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CONTENTS
Vol. 14, No. 2: AprilJune 1982
Herbert P. Bix - Rethinking Emperor-System Fascism: Ruptures
and Continuities in Modern Japanese History
Gavan McCormack - Nineteen-Thirties Japan: Fascism?
Micronesia Support Committee - Marshall Islands: Americas
Radioactive Trust / A Photo Essay
Kamata Sadao and Stephen Salaff - The Atomic Bomb and the
Citizens of Nagasaki
Glenn D. Hook - Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical,
and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings by the Committee for the
Compilation of Materials on the Damage Caused by the Atomic
Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Oe Kenzaburo - Someone Elses Feet / A Short Story Translated
by Ruth W. Adler
Gail Omvedt - Caste: The Emergence of the South Asian Social
System by Morton Klass / A Review Essay
Gail Omvedt - States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative
Analysis of France, Russia and China by Theda Skocpol / A Review
Essay
Stephen W. Kohl - Reality and Fiction in Modern Japanese
Literature by Noriko Mizuta Lippit / A Review
BCAS/Critical AsianStudies
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CCAS Statement of Purpose
Critical Asian Studies continues to be inspired by the statement of purpose
formulated in 1969 by its parent organization, the Committee of Concerned
Asian Scholars (CCAS). CCAS ceased to exist as an organization in 1979,
but the BCAS board decided in 1993 that the CCAS Statement of Purpose
should be published in our journal at least once a year.
We first came together in opposition to the brutal aggression of
the United States in Vietnam and to the complicity or silence of
our profession with regard to that policy. Those in the field of
Asian studies bear responsibility for the consequences of their
research and the political posture of their profession. We are
concerned about the present unwillingness of specialists to speak
out against the implications of an Asian policy committed to en-
suring American domination of much of Asia. We reject the le-
gitimacy of this aim, and attempt to change this policy. We
recognize that the present structure of the profession has often
perverted scholarship and alienated many people in the field.
The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars seeks to develop a
humane and knowledgeable understanding of Asian societies
and their efforts to maintain cultural integrity and to confront
such problems as poverty, oppression, and imperialism. We real-
ize that to be students of other peoples, we must first understand
our relations to them.
CCAS wishes to create alternatives to the prevailing trends in
scholarship on Asia, which too often spring from a parochial
cultural perspective and serve selfish interests and expansion-
ism. Our organization is designed to function as a catalyst, a
communications network for both Asian and Western scholars, a
provider of central resources for local chapters, and a commu-
nity for the development of anti-imperialist research.
Passed, 2830 March 1969
Boston, Massachusetts
Vol. 14, No. 2/ Apr.-June 1982
Contents
Herbert P. Bix 2 Rethinking "Emperor-System Fascism": Ruptures and
Continuities in Modem Japanese History
Gavan McCormack 20 Nineteen-Thirties Japan: Fascism?
Micronesia Support Committee 34 Marshall Islands: America's Radioactive "Trust"/photo
essay
Sadao Kamata and Stephen Salaff 38 The Atomic Bomb and the Citizens of Nagasaki
Glenn D. Hook 51 Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical, and
Social Effects ofthe Atomic Bombings by the Committee for
the Compilation of Materials on the Damage Caused by
the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki/review essay
de Kenzaburo 55 "Someone Else's Feet"/a short story, translated by
Ruth W. Adler
Gail Omvedt 62 Caste: The Emergence ofthe South Asian Social System
by Morton Klass/review essay
Gail Omvedt 67 States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis
ofFrance, Russia and China by Theda Skocpol/review essay
Stephen W. Kohl 71 Reality and Fiction in Modern Japanese Literature by
Noriko Mizuta Lippit/review
71 List of Books to Review
Contributors
Herbert P. Bix: Hosei University, Tokyo, Japan.
Gavan McCormack: Dept. of History, La Trobe Univ.,
Bundoora, Victoria, Australia
Micronesia Support Committee: 1212 University Ave.,
Honolulu, Hawaii
Sadao Kamata: Professor, Nagasaki Institute of Applied Sci
ence, Nagasaki, Japan
Stephen Salaff: Mathematician and writer on science and world
affairs, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Glenn D. Hook: Foreign Lecturer, Okayama Univ., and Re
search Fellow, Institute of Peace Science, Hiroshima Univ.,
Japan
Ruth W. Adler: Translator and writer on Japanese literature,
Englewood, New Jersey
Stephen W. Kohl: Dept. of Literature, Univ. of Oregon,
Eugene, Oregon
GailOmvedt: Writer on India, Kasegaon, Maharashtra, India
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Rethinking "Emperor-System Fascism":
Ruptures and Continuities in Modem Japanese History
by Herbert P. Bix*
Introduction
A full half century ago the Great Depression and an up
surge of national liberation struggles in China and Korea took
only three years to shake the foundations of Japan's fragile
political institutions, turning the question of refonn into the
major issue of the day. In the crisis of 1929-31 , Japanese foreign
policy underwent further militarization, authority at all levels
become more coercive, dissent was suppressed, and disenchant
ment with the ambiguities of a highly limited parliamentarism
spread to all levels of society. By the end ofthe 1930s, not only
could some of the same fascist themes that were playing in
Rome and Herlin be found in Tokyo, but Japan, too, had
acquired a radical authoritarian regime which may be usefully
labelled "emperor-system fascism." A very tight embrace be
tween the military cliques, the upper echelons of the civil
bureaucracy, the imperial institution and the holders of indus
trial and financial power, particularly the zaibatsu, constituted
its essential features. The authority of the imperial institution
and of the bureaucratic ministries reigned supreme, however,
over the Japanese type of composite ruling fonnation, giving
control and direction to its other components. On the other
hand, inner conflicts and intractable contradictions beset the
entire fonnation as it struggled to advance economic revival and
growth at a forced-draft pace while simultaneously pursuing
aggressive war against the dependent peoples of East Asia. 1 In
August 1945, emperor-system fascism was defeated from with
out and the alliance of the different elements of Japan's wartime
regime disintegrated. Almost immediately during the occupa
tion years, an outburst of historical production on its nature
followed. But the subject soon ceased to be of pressing political
concern once it became clear that the old guard (minus the
military) had returned to power and that there would be no
revolution by Japanese hands in the post-surrender state.
* My thanks to Joe Moore, John Dower and Jon Halliday for commenting
helpfully on this essay.
I. See Hashikawa Bunzo's comments in Shimposium Nihon rekishi 21.
Fuashizumu to senso (Symposium on Japanese history, Vol. 21, Fascism and
War) (Tokyo: Gakuseisha, 1973), p. 77. A useful concept for treating these
struggles is that of "negative power" as developed by Jadwiga Staniszkis in
"Adaptational Superstructure: The Problem of Negative Self-Regulation" in
Jerzy J. Wiatr (ed.), Polish Essays in the Methodology ofthe Social Sciences,
Boston Studies Vol. XXIX (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Pub. Co., 1979),
pp.233-39.
