1974), pp. 639–640 (words in parentheses added by me). 62.  It is worth remembering, however, that the menace of patriotic participants in popular politics also played an important role in producing laws of political suppression. The 1887 Peace Preservation Ordinance was passed in response to violent sōshi gathering in the capital in opposition to unequal treaty negotiations. The first elections in Japan featured sōshi who made voting difficult for opposition party supporters, prompting intervention by the police. See Eiko Maruko Siniawer, Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists: The Violent Politics of Modern Japan, 1860–1960 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), pp. 48, 64–70. The Marxist critic Tosaka Jun produced an interesting analysis of the violence group hunt conducted by the police, focusing on broader ideological issues. See “The Police Function,” translated by Ken Kawashima, as well as Kawashima’s analysis of that piece in his essay “Notes toward a Critical Analysis of Chronic Recession and Ideology: Tosaka Jun on the Police Function.” Both were included in Tosaka Jun, Tosaka Jun. 63.  Quoted in “Iwayuru bōroykudan gari to shinbungai,” Shinbun to shakai (Newspaper and society) 6 (June 1935): 25.

184

Notes to Pages 116–126

64. Ibid. See also Satō Takumi, “Nihonshugi janarizumu no eikōdan: ‘Shinbun to shakai’ no kiseki,” in Takeuchi Yō and Satō Takumi, Nihon shugiteki kyōyō no jidai. 65.  See Tosaka Jun’s observations and analysis of the violence group hunt in Tosaka Jun, Tosaka Jun, “Police Function.” 66.  I have not been able to independently verify Ohara’s actual words. Minoda states that the comment occurred at a meeting on May 22. See Genri Nippon 11, no. 5 (1935): 3. 67.  Minoda Muneki, “Ohara hōsō no mōhan o unagasu,” Genri Nippon 11, no. 5 (1935): 3. 68.  Mitsui Kōshi, “Shōsoku,” Genri Nippon 11, no. 7 (1935): 61. 69. Uemura cites the above comments by Mitsui in making this point. See Uemura Kazuhide, ‘Nihon’ e no toi o meguru tōsō, pp. 215–217. 70.  See, for example, Minoda Muneki, “Minobe hakase no ‘kokutai henkaku’ shisō ni taisuru genriteki sōgōteki hihan,” Genri Nippon 15, no. 1 (1935): 33. 71.  Mitake Jōshi, Gokanen o kaerimite (Tokyo: Kokutai Yōgo Rengōkai, 1937), p. 156. 72.  Ibid., pp. 154–155. 73.  See “Iwayuru kikansetsu hantai undō no jōkyō” in the July 1935 issue of Tokkō geppō. 74.  Stalker, Prophet Motive, p. 182. Stalker cites the Shakai undō no jōkyō of the Home Ministry. 75.  Cited in Itō Takashi, “Kaisetsu: Chian iji hō, Tokkō keisatsu, Nihon Kyōsantō,” in Tokkō no kaisō: Aru jidai no shōgen (Tokyo: Tahata shoten, 1978), p. 312. Karasawa also mentions the possibility of the Showa Shinseikai funding right-wing organizations in the interview cited in note 61. 76.  Interestingly, as Nancy Stalker notes, the suppression of the Ōmoto-kyō featured the first application of the Peace Preservation Law to a religious institution. Both the Peace Preservation Law and the Special Higher Police had been expanded in recent years to include the prosecution and surveillance of religious organizations. See Stalker, Prophet Motive, p. 183; Ogino, Tokkō keisatsu taisei shi, pp. 284–285. In examining the suppression of new religions and the expansion of the jurisdiction of the Special Higher Police to include religious organizations, Sheldon Garon pushes back against the notion that this was in order to contain right-wing politics. Still, in the specific case of the Ōmoto-kyō, we can say that its Showa Shinseikai and its relationship to other right-wing organizations was an important element in the police’s attempt to destroy the organization. See Garon, Molding Japanese Minds, pp. 70–80. 77. Ogino, Tokkō keisatsu taisei shi, pp. 322–325.

Chapter Five: The Dream of Intellectual Leadership   1.  See, for example, William Miles Fletcher’s discussion of the Showa Research Association in The Search for a New Order: Intellectuals and Fascism in Prewar Japan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982) and Sheldon Garon’s discussion of feminist leaders involved in mobilization efforts in Molding Japanese Minds, pp. 140–145.  2. See chapter 1 for a brief discussion of Miyake Setsurei and Kuga Katsunan. On Tokutomi Sohō, see John D. Pierson, Tokutomi Sohō, 1863–1957: A Journalist for Modern Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).   3.  On this issue, see also Ōsawa Satoshi, Hihyō mediaron: Senzenki Nihon no rondan to bundan (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2015), especially the introductory chapter.   4.  Teikoku Daigaku Shinbun, ed., “Sōgō zasshi o kataru zadankai.” Teikoku Daigaku shinbun, (November 30, 1938), p. 5.   5.  On censorship of the media in prewar Japan, see Kasza, State and the Mass Media in Japan, 1918–1945; Satō Takumi, Genron tōsei: Jōhōkan Suzuki Kurazō to kyōiku no kokubō kokka (Tokyo: Chūō kōron shinsha, 2004); and Jonathan E. Abel, Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).



Notes to Pages 127–133

185

  6.  See Samuel Perry, Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan: Childhood, Korea, and the Historical Avant-Garde (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014) and the introduction to Heather Bowen-Struyk and Norma Field, ed., For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution: An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), pp. 1–13.  7. See, for example, the roundtable on the leadership of literature in Kōdō 2, no. 11 (1934); Aono Suekichi, “Bungaku no shidōsei towa nanzoya,” in Bungei to Shakai (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1936): pp. 93–105; and Funayama Shin’ichi, “Seiji hyōron no shidōsei,” Seikai ōrai 8, no. 9 (1937).   8.  Minoda’s review article appeared in the January 1939 issue of Genri Nippon. The roundtable appeared in the Teikoku daigaku shinbun in late November 1938.   9.  Minoda Muneki, “Chishiki kaikyū saikyōiku-ron,” Genri Nippon 15, no. 1 (1939): 54. Reprinted in Minoda Muneki zenshū 5:1145–1166. 10. “Sōgō zasshi o kataru zadankai,” Teikoku Daigaku shinbun, November 30, 1938, p. 5. 11.  Mark Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan’s Imperialism, 1895–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Mimura, Planning for Empire; Hiromi Mizuno, Science for the Empire: Scientific Nationalism in Modern Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Aaron Stephen Moore, Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). 12. Moore, Constructing East Asia, p. 93. 13. Elsewhere Minoda complains that Japan’s imperial universities are “comprehensive” in name only, save for the fact that the buildings are in the same location. He argues that the only solution is for Japan’s education systems and intellectual culture to undergo a scholarly restoration (gakujutsu ishin). See Minoda Muneki, Gakujutsu ishin, pp. 67–68. 14.  For more on Miki’s ideas and their political and intellectual context, see works such as Fletcher, Search for a New Order and John Namjun Kim, “The Temporality of Empire: The Imperial Cosmopolitanism of Miki Kiyoshi and Tanabe Hajime,” in Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History: Colonialism, Regionalism and Borders, ed. Sven Saaler and J. Victor Koschmann (London: Routledge, 2007). 15.  For an analysis of Miki’s relation to the so-called Iwanami Literati, see, for example, Yamamoto Ryōsuke, “Iwanami Bunkajin Miki Kiyoshi no shuppatsu to sono shiso: Shuppan, kyoyo, kokyoken,” Nihon Bungaku 58, no. 11 (November 2009). 16.  See “Dokushoshi ni kisu: Iwanami bunko hakkan ni saishite,” available on the back page of any compact bunko-size paperback published by Iwanami. 17.  See “Jikyoku no shisō no dōkō,” Miki Kiyoshi zenshū, vol. 15 (Tōkyō: Iwanami shoten, 1966), p. 87. In a similar vein, Maruyama Masao would argue in the early postwar period that the 2.26 Incident marked the shift in the dominant form of Japanese fascism from a movement from below to control from above. See the discussion in the introduction. 18.  Arakawa Ikuo, Miki Kiyoshi (Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten, 1968), p. 172. 19. Fletcher, Search for a New Order, p. 111. 20.  Arakawa Ikuo, Miki Kiyoshi, p. 191. For a treatment of Miki’s engagement with the term “techne” (gijutsu) particularly in relation to art (geijutsu) that also engages Arakawa’s work, see Akamatsu Tsunehiro, “Miki Kiyoshi ni okeru gijutsu no mondai,” Jinbun kagaku ronshu 17 (1983): 35–44. 21.  See Kim, “Temporality of Empire,” as well as Lewis E. Harrington, “Miki Kiyoshi and the Showa Kenkyūkai: The Failure of World History,” Positions 17, no. 1 (2009): 43–72, for critical introductions to the “cooperativism” of Miki and the Showa Kenkyūkai. 22.  Showa Kenkyūkai, “Kyōdōshugi no tetsugakuteki kiso,” in Gappon: Shin Nihon no shisō genri, Kyōdōshugi no tetsugakuteki kiso, Kyōdōshugi no keizai rinri (Tokyo: Seikatsusha, 1941), p. 103. 23.  Ibid., p. 110.

