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107 4 IDEOLOGUES OF FASCISM Okumura Kiwao and Mōri Hideoto Reform bureaucrats returned from their overseas postings in Manchuria and China with a new mandate to reform Japan, Manchuria-style. Under Prime Minister Konoe, who headed three cabinets between 1937 and 1941, they assumed key bureaucratic posts. Many joined the newly established Cabinet Planning Board and held joint appointments at their old ministries. These bureaucrats drew on the ideas and support of civilian technocrats in reformist bodies such as the Shōwa Research Association, National Policy Research Association, and Social Masses Party. They attended informal, weekly discussion groups of military and civilian technocrats to deliberate on national policy. Through their writings, speeches, and interviews, they promoted a new techno-fascist vision of state, society , and empire. Both the military and civilian programs promoted antiliberal visions and policies , but there were important differences. Reform bureaucrats and their supporters respected the Meiji constitution and preferred to change the system from within. They wanted to strengthen the state’s control over society but rejected notions of nationalizing industries, eliminating the peerage system, or limiting private property. In their vision of the new order, ownership of property was not a requirement for its control. Moreover, they incorporated a new technological worldview and managerial and ethnic nationalist concepts drawn from European fascism into the military’s vision. Finally, their techno-fascist vision was oriented primarily toward progressive, middle class, urban professionals. Scholars of Japanese fascism have tended to emphasize the nativist, agrarian , and pan-Asianist visions associated with right-wing ideologues and radical 108 CHAPTER 4 officers. Maruyama Masao argued that the distinctive features of Japan’s fascist ideology were the Japanese family system, physiocratic celebration of Japanese agriculture and village life, and pan-Asianism. He attributed these characteristics to the social basis of fascism, which he located in the provinces among the “petty bourgeois” class of small landowners, independent farmers, local officials, primary school teachers, and small business owners. Maruyama distinguished this group from the urban, salaried middle class, and especially Japanese intellectuals, who he claimed were too sophisticated and cosmopolitan to stoop to such a low cultural level.1 A number of studies have challenged this view and have shown how elite, progressive intellectuals and left-wing politicians counted among fascism ’s supporters.2 Progressive intellectuals and politicians formed part of a broader group of university-educated, middle-class professionals who represented Japan’s new managerial class. They included company managers, scientists, engineers, technicians , journalists, radio broadcasters, social scientists, and civil servants. These professionals desired neither capitalism nor socialism.3 They preferred to eliminate the privileges of the upper class, alleviate the poverty of the working class, and increase their own power and prestige as administrators within the modern, complex organizations. At the same time, the rise of the managerial class altered the old political landscape of capitalists versus workers. Left-wing, progressiveminded intellectuals and politicians “graduated” from socialism and lost their revolutionary fervor as leaders of labor.4 Under the new order, future political battles would take place between the “inner” and “outer” group of administrators .5 Given the prestige of “insiders,” or officials, in Japan, however, “outsiders” such as intellectuals and politicians would continue to play second fiddle to bureaucrats. In order to fully grasp the modern, technocratic thrust of Japanese fascism, one must examine the ideology of two of its leading ideologues Mōri Hideoto and Okumura Kiwao. English language studies have analyzed the ideas and strategies 1. Maruyama,“The Ideology and Dynamics of Japanese Fascism,” 36–51, 57–59. 2. James Crowley,“Intellectuals as Visionaries of the New Asian Order,” in James W. Morley, ed., Dilemmas of Growth in Prewar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1971),319–373; Fletcher, Search For a New Order; Andrew E. Barshay, The State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); William D.Wray,“Asō Hisashi and the Search for Renovation in the 1930s,”Papers on Japan 5 (Cambridge, MA: East Asia Research Center, Harvard University, 1970), 55–98; Earl H. Kinmonth,“The Mouse that Roared: Saitō Takao, Conservative Critic of Japan’s ‘Holy War’ in China,” Journal of Japanese Studies 25, no. 2 (summer 1999), 331–360. 3. See George Orwell,“Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” Polemic 3 (May 1946). 4. This point was made about postwar managerial groups by Walter A. Weisskopf, “Same Old New Class,” The New York Review of Books 9, no. 10 (December 7, 1967). 5. Ibid. [3.17.154.171] Project MUSE (2024...

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