While under U.S. military occupation, the managers of
Japanese society were obliged to reorganize and reintegrate
their system of power. Jettisoning the discredited tradition of
imperial absolutism, they adopted democratic ideology. Re
lieved of their colonial empire, they opted for integration within
the new global order organized and managed by the U.S. By
1949, on the eve ofthe Korean War, the problem ofpower in the
postwar Japanese state had been definitely settled and a restored
triumvirate of bureaucratic, political party and big business
forces began to push for a reversal of course on many of the
democratizing occupation refonns. Precisely in the context of
that political "reverse course," post-occupation Japan exper
ienced its second round of fascism discussions lasting through
out the fifties. But with the second revision in 1960 of the
US-Japan Security Treaty, Japan's basic political line was set:
no fundamental danger appeared to exist of a shift in the essen
essentially limited democratic and paternalistic nature of the
regime.
Japan's high economic growth spanned the late fifties and
sixties and lasted until the early 1970s. During that fairly long
period of relative stability of postwar world capitalism, fascism
discussions, except among academic historians, languished.
But the onset of the world recession in the early 1970s re-posed
the issue once again. As the recessionary wave of world cap
italism deepened, concern spread, in many countries, not only
Japan, of a return to an extremely coercive relationship between
the bureaucratic and business rulers of society and the domestic
population.
Although the institutions of Japanese democracy are no
longer fragile, they are limited and incomplete-a fact which
nearly thirty years of steady economic growth, full employment
and general consumer prosperity has obscured. Moreover,
Japan has returned to being a central component in the system of
world imperialism, with its own highly militarized periphery of
repressive dictatorships, none of Yv'hich is secure and all of
which desire Tokyo's finn support. Meanwhile, vis-a-vis West
ern Europe and the United States, Japan's trade and currency
conflict deepens; and the crisis that afflicts the rest of the
capitalist world puts increasing pressure on Japan, from within
and without, to rearm further and to playa more active role in
defense of capitalism's economic and strategic interests in East
Asia.
It is against this background that recent changes in the
context ofJapanese political debate need to be set. In June 1980,
2
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an overwhelming LOP electoral victory strengthened conserva
tive control of the Diet, while reversing earlier trends of con
servative party decline. A minority of LOP politicians, exuding
confidence in the "realism" of their traditional party agenda,
seized the occasion to try and revive the prewar conservative
legacy of militarism, political reaction and nationwide con
sensus under the emperor.2 These "new conservatives" chafe
at Japan's subordination to foreign interests and seek to retrieve
the state's full political independence in the prewar sense.
Exactly the sort of independence and control over vital decision
making that an earlier generation ofconservative politicians, led
by Yoshida Shigeru, had been forced to surrender, the "new
conservatives," the Self Defense Forces lobby and certain ele
ments of the business community now hope to regain by taking
advantage of US pressure to have Tokyo increase its military
capabilities.
But a majority of Japan's power holders and strategy plan
ners in the LOP and the bureaucracy still vacillate, hoping
somehow to preserve the nation's economic gain by continuing
to operate along the same political and strategic lines that were
first laid out during the tenure of the late prime minister Yoshida
Shigeru ( 1949-54). Nevertheless, the old conservatives also see
the danger to the present internal balance of forces in Japanese
society, particularly to the cooperation between labor and cap
ital, posed by the deepening crisis of capitalism. Although their
reasoning differs from the new conservatives-the former be
lieve that global capital as a whole should be protected, the latter
give priority to securing Japanese capital-both are moving in
the same direction of gradually turning Japan into a great mili
tary power.
So far, the opposition parties have offered them little
effective resistance. Komeito, weakened by revelations of cor
ruption in its support organization, the Soka Gakkai, is in
decline and maneuvering in de facto alliance with the right wing
conservatives. The numerically larger socialist and communist
parties have been equally hurt by the structural corruption of the
Japanese political system. Unsuccessful in building cross-class
alliances and increasingly divided in their leadership, neither
party of the left can soon expect to win broad-based public
support for their more realistic programs of neutralism and
security under the present constitution. With the opposition in
disarray and unable to replace the perennial conservative ruling
party, educational policy is slow Iy being reshaped to help attain
the conservative's long-term goal of a militarily powerful Ja
pan. Meanwhile, legal preparations go forward for the end of
the current Showa era. In the offing is a new-era reign, under a
new emperor, and, possibly, with a new ("autonomous") con
stitution that can be more easily interpreted to support militar
ism. Once again bureaucrats and politicians are setting the stage
for a change in Japan's domestic political practices and institu
tions. Restrained by the 1946 Constitution-as once before
they were restrained by the Meiji Constitution-they are
obliged to proceed in a legalistic, piecemeal fashion but, so far,
without the aid of political terrorism.
In these circumstances, a discussion of the various proces
ses and events which brought about the 1930s political transfor
2. Kato Shiiichi, "Nichi Bei hoshuka no koto: mamoru dento ni okinasa"
(translated by the Japan Translation Center under the title "The New Right in
Japan and America: Changing Spots and the Two Platoon System") in Asahi
shimbun, yiikan (July 7, 1980).
I
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I
I
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t
Anniversary rally oflhe Japanese-Germany!taly Anti-Comintern Pact, Tokyo,
!
Nov, 1937, Courtesy ofHerbert Bu.
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mation may again be particularly relevant. Today that earlier
watershed period of political change under conditions of acute
capitalist crisis needs to be explored not only with a view to
sharply separating it from the 1980s, but also in order to gain
insights from specific events of that time which might help in
illuminating the present,
Emperor System and Fascism
During the long course of the Meiji Restoration (1868
1890), the oligarchs learned how to transform their private class
interests into the general interest, effectively counteracting in
'the process demands from the peasant majority for basic bour
geois rights and liberties. This they did not only by exploiting
skillfully foreign policy crises and imperial ventures, but also by
utilizing the charisma of the imperial institution. The manipula
tion of only 'one device-foreign policy-probably would not
have been enough to secure their continued hold on power, or to
legitimate their policies, Equally indispensable was the eleva
tion of the emperor above the state and above all law. This
policy was organically connected to the elevation of the em
peror's servants and advisers above the rest of society. Hence,
in late Meiji, the standard practice for reproducing political
legitimacy and national unity became absolutism infused by
nationalism, Or stated more accurately, the success formula for
rule in late developing Japan was (1) an ideology of absolutism,
3
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promoted by a regime in which the sovereign had virtually
unlimited powers and was regarded as an object of popular
veneration. plus (2) a nationalism generated by periodic na
tional crises. 2a
Not until after World War I did the development of indus
trial capitalism in Japan create sufficient material conditions and
opportunities for the oppressed classes to challenge the ab
solutist regime from within. By then nationalist challenges were
also beginning to arise in China and Korea. A reaction was not
long in coming. Already by the crisis conjuncture of the late
twenties-early thirties. many new groups and individuals had
m o u n t ~ d the state of Japanese politics embued with fascist aims
and ideas. As these "new bureaucrats" moved into the mini
stries of Justice. Home and Foreign Affairs. as younger officers
acquired influence over military policy. and as a younger group
formed at court. the form of the political regime in Japan
gradually altered. By June. 1937. when Konoe Fumimaro. the
forty-six-year-old hereditary noble and former president (1933
37) of the House of Peers. formed his first cabinet. the regime in
Japan could be called composite fascist. What does such a term
mean?
Pluralist writing assumes that fascist parties exercised uni
lateral control from the time they attained state power. But the
history of European and Japanese fascism fails to bear that out.