186

Notes to Pages 133–136

24.  Minoda Muneki, Gakujutsu ishin, p. 334. Minoda at times also likened “Minsei” to a bakufu-like government. By making this link, Minoda was suggesting that, like the bakufu, a party-ruled government represented the will of a “people” rather than the emperor. Until the will of the people mirrored that of the emperor through a process of moral suasion and thought guidance, according to Minoda, democracy would not work in Japan. See, for example, Minoda Muneki, “Teikoku Daigaku no gakujutsuteki jichi munōryoku,” Genri Nippon 14, no. 8 (1939): 9. On Minoda’s criticism of the Minseitō for its name, see “Minseitō no kyōgyaku tōmei to Seiyūkai no dōzai,” Genri Nippon 12, no. 1 (1936): 48–61. 25.  This did not mean that Minoda believed that parliamentary politics was not possible in Japan. Rather, he believed that parliamentary politics truly run according to the stipulation of the Imperial Constitution would reflect the imperial will. This would mean that cabinet ministers needed to successfully execute their duty of hohitsu. Minoda imagined a time in which Japan would be able to return to a parliamentary system, a proposal of delaying democratic institutions not unlike those proposed in the Meiji era by intellectuals like Katō Hiroyuki. 26. Takano Kunio, Tennōsei kokka no kyōikuron: Kyōgaku Sasshin Hyōgikai no kenkyū (Tokyo: Azumino shobō, 1989), pp. 82–85. 27. Ibid. 28. Shōgimen Takashi, Genron Yokuatsu: Yanaihara jiken no kōzu (Tokyo: Chūō kōron shinsha, 2014), pp. 81–100, 164–165; Shōgimen Takashi, “Censorship, Academic Factionalism, and University Autonomy in Wartime Japan: The Yanaihara Incident Reconsidered,” Journal of Japanese Studies 40, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 57–85; and Akae Tatsuya, Yanaihara Tadao: Sensō to chishikijin no shimei (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2017), pp. 130–135. On Yanaihara, see also Shōgimen Takashi, “‘Another’ Patriotism in Early Shōwa Japan (1930–1945),” Journal of the History of Ideas 71, no. 1 (January 2010): 139–160. 29.  On these critiques and for a comparison of the Genri Nippon Society and the Kyoto School, see Uemura Kazuhide, “Nihon” eno toi o meguru tōsō. Unlike most targets of the Genri Nippon Society, Tanabe Hajime actually wrote a rejoinder to Minoda, which was published in Genri Nippon in 1937. 30. Marshall, Academic Freedom and the Japanese Imperial University, p. 167. 31.  Takeuchi Yō, “Teidai shukusei undō no tanjō, mōkō, satetsu,” in Takeuchi Yō and Satō Takumi, Nihonshugiteki kyōyō no jidai, p. 34. 32.  For an overview of the history of the Alliance for the Purification of the Imperial Universities, see Arakawa Hidetoshi, “Teidai Shukusei Kisei Dōmei: Showa jūsan-nen kara Showa jūyonn-nen ni kakete,” Nihon Rekishi 256 (September 1969): 99–105. 33.  Takeuchi, “Teidai shukusei undō no tanjō, mōkō, satetsu,” p. 38. Takeuchi notes that among the audience was a young Maruyama Masao, who had attended at the request of his senior colleague Nanbara Shigeru. According to Takeuchi, the growing influence of Japanism at Tokyo Imperial University prompted Nanbara to convince Maruyama to switch disciplines from German political theory to Japanese political theory. On this story, see Takeuchi Yō, Maruyama Masao no jidai: Daigaku, chishikijin, jyānarizumu (Tokyo: Chūō kōron shinsha, 2005). 34.  Arakawa, “Teidai Shukusei Kisei Dōmei,” p. 101. 35.  Takeuchi Yō, Daigaku toiu yamai: Tōdai funjō to kyōju gunzō (Tokyo: Chūō kōron shinsha, 2001). Marshall, Academic Freedom and the Japanese Imperial University, pp. 175–180. 36.  Takeuchi Yō, “Teidai shukusei undō no tanjō, mōkō, satetsu,” pp. 39–40. 37.  Nagahama Isao, ed., “Showa jūni-nendo kokumin seishin sōdōin chūō renmei jigyō gaiyō,” in Kokumin seishin sōdōin undō minshū kyōka dōin shiryō shūsei, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Akashi shoten, 1988), 69–70; “Showa jūsan-nendo kokumin seishin sōdōin chūō renmei jigyō gaiyō,” in Kokumin seishin sōdōin undō minshū kyōka dōin shiryō shūsei, pp. 94–104.



