Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alan Tansman is Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Writings of Kōda Aya: A Japanese Literary Daughter and a co-editor of Studies in Modern Japanese Literature. Marilyn Ivy is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. She is the author of Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Marilyn Ivy is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University.

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"An extremely provocative and stimulating collection of essays, "The Culture of Japanese Fascism "canvasses a wide array of cultural forms--movies, novels, religious rites, material culture, monuments, and architecture--to show the ways that fascist aesthetics saturated a dispersed cultural field. By focusing on thought and culture, it helps us rethink the turn from modernism to fascism, to understand fascism's effects on everyday life, and to reconsider the reigning conceptions of fascist ideology."--Louise Young, author of "Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism"

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THE CULTURE OF JAPANESE FASCISM

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

MARILYN IVY Foreword: Fascism, Yet?............................................................................................................................viiALAN TANSMAN Introduction: The Culture of Japanese Fascism.....................................................................................................1KEVIN M. DOAK Fascism Seen and Unseen: Fascism as a Problem in Cultural Representation.........................................................................31RICHARD TORRANCE The People's Library: The Spirit of Prose Literature versus Fascism...........................................................................56HARRY HAROOTUNIAN Constitutive Ambiguities: The Persistence of Modernism and Fascism in Japan's Modern History.................................................80KIM BRANDT The Beauty of Labor: Imagining Factory Girls in Japan's New Order...................................................................................115NORIKO ASO Mediating the Masses: Yanagi Soetsu and Fascism.....................................................................................................138AARON SKABELUND Fascism's Furry Friends: Dogs, National Identity, and Purity of Blood in 1930s Japan...........................................................155AARON GEROW Narrating the Nation-ality of a Cinema: The Case of Japanese Prewar Film...........................................................................185MICHAEL BASKETT All Beautiful Fascists?: Axis Film Culture in Imperial Japan...................................................................................212AKIKO TAKENAKA Architecture for Mass-Mobilization: The Chureito Memorial Construction Movement, 1939-1945......................................................235JONATHAN M. REYNOLDS Japan's Imperial Diet Building in the Debate over Construction of a National Identity.....................................................254ANGUS LOCKYER Expo Fascism?: Ideology, Representation, Economy.................................................................................................276ELLEN SCHATTSCHNEIDER The Work of Sacrifice in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Bride Dolls and Ritual Appropriation at Yasukuni Shrine.....................296NINA CORNYETZ Fascist Aesthetics and the Politics of Representation in Kawabata Yasunari.......................................................................321JIM REICHERT Disciplining the Erotic-Grotesque in Edogawa Ranpo's Demon of the Lonely Isle.....................................................................355KEITH VINCENT Hamaosociality: Narrative and Fascism in Hamao Shiro's The Devil's Disciple......................................................................381JAMES DORSEY Literary Tropes, Rhetorical Looping, and the Nine Gods of War: "Fascist Proclivities" Made Real...................................................409ALEJANDRO YARZA The Spanish Perspective: Romancero Marroqu and the Francoist Kitsch Politics of Time..........................................................435Contributors....................................................................................................................................................451Index...........................................................................................................................................................455

Chapter One

Fascism Seen and Unseen: Fascism as a Problem in Cultural Representation

Just as romanticism was the illusion of the nineteenth century, fascism is the illusion of our time. -Imanaka Tsugimaro, Fuashizumu undo ron, 78-79.