Fascism everywhere coopted. rather than displaced. the most
important pre-fascist ruling elites. making it impossible for
fascist leaders or the parties they headed to exercise, to their
complete satisfaction, overwhelming, unilateral control over all
apparatuses and branches of the state. To varying degrees all
fascist dictatorships were socially composite in nature and ob
liged to compromise with conservative nationalists, traditional
ruling elites and, where they existed, monarchies.
3
And a high
degree of compositeness was a particularly pronounced feature
of fascism in the Japanese case. To emphasize that feature,
some Japanese historians follow Moriya Fumio, who in 1949
first established the theory of "emperor-system fascism."
Moriya posited the thesis of the enduring absolutist nature of the
emperor system, its gradual acquisition of fascist functions and
the "growing fusion of the emperor system with monopoly
capital. "4 Other historians have since given this term varying
contents or used it, as I do here, in their own way.
Emperor-system fascism highiights the temporary combi
nation. merging or loose juxtaposition of elements formed in
different historical stages ofthe same capitalist mode ofproduc
tion, within a nation having distinctive historical traditions of
authoritarian rule and the value structures derived from a long
feudal past. The modern emperor-system emerged during the
late 19th century, in the course of the simultaneous development
of industrial capitalism and overseas imperialism. The term
itself denotes a framework of power. a total system of ruling
people, constructed out of and encompassing diverse but related
2a. Shibahara Takuji, "Tennosei seiritsuki ni okeru kokka ishin to taigai
mondai" in Taikei Nihon kokkashi 4, kindlJi I (Tokyo, Tokyo Daigaku Shup
pankai 1975), pp. 139-193.
3. Alexander J. Groth, "The 'Isms' in Totalitarianism", in American Political
Science Review, Vol. 58 (December 1964).
4. See Eguchi Keiichi, "Sengo no 'Nihon fuashizumu' kenkyu" (Postwar
Studies of Japanese Fascism) in Rekishi kagaku taikei 12: 'Nihon fuashbmlll'
ron (Tokyo: Azekura ShobO, 1977), pp. 288-316. Moriya Fumio's most recenl
book is Tennosei kenkyu (Studies of the Emperor System) (Tokyo: Aoki Sholen.
1979).
structures and institutions, each one of which had its own
"logic" of development. Landlord/tenant relations in agri
culture, linked to the modern factory system but cast in a strong
semi-feudal mold, and having a moral economy of its own was
one such structure. Another was the civil bureaucracy, narrowly
recruited, deriving its income from taxes and with a distinctive
espirit d'corps shaped by state Shinto and Confucian precepts.
A third related component was the Meiji legal structure capped
by the 1889 Constitution a 'gift from the emperor to his sub
jects. and the 1891 Imperial Rescript on Education, which
proclaimed the virtues of emperor and state worship in the
classrooms of the nation. The Diet and political parties had
their own subordinate place in the system while two other
institutions-the police and the military-functioned as its
bulwarks. The military also had its own special sub-system of
extended authority in colonial Taiwan and Korea and semi
colonial South Manchuria. But most important was the sov
ereign emperor himself and his Imperial Household. situated at
the very apex of the authority structure and functioning as a
dynamic entrepreneurial enterprise linked directly to all the
other elements: landholding and landlordism. heavy industry
and finance. the police. the military and the colonies. The
imperial institution (meaning: the individual. the family. the
Imperial Household and the court officials) represented the
general interests of the ruling bloc as a whole and was the sun.
the axis and the core element of the entire' 'emperor system": a
monolithic center around which the different parts fitted in such
a way as to advance and protect the long term interests and aims
of the social forces comprising the ruling bloc.
To sum up: emperor system denotes not an object but an
abstraction. It is a functional concept deriving from the Japanese
historical and intellectual environment and entailing some prior
schematic knowledge of at least these three institutional struc
tures plus their interrelationships. conflicts and contradictions
over time. Use of this term thus points to. though it does not
necessarily explain. the distinguishing features of a specific
state together with its ruling bloc and all-encompassing moral
life.
By contrast. the term "fascism." despite its European
provenance, connotes a global political phenomenon associated
initially with the political backlash and moral dislocation result
ing from World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. After
fascist movements in Italy. Weimar Germany and Japan had
changed into dictatorial regimes. the latter were distinguished
generally by a) the extremely offensive thrusts of their foreign
policies, based on racist and anti-communist principles: bl their
use of such aggression to serve the purposes ofdomestic integra
tion and political repression: and c) their intensification of all
preexisting tendencies towards militarism. imperialism and ra
cism. But "intensification" in this context does not imply any
inexorable determinism. The fascist state foml need not even
tuate stage by stage. or in a manner analogous to the change
from quantity to quality. in every society characterized by
racism. imperialism and militarism. Its emergence. rather. de
pends also on many other factors such as the political and
cultural traditions of such societies. the timing and degree of
completeness of their bourgeois revolutions. the nature of the
economic crisis and how it is perceived. and especially on the
dynamics of the political process which always proceeds dif
ferently in each country. Thus no single concept or definition
can possibly register all that historical fascism connoted in the
above three countries over the course of its short life-span. Yet
4
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any over-preoccupation with fascism's definition per se, in an'
effort to make the term less value-laden, can easily cause one to
lose sight of a most critical issue: the moral evils and hateful
oppression that fascist regimes personify to an extreme degree.
Ultimately, whether a particular form of state is fascist or not
fascist is a moral question precisely because it is also a factual
question. 5And if the factual side of the question is approached
by acknowledging at the outset the rise of contemporary forms
of neo-fascist dictatorship in Third World countries (such as
Chun 000 Hwan's regime in South Korea. Marcos's in the
Philippines, Pinochet in Chile, etc.), and the rightward shift
presently underway in the advanced capitalist countries. includ
ing Japan, then what may well be enhanced by such a historical
discussion is our will to act against contemporary forms of
oppressive regimes. Me.anwhile the nature of fascism in Japan
will become clear in the course of historical analysis.
With these thoughts in mind. the first step is to note that. in
prewar Japan. fascism took the guise of a powerful state re
novationist drive against the forces of orthodoxy and privilege
(the "establishment"). which developed within virtually all
components of the emperor system during the late 1920s and
1930s. This movement. having some of the characteristics of a
crusade for the reformation of a sacrosanct church. arose out of a
final. belated and extremely complex effort to renovate and
redefine the emperor system. at both the political and economic
levels. largely by means of national mobilization campaigns and
war. during the period of transition to state monopoly cap
italism. The renovation and reconstruction drive aimed at the
broadest possible organization of society from above for pur
poses of full-scale war. It was bureaucratically led, deeply
hostile to all manifestations of liberalism, attractive to cynical
opportunists and adventurers. and drew heavily on European
fascist precedents and projects (modified, of course, to suit the
Japanese context). It also tried to exploit the deeply-felt and
anti-capitalist. anti-monopoly sentiments of the petty bour
geoisie on the land and in the cities, and to that extent sometimes
assumed a pseudo-revolutionary coloration. Ultimately, how
ever. the movement was constrained by the Meiji Constitution
and obliged. at most times. to proceed slowly, legally and by
enacting enabling legislation.