Notes to Pages 137–145

187

38.  Nagahama Isao, ed., “Showa jūgo-nendo kokumin seishin sōdōin chūō renmei jigyō gaiyō,” in Kokumin seishin sōdōin undō minshū kyōka dōin shiryō shūsei, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Akashi shoten, 1988), pp. 294–297. 39.  On the careers of these intellectuals, see Katayama Morihide, Kindai Nihon no uyoku shisō (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2007); Szpilman, “Kanokogi Kazunobu,” 233–280; Uemura Kazuhide, Maruyama Masao to Hiraizumi Kiyoshi: Showa-ki Nihon no seijishugi (Tokyo: Kashiwa shobō, 2004). 40.  On this relationship, see Matsumoto Ken’ichi, Showa-shi o kage de ugokashita otoko. 41.  Inoue Yoshikazu, Nihonshugi to Tokyo Daigaku: Showaki gakusei shisō undō no keifu (Tokyo: Kashiwa shobō, 2008). 42. Imai Seiichi and Itō Takashi, eds., Kokka sōdōin 2 (Tokyo: Misuzu shobō, 1974), pp. 370–372. 43.  For more on Yabe’s clashes with Japanist students, see Inoue Yoshikazu, Nihonshugi to Tokyo Daigaku. 44.  Yabe Teiji, Konoe Fumimaro (Tokyo: Jiji tsūshinsha, 1958), pp. 123, 126–127. 45.  Ibid., p. 129. 46.  Minoda Muneki, Kokubō tetsugaku (Tokyo: Tokyodō, 1941), p. 47. 47.  Ibid., p. 44. 48.  Ibid., p. 122. 49.  Ibid., pp. 100–104. 50. Sugihara Masami, Kokumin soshiki no seijiryoku (Tokyo: Modan Nihon-sha, 1940), pp. 333, 385. Cited in Minoda, Kokubō tetsugaku, p. 46. 51. Minoda, Kokubō tetsugaku, p. 46. 52.  Ibid., p. 47. 53.  Ibid., p. 48. 54. Karlfried Dürckheim, “Yōroppa seishin to Doitsu seishin,” Chūō Kōron 55, no. 6 (1940): 175. 55.  The term “Genri Isuraeru” was coined by Kawamura Mikio, an early member of the Genri Nippon Society and a Christian. Minoda quoted Kawamura frequently throughout his career, including in the Philosophy of National Defense discussed in this chapter. See Minoda, Kokubō tetsugaku, p. 16. 56.  Ideas related to Nazism and Hitler were also hotly debated among other right-wing thinkers and state socialists in Japan. See Fuke Takahiro, Senkan-ki Nihon no shakai shisō, chap. 8. 57.  Minoda Muneki, “‘Nijusseiki no shinwa’ o yomu,” Genri Nippon 15, no. 6 (1939): 25–37. 58. Moore, Constructing East Asia, pp. 92–94. 59.  See Minoda’s discussion of cosmopolitanism in relation to the concept of hakkō ichiu in Gakujutsu ishin (The restoration of scholarship) (Tokyo: Genri Nippon-sha, 1941), p. 746. 60.  See, for example, Minoda Muneki, “Genjitai no seishin kagakuteki bunseki,” Genri Nippon 15, no. 10 (1939): 28. 61.  See the chapter “Nihon seishin to nachisu seishin (The Japanese spirit and the Nazi spirit),” in Minoda’s Gakujutsu ishin, p. 717. Regarding these issues, Minoda notes that he spoke with a man by the name of Braun in charge of cultural affairs at the German Embassy on two occasions, accompanied by professor and former diplomat Fujisawa Chikao, and received his promise that they would submit a formal request back to Germany. See Genri Nippon 15, no. 7 (1939): 71. 62.  See, for example, Michael E. Robinson, “Colonial Publication Policy and the Korean Nationalist Movement,” in The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945, ed. Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 312–343.

188

Notes to Pages 145–150

63.  See, for example, Barak Kushner’s discussion of the difficulties Japanese propagandists faced in China in Thought War, chap. 5. 64.  See Konno Nobuyuki, Kindai Nihon no kokutairon: “Kōkoku shikan” saikō (Tokyo: Perikansha, 2008), especially chapters 3 and 4. The lack of Pan-Asian perspective was not the only source of criticism against The Essence of the National Polity. Others criticized the tract as too utopian and said that the “naturalist” description of the relation between the imperial lineage and its subjects did not do enough to emphasize the importance of the subjective will of the patriotic heroes who had fought for the emperors. Konno argues that the older generation of kokutai theories that emphasized this “natural” relation to the nation proved to be obsolete in the era of total war and was subsequently taken over by a newer generation of kokutai theories that promoted voluntary participation on the part of imperial subjects through the training of everyday actions, a trend exemplified in the sequel to The Essence of the National Polity, Way of the Subject (Shinmin no michi), which appeared in 1941. While I have throughout this book argued for the various ways in which Minoda, Mitsui, and other members of the Genri Nippon Society had privileged subjective agency and personal creativity, Konno places the Genri Nippon Society solidly in the older generation of kokutai theorists, a contention that is not necessarily contradictory to my characterization of the organization. Minoda and Mitsui believed that from the perspective of folk psychology, human agency was always already conditioned by the sociocultural environment within which it operated. For more discussion on these issues, see chapters 1 and 3 of this book. 65. Kushner, Thought War, pp. 10–11. 66. Reprinted in Minoda Muneki zenshū 7:687. Ōtsu Yasushi, a scholar of German thought, was an early collaborator of Mitsui Kōshi, with whom he shared a home prefecture in Yamanashi. Genri Nippon contributors often referred to Ōtsu’s work on the thought of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. 67.  For a refutation of this view of Japan as a monocultural entity through history, see, for example, Amino Yoshihiko, “Deconstructing ‘Japan,’” trans. Gavan McCormack, East Asian History 3 (June 1992): 121–142. 68.  That the egalitarian language of the Showa Research Association was little more than semantics is argued persuasively in John Namjun Kim’s treatment of Miki Kiyoshi and Tanabe Hajime, cited earlier. 69.  Miki Kiyoshi, Miki Kiyoshi zenshū, vol. 17, p. 520. 70.  These arguments closely resembled their attacks on the imperial organ theory discussed in the previous chapter but also included arguments that economic rationalization violated the rights to private property guaranteed under the constitution. 71.  Yamamoto’s liberal, anticommunist stance would continue into the postwar period when he served as an elected member of the Diet with the Liberal Democratic Party. 72. Fletcher, Search for a New Order, p. 153. 73.  See, for example, Hiromatsu Wataru’s treatment in “Kindai no chōkoku” ron: Showa shisōshi eno ichi shikaku (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1989), chap. 6. 74.  Suzuki Teiichi and Kido Nikki Kenkyūkai, Suzuki Teiichi-Shi Danwa Sokkiroku Volume 1: Nihon kindai shiryō sōsho B-4 (Tokyo: Nihon kindai shiryō kenkyūkai, 1971–1974), p. 55. 75.  Genri Nippon 17, no. 10 (1941): 36. 76. While the reviews of Tokutomi and Kumagai were directed at The Restoration of Scholarship, a book covering more general topics of scholarship and not specifically the idea of total war, these were also quite favorable reviews. It should be noted that Kumagai, a native of Fukuoka Prefecture, attended the Fifth Higher School with Minoda, and the two had known each other since that time, which Kumagai mentions in the review. He eventually graduated from the School of Law at Tokyo Imperial University and served in various bureaucratic and administrative positions, including prefectural governor, director of the Bureau of Ideology (Shisōkyoku), and director of the defense administration of Hokkaidō



Notes to Pages 151–157

189

toward the end of the war. Despite these high-ranking positions and proximity to Minoda, there is no visible evidence of collaboration between the Genri Nippon Society and Kumagai, and this review seems to be the only mention of Kumagai in the twenty years of Genri Nippon. 77.  Ryūhoku sonshi, 457. 78.  Hori Yukio, Senzen no kokkashugi undō shi, p. 425. 79.  This is reported in Hosokawa Ryūgen, “‘Nihon Makkāshii’ shimatsuki,” 28. 80. Satō Takumi, “Kaidai,” in Minoda Muneki zenshū 7:756. 81.  Ibid., p. 773. 82.  Hosakawa, “‘Nihon Makkāshii’ shimatsuki,” p. 28. 83.  Ibid., pp. 28–29. 84.  Ryūhoku sonshi, p. 459. 85. Two examples that come to mind are Tosaka Jun and Kobayashi Hideo. Tosaka often displayed his skepticism toward the success of a political system that called for the development of the character of its participants (jinkakushugi), primarily due to its tendency to mask over social inequalities. Though Kobayashi supported the war effort in China, he often expressed ambivalence about the role of intellectual production in guiding the war.

