{"id":1676,"date":"2011-09-30T21:16:42","date_gmt":"2011-09-30T19:16:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lacanquotidien.fr\/blogx16y\/2011\/09\/the-japan-times-sunday-sep-25-2011-praise-where-its-due-for-japanese-fascism-by-michael-hoffman\/"},"modified":"2011-10-02T15:49:14","modified_gmt":"2011-10-02T13:49:14","slug":"the-japan-times-sunday-sep-25-2011-praise-where-its-due-for-japanese-fascism-by-michael-hoffman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lacanquotidien.fr\/blog\/2011\/09\/the-japan-times-sunday-sep-25-2011-praise-where-its-due-for-japanese-fascism-by-michael-hoffman\/","title":{"rendered":"THE JAPAN TIMES – Sunday, Sep. 25, 2011 : Praise, where it’s due, for Japanese fascism by Michael Hoffman"},"content":{"rendered":"

PLANNING FOR EMPIRE: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State, by Janis Mimura. Cornell University Press, 2011, 229 pp., \uffe124.95 (hardcover)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Once upon a time men were proud to call themselves fascist. \u00ab\u00a0I am convinced,\u00a0\u00bb wrote a leading Japanese reformist bureaucrat in the early 1930s, \u00ab\u00a0that from now on the spirit of the civilization and politics of mankind is fascist ideology … Before the iron laws of historical development, the downfall of the liberalistic, individualistic, capitalistic world is unavoidable.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n

