Fascist Moments: New Research on Twentieth-Century Japanese Aesthetics and Ideology

Studies on the interwar and war years done during the past decades have shown a certain reluctance to apply the term "fascism" to the Japanese case. As Alan Tansman, editor of The Culture of Japanese Fascism, explains in his introduction, among American scholars-and, we might add, in studies in other Western languages as well-the prevailing consensus was that "the Japanese case is so dissimilar [to the European] that it is meaningless to speak of Japan in the 1930s as a 'fascist' political system" (pp. 20-21).¹ So, by the mid-1980s, the term "fascism" appeared to have "become analytically useless in both the United States and Japan" (p. 21). Instead, scholars preferred to speak of and deal with Japan as a system of emperor-worshipping militarism or totalitarianism. As Kevin M. Doak and Richard Torrance demonstrate in the essays they contributed to this volume, however, the term has in fact been applied to Japan since the 1930s by Japanese critics and intellectuals such as Marxist philosopher Tosaka Jun (1900-1945). Also, it should be noted that recent Japanese scholarship likewise refers to fascism in Japan, as Tansman readily acknowledges in referring to studies and edited volumes by Ban Pō, Nagahama Isao, Eguchi Keiichi, and Yoshimi Yoshiaki.² Tansman's point is, however, that scholars of Japanese history and culture "generally treated the question of fascism in its political manifestations," debating the very applicability of the term and thereby dampening the possibility of analyzing Japan's fascism and examining its cultural manifestations (p. 2). In making this case, Tansman offers a circumspect appraisal of the academic discourse concerning the Japanese history of repression and imperialism in the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century that is clear and convincing. Consequently, it is the relationship between culture and fascism in Japan that is the topic of The Culture of Japanese Fascism, which gathers seventeen essays arranged in five sections according to generic categories. As Tansman makes clear in his introduction, the contributors do not aim at a unified definition of the term, and some even resist applying the term and concept to Japan. Nevertheless, "the volume does argue for the presence of a fascist culture in Japan and for the presence of fascistic ways of healing the crisis of interwar modernity" (p. 1). The question here is whether and how this approach, which avoids a unified definition while somehow taking the existence of fascism for granted, can be considered productive.

Part 1, "Theories of Japanese Fascism," opens with Doak's essay "Fascism Seen and Unseen: Fascism as a Problem in Cultural Representation." He introduces and interprets the writings of two contrasting figures, namely, liberal Christian Imanaka Tsugimaro (1893-1980) and Marxist Tosaka Jun, both of them influential theorists and critics of fascism during the time when fascism "began to appear as a cultural movement in Japan" (p. 33). Tosaka in particular has recently attracted the interest of researchers, as can be seen, for example, from the collection of translations of his texts into German.³ Doak perceptively balances the impact of the two thinkers, and what is more, under the heading "The Ambivalent Legacies of Fascism as Cultural Ideology" (pp. 44-49), he highlights blind spots and continuities of the discourse that connect the period of "historical fascism" to the present day (p. 49). Torrance's paper gives fascinating insights, supported by dense textual evidence, into the Jinmin bunko (The People's Library). This literary monthly founded in 1936 served as "Japan's most articulate, organized, and popular literary opposition to fascism" (p. 57) during the brief period of its existence; it was forced to cease publication in 1938. In "Constitutive Ambiguities: The Persistence...