Epilogue 1.  Minoda’s last essay in Genri Nippon was published in the February 1943 issue. 2.  Iwanami Shigeo, the founder of the publishing giant Iwanami shoten, is said to have sent his respects to the Minoda family upon hearing of Minoda’s demise, acknowledging the sincerity of his enemy’s attacks. See Anan Mitsuaki, “Minoda Muneki shōden,” Anga 4 (1974): 71. 3.  As reported by the author of the history of his village, Ryūhoku in Kumamoto Prefecture. See Yatsushirogun Ryūhoku Sonshi Hensan Iinkai, ed., Ryūhoku sonshi (Ryūhoku: Ryūhokumura yakuba, 1973), p. 461. 4.  “Tadayou kunō no gohyōjō: Nabe, kama korobu rōka wo ayumaru,” Asahi shinbun, February 20, 1946, p. 3. 5.  Comment by Satō Tadao. See “Sensō to Heiwa,” Gikyoku zenshū, vol. 16 (Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Sentā, 1998), p. 87.

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Index

Abe Genki, 94–95, 97, 107 Abe Jirō, 17 affect: and nationalism, 10–11, 25, 27, 35–40, 76–77, 98–99, 103–104; and reason, 4, 132, 140, 144, 162n8; and poetry, 18–22, 29–30, 35. See also faith; nationalism; vitalism; waka agrarianism, 182n41. See also farmers; Gondō Seikyō; Tachibana Kōsaburō Akane, 12, 17, 19, 21–22, 28, 51, 53, 163–164nn5–6, 164n19. See also Genri Nippon; Life and Representation Alliance for the Purification of the Imperial Universities (Teidai Shukusei Kisei Dōmei), 135 anguish (hanmon), 18, 23–24, 165n23 Arakawa Ikuo, 131–132 Araki Sadao, 81, 135, 137, 178n57 Araragi, 21, 51, 164n19 army, 45, 98, 118, 148, 150, 156, 181n13; Control Faction (Tōsei-ha), 111, 138, 178n57; Imperial Way faction (Kōdō-ha), 81, 111, 138, 178n57. See also Imperial Military Reserve Association; Kenpeitai Asahi Heigo, 44–45 Asahina Chisen, 170n12 Ashibi, 18, 21, 164n6 assassination, 44, 62, 90, 92–94, 96, 99–102, 107, 112, 182n36. See also Asahi Heigo; Blood Pledge Corps Incident; February

26 Incident; May 15 Incident; Shimpeitai Incident; terrorism august composition (gyosei), 34–39 Awaya Ken, 80, 178n61, 178n63 bakufu, 91, 107, 114, 119–120, 138, 140, 148, 152, 180n5, 183n60, 186n24; bakuri (servant of bakufu) as a pejorative, 91, 101 Bergson, Henri, 28 Blood Pledge Corps Incident (Ketsumeidan Jiken), 93, 100–101, 109, 116, 170n13 Buddhism, 22, 37, 146, 165n20, 165n22, 165n29. See also Chikazumi Jōkan; Shinran bushido, 9, 14, 39, 169n75 Cabinet Planning Board (Kikakuin), 149 Campaign to Clarify the Kokutai (Kokutai meichō undō), 85, 110–112, 118, 120, 126, 136, 138, 141, 183n57 censorship, 1–2, 5, 32, 57, 60–61, 66–67, 82, 89, 91, 113, 125, 179n70, 184n5; of right-wing thought, 151, 157, 180n7; self-censorship, 2, 61 Center for Seeking the Way (Kyūdō Kaikan), 22–24, 165n21, 165nn27–28 Central Review (Chūō kōron), 48–50, 121, 123, 132, 142–143, 180n1 Chikazumi Jōkan, 22–25, 27, 165n22, 165n27

203

204 Index China, 50, 86, 124–125, 127–128, 131–132, 136, 145, 167n51, 188n63, 189n85. See also Sino-Japanese War Christianity, 22, 24, 33, 187n55 communism, 8; anticommunism, 5, 49–50, 53, 55, 58, 65, 67, 78–86, 106–107, 181n33. See also Lenin, Vladimir; Marxism; socialism Communist International, 66, 68, 74 Communization of Judicial Officers Incident (Shihōkan sekka jiken), 82, 88 comprehensiveness, 128–130, 138, 185n13 Confucianism, 37, 146 conscription, 9, 39, 57 constitution, 61, 90, 94, 98, 104, 188n70; and the emperor, 13, 49, 85–86, 88, 95, 108–111, 141, 148; and popular politics, 45–46, 54, 172n43, 186n25. See also Imperial Organ Theory Incident; London Naval Treaty; minponshugi; Taisho Political Crisis cooperativism (kyōdōshugi), 132–133, 145, 148, 185n21 crisis: in economy, 43, 56, 93; and political violence, 93, 98, 103–104; in thought, 79, 81. See also Taisho Political Crisis Dai-Nippon Kyōka Dantai Renmei, 49, 56 Deguchi Onisaburō, 47, 118, 170n16. See also Ōmoto-kyō; Showa Shinseikai de Man, Hendrik, 74–77, 162n10, 175n34, 176nn43–44, 176n48 democracy, 6, 41–43, 54–56, 132–133, 156, 158, 176n43; Japanism and democracy, 47, 52, 63; and moralism 12, 55–56, 63, 186n24. See also minponshugi; Taisho democracy Diet, Imperial: and academic suppression, 2, 82–85, 88, 108, 111; criticism of, 2, 103, 128, 134, 141; and the Peace Preservation Law, 59–60, 106 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 23, 69, 124 Dürckheim, Karlfried, 142–143 Education, Ministry of: and academic suppression, 52, 66, 78, 84–85, 135, 179nn77–78; Committee for the Renewal of Morality and Scholarship, 134; Institute for the Research of National Spirit Culture, 80, 148, 179n71; and Japanist scholarship, 12, 67, 79–83, 136,

177n56, 178n61, 182n48; Student Division, Bureau of Professional Education Affairs, 78. See also shisō zendo emotion. See affect emperor, 50, 90–92, 97, 99, 116–117; and absolute political power, 44, 47, 49, 54, 87, 97, 103, 108–112, 134, 141, 144–145, 148; and capitalism, 60, 105; and democracy, 54–55, 59; as the embodiment of the nation, 10, 12, 14–16, 26, 32, 34–40, 133; as moral foundation, 47, 49, 59, 63, 139–140. See also constitution; Hirohito; kokutai, Mutsuhito; Yoshihito Endō Tomosaburō (Musui), 47 Essence of the National Polity (Kokutai no hongi), 136, 145, 182n48, 188n64 ethnos. See folk Etō Genkurō, 108, 110 faith, 21–22, 154, 165n20; and nationalism, 22–27, 38–40, 142–143 farmers, 39, 44, 93, 102, 105, 171n30; Mitsui Kōshi’s disputes with, 52–54, 59, 61, 63, 171n32 fascism: as the aestheticization of politics, 38; discourse on, 6, 49, 109, 113, 127, 162n7, 170n23, 174n5, 185n17; and fascist minimum, 8, 162nn12–13; and Japanism, 7–11, 39, 131; according to Minoda Muneki, 10, 109, 134, 143; as totalitarianism, 8, 162n14; and vitalism, 4, 11, 75 February 26 Incident, 93, 96, 100–102, 114–115, 118–120, 185n17 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 143, 188n66 Fifth Higher School, 4, 51, 67, 188n76 First Higher School, 4, 17, 23–24, 32, 165n28 folk (ethnos, minzoku): and class, 66, 72; and emotion, 10; and psychology, 25–26. See also nationalism; vitalism Fujimura Misao, 24 Fukumoto Kazuo, 67–68, 72–74, 127, 174nn9–10, 174n34, 174n36, 175n38 Fukuzawa Yukichi, 146 Funayama Shinichi, 161n6, 173n56, 185n7 Gandhi, Mahatma, 10, 143 Garon, Sheldon, 56, 172n38, 184n76 (chap. 4), 184n1 (chap. 5) General Election Law, 42, 59–60, 62