Thus emperor-system fascism denotes the incomplete,
tension-ridden nature of the fascist form of crisis regime in
Japan. The bureaucracy was the first and main area of Japanese
public life to be fascized. Here the Home and Justice Ministries
played. by proxy. the role of a fascist party. Even the military
cliques (most notably the Control Faction or Tosei-ha) rose to
power only within the established context of the emperor sys
tem, whose legitimacy it could not question. ,Under such condi
tions, the breaks with the past that did occur were discrete and
incremental and their effects cumulative. Continuity invariably
predominated over discontinuity. *
I
! 5. For interesting argument on the need to obliterate sharp distinctions between
I
! questions of fact and questions of morality see Renford Bambrough. Moral
Scepticism and Moral Knowled/?e (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1979);
especially p. nfC
* Penned within the imperial legal and ideological framework, with its ramify
ing network of divided rights. authorities and interests. the Japanese military
I
1 could never achieve what it considered an adequate or even necessary centraliza
tion of power. It had always to rely on the strategy of war and territorial
expansion as levers for securing desired structural reform. By contrast, since
5
Emperor-system fascism highlights the temporary
combination, merging or loose juxtaposition of ele
ments formed in different historical stages of the same
capitalist mode of production, within a nation having
distinctive historical traditions of authoritarian rule
and the value structures derived from a long feudal
past.
Furthermore, since modem warfare required the active
cooperation of big capital in the establishment of industries for
war production, the military (as well as the ministries ofthe civil
bureaucracy) were compelled to allow the zaibatsu, particularly
the older, integrated ones such as Mitsui, Mitsubishi and
Sumitomo, to continue making monopoly profits under the
regime of total national mobilization. The zaibatsu, in tum,
used the renovation movement and the Manchurian Incident to
extricate themselves from the depression and advance indus
trialization.
Finally, the emperor, occupying the very top position,
consistently defended the basic class interests of the original
ruling bloc and checked its rivalries to some extent by giving, or
withdrawing, his trust to the representatives of the different
groups with whom he treated. Although the imperial institution
benefitted from the alliance of the military with the monopoly
bourgeoisie, it used its enhanced power to limit the reno
vationist tendency embodied in the military and key ministries
of the bureaucracy. In that sense one can speak of it as having
functioned to hinder effective fascist controL Thus, during the
era of fascism and war, big capital, the upper echelons of the
bureaucracy, the emperor and, at his suffrance, the military all
prevailed institutionally-each supreme in its own sphere,
though with ultimate decision-making power in the emperor's
hands. How did such a situation arise?
The Apparatus of Repression
To answer that question we might begin by acknowledging
the deep and lasting impact that the Manchurian aggression of
September 1931 had on Japanese politics for the remainder of
the decade. Conceived by army officers imbued with ideas of
national reconstruction under military leadership, the expropri
ation of China's Three Eastern Provinces immediately com
municated to public life in Japan an acute sense of war crisis and
tension. In the process, it blurred for many Japanese all distinc
tion between soldiers and civilians, war and politics. The politi
cal assassinations of early 1932, which arose from the same
widespread reconstruction movement-Finance Minister Inoue
Junnosuke, Mitsui chief Baron Dan Takuma, and Prime Minis
ter Inukai Tsuyoshi-then further deepened the sense of extra
ordinary national emergency by giving the public new episodes
on which to focus. Subsequently, in March 1933, Japan with
drew from the League of Nations, and the emperor issued a
rescript to acknowledge the event.
today's Self Defense Force is a subordinate unit within a U.S. Asia-Pacific
defense setup. it depends on and must take advantage of U.S. pressure, and of
imperialist interventions in the Third World by both ofthe superpowers. in oider
to advance the structural reforms that it desires.
I
I
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The crisis management policies of the professedly apoliti
cal "national unity" cabinets of the 1930s enter the picture at
this point. Starting with the cabinet of the "moderate" retired
admiral, Saito Makoto (May 1932 to July 1934), formed about a
year and a half before the Hitler cabinet in Germany, the trend
toward a fascist domestic control structure and an expanded war
abroad was further strengthened. In foreign policy, the Saito
cabinet established an autarchic Japan-Manchukuo-Korea bloc;
approved the expulsion from North China of Guo min dang influ
ence and, in its place, fostered local puppet regimes; and enun
ciated a Japanese "Monroe Doctrine" for Asia, based on the
assumption that Japan could develop an autonomous military
capa)jility for meeting its expanded imperialist commitments.
Domestically, to secure support for this shift to a foreign policy
of territorial repartition by means of aggression, the Saito cabi
net strengthened press censorship and, in 1933, increased politi
cal arrests to an all-time high of 18,397. Simultaneously, it
initiated, as part of a campaign to suppress rural labor's fight
against landlords in farming and fishing villages, a self-assis
tance and life-renewal (jiriki kosei) movement, which (despite
failures) also served to quicken the trend toward spiritual and
economic mobilization of the public for war.
6
The second national unity" cabinet, spanning the years
1934 to 1936, continued the course which had been chartered by
the unstable balance of military, bureaucratic and political
party forces in the previous Saito cabinet. Headed by Okada
Keisuke (another retired admiral), it presided over a period of
bitter army factional rivalry, paralleled by conflicts within capi
tal between "old" and "new" zaibatsu. Like its predecessors,
it used an aggressive foreign policy as a tool for forging dom
estic integration while giving the appearance, at the same time,
of working to contain more radical demands for a national
restoration and reconstruction. Under the Okada cabinet, the
army, starting in October 1934, aggravated the domestic scene
by issuing public propaganda (in pamphlet form) about an
impending crisis of war that would occur in either 1935 or 1936.
Crisis management in Japan during the early 1930s was
also aided by the formation of civilian air-raid defense corps
(bogodan) in all Japanese cities, apparently starting first in
Tokyo on September I, 1932.7 Furuya Tetsuo has recently
emphasized this development with its roots in the 1920s and its
role in sustaining the public's sense of crisis. Japan's first,
well-publicized air defense drill was held in Osaka on July 5,
1928, fully three years before the "Manchurian Incident" even
occurred.
8
The context was a hardening of Japan's position
regarding the Chinese civil war. The last of Prime Minister
Tanaka Giichi's four military interventions in China had re
cently ended without having achieved its purported objective of
protecting Japanese rights and interests. The previous month.
6. The foreign policies of the Saito cabinet are discussed in James B Crowley.
Japan's Quest For Autonomy. National Security and Foreign 1930-193X
(Princeton Univ. Press, 1966). pp. 178-186; its domestic policies in Awaya
Kcntaro. "Nihon fuashizumu no keisei to senso junbi taisei no lukushilsU."
Rekishigaku kenkyiikai. ed .. Sekaishi ninshiki 10 jinmin lososhi kenh'llllo kwla'
(Tokyo: Aoki Shoten. 1972). pp. 122135.
7. Furuya Tetsuo. "Minshii doin seisaku no keisei to tenkai" (The Formalion
and Development of Mass Mobilization Policy) in Kikan gendaishi (Quarterly
Journal ofContemporary History). No.6. Summer issue (August 1975)' pg. 41<
The material in the following paragraph on the civilian air raid defense move
ment is drawn from Furuya's pathbreaking article.