So it seemed to many enlightened spirits, and we reading these lines 80 years later can perhaps congratulate ourselves on a narrow escape. To the democratic mind, \u00ab\u00a0fascist\u00a0\u00bb is the most damning political epithet in the lexicon \u2014 just as, to the fascist mind, \u00ab\u00a0democrat\u00a0\u00bb was, unless \u00ab\u00a0liberal\u00a0\u00bb or \u00ab\u00a0capitalist\u00a0\u00bb trumped it.
\nJapanese fascism \u2014 not to be confused with the emperor-worshiping militarism with which it was fitfully, uneasily allied \u2014 has a decidedly more intellectual, less charismatic, less hideously vicious and sadistic cast than its German and Italian equivalents. It was \u00ab\u00a0techno-fascism,\u00a0\u00bb \u00ab\u00a0managerialism.\u00a0\u00bb Its proponents, writes American historian Janis Mimura in this provocative re-examination of recent history we thought we knew, \u00ab\u00a0were neither fanatic militarists nor manipulated leaders. They were highly rational and conscientious public servants who promoted a vision of an ultramodern Japan.\u00a0\u00bb
\nWe are uncomfortable hearing fascism in any form praised, however equivocally, but it must have its due if it is to be understood, and \u00ab\u00a0Planning for Empire\u00a0\u00bb is a scholarly but readable contribution towards that end. \u00ab\u00a0Fascism,\u00a0\u00bb writes Mimura, \u00ab\u00a0offered a means to overcome the crisis of capitalism and resolve the problems of class conflict and authority in modern industrial society. It was viewed as a ‘third way,’ an alternative path to modernity that was superior to liberalism and communism and best suited to meet the technological challenges of the modern era.\u00a0\u00bb
\nTwo revolutionary phenomena marked 20th-century man to such an extent as to make almost a new species of him \u2014 mechanization and \u00ab\u00a0total war.\u00a0\u00bb These were the facts with which techno-fascist intellectuals grappled. Mechanization \u00ab\u00a0introduced the new principles of machinelike efficiency and organization.\u00a0\u00bb Total war meant \u00ab\u00a0extended wars conducted between nations, not just troops, requiring the mobilization of the entire population and self-sufficiency in resources.\u00a0\u00bb The Russo-Japanese War and World War 1 were harbingers of worse to come (or of better, if you see war as the forge which tempers the race); war would be permanent; peacetime itself would be consumed by warlike preparations.
\nIt’s not an attractive vision, from our vantage point, but from theirs, liberalism, democracy and laissez-faire capitalism had proven themselves abject failures. The Wall Street crash of 1929 and the ensuing global Great Depression were hitting Japan very hard. Capitalism was seen as grossly enriching the corrupt few while grossly impoverishing everyone else. That aside, the new technological environment demanded technocratic government. Japan’s brief fling with party politics in the 1920s had produced \u2014 so it seemed \u2014 chaos. \u00ab\u00a0Totalitarian\u00a0\u00bb to us is an evil word. To progressive thinkers of the 1930s it was the solution to evils that to us are good \u2014 individualism, the pursuit of profit, the quest for personal advantage at the expense, if necessary, of the collective. It is one of the challenges and satisfactions of this book that it takes us inside an alien, unattractive mindset and forces us to look at our own from outside.
\nTechno-fascism was progressive in ways that we can recognize, acknowledge and even admire. It spurned privilege, despised social rank, scorned wealth. Competence, expertise, selfless dedication to the nation were the virtues it valued and displayed. It produced no Japanese Hitler or Mussolini, no personality cult, no mass hysteria. A guiding spirit and representative figure was a decidedly uncharismatic young agriculture ministry bureaucrat named Nobusuke Kishi, better known as the postwar prime minister (1957-60) whose political resurrection followed three years served in Sugamo Prison as an unindicted Class A war criminal. The prewar Kishi was as awed by the productive capacity of the United States as he was by the \u00ab\u00a0organic hierarchical, functionalist society\u00a0\u00bb (the words are Mimura’s) he observed in early Nazi Germany. Of the U.S. he wrote in 1926, \u00ab\u00a0The United States was a country blessed with the power of its vast richness … Its vast economic structure … made Japan’s own economy appear extremely shabby in comparison.\u00a0\u00bb
\nBut America was no model for Japan. Lacking the natural resources with which America overflowed, Japan, the techno-fascists believed, must seek \u00ab\u00a0liberation from natural resources. If ‘have-not’ countries could overcome their resource limitations by creating synthetic substitutes, their entry to the exclusive circle of resource-rich powers would no longer be blocked.\u00a0\u00bb The industrial engineering envisioned was on such a scale as to make social engineering seem inevitable. The individual would be swallowed by the state, and either find happiness in being so swallowed, or live without happiness. Happiness was beside the point.
\nTo most of us today this seems a bad dream from which humanity is fortunate to have awakened. And yet, Mimura stresses, there are continuities. \u00ab\u00a0Kishi’s personal imprint,\u00a0\u00bb she writes, \u00ab\u00a0can be seen in basic aspects of Japan’s postwar managerial state\u00a0\u00bb \u2014 techno-fascism modified to the democratic demands of the new age.
\nThere is another continuity which Mimura does not mention. The \u00ab\u00a0war on terror,\u00a0\u00bb 10 years on, has no end in sight. A recent Washington Post report shows the Pentagon now envisioning \u00ab\u00a0a period of persistent conflict\u00a0\u00bb \u2014 \u00ab\u00a0total war,\u00a0\u00bb perhaps, by another name.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/search.japantimes.co.jp\/cgi-bin\/fb20110925a2.html<\/p>\n


\n<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PLANNING FOR EMPIRE: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State, by Janis Mimura. Cornell University Press, 2011, 229 pp., \uffe124.95 (hardcover)<\/p>\n

Once upon a time men were proud to call themselves fascist. \u00ab\u00a0I am convinced,\u00a0\u00bb wrote a leading Japanese reformist bureaucrat in the early 1930s, \u00ab\u00a0that from now on the spirit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":2282,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[76],"tags":[346,347],"class_list":["post-1676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pressemonde","tag-fascist-ideology","tag-japan-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lacanquotidien.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lacanquotidien.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lacanquotidien.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lacanquotidien.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lacanquotidien.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1676"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/lacanquotidien.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2283,"href":"https:\/\/lacanquotidien.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1676\/revisions\/2283"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lacanquotidien.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lacanquotidien.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lacanquotidien.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lacanquotidien.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}