Index 205 Genri Nippon (magazine): attacks of academics published in, 2, 71, 82, 84, 109, 117, 180n79; early years, 12, 34, 51, 67, 70, 177n55; final years, 13, 151–154, 155, 189n1; genealogy, 51, 69; under the Newspaper Law, 78; political connections, 80, 83, 149–150, 177n56, 178n61; political disposition of contributors, 10, 35, 130, 143, 188n66; reputation, 1, 67. See also Akane; Life and Representation Genri Nippon Society: campaigns of, 41, 51, 61, 81–86, 108–113, 135–137, 173n52, 186n29; final years, 151–154, 155–158; influence of, 2–5, 10, 65, 77, 98; members of, 165n29, 178n61, 187n55; origins of, 1, 7, 12, 17, 31, 35, 51–53, 58–59, 67–70, 143, 146–147; partners of, 11, 26, 61, 77–81, 114, 116–117, 143, 179n71, 188n76; scholarship on, 162n7, 186n29, 188n64 German idealism, 4, 19, 21, 69, 74, 76 Goethe, 12, 28, 143 Gondō Seikyō, 51 Gotō Eihan, 98–99, 104, 181n13 Gotō Fumio, 108 Great Kantō Earthquake, 57 gyosei. See august composition haiku, 16–20, 28–30, 36 Hamaguchi Osachi, 64, 92–93, 95, 97, 102, 181n33 Hani, Gorō, 69 Hashida Tōsei, 80, 177n56, 178n62 Hashikawa Bunsō, 1, 168n58, 183n53 Hatoyama Ichirō, 84–85 Hayashi Senjūrō, 111 Hibiya Riots, 42–43 Hiraga Incident, 135 Hiraizumi Kiyoshi, 137 Hiranuma Kiichirō, 52, 112, 177n57, 183n58 Hirohito (Showa emperor), 95, 156 Hirose Tetsushi, 51 Hitler, Adolf, 10, 124, 126, 142–144, 187n56 Home Ministry, 62, 80, 90, 96, 178n63, 182n36, 184n74; Police Affairs Bureau (Keihokyoku), 97, 100, 102, 106, 115, 118 House of Peers, 84, 89–90, 108, 112, 135–136 Hori Yukio, 50 Ichiki Kitokurō, 89–90, 112, 117 Ida Iwakusu, 135–136

Iimura Jō, 149–151 Imai Toshiki, 121, 123, 126 Imperial Military Reserve Association (Zaigō gunjinkai), 109–111, 114, 117, 124, 136, 183n54 Imperial Organ Theory Incident, 13, 86, 88–92, 108–120, 134–135, 141, 156, 183n54, 188n70. See also Campaign to Clarify the Kokutai; Minobe Tatsukichi imperial rescripts, 26, 45 168n57, 170n12; Imperial Rescript on Education, 58; Imperial Rescript Regarding the Invigoration of the National Spirit, 57–58, 172n46 Imperial Rule Assistance Association (Taisei yokusankai), 134, 141, 149 imperial subject: rights of, 57; mobilization of, 9, 136, 139–142, 188n64; morality of, 27, 36, 58; relation to emperor of, 36, 38, 136 imperial university, 82, 85, 124, 150, 152 157, 175n36, 177n54, 179n71; accusations of communization, 84, 88, 117. See also Kyoto Imperial University; Tokyo Imperial University Imperial University Newspaper (Teikoku Daigaku shinbun), 122, 124, 126, 135, 139 Inoue Enryō, 22, 32, 165n20 Inoue Junnosuke, 93, 170n13 Inoue Kameroku, 177n56 Inoue Kowashi, 146–147 Inoue Tetsujirō, 33, 50 Inoue Ukon, 51 Inukai Tsuyoshi, 83, 93, 98–100, 112, 181n13, 182n36 Ioki Ryōzō, 43, 137 Itō Sachio, 21–22, 51, 164n6, 165n19 Iwanami Shigeo, 17, 23–24, 130–131, 136, 165n28, 189n2 Iwano Hōmei, 77, 146–147 James, William, 23, 166n33 Japanism: criticism of, 8–10, 39, 61–62, 65, 89, 131, 173n59, 186n33; and fascism, 7–11, 131; genealogy of, 2–5, 10, 31–34, 42–47, 69, 112, 167n51, 168n66, 183n58; of postwar, 41–42, 155–159; as religion, 39–40; scholarship on, 161n6, 163n3, 165n21, 173n55; and state, 77–81, 85, 89–92, 117, 120, 134–139; theories of, 65–67, 129–130, 141–151. See also fascism; nationalism

206 Index Jesus, 10, 26, 143 Japan and the Japanese (magazine), 21, 28, 31–32, 52–54, 79, 137, 177n56 Japan Communist Party, 78, 82, 88 Japan Romantic School, 163n4, 165n20 Jinsei to hyōgen. See Life and Representation Justice Ministry, 66, 82, 90, 101–102, 106–107, 113, 116–117, 163n18, 179n74, 182n36. See also Communization of Judicial Officers Incident Kageyama Masaharu, 163n4. See also Shimpeitai Incident Kaizō, 121, 123–125, 127 Kamei Kan’ichirō, 141 Kanamori Tokujirō, 112 Kanokogi Kazunobu, 137, 170n23 Karasawa Toshiki, 115, 118–119, 184n75 Katsura Tarō, 45–46 Kawahigashi Hekigotō, 28 Kawakami Hajime, 71, 174n9, 175n36, 176n38 Kawamura Mikio, 178n61, 187n55 Kazahaya Yasoji, 60, 173n50 Keio University, 51, 64, 67, 82, 88, 97, 179n71 Keirin Gakumei, 49, 170n19 Kenmu Restoration, 15 Kenpeitai (military police), 102–104, 152, 182n38 Kikuchi Takeo, 84, 108, 135 Kimura Masayoshi, 79–80 Kimura Naotatsu, 106 Kita Ikki, 4, 43, 50–51 Kita Reikichi, 84, 180n80 Kiyozawa Manshi, 22, 165n20 Koizumi Shinzō, 179n71 Kojiki, 37, 62, 140 Kōkoku Dōshikai (Brotherhood for the Advancement of the State), 52, 177n57 Kokuhon Society, 177n57, 183n58 Kokumin Seishin Bunka Kenkyūjo (Institute for the Research of National Spirit Culture). See Education, Ministry of Kokuryūkai (Amur River Society), 114, 137 Kokushikan University, 89, 179n71 kokutai: as a contested concept, 111–113, 117; and the emperor, 92, 96; and Japanism, 33; and national morality, 55, 136; and the Peace Preservation Law, 59–61, 78, 105–107; and the state, 85, 92, 96–97, 100,