8. Ibid .. pp. 29-30.
June. the Senior Staff Officer of the K wantung Army. Colonel
Komoto Daisaku. had assassinated the Manchurian chief of
state, Zhang Zuolin. (Chang Tso-Iin). Against this background,
locally organized, citizen-supported defense drills were held in
the summer of 1928. Other drills followed during the next few
years. But not until the Manchurian incident had nearly ended,
in 1933, were frequent air defense drills introduced on a national
scale. Tokyo's first "air defense week" (bOgo shakan) com
menced on June 22, 1933, and featured public lectures and
movies. It was followed less than two months later by the first
"Kant6 air defense maneuvers" (Dai ikkai Kania hoku enshii)
held on August 9-11. 1933, Meanwhile, to heighten the public's
sense of national emergency, the bureaucracy launched an "air
defense donation campaign" (h6ku kenkin IIndo) and mobilized
town councils (ciJokai) to help collect money and distribute
"donation bags" (kenkin hukuro) to households in the major
cities.
9
Behind these activities lay the army's desire for military
modernization and decisive changes in the state structure. Its
aspiration, dating back to 1920. to develop and implement a
"total war mobilization policy". had actually been realized in
principle when the Kato Government on April 29, 1926 es
tablished a "Preparatory Committee for Establishing an Organ
for General Mobilization." One year later, in May 1927. the
Tanaka government established the first cabinet-controlled
central planning agency (shigen kyoku) for the mobilization of
natural resources and manpower. 10
Thus the late 1920s and early 1930s. covering in particular
the years of the party cabinets and the Saito and Okada "na
tional unity" cabinets, saw crisis itself being steadily
institutionalized and politicized by ruling class cabinets which.
despite their frequently bitter internal conflicts, were firmly at
one in advancing the new fascist aims in domestic and foreign
policy. The aims themselves (spawned in the era of "Taisho
democracy") represented the culmination of a long tradition.
dating back to Meiji, of relying on war and the manipulation of
foreign policy crises to achieve domestic unity and integration.
Caught up in an atmosphere of chauvinist. patriotic propaganda.
heightened to an unprecedented degree by the mass circulation
dailies, subjected to the modem tactics of crisis management
and to an ideology of emperor worship. the overwhelming
majority of Japanese strengthened their diverse group ties. In so
doing, they helped implement ever greater degrees of mass
mobilization, since the groups to which they belonged all avo
owed unquestioning belief in the emperor. and were wide open
to manipulation from above. The vertical restructuring of exist
ing intermediate groups so as to support fascist principles and
methods of controlled mass mobilization continued apace.
Yet another structural cause of the crisis atmosphere that
had waxed continually since 1930. was the rule of law itself. or,
more specifically. the role of the police and courts under the
revised Peace Preservation law of 1l)2R To slight the role of the
police and courts under the Peace Preservation Law in the period
before 1937 is to do more than miss an important signpost of the
shift from the Meiji police state to a qualitatively different,
composite fascist It is also to confuse fascism. a specific
form of the modem capitalist state, with militarism. a more
1!eneral social phenomenon affecting most societies at all times.
I} Ihid .. p. 41}
I(). Ihid..
6
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Where militarism denotes a technique of class rule associated
with military budgets, the arms race, the development ofweap
ons technology and everything which contributes to the spiritual
support for waging war, the discussion of fascism is intended to
focus attention on the process of change in the political form
itself and the conditions under which such changes persist. II
Long before the reformist military cliques took the initia
tive in trying to rearrange Japan's political structure to make it
more responsive to the needs of the time (as they saw them), the
police, under the centralized control of the Home Ministry, had
been interferring in domestic politics.By nurturing hysteria and
fear over such issues as anarchism, communism and radicalism,
they paved the way for the military to act. Although the military
has received most of the attention and criticism of writers, the
apparatus of police repression was actually the more effective
bulwark of modern emperor ideology and of Japanese industrial
capitalism, both of which were only as old as the Meiji Restora
tion itself. Since the enactment in 1900 ofthe Public Peace and
Police Law-designed to prevent the decline of the landlord
system by helping landlords and capitalists suppress the em
bryonic tenant and labor movements-the police administra
tion in Japan had had complete control over freedom of speech,
association and assembly. Without doubt, their sphere of au
thority included an enormous area; and in the transition to
Japanese "fascism from above," they came to playas distinc
tive and pivotal a role as the military. A significant problem then
is to show exactly how each connected with and buttressed the
other.
On March 7, 1925, the Lower House of the Japanese Diet
passed overwhelmingly, by a vote of 246 to 18, a Peace Preser
vation Law which brought the thoughts of the Japanese people
for lhe first time within the confines of state action. In the words
of the new basic security law,
Anyone who has formed an association with the object of
altering the national polity (kokutai) or the form of govern
ment (seitai), or disavowing the system ofprivate ownership,
or anyone who has joined such an association with the full
knowledge ofits objects, shall be liable to imprisonment with
. or without hard labor for a term not exceeding ten years.
This new law, enacted against a background of intensifying
class conflict and counter-revolutionary violence on a global
scale, in effect divided the entire Japanese nation into those who
II. Herbert P. Bix, "Kawakami Hajime and the Organic Law of Japanese
Fascism," The Japan Interpreter, Vol. 12, No.1 (Winter 1977), pp. 118-133.
Nearly all aspects of the Peace Preservation Law system are introduced and
analyzed in the special issue of Kikan gendaishi, No.7 (June 1976) titled
"Chian ijiho taisei-sono jittai to dotai" (The Peace Preservation Law
System-Its Substance and Dynamics). I have drawn on it for infomlation in
this and the next paragraphs. Ebashi Takashi, in his article "Showaki no tokko
keisatsu" (The Special Higher Police in the Showa Period), points out that
the original mission of the "military thought police" was to root out within the
armed forces left wing thought and activities. The year before, with the comm
encement of Japan's military intervention in Shandong, an anti-war movement
had gotten underway, spearheaded by the' 'Communist Youth Kansai Regional
Committee" and the "Suiheisha" (p. 80). The military high command's fear of
antiwar propaganda spreading within the army was grounded in a real
possibility .
Another interesting discussion of the 1928 Peace Preservation Law revi
sion can be found in Furuya (Ibid., pg. 29) and Okudaira Yasuhiro, "Tennosei
kokka no jinmin shihai" (Control of the People in the Imperial State), in
Nakamura Masanori, ed., Taikei Nihon Kokka shi 5, Kindai 2 (Tokyo: Tokyo
Daigaku Shuppankai, 1976), pg. 324ff.