Retrospection has advantages, but it also has its risks. Nowhere is this more so than in the never-ending debate over whether, when, and how Japan was fascist. Unlike Mussolini's Italy, where fascism was undeniable, or Hitler's Germany, where (with a bit of conceptual revision) National Socialism could be made to play the role of a "fascist" revolution, wartime Japan never experienced an overthrow of the monarchical constitutional order established in the late nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the rise of militarist influences with the escalation of war on the Asian continent, Japan's joining with fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in the anti-Comintern pact in 1936, then the Tripartite Pact in 1940 all have given postwar historians cause to lump Japan in the same "fascist" category as its wartime allies. The fascist label has been particularly appealing for two broad groups of critics: Marxists, who could draw from their wartime comrades who considered Japan's wartime crackdown on communism as "fascist"; and post-war nationalists (both Japanese as well as citizens of Japan's wartime enemy states), who simply use the term to excoriate anything connected with wartime Japan. Often lost in the recriminations and political posturings over Japanese "fascism" are serious and troubling questions. Was the dominant political structure, or even the cultural tendencies, of wartime Japan really "fascist"? And if so, what does this "fascism" refer to? How was fascism reconciled with Japanese imperialism? Finally-and, I believe, most important-what did Japanese at the time understand fascism to be, and to what extent did they consider their own political and cultural forms to be "fascist"?

The problem of identifying how fascism works as a cultural ideology is not a simple one. Complicating the question is the difficulty in determining a "fascist" culture style. As Walter Laqueur points out in his authoritative Fascism: Past, Present and Future, the fascist "cultural malaise was most acutely felt in literature and the visual arts.... [yet] political indoctrination in culture was, on the whole, limited to prohibitions; there was no Nazi style in literature comparable to 'Socialist realism.'" Further, Laqueur notes, even Hitler's preference for monumentalism in the visual arts was not shared in Mussolini's fascist Italy. It may not be possible in the end to identify a single fascist theory of culture, in this sense. Moreover, underlying Laqueur's interrogation is the liberal understanding of culture as a broad-perhaps even undefinable-field of human creativity. Given this assumption about culture, it is not at all surprising that Laqueur finds it impossible to identify a specific Nazi or fascist cultural style. This failure to identify a universal fascist style aside, Laqueur's point about literature's historical relationship to fascism in particular seems especially fruitful in identifying how fascism and culture intersected in wartime Japan.

When joined by the postwar reflections of Maruyama Masao, Laqueur's emphasis on literature as a key site for fascist culture takes on added value in determining the place of fascist culture in wartime Japan. Maruyama was not only one of postwar Japan's most important commentators on the political culture of wartime Japan. He was also a witness to historical fascism in Japan, having lived through the period while struggling to continue his work in comparative political theory. His reflections on the impact of fascism among intellectuals are an important starting point in trying to capture the precise ways in which fascism and culture intersected in wartime Japan. Maruyama identified a double response in literary culture to the pressures of fascism when he described the "typhoon" that swept up writers in the early 1930s:

There was another important shift in the basic circumstances surrounding politics and literature. This was of course the development of Japan's continental policy which followed from the establishment of Manchukuo and the escalation into all-out war between Japan and China that occurred as its historical consequence. This brought the problem of "national trends (kokusei)" once again front and center into literature. ... One group among the tenko writers folded their earlier image of keeping pace with politics-what had been for them a movement-into this new "politics" without any revision at all. Look how far politics has come, literature must not be left behind! (This was the direction of what was called state-policy literature, or continental literature.) Yet another group discovered in the myth of ethnic nationality (minzoku) and the emperor the ir-rationality [sic] which had been rejected in the previous clamor over "the supremacy of politics." They tried very hard to burn up their literary selves in the totality of irrationality which was the flip side of the totality of rationality.

Together, Laqueur's and Maruyama's analyses suggest that too little attention has been given to literary texts, where fascist views were often espoused in terms of a return to ethnic national culture. In short, what is needed today is a different approach that, instead of uncritically ingesting postwar assumptions about Japanese fascism as the characteristic mode of wartime state power, seeks to uncover the place of fascism within and against dominant retrospective views by turning back to what was actually said about fascism by its critics during the time when fascism began to appear as a cultural movement in Japan.