105–107, 114, 117–120, 134, 138, 141, 182n48, 188n64. See also Campaign to Clarify the Kokutai; Essence of the National Polity Komatsu Shigeo, 31 Korsch, Karl, 68, 174n10 Koyama Matsukichi, 106 Kropotkin, Pjotr, 52, 56, 79, 177n57 Kuga Katsunan, 32, 123, 179n75, 184n2 Kurokami Shōichirō, 168n66 Kyoto Imperial University, 2, 84–85, 130, 135, 175n36, 178n61, 179n78, 180n81 League for Protecting the Kokutai (Kokutai yōgo rengōkai), 108–109, 114, 117, 136 Lenin, Vladimir, 126, 140; Leninism, 79, 127, 140 lèse-majesté, 89, 108, 118, 135. See also treason liberalism: and fascism, 131, 173n59; and nationalism, 11, 54–55, 63, 131; nationalist attack of, 13, 88, 91–92, 113–114, 180n1; and Taisho era, 42–43, 123, 127 Life and Representation, 28, 51, 53, 57–58, 69, 164n19, 166n35, 172n48. See also Akane; Genri Nippon Lincoln, Abraham, 10, 26, 143 London Naval Treaty, 95, 98, 102–103, 118, 177n57, 181n18 Ludendorff, Erich, 126, 139 Lukács, Georg, 68, 73–74, 174n10, 176n38 Makino Ei’ichi, 82, 85, 179n70 Manchuria, 34, 41, 45, 83 Manyōshū, 15, 17, 37, 62–63, 164n6 Maruyama Masao, 177n56, 183n53, 185n17, 186n33 Marxism, 2; 12, 55, 62, 66–68, 70–71, 74–76, 79, 82, 107, 123, 126–127, 148, 161n5, 162n12, 167n42, 175n34, 176n48, 179n71, 179n78 Masaki Jinzaburō, 81, 111, 178n57 Masaoka Shiki, 12, 16–20, 28, 30, 32, 43, 51, 137, 146, 163n5, 164n8, 164n10, 165n19 Materialism, 7, 79, 176n48; dialectical, 73, 175n38; historical, 55, 66, 71, 74, 140 Matsumoto Gaku, 97, 106, 115, 182n36 Matsumoto Matatarō, 24, 69, 166n30 Matsuo Takayoshi, 83, 179n73, 179n78

Index 207 May 15 Incident, 42, 83, 93, 96–101, 104, 112, 117, 182n38 Meiji emperor. See Mutsuhito Meiji Restoration, 10, 12, 43–47, 94, 99, 104, 114, 120, 170n15 Metropolitan Police, 93, 96, 100, 115, 118, 156 Miki Kiyoshi, 25, 69, 71, 121–122, 124, 126–135, 142, 145, 147–153, 165n21, 185nn14–15, 185n20, 188n68 Minobe Tatsukichi, 82, 85, 95, 157, 178n69, 179n70, 182n49, 183n51; and imperial organ theory, 13, 85–86, 88–91, 108–114, 117, 119–120, 135–136, 183n60. See also Imperial Organ Theory Incident Minoda Muneki: attacks against academics, 61–62, 81–87, 108–113, 134–136, 173n3, 175n36, 177n54, 179n70, 179– 180nn78–79, 186n29; early career, 51–53, 67–68, 177n57, 183n; as fanatic, 1–5, 64–65, 161n5, 174n4; in fiction, 157–158; final years, 41, 151–154, 155–156, 189n1; on intellectuals, 125–30, 133–134, 141–151, 185n13; and Justice Ministry, 82, 88, 117, 179n71, 179n77; on methods of social sciences, 66–77, 175n38; and Ministry of Education, 79–81, 178n62; on mobilization campaigns, 136–141, 186nn24–25, 187n59; scholarship on, 161–162nn6–7, 168n58, 169n2, 178n69, 188n64; Special Higher Police on, 89–90, 107–108; on terrorism, 97–99, 117 minponshugi, 54–55, 63 Minseitō, 94–95, 112, 133, 182n36, 186n24 Mitsui Kōshi: background, 16–17, 164n19, 165n28, 172n48, 177n57, 178n65, 188n66; cosmopolitan influences of, 9–10, 143; as landowner, 52–54, 168n64, 171nn31–32; legacy of, 1–5, 14–16, 41–43, 152, 168n66; in the National Spiritual Mobilization Campaign, 136–137; as a poet, 15, 164n6; on popular politics, 46–47, 52–59, 62–63, 173n59; scholarship on, 163n3, 165n29, 169n2, 172n36, 188n64; on terrorism, 117; theories of experience, 11, 22–27, 69, 166n33, 167n44; theory of poetry, 12, 18–22, 27–31, 34–40, 79, 165n20, 166n30, 166nn35–36, 177n56; weaponization of Peace Preservation Law, 59–62, 135 Miyake Setsurei, 32, 123, 172n35, 184n2 Miyazawa Yutaka, 83–85, 179n74

moralism: as moral suasion (kyōka), 49–50, 55–59, 98–99, 117, 127, 134–136, 141, 152, 172n38, 186n24; and liberalism, 173n59; and nationalism, 11, 12, 55, 63, 97, 163n19, 171n34; and revolution, 51, 68, 73. See also shisō zendō Morito Tatsuo, 52, 56, 70, 79, 177n57 Muhs, Karl, 79 Murobuse Kōshin, 121, 124 Mussolini, Benito, 10, 49, 75, 77, 143 Mutō Akira, 138 Mutsuhito (Meiji emperor): death of, 35, 45; as embodiment of Japaneseness, 143, 147, 168n66; and Imperial Universities, 99; rescripts of, 58, 168n57; waka of 2, 12, 26, 34–40, 63, 79, 143, 146, 168n57, 168n60. See also august composition Nagata Tetsuzan, 111, 178n57 Nakae Chōmin, 6, 170n19 Nakajima Takeshi, 163n3, 165n21 nationalism: as cosmopolitan, 28, 65–66, 86–87, 143; and culture, 146–147; and language, 30, 34–39, 71–72; nationalist movements and, 2–5, 10, 31–34, 42, 47–52, 91–92, 96–97, 110–113; paradox of, 11, 40; and popular politics, 43–47, 54–59, 63, 74–77, 171n34; as religion, 22–27, 71–72, 143; scholarship on, 161n5, 162n7, 173n56, 183n53; and the state, 7–8, 11, 13, 65, 85–86, 99–108, 113–120, 135–136, 157. See also affect; faith; folk; Japanism; moralism nationality preservationism (kokusui hozonshugi), 31, 33 national security, 6, 55, 57, 68, 128, 143, 149 natural science, 29, 31, 69–71, 74 nature: as the object of observation, 18–20, 29, 132, 166n40; and nationalism, 30. See also natural science navy, 45, 95, 111, 156, 171n32; Navy General Staff, 95, 178n57. See also London Naval Treaty Nazism, 49, 134, 142–144, 187n56, 187n61 Negishi Tanka Society, 12, 17–18, 21–22, 27–28, 32, 51, 163–164nn5–6, 165n19 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 28, 33 Nihon shoki, 37, 136 Nishida Kitarō, 1, 4, 23, 25, 61–62, 80, 135, 137, 161n5, 166n33, 173n56