Children at lunch at the Kozuya Primary School,lwate Prefecture, 1934. More
than halfofthem died in the war. Counesy ofHerb Bbc.
supported capitalism and the existing form of state, and every
one else who sought changes in either. Henceforth the latter
stood accused of two specific crimes: one against capitalism, the
other against the emperor system (or the kokutai). and for each
crime maximum punishments of equal severity were stipulated:
ten years imprisonment. 12
With the advent to power ofthe Seiyiikai cabinet of Tanaka
Giichi in April 1927, a break occurred in the application of this
Peace Preservation Law. Justice Ministry bureaucrats who had
been instrumental in drafting it and who were connected with
Baron Hiranuma Kiichiro's National Foundation Society,
moved into the key Home Ministry. At their direction, mass
arrests under the Peace Preservation Law began in March 1928,
in the wake of the 16th national Diet elections, the first held
under an expanded suffrage law and the first in which rep
resentati ves of the proletarian parties won seats. Following these
arrests the Tanaka government, on June 29, 1928, suspended
normal constitutional processes and issued an emergency impe
rial edict revising the 1925 Peace Preservation Law with respect
to the crime of "altering the kokutai", which was now made
punishable by death. Simultaneously, punishments were speci
fied for those who merely took "actions for the purpose of
furthering the aims" of proscribed organizations. 13
To implement this revised, loosely drawn Peace Preserva
tion Law, a decentralization of repression occurred. That is to
say, the organizations of repression were expanded within the
ministries of Home, Justice and the armed forces. This person
nel expansion began in 1928-at approximately the same time
as the start of the first air defense drills-with the appointment
in all prefectures of specially-designated' 'thought procurators"
(shiso gakari) , "special higher police"(tokko kei
satsu), "military thought police" (shiso gakari kempei), Home
Ministry police officials (keimukan) , and specially-deputized
"police assistants" (keimukanho).14 these upholders of
12. Okudaira, pp. 321-328.
13. Ebashi Takashi, Op. Cit, pp. 78-79.
14. Watanabe Osamu, "Fuashizumuki no shiikyo tosei-chian ijiho no shiikyo
7
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ideological orthodoxy justified their existence by energetically.
fomenting fear of internal "conspiracies" being plotted by
communists and other radicals-fear that in time fed on itself
and turned into rampant hysteria against any form of expression
that seemed to obscure the brightness of the kokutai.
By the time of the Manchurian Incident, the pattern had
been set. The army agitated the nation with propaganda on
Japan's foreign policy crisis and on the need for more arma
ments, while the pervasive internal security apparatus (to which
the Peace Preservation Law in its numerous revisions gave legal
carte blanche) deflected the public's attention from the
economic impact of the Depression in order to focus it on the
internal crisis. Between 1933-34 and the summer of 1937, these
two political crisis of Japan's own making interacted, percep
tion of the external danger prompting and reinforcing perception
of the internal one, and vice-versa.
The Peace Preservation Law, and the various state organs
whose task was to enforce it, became entangled with the trend
toward bureaucratically controlled mass-mobil ization.
Chronologically, the latter trend developed in and through the
very process of political repression. By March 1935, with the
arrest of the central committee of the Japan Community Party,
the Peace Preservation Law's initial object of destruction had
been virtually eliminated as an organized force. No anti-war,
anti-militarist public opinion existed within Japan and the gov
ernments of the day could do just as they pleased, subject to
dissent and schisms within the groups comprising the ruling
stratum.
Why. then. did the police and judicial bureaucrats still
continue to expand the system of politial repression and thought
control? They did so because of their own lack of confidence in
the intellectual efficacy of State Shinto as the sole support for
emperor worship. but also. more importantly, from fear that,
even in the absence of self-professed revolutionary forces, the
domestic situation in a time of exceedingly rapid economic
change remained highly volatile and fraught with contradic
tions.
During 1935, the Home Ministry adopted a "heresy an
nihilation" (jakyo senmetsu) policy and stepped up its control
over religions in general and shinto-type new religions such as
Omoto kyo and Tenrikyo in particular. 15 Early the following
year. on February 26, 1936, officers of the army's Imperial Way
faction (kodo-ha) attempted unsuccessfully a coup d'etat in
Tokyo and in the wake of this happening the legal system
underwent further modifications. First, the cabinet promulgated
on May 28, 1936, a "Thought Crimes Prevention and Observa
tion Law" (Shisohan hogo kansatsil ho). It stipulated that any
one who was either"arrested under the Peace Preservation Law
but not prosecuted, given a stay of execution of punishment,
released from prison before completion of sentence. or released
after completion of his sentence, was to be subjected to an
additional two years (or more) of protective observation and
restrictions on residence and communications." This law anti
cipated by five years the preventive detention centers, which
dantai e no hat5udo 0 negutte" (Religious Control in the Period of
Fascism-The Application of the Peace Preservation Law Against Religious
Groups), Fuashizumuki no kokka to shakai 4, Senji Nihon no hOtaisei (Tokyo:
Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1979), pp. lIS, 127.
15. Fujiwata Akira, Imai Seiichi, Toyama Shigeki, et. aI., ShinpojiumNihon
rekishi 21, Fuashizumu to senso (Fascism and Wat), (Tokyo: Gakuseisha,
1973), p. 262.
were established in 1942, after the Peace Preservation Law had
once again been fully revised. The vital point, however, is that
these laws, taken as a whole, signalled the fascization of the
state's legal structure, brought about after the left had been
destroyed, by Home and Justice Ministry bureaucrats, acting
sometimes on their own initiative and sometimes at the behest of
the army, but without any undue stimulus from outside civilian
extremists. Similarly, the promulgation on April I, 1938 of the
National General Mobilization Law (Kokka sOdoin ho) further
systematized this reorganization of the legal system, the net
effect of which was to elevate the absolutist features of the Meiji
Constitution while emasculating its constitutional aspects. 16
In the light of this prehistory of constantly expanding
thought repression, public mobilization for war, and fascization
of the legal system, the Konoe cabinet's decision, coming just
after one month in office, to deal China a crushing blow by
escalating the fighting at Marco Polo Bridge was no more a
mistake or "blunder" than the Johnson administration's deci
sion in 1964 to escalate the American attack against Vietnam.
Both undeclared wars were inevitable consequences of specific
undemocratic systems of rule in which decades of brain washing
and mass mobilization operated to forestall and deflect demands
from below for reform and fundamental change. In Japan's
case, however, such reforms were not only more desperately
needed but were couched in the rhetoric of "Sh6wa restora
tion. " Steadily and deliberately, at least since the early 1920s,
Japan's rulers had been moving to establish a strongly author
itarian system of national mobilization, while preparing for an
expanded war on the continent. And-another contemporary
parallel-like leaders of present day neo-fascist states, they had
found in the ideological struggle against communism and het
erodoxy an official rationalization for war that also served to
rationalize their suppression of the class struggle at home.
Writers in the pluralist tradition frequently mislabel Japan
in the period 1937-41 militarist rather than fascist, thereby
leaving the impression of a one-dimensional rule by the military,
commencing after 1937. But, in fact, a dominant political trend
of the entire period (which commenced not in July 1937 but in
September 1931) was the marriage of the military with the upper
stratum of the industrial and financial bourgeoisie, and their
joint participation in the formal drafting of the laws and mainte
nance of the war economy. A state in which top corporate
executives shared power directly with the military, while retain
ing in their own hands supervisory direction over national
economic affairs, is more characteristic of fascism than of an
ordinary military dictatorship. Nor does the militarist label
apply to a state which always remained, in a sense, "under
civilian control" because the military, with all of its imperial
prerogatives, was unable to conquer the highest citadels of
executive power.