Two of the most influential critics of fascism who wrote during the 1930s and early 1940s were Imanaka Tsugimaro (1893-1980) and Tosaka Jun (1900-45). These two men might be seen as a study in contrasts. Imanaka was a liberal Christian who resigned his post at Kyushu Imperial University in 1942 to take a position in the wartime government, whereas Tosaka was a Marxist who was arrested in 1938 and died in prison at the end of the war. Moreover, Imanaka's studies drew attention to the historical connections between fascist movements and workers' movements, while Tosaka emphasized fascism as an ideology linked to capitalism and liberal intellectuals. Yet they shared a deep concern about the rise of fascism in Japan and believed that the foundations for fascism stemmed from transformations that followed the First World War. Read together, their writings on fascism provide an important illumination on how fascism was seen, and subsequently "unseen"-a complex process of shifting signification that has had a lasting impact on the debate over Japanese fascism today. Most important, as we shall see, their works reveal how many postwar retrospectives came to "unsee" fascism by discounting the centrality of an ethnic concept of national cultural identity (minzoku) and instead represented Japanese fascism as a top-down ideology driven by the state and social elites. As I will note, this postwar unseeing of historical fascism has served to legitimate a new ideology of ethnic national culture whose contemporary adherents often claim to be the most virulent critics of wartime "fascism" even as they adopt a political position whose ultimate target is not limited to the ghosts of the wartime state but may even extend to the postwar liberal-democratic Japanese state.

Back to the Future: Imanaka Tsugimaro and Tosaka Jun's Wartime Theories on Fascism

Imanaka Tsugimaro is a rewarding place to begin a reconsideration of cultural fascism in Japan. Although not widely known in the English literature on Japanese fascism, Imanaka's wartime studies are among the most important works on fascism in Japan during the 1930s and served as very early warnings of the dangers of fascism in Japan. In his first major work on fascism, On the Fascist Movement (February 1932), Imanaka confronted the problem of particular differences within any universal theory of fascism. Imanaka stated that the book would focus exclusively on the fascist movement in Italy, but he added two important qualifications. First, he noted that he considered "movements like Hitler's to be essentially the same" as the fascism in Italy. And second, he added that his major objective in the work was to focus on fascist movements rather than fascist states, "because I have been thinking about its [fascism's] contemporary political significance for Japan." At issue was whether Imanaka could articulate a theory of fascism that could suture the differences in Italian, German, French, Swiss, Japanese, and other fascist movements. And whether he could do so rested on how he conceived of fascism as a general problem.

Imanaka arrived at a universal understanding of fascism first from a historical reading of the movement's origins in Italy and second through a conceptual analysis that tried to isolate those elements of fascism that were common to all fascist movements. His analysis of the historical development of fascism in Italy in three stages (Revolutionary Fascism of 1914; Combative Fascism of 1919; and Party Fascism after 1921) emphasized the social, economic, and cultural dislocations of the First World War as the universal conditions for the rise of fascism as a general phenomenon. Imanaka's focus on the crisis of 1914 led him to confront the relationship of fascism to the middle class and, especially, to understand the historical and theoretical ties between fascist and communist movements. He concluded that fascism was not merely a "reactionary" but also in some senses a "revolutionary" movement whose origins were found in self-articulations by fascists whose revolutionary beliefs had been honed within socialist movements. The implications for cultural ideology were significant. Fascism was both revolutionary and reactionary, both a middle-class ideology and a force that went far beyond the middle class, ultimately betraying middleclass hopes. Here, Imanaka was quite close to Walter Laqueur's point that "fascism thought of itself as a movement of cultural revolution." What they shared was a sense that fascism aimed at revolution, a breaking out of the restraints of constitutional politics to something entirely new and different. But what kind of revolution was the fascist revolution? And what role, if any, did culture play in addressing the social and economic dislocations that flowed from the First World War?

The key to grasping the apparently paradoxical nature of fascism was to recognize that the First World War had unleashed a historically specific form of nationalism (minzokushugi) centered on an ethnic appropriation of cultural identity. Defining culture as the culture of ethnic nations appealed to growing numbers of people, especially but not exclusively among the middle class, who turned to ethnic nationalism to address what existing political structures seemed incapable of resolving: the oppression suffered by "weak" capitalist economies at the hands of the stronger established capitalist states. Skirting a theory of historical backwardness, Imanaka preferred to describe these economic inequalities between nations in terms of whether their economic base was "fragile" or "sound." In advanced capitalist states with a "fragile" economic base (e.g., interwar Italy), the influx of capital from advanced "sound" capitalist economies (e.g., England, the United States, Germany) is seen as a threat to their national survival. Imanaka's point was that any attempt to understand fascism theoretically must consider these international relations of power, or what was really a theory of global imperialism, in addition to issues of domestic oppression.