208 Index Odamura Torajirō, 152 Ogawa Heikichi, 83, 179n74 Ohara Naoshi, 116–117, 184n66 Okada Keisuke, 85, 88, 92, 108, 111–115, 118–119, 136, 183n60 Okakura Tenshin, 58, 146 Ōkawa Shūmei, 4, 50 Okuno Shintarō, 64–65, 97, 174n4 Ōmoto-kyō, 47, 118–119, 184n76. See also Deguchi Onisaburō; Showa Shinseikai Ōno Rokuichirō, 100 Ōshio Heihachirō, 46, 170n13 Ōsuga Otsuji, 28–29, 146–147, 166n40 Ōtsu Yasushi, 146–147, 188n66 Ōuchi Hyōe, 52, 135 Pan-Asianism, 50, 58, 137, 145–146, 170n23, 188n64 patriotism: accusations as “fake,” 116–117; and bureaucrats, 10–11, 90–92, 96–97, 101, 106–107, 115; and emotion, 10, 12, 39–40, 97–98, 103–104, 122; monopoly over, 11, 13, 86, 119–120, 183n62; and moralism, 55–59; as rhetorical tool, 16, 26–27, 60–61, 83, 112–113, 158–159. See also affect; faith; nationalism; treason Peace Preservation Law, 7, 42, 52, 78, 89, 173n50, 179n74, 182n43; application to right wing, 104–107, 115, 184n76; impact on nationalist writing, 39, 59–62; poetry. See august compositions; haiku; rensaku; waka police. See Home Ministry; Justice Ministry; Kenpeitai; Special Higher Police political spectrum: adoption by the police, 101; and history, 3, 5–7, 158, 162n10; usage in Japan, 42, 47–52, 170n17 Popular Front Incidents, 135 populism, 43; ancestral land (patriotic) populism, 55–59, 63 private property rights: in the Kojiki, 140; and the Peace Preservation Law, 60–61, 78, 105; and political ideology, 48, 50, 179n70, 188n70 Privy Council, 89–90, 95, 112, 177n57 psychology, 4, 24, 69, 166n30, 167n44; and the limits of reason, 24–26, 140; and nationalism, 25, 30, 40, 71–72, 75–77, 146, 188n64; as the study of immediate experience, 68–71, 74. See also de Man,

Hendrik; Matsumoto Matatarō; Wundt, Wilhelm Publishing Law, 61, 136 reform bureaucrats, 13, 93, 129, 149, 181n10 rensaku, 20, 29–30 Rice Riots of 1918, 46, 55, 170n13 right wing: as a category in historical writing, 3–7, 11, 92, 153–154, 156–159, 161n5, 162n7, 181n33; as a category used by the police, 92, 99–108, 181n32; cosmopolitanism among, 64–66; as “right-leaning” (ukei), 47–52; and the state, 79–80, 88–92, 99–108, 115–116, 119–120, 180n7; variation among, 4, 8, 183n53 Rosenberg, Alfred, 143–144 Russian Revolution, 55, 65, 84, 100, 140, 179n78 Russo-Japanese War, 31, 33–34, 37, 42, 77, 143 Sagoya Tomeo, 64, 92, 102, 181n33 Saionji Kinmochi 45–46, 83 Saitō Minoru, 83, 100, 102, 106, 118, 178n57 Saitō Mokichi, 51, 164n19 samurai, 9, 14, 16–17, 39, 46, 91, 104. See also bushido Sano Shigeki, 90–92, 96, 101–102, 113, 119 Satō Takumi, 62, 8, 173nn55–56 Satō Tsūji, 137, 161n5 Sawayanagi Masatarō, 85, 180n82 Seikyōsha, 31–33, 167n51, 172n35 Seiyūkai, 45, 83, 86, 93–94, 102, 111–112, 182n36 shasei, 17–18, 28, 164n8 Shiga Shigetaka, 32, 167n46 Shikishima Way: as Japanese poetry and ideology, 2, 34–40; and Mitsui Kōshi’s home village, 53; Shikishima Way Group, 2, 58, 143 Shimpeitai Incident, 102, 163n4 Shinran, 22–27, 146–147, 163n3, 165nn20–21, 165n29 Shiode Tamaki, 22, 162n7, 164n6, 164n19, 178n65 shisō zendo (thought guidance), 78–79, 117, 186n24. See also Education, Ministry of Shōtoku, 37, 146–147, 168n66 Showa Research Association, 13, 130, 132–134, 138, 145–153, 184n1, 188n68

Index 209 Showa Restoration 43, 45–47, 91; and electoral politics 62, 173n57; and terrorism 12, 91, 94, 96–99, 114, 119, 170n13 Showa Shinseikai, 47, 118, 184nn75–76 Sino-Japanese War: first, 31–32, 137; second, 86, 120–122, 127, 131, 136, 143, 145, 149 socialism, 42, 48, 137, 158, 176n44; campaigns against, 2, 12–13, 26, 39, 53, 56–60, 65–68, 72, 77–82, 85, 90–91, 99–100, 105–108, 115–116, 177n57, 178n 61, 179nn70–71, 179n74; 179n77; as national socialism, 47, 75–77, 101, 176n43; and opinion journals, 123–127; as science, 68, 74; as state socialism, 43, 49–50, 178n57, 183n53, 187n56 sōgō zasshi (opinion journals), 53, 121–129, 131, 139, 142 Sombart, Werner, 74, 124, 176n38 Special Higher Police (Tokkō): Monthly Bulletin (Tokkō geppō), 89–90, 107, 113, 117; nationalism and, 96–97; in the postwar, 156; suppression of socialism by, 62; suppression of religious organizations by, 181n32, 184n76; surveillance of Japanists by, 40, 85, 89–90, 94–95, 100–102, 107–108, 111, 113–119, 181n32, 182n35, 183n60, 184nn75–76. See also Home Ministry Spencer, Herbert, 18, 164n10 Stalker, Nancy, 118, 170n16, 184n74, 184n76 State Mobilization Law (Kokka sōdōin hō), 122 Suehiro Izutarō, 61, 85, 89 Sugihara Masami, 141 Suzuki Kisaburō, 102, 182n36 Suzuki Tei’ichi, 149–151 synthesis. See comprehensiveness Tachibana Kōsaburō, 51 Taisho democracy, 12, 42–44, 48, 59, 63, 133, 169n4 Taisho Political Crisis, 45–46, 169n8 Taisho Restoration, 12, 43–47, 62, 91, 170nn15–16 Takabatake Motoyuki, 43, 49, 51 Takayama Chogyū, 31–34, 77, 146–147, 167n51 Takeuchi Yō, 62, 173nn55–56 (chap. 2), 173n3 (chap. 3), 186n33

Takigawa Yukitoki: 82, 157, 179n70, 179n73; and the Takigawa Incident, 2, 84–86, 88, 110, 134, 178n61, 179–180nn77–79, 180n82 Tanabe Hajime, 80, 135, 186n29, 188n68 technocracy, 5, 13, 93, 127, 129–134, 138–142, 149, 153 terrorism, 11, 48, 89, 92–97, 99–108, 119, 138. See also Asahi Heigo; assassination; Blood Pledge Corps Incident; February 26 Incident; May 15 Incident; Shimpeitai Incident thought crime, 57, 60–61, 90–92, 97–106, 113, 115–116, 119, 158, 163n18, 183n60 Tokugawa era, 17, 30, 43, 45–47, 91, 104–105, 168n56 Tokutomi Sohō, 123, 149, 184n2, 188n76 Tokyo Imperial University, 4, 17, 22, 24, 51–52, 56, 61, 67, 69, 84–85, 88, 121, 152, 165n28, 166n30, 168n66, 177n57, 178n61, 186n33, 188n76 Tosaka Jun, 8–9, 39, 163n17, 173n59, 183n62, 184n65, 189n85 total war, 43, 120, 124, 136, 138–139, 143, 149–151, 188n64, 188n76 Toyama Mitsuru, 137 treason, 1, 61, 89, 105, 179. See also lèse-majesté Tsuda Sōkichi, 135–136 Uchida Ryōhei, 137 Uchimura Kanzō, 24, 33 Uemura Kazuhide, 117, 184n69, 186n29 Uesugi Shinkichi, 49, 52 unequal treaties, 31–33, 104, 183n62 United States, 26, 41, 55–57, 86, 95, 137, 150, 153, 156–157 Uno Kōzō, 135 violence groups (bōryokudan), 115–119, 183n62, 184n65 vitalism, 4, 11, 26, 39, 49, 63, 66 waka, 12, 14, 17–21, 25, 29–36, 39, 163n3, 163n5, 168n57, 177n56. See also august composition Ward, Max, 104, 172n38 Watsuji Tetsurō, 71, 80 Way of the Subject (Shinmin no michi), 188n64 Whitman, Walt, 10, 12, 26, 28 Wilson, Woodrow, 55, 172n36