In the wartime Japanese state intermediate groups, not
"masses," were permanently mobilized; the military and the
special thought police acted in the name of an autonomous
politico-religious leader; and the industrial and financial bour
geoisie in partnership with the bureaucracy controlled everyday
economic life. The difficulty in defining and labeling such a
state arises from the fact that fascism developed in installments,
16. Kisaka Junichiro, "Nih"n fuashizumu kokkarnn" (the Japanese Fascist
State), Taikei Nihon gendaishi 3. Niho/l filll.l'hi:llmll no kakuritsu to hokai
(Tokyo: Nihon Hyoronsha, 1979), pp. 28-29.
8
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by and through the process of strengthening absolutism. But
here no static labeling approach is intended. Instead, in the
discussion that now follows attention will focus on the institu
tions, the changing political and ideological practices, and the
alliance relationships that gave the wartime Japanese state its
highly composite (hence transitional) nature. To understand this
feature and the logic of the political and economic relationships
to which it points, more attention must be paid hereafter to the
political functions of the emperor institution.
The Problem of the Emperor
Constitutionally, the emperor's formidable political pow
ers suffered no diminution over time but remained the
same-essentially absolute in nature-from 1889 until the
early Showa period down to the surrender on August 15, 1945.
The question of when, exactly, the relative autonomy of both
emperor and emperor system began to be undermined is part of
what the early postwar controversy over Japanese fascism was
largely about. Because the Meiji Constitution (articles 3 and 4)
defined the emperor as "sacred and absolute," "the head of the
Empire," the veritable embodiment of real sovereignty, and
because it also designated him (article 11) "the supreme com
mander of the army and navy," his real decision-making power
and actual role or function were inseparable, both in practice as
in theory. Politically, the emperor furnished the necessary co
ordination to make the system work and in times of deadlock or
crisis there was no way it could work unless he involved him
self, to some degree, in actual decision-making. Such a moment
occurred on May 15, 1932, when one group of young naval
officers assassinated Prime Minister Inukai at his official resi
dence while another group bombed the Seiyiikai headquarters.
At that crucial juncture, Emperor Hirohito and the Genro made
the actual break with the previous technique of rule, by the
simple expedient of by-passing the parties and appointing a
retired admiral, Saito Makoto, to head a cabinet of "national
unity. "
The trick comes when one puts into the picture the element
of will, thereby implying a level of power which did not neces
sarily connote an active or continuing imperial role in the
decision-making process. The oligarchs who contrived the pre
war state deliberately arranged to have the will to war or peace
emanate from only one man-the emperor-so that, from one
angle, his sovereignty amounted merely to the power to declare
the state will. For that, participation in actual decision-making
was unnecessary. One approach to this problem of the emperor's
political role is to examine concrete instances of the way in
which the prewar state embarked upon wars or made alliances,
or instances in which the emperor personally managed grave
domestic crises such as the dismissal of Prime Minister Tanaka
Giichi for his handling of the Zhang Zuolin assassination and the
suppression of the February 26, 1936, military uprising.
Another is to look closely at the theory of Japanese sovereignty
itself and the way in which the emperor institution protected the
individual occupying the throne. The latter approach especially
will show that, within the type of absolutism the emperor
represented, much more was implied than a merely formal claim
to sovereignty; it also involved a ubiquitous civil faith which
subordinated the individual to the state and its mission, and an
ideology obstructive of rational political discussion.
Consider the prewar theory of sovereignty. Japanese loy
alist thought strengthened the emperor's claim to absolute sov
ereignty by drawing on the myth of the divine origins of the
imperial line and adding to it, in the preamble to the 1889
constitution, a genuinely unique element of blood. The latter
differentiates the theory of Japanese absolutism from its Euro
pean counterpart: "The rights of sovereignty of the State, We
have inherited from our Ancestors, and We shall bequeath them
to our descendants. " European conceptions ofdivine monarchy
had assumed that supreme rights of state sovereignty were
bestowed originally by God and, thereafter, the monarch acted
as God's representative on earth, wielding his powers in accord
ance with natural and divine law. In contrast, as Nakamura
The consolidation process of fascism in Japan, as else
where, was also accompanied by chronic inDation.
Over the whole period from 1934-36 to 1945, nominal
wage-rates tripled, going from 100 in 1934-36 to 289.9
in 1945. But the actual cost of living in Japan during
that same period rose seven-fold to 705 percent. As a
result, in the final phase of the Japanese war econ
omy-the years of the Pacific War-real wages fell to
what was in effect a starvation level, far below any
thing experienced by the Germans at any time under
the Hitler regime.
Masanori has pointed out, this Japanese version of constitu
tional absolutism reflected a stifling indigenous heritage of
despotism. Ultimately, it based the emperor's right to govern
later generations on an appeal to his own blood ancestors, i.e.
"from our Ancestors," and thereby justified, as his own (dy
nastic and eternal) possession, the supreme decision-making
power so wielded. 17
More specifically, the Japanese version of absolutism ele
vated and protected the emperor by making him absolute vis-a
vis all positive law, in the sense that all the organs of state-but
especially the army, police and courts-belonged personally to
him. In Nakamura's words, there were "no apparatuses of the
state that did not conform with his will nor any able to resist his
will." In effect, the emperor was freed from all legal restric
tions, and, thanks to him, the spirit of absolutism (and fanati
cism) pervaded the entire bureaucracy. IS Furthermore, all state
organs of the modern emperor system, without exception, were
arranged systematically and structured internally in such a way
as to express, v i s - ~ a - v i s the people, the absolutist essence con
ferred upon them individually by the emperor, who was him
self, in theory, an absolute being. Japanese absolutism, if de
fined narrowly as the officials' consciousness of exercising
unlimited power of control over people, also drew on the speci
fically samurai tradition (which was really of Confucian prove
nance) of kanson minpi ("revere officials and despise the
people"). As E.H. Norman stressed, the attitude of kanson
minpi was integral to the esprit d'corps of the various organs of
the state system.
A recent study by Fujiwara Akira offers an explanation of
17. For discussion of theories of the modem emperor system see Nakamura
Masanori, "Kindai tenniisei kokkaron" (On the Modem Emperor System) in
Nakamura Masanori, ed., Taikei Nihon kokka shi 4. kindai I (Tokyo: Tokyo
Shuppankai, 1975), p. 62, footnote 13.
18. Ibid., p. 53.
9
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what, in practice, this absolutism meant during the early Showa
period. The monarch, in whom resided the leadership power of
the state, acted in behalf of the ascendant capitalist class, which
was then in alliance with big landlords. Depending on circum
stances, however, he shifted his trust to different power organs.
upon which he had conferred an absolutist nature. When war
fare grew more technical after World War I and maintenance of
military control over the colonies became more difficult, the
emperor was obliged to trust his top military commanders more
than others. They in tum began to exercise preponderant power
in the state. 19 But this appearance of exercising preponderant
power was partly illusory. Never was the military able to suc
cessfully defy the emperor's will; nor were military com
manders ever able to strengthen their authority beyond the will
of the emperor. Neither, until the very end of the war, could they
bring the zaibatsu to heel by defying the zaibatsu in their own
sphere of influence. Thus in peacetime as in wartime Japan, the
ultimate ljIerve-center of decision-making never ceased to be
"civilian" in coloration. All of which brings us next to the
classic problem of how to explicate the relationship that de
veloped between the zaibatsu and the forces of fascism.
