The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915–1952 by Reto Hofmann, and: Casualties of History: Wounded Japanese Servicemen and the Second World War by Lee K. Pennington, and: Grassroots Fascism: The War Experience of the Japanese People by Yoshimi Yoshiaki (review)

The three works reviewed here were published in 2015, the seventieth anniversary of the end of the most destructive war in history (though the original Japanese edition of Yoshimi Yoshiaki’s work was published in 1987). They are quite varied in focus and framing. Reto Hofmann’s and Yoshimi’s books explicitly and implicitly engage with the concept of fascism, while Lee K. Pennington’s social and institutional history of soldiers and the state contains not a single reference to the term. Yoshimi looks only at the years of war and its immediate aftermath, concentrating mainly on the experience of soldiers in the field and after their return. Hofmann and Pennington likewise focus on the war years, but both begin their accounts in the early twentieth century and address in some measure the postwar aftermath (Pennington) or afterlife (Hof-mann) of their stories. The two new works plow new ground, making it clear that the study of Japan’s road into and through World War II remains worthwhile, even as Yoshimi’s book demonstrates that older works by Japanese scholars continue to merit attention as well as translation. The works by Hofmann and Yoshimi further demonstrate that fascism remains relevant in two ways—the manner in which fascism was understood and pursued during the prewar and wartime years still repays study, and the concept also continues to have value, albeit with shape-shifting aspect, as a framework for understanding that history.

The Fascist Effect engages explicitly and thoughtfully with its title concept. Hof-mann sees fascism as “a mediator between revolution and restoration” and a hybrid “product of global and national history” (p. 7). He argues that fascist ideals and goals could be embraced by those who eschewed some of the fascist means to reach them. He finds in Japan from the 1910s through the 1940s two related and robust discourses, one of Italian Fascism specifically and the other of a more generic, lowercase “fascism.” His study “focus[es] on how contemporary Japanese understood fascism,” thereby “recuperat[ing] a historical debate that has largely been disregarded by historians, even though its extent reveals that fascism occupied a central position in the politics of interwar Japan” (p. 2). Although the book ultimately reads as a subtle argument that Japan indeed had been dominated by fascism as a political and cultural formation by the late 1930s, it does not seek to judge whether Japan should be called a fascist regime. Hofmann rather writes that “Japanese politics and ideology in the first half of the twentieth century were enmeshed in a dialogue with European fascism” (p. 2). His is a book more about the connections that defined a fascist discourse than about a comparison of fascist systems. His most important interpretative move is to argue that the Japanese right wing displaced fascism into various formulations of nativism, such as kokutai or ōdō (imperial way), in an effort to “circumvent” fascism that was, as he significantly contends, itself “part of the fascist logic” (p. 3). Some might feel this approach seeks to have the fascist cake and eat it too, but I find it a convincing and essential claim.

Hofmann begins with a close reading of the career of Shimoi Harukichi between 1915 and 1928. Shimoi lived in Naples and Rome for the first ten years of this span. Hofmann portrays him as an important “propagandist of Italian Fascism” who nevertheless promoted a somewhat different route for Japan than that taken by Mussolini (p. 8). Shimoi was drawn...