210 Index World War I, 50, 55, 57, 65, 75, 171n30 World War II, 3, 16, 47, 86, 165n20, 169n11 Wundt, Wilhelm: influence on Genri Nippon Society, 12, 23–25, 28, 40, 69–72, 143, 166n30, 166n35; popularity in Japan, 25–26; theory of folk, 71–72, 146, 167n44; theory of science, 30–31, 69–72, 76, 166n31, 166n33, 166n35, 175n17, 176n44 Yabe Teiji, 138, 187 Yamakawa Hitoshi, 174n9, 175n36

Yamamoto Katsuichi, 148, 188n71 Yamamoto Sanehiko, 121, 125–126 Yamamoto Senji, 177n54, 179n70 Yanaihara Tadao, 135 Yasukuni Shrine, 12, 14–16, 40, 163n1 Yoshihito (Taisho emperor), 42, 45, 58, 170n12 Yoshino Sakuzō, 172n36; on minponshugi, 54–55, 63, 171nn34–35; on the political spectrum, 48–50; on Taisho Restoration, 46. See also minponshugi

About the Author

John Person is assistant professor of Japanese studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York, where he teaches courses on the history of Japan. He holds degrees from Gustavus Adolphus College and the University of Chicago and was a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA and Hamilton College. He has published articles in the Journal of Japanese Studies and the Journal of the History of Ideas and is the translator of Hiroki Azuma’s General Will 2.0: Rousseau, Freud, Google.

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute Columbia University

Selected Titles (Complete list at http://weai.columbia.edu/publications/studies-weai/) Fighting for Virtue: Justice and Politics in Thailand, by Duncan McCargo. Cornell University Press, 2019. Down and Out in Saigon: Stories of the Poor in a Colonial City, by Haydon Cherry. Yale University Press, 2019. Beauty in the Age of Empire: Japan, Egypt, and the Global History of Aesthetic Education, by Raja Adal. Columbia University Press, 2019. Mass Vaccination: Citizens’ Bodies and State Power in Modern China, by Mary Augusta Brazelton. Cornell University Press, 2019. Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan, by Franz Prichard. Columbia University Press, 2019. The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism: Malthusianism and Trans-Pacific Migration, 1868–1961, by Sidney Xu Lu. Cambridge University Press, 2019. The Power of Print in Modern China: Intellectuals and Industrial Publishing from the End of Empire to Maoist State Socialism, by Robert Culp. Columbia University Press, 2019. Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam, by Claire E. Edington. Cornell University Press, 2019. Borderland Memories: Searching for Historical Identity in Post-Mao China, by Martin Fromm. Cambridge University Press, 2019. Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860–1949, by Alyssa M. Park. Cornell University Press, 2019. The Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War, by Jeremy A. Yellen. Cornell University Press, 2019. Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan, by Max Ward. Duke University Press, 2019. Statebuilding by Imposition: Resistance and Control in Colonial Taiwan and the Philippines, by Reo Matsuzaki. Cornell University Press, 2019.

Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies, by Sayaka Chatani. Cornell University Press, 2019. Fixing Landscape: A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three Gorges, by Corey Byrnes. Columbia University Press, 2019. The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China, by Emily Baum. University of Chicago Press, 2018. Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire, by David Ambaras. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Heroes and Toilers: Work as Life in Postwar North Korea, 1953–1961, by Cheehyung Harrison Kim. Columbia University Press, 2018. Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868–1945, by Kerim Yasar. Columbia University Press, 2018. Making Two Vietnams: War and Youth Identities, 1965–1975, by Olga Dror. Cambridge University Press, 2018. A Misunderstood Friendship: Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, and Sino–North Korean Relations, 1949–1976, by Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia. Columbia University Press, 2018. Playing by the Informal Rules: Why the Chinese Regime Remains Stable Despite Rising Protests, by Yao Li. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Raising China’s Revolutionaries: Modernizing Childhood for Cosmopolitan Nationalists and Liberated Comrades, by Margaret Mih Tillman. Columbia University Press, 2018. Buddhas and Ancestors: Religion and Wealth in Fourteenth-Century Korea, by Juhn Y. Ahn. University of Washington Press, 2018. Idly Scribbling Rhymers: Poetry, Print, and Community in Nineteenth Century Japan, by Robert Tuck. Columbia University Press, 2018. China’s War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making of the Modern State, 1842–1965, by Philip Thai. Columbia University Press, 2018. Forging the Golden Urn: The Qing Empire and the Politics of Reincarnation in Tibet, by Max Oidtmann. Columbia University Press, 2018. The Battle for Fortune: State-Led Development, Personhood, and Power among Tibetans in China, by Charlene Makley. Cornell University Press, 2018. Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan, by Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit. Harvard University Press, 2018. Where the Party Rules: The Rank and File of China’s Communist State, by Daniel Koss. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Resurrecting Nagasaki: Reconstruction and the Formation of Atomic Narratives, by Chad R. Diehl. Cornell University Press, 2018. China’s Philological Turn: Scholars, Textualism, and the Dao in the Eighteenth Century, by Ori Sela. Columbia University Press, 2018. Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan, by Yulia Frumer. University of Chicago Press, 2018. Mobilizing without the Masses: Control and Contention in China, by Diana Fu. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Post-Fascist Japan: Political Culture in Kamakura after the Second World War, by Laura Hein. Bloomsbury, 2018. China’s Conservative Revolution: The Quest for a New Order, 1927–1949, by Brian Tsui. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Promiscuous Media: Film and Visual Culture in Imperial Japan, 1926–1945, by Hikari Hori. Cornell University Press, 2018.

The End of Japanese Cinema: Industrial Genres, National Times, and Media Ecologies, by Alexander Zahlten. Duke University Press, 2017. The Chinese Typewriter: A History, by Thomas S. Mullaney. MIT Press, 2017. Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine, by Hilary A. Smith. Stanford University Press, 2017. Borrowing Together: Microfinance and Cultivating Social Ties, by Becky Yang Hsu. Cambridge University Press, 2017. Food of Sinful Demons: Meat, Vegetarianism, and the Limits of Buddhism in Tibet, by Geoffrey Barstow. Columbia University Press, 2017. Youth for Nation: Culture and Protest in Cold War South Korea, by Charles R. Kim. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017. Socialist Cosmopolitanism: The Chinese Literary Universe, 1945–1965, by Nicolai Volland. Columbia University Press, 2017. The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China, by Dorothy Ko. University of Washington Press, 2017. Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine: Evolutionary Theory and Religion in Modern Japan, by G. Clinton Godart. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017. Dictators and Their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions and State Violence, by Sheena Chestnut Greitens. Cambridge University Press, 2016. The Cultural Revolution on Trial: Mao and the Gang of Four, by Alexander C. Cook. Cambridge University Press, 2016. Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political Economy of Redemption after Empire, by Yukiko Koga. University of Chicago Press, 2016. Homecomings: The Belated Return of Japan’s Lost Soldiers, by Yoshikuni Igarashi. Columbia University Press, 2016. Samurai to Soldier: Remaking Military Service in Nineteenth-Century Japan, by D. Colin Jaundrill. Cornell University Press, 2016.