It's true that the Japanese regime from the assassination of Inukai Tsuyoshi in Goichigo Jiken of 1932 (cf. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_15_Incident>) to the end of WW2 was in some important ways quite unlike European fascism, as Heartfield notes. Where Japan most clearly differed from Italy and Germany was of course the absence of powerful Communist and Social Democratic movements in Japan, so what happened in Japan can't be said to be the Right's reaction to the Left -- hence the absence of a mass fascist movement comparable to National Socialism. The watershed events in this period of Japanese history concerned struggle within the Right as well as between the Right and the Center, rather than between the Left and the Right, concerning how to respond to the West.
In some respects, the ideology of Kita Ikki (cf. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kita_Ikki>), a radical nationalist, pan-Asianist thinker who was a major influence on the coup plotters of Niniroku Jiken of 1936 (cf. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_26_Incident>), has more in common with certain radical nationalist, regionalist ideologies in the Third World than European fascism.
But I think we can usefully identify what the three main axis powers, Italy, Germany, and Japan, had in common:
* all were latecomers to the business of capitalism and imperialism, in comparison to the main capitalist allied powers, Britain and America;
* and all of them experienced what Gramsci called "passive revolution" rather than Jacobin Terror like the French Revolution:
[R]estoration becomes the first policy whereby social struggles
find sufficiently elastic frameworks to allow the bourgeoisie to
gain power without dramatic upheavals, without the French
machinery of terror. The old feudal classes are demoted from
their dominant position to a 'governing' one, but are not
eliminated, nor is there any attempt to liquidate them as an
organic whole; instead of a class they become a 'caste' with
specific cultural and psychological characteristics, but no longer
with predominant economic functions. (Antonio Gramsci,
Selections from Prison Notebooks, p. 115).
If Russia had not had the October Revolution and therefore had not become a socialist power, it might have become like Japan and joined the axis, for its structural relation to the center of capitalism was roughly the same as Italy, Germany, and Japan.
On 7/21/07, James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> As far as I understand it, it was an important component of Japanese
> Communist Party doctrine that the military leaders in Japan were Fascist,
> but that is because of the needs of Soviet Communist doctrine, i.e. that
> after 1941 the world was divided between the camp of democracy and the camp
> of Fascism. Jon Halliday, in his book on Japanese Capitalism, written when
> he was a New Left Review EB member, dismisses the argument that it was a
> Fascist state.
The label of fascism applied to wartime Japan must have been rooted in the Popular Front ideology, as you suggest, and it probably did disservice to Japanese leftists in the post-WW2 period, as such a way of thinking made many of them accept the occupier's view of history and implicitly encouraged them to look to the liberal capitalist powers of the West, rather than Asia. That has been a problem for the Left in Japan to this day: leftists are less pan-Asianist than rightists.
In addition, the fascist label obscures the fact that the pre-war Left in Japan was decimated not so much by brute force as by their own conversion -- tenko -- to the Right. In their preference for public recantations of former leftists rather than outright suppression when possible, the Right in Japan resembled not European fascists but Stalinists, Maoists, and Khomeinists.
<http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3680/is_199404/ai_n8729433/print> Pacific Affairs, Spring 1994
Book reviews -- Tenko: Ideology and Societal Integration in Pre-War Japan (Harvard Studies in Sociology) by Patricia G. Steinhoff Neary, Ian
TENKO: Ideology and Societal Integration in Pre-War Japan. By Patricia C. Steinhoff: New York: Garland Publishing (Harvard Studies in Sociology). 1991. xix, 220 pp. US$50.00, cloth. ISBN 0-8240-2567-9.
IN JUNE 1933 Sano Manabu and Nabeyama Sadachika, two leaders of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP), formally renounced their Communist affiliations and denounced the party. Their action was referred to by them and by the authorities as a tenko a "change of heart" or "defection" although no single English phrase or word conveys the full range of meaning of the Japanese. This started a landslide. Within a month over five hundred others, both those already convicted and those awaiting trial, had produced similar statements. Arrests and police harassment of the late 1920s and early 1930s seriously disrupted the party's activities but it was the tenko, the defection of the bulk of the core activists, which meant that it was discredited by 1935 and unable to recommence activity until 1945.
In the mid 1960s Patricia Steinhoff was a postgraduate student in the Harvard Department of Social Relations where Parsonian functionalism was the dominant theoretical orientation. Intrigued by the problem of ideological commitment in prewar Japan, she sought to "understand how tenko had emerged as a mass response of submission to the Japanese state among just those people who had taken the riskiest and most profound stance of ideological opposition at a critical historical moment" (p. v). The result was a Ph.D. dissertation accepted in 1969 which, for a variety of reasons, has only just been published.
Despite all that has been published about Japan in the intervening years this book fills an important gap. Reflecting the circumstances in which it was produced, the work lies squarely within the functionalist tradition. However, unlike many analyses of the time it is not so suffused with the ideas and language of Parsonian sociology that the human experiences described are smothered by the methodology. Steinhoff is particularly impressive where she is describing the process of tenko, the circumstances in which the imprisoned activists were cajoled and persuaded to make statements explaining their rejection of communism and all its works. She makes extensive use of quotations from the writings of tenkosha and of insights suggested to her by the activists and officials in interviews carried out in the 1960s. Her classification of tenko into three types--common, political and spiritual--provides a framework for further detailed discussion of the experiences of those who went through the process. This is then balanced by a fascinating discussion of a few who resisted the pressures and inducements to abandon their ideas. While she is careful not to come to any grand conclusions from the small numbers of cases reviewed, she suggests that the main difference between those who succumbed to state pressure and those who did not was the strength of the personalities of the individuals. By 1935 not only had the JCP been destroyed but most of the left was in decline. The tenko process then became institutionalized so that both individuals and organizations came under pressure to proclaim their acceptance of nationalist ideas.
This work has already made an important contribution to our understanding of prewar Japan as an unpublished dissertation and in this new form it is now available for the use of our students and others. My only complaint is that given their recognition of the importance of this study, the publishers should have taken the trouble to add a proper index which would have greatly enhanced its value as a research tool.
On 7/21/07, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:
>
> > Yoshie wrote:
> > >
> > >...The question is why the Chinese people couldn't
> > >have a clarifying debate, even a sharp conflict, that
> > >was focused _only on politico-economic alternatives_
> > >-- why the conflict took the form of "cultural"
> > >revolution instead...
> >
> > The answer is straightforward and obvious:
> > Stalinism. Mao, like Stalin, hated debate and all
> > aspects of democratic process.
>
> The Cultural Revolution was all the result of one guy?
The Great Purge in the USSR on one hand and the Cultural Revolution in China on the other hand had some things in common, for instance the cult of personality, but they did not function in the same way.
In any case, Stalinism, like the Cultural Revolution, can't explain anything. Stalinism (its social basis, its hegemony, etc.) itself, instead, is what needs to be explained. -- Yoshie