Japan's Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shinto Ultranationalism (review)

The ideological construction of an emperor-centered national polity, called kokutai ron in Japanese, has long exercised scholars of modern Japan. Narrowly defined, kokutai ron concerned itself with interpretations of Japan's first constitution (the Meiji Constitution). Did this document, ostensibly a gift to the people of Japan from his imperial majesty, leave room for the possibility of parliamentary rule, or did it foreclose any political entity, apart from the sovereign emperor himself, from exercising other than purely advisory influence in governing the country? More broadly defined, kokutai ron established the scaffolding upon which ideologues of various stripes framed modern Japanese nationalism and defined political community, with some variants leading to formulations conducive to a de facto democracy and others lending themselves to totalitarian constructs.

Historians of modern Japanese politics and nationalism have, accordingly, paid considerable attention to this body of ideological and legal discourse in English- as well as Japanese-language works. Scholarship in English includes Richard Minear's study of Hozumi Yatsuka, Japanese Tradition and Western Law: Emperor, State and Law in the Thought of Hozumi Yatsuka (Harvard University Press, 1970); Frank Miller's book Minobe Tatsukichi, Interpreter of Constitutionalism in Japan (University of California Press, 1965); and Carol Gluck's opus on emperor ideology in the Meiji era, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton University Press, 1985). The latest addition to this body of work is Walter Skya's Japan's Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shinto Ultranationalism. Skya traces the history of kokutai ron, with an emphasis on what he calls "State Shintō," from the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution in 1889 to the publication of Kokutai no hongi (The fundamentals of our national polity) by the Ministry of Education in 1937 and identifies what he argues is an important strain of emperor-centered ideology emerging in the Taisho era (1912–26) that has been largely overlooked in English-language historiography.

Skya defines State Shintō as a body of ideology committed to the divinity and absolute sovereignty of the emperor, constructed by its proponents as a bulwark against liberal, secular interpretations of the constitution most prominently represented by the constitutional scholar Minobe Tatsukichi. He argues that, whereas past scholarship has emphasized continuity in State Shintō as a largely conservative orthodoxy from the Meiji era through the 1930s, there is evidence of a major sea change in emperor-centered ideology occurring early in the Taisho era. A new strain of State Shintō, which he describes as "radical Shintō ultranationalism," emerged as a countervailing force to the liberalizing trends of what came to be known as Taisho democracy. This new discourse about an emperor-centered polity, decidedly radical, mass-oriented, and explicitly religious, broke with the family-state trope of the earlier version. It pitted itself against parliamentary liberalism, social democracy, and left-leaning populisms, but it also distinguished itself from other forms of radical nationalism represented, for example, by Kita Ikki. It is radical Shintō, much better adapted to mass politics, Skya argues, that dominated kokutai ron in the 1930s and delivered a decisive blow against the liberal theory of Minobe that regarded the emperor as "an organ of the state."

The book is organized into three parts and nine chapters. Part 1, retracing some well-trodden ground, explores the shaping of conservative State Shintō under the guidance of the constitutional scholar Hozumi Yatsuka and its support of an imperial-absolutist interpretation of the Meiji Constitution. Skya also reviews challenges to such illiberal interpretations by Minobe, whose ideas gave support to the movement for parliamentary government. A chapter devoted to Kita Ikki endeavors to distinguish this radical activist from mainstream Shintō nationalism, conservative or radical, and characterizes him as an outlier with respect to the kokutai ron of the 1920s and 1930s. Part 2, exploring a new area of study in English-language work, examines the emergence of radical Shintō ideology...