For Imanaka's theory of fascism, the most significant point about these dislocations of imperialist capitalism was that, beginning around the First World War, it was the middle class in countries where capitalism had a fragile base who were the most seriously afflicted. In those economies, the middle class found its relative advantage over the working class-and its dreams of approximating the upper class-quickly disappearing. Fascism arose as a recognition by middle-class people in these "fragile" capitalist countries that capitalist methods had failed them, and they were easily seduced by fascism's promise of a "third way," imaginative (and thoroughly imagined) hopes for a social solution that would overcome capitalism itself. In this sense, Imanaka concluded that "fascism is not a concept that can be completely subsumed under the category of a capitalist reactionary movement." Indeed, he pointed to fascism's origins in working-class movements in both Italy and Germany, noting the paradox that fascism was more influential in countries with active socialist politics than it was in England, France, and the United States, where socialists and communists had enjoyed much less success as organized players in national politics. One defining feature of fascism, for Imanaka, was its anti-capitalist nature.

Thus, a major problem confronting any global theory of fascism was the historical relationship between communism and fascism as forms of anti-capitalism. As Imanaka put it, "The parallel direction in the force of fascism and communism is a fact difficult to ignore, but [the real problem is] how to explain this fact." Imanaka rejected the notion that the turn to fascism was merely a "strategic mistake" by leaders of the communist movement, pointing instead to the longstanding influence of "nationalism (minzokushugi)" among the Italian intellectual class. Those in the communist movement who labeled fascism a "reactionary" force were simply reflecting the reality that middle-class socialists eventually turned against the communist movement. For those who did and became national socialists, the crisis of international capitalism meant their own position as a middle class was endangered and, unable to identify with an international proletariat due to their nationalistic education, they increasingly turned to the state. Imanaka's underlying point was that fascism arose not as an ideology for, by, or of a state that was already supreme, but from an endangered middle class that turned to the state to shore up the fragile capitalist base of its own nation. For this reason, Imanaka concluded that fascism was not simply the logic of reaction, but an extension of the revolutionary sentiment of the working class transferred by the nationalist middle class into a revolution by the "social mass." His conclusions take on a prophetic tone when read in the light of the conversions to national socialism the following year by Sano Manabu and Nabeyama Sadachika, members of the Japan Communist Party's Central Committee. Fascism, like communism, was a revolutionary movement against capitalism, but it sought its revolutionary subject not in a class-bound entity like the proletariat, but in the mass-based subjectivity of minzoku, or ethnic nationality.

Revolutionary fascism, then, had to involve cultural considerations and should not be merely reduced to an analysis of political institutions. Some theory of cultural identity was necessary to account for the dynamics that led the middle class to reject class-consciousness in favor of a "social mass" conceived as the embodiment of the ethno-cultural nation. Why should the social masses be signified in ethnic national terms? On this question, Imanaka's comparative theory of fascism faltered. He did not sufficiently explore the cultural implications of fascism, except to note the power of this revolutionary ethnic nationalism (minzokushugi) that had emerged around the First World War and that had transformed socialist movements around the world. One might have expected Imanaka to develop a cultural theory of fascism when, a few months later, he offered a monograph on the rise of the national socialist movement in Germany, a movement that in mid-1932 was a striking example of "bottom-up" fascism rather than "top-down" fascism growing out of a state. Here was a prime opportunity for Imanaka to explain how socialists, middle-class professionals, and especially the young were being enticed to join a movement that he argued would never serve their real interests. Surely, some form of culturalist ideology was the key. But in the end, Imanaka retreated from the cultural implications of his work, concluding only that the source of fascism's power could not be found in any theory, cultural or otherwise. Fascism was merely a "movement" and could only be studied as such.

(Continues...)

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