Fascism and Late-Developing Capitalism
Certainly common needs and aims constituted the basis on
which the zaibatsu became integrated with the bureaucracy and
the military. By colluding with the forces of fascism in the
thirties, by tying up with state-sponsored and operated war
industries, the private zaibatsu combines (of which there were
various types) were able to expand production, strengthen their
control over the nation's economic life and, in the process, build
up a more integrated and centralized system of diverse econ
omic dependencies. Even a brief investigation oftheirrole in the
rise and partial consolidation of emperor-system fascism can
serve to bring into focus a rough picture of the structure of
Japanese society in the 1920s and '30s. It is helpful to begin,
however, by noting two features of the core group of the Jap
anese bourgeoisie, one common to all capitalist classes, the
other specific to countries with late developing, weak bour
geoisies.
First was its inherent diversity of purposes. Vis-a-vis the
key agricultural sector as well as one another, Japanese cap
italists seldom had consistently unified economic interests.
Rather, conflicting interests and schisms beset capitalists and
big landlords through all stages of development.
Yet, secondly, these conflicts were usually mediated effec
tively by the state bureaucracy, largely because Japan's small
industrial bourgeoisie had been conditioned culturally, almost
from birth, to seek and receive state aid and guidance in the
conduct of its economic affairs. Initially, such aid took the form
of a system of laws, erected in the 1890s, which helped to
reproduce and mediate the aims of the classes comprising the
ruling bloc. 20 But the zaibatsu were also charter members of the
19. Fujiwara Akira, "Senzen tennosei ni okcru tennonochii" (The Position of
the Emernr in the Prewar Emperor System) in Gendai to shisli. No. 15 (March
1974). pp. 17-34.
20. The importance of the special class legislation passed in the latc IR9(h.
parallel with the enactment ofthe 1898 Civil Code and 1899 Commercial Code.
is discussed in Shibahard Takuji, "Kindai tcnnoseirnn" (The Modem Emperor
System), Iwanami koza Nihon rekishi 15. kind"i:! (Iwanami Lectures, Japanese
History, Volume 15. The Modem Period II) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. 1976).
ruling bloc and had residual power in the core political institu
tions: namely, the House of Peers and the Imperial Household,
both of which acted directly on their behalf. The Peers did so
because the former court nobles and daimyo (i,e. the upper
stratum of the pre-Meiji hereditary aristocracy) no sooner be
came entitled under the Peerage Act of 1884 than they became a
new financial aristocracy with investments in mining, shipping
and the sphere of distribution-all of which were dominated by
zaibatsu corporations. Also deeply tied in by investments to the
main lines of zaibatsu activity was the agency known as the
Imperial Household. administrative arm of the emperor's vast
properties. Like the Peers. but only more so, it functioned over
the long run as a champion and defender of zaibatsu interests,
Moreover, the Imperial Household locked into the landlord
system through the emperor's huge holdings of farm, forest and
mountain land. Lastly. there existed numerous chambers of
commerce, agricultural associations, the Yurakukai (1900), and
the Higher Chamber of Agriculture. Commerce and Man
ufacturing (Noshoko koto kaigi) (1896), plus political parties in
the Diet, such as the Seiyiikai (1900). through which not only
capitalists but large landowners (those owning 50 cho and over)
were able to make their wishes known to the bureaucracy.
2
1
Thus, despite its many internal conflicts. the ruling bloc was
exceptionally well integrated at the top and its system of power
relations relatively impervious to even the most needed
changes. Furthermore, private zaibatsu interests interlocked
with state interests at all times, while state capital played an
enormously important role in the development of Japanese
capitalism down to and including World War I.
In his Political History ofJapanese Capitalism. Jon Halli
day remarks that "in discussing the issue of military-business
aggressivity it should be remembered that the central role in
Japan's expansion was played by the state which provided the
budgets and credits which permitted both military adventures
and capitalist exploitation and 100ting."22 For the interwar
period it is necessary to build on this observation by investiga
ting the concrete ways in which the connections were made
between the private zaibatsu monopolies and the state. and how
those connections changed over time.
The precocious advances of Japanese capitalism during
World War I offer a handle on which to begin such an inquiry.
Between 1914 and 1919 production in mining and manufactur
ing increased over four fold. going from 100 to 487 according to
the Nagoya Kosho index. 23 Since most of the increase occurred
in small and medium-sized factories employing less than tifty
workers. the economy emerged from the war in a highly un
balanced state. In fact. despite the advances in heavy industriali
pp. 304-357: ,ee espeCially pp. Shihahara's study employs the
concepts of "dass will" and ",tate will" as refined in Fujita Isamu's H6 10
kl'i:lIi 110 if'f'all rim11 [The General Theory of La" and Economyl (Tokyo:
Nihon Hy,-,ronsha. 1974)
21 Nakamura Masanori and Suzuki Masayuki. "Kindai tennosei kokka no
kakuntsu" (The Establishment of the Modem emperor-System State) in Taikei
Ni/1011 ko!.:ka.lhi. 5. killdai II. Op. cit" pp. 60-69.
Jon Halliday. A Political History o{ Japanese Capitalism (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1975). p. 255, fn. 46.
23. M.akoto Ito. Value and Crisis: Essays on Marxian Economics in Japan
(New York: Monthly Review Press. 1980)' p. 168, fn. 10; for a helpful short
resume of the war's economic consequences for Japan see the article by Ogawa
Masanori in Fujiwara Akira. Imai Seiichi. Oe Shinohu, eds .. Kindai Nihonshi
I/O kiso chishiki (Basic Knowledge of Modem Japanese History) (Tokyo:
Yllhikaku. 1972). pp. 242-243.
10
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zation, the position of the textile industry remained pivotal,
indicating that Japan itself remained a light industrialized coun
try. Lastly, increased industrialization had caused Japan's
dependency on imported raw materials to deepen, thereby
precipitating strengthening of control over its colonies to com
pensate for a corresponding subordination to Western
imperialism.
Class Structure in the 20s and 30s
Taken together, both the gains as well as the costs of
Japan's World War I industrialization paved the way for
changes that occurred in the class structure during the 1920s and
'30s. Bloc unity and internal cohesion at the national level were
undermined by the strengthening of the capitalist class and the
weakening of different strata of landlords. Simultaneously. at
the local level, the slow but steady absorption of the surplus
agricultural population was undermining the local. landlord
dominated structure of the villages. Particularly during the
1920s, the long-term tendency for the balance of class power to
change adversely for many strata of landlords could be seen in
several distinct ways. First, both small-sized landlords (owning
1-5 cho) and big landlords (owning 50 chi) and over) began to
abandon agriculture altogether. precipitating a partial (i.e. geo
graphically uneven) dissolution and restructuring of the land
lord system. In 1924 there were 4.950 landlords owning over 50
chi) for a total land area of 405.232 chao Thereafter their num
decreased until, by 1940, there were only 2,941 large-sized
landlords or slightly more than had existed in 1908 when land
lords were in the ascendant within the bloc. 24
A second index of the destabilization of the ruling bloc,
particularly at the level of its social base, was the rise of the
tenant movement led by minute peasant proprietors and middle
and upper-echelon tenants demanding rent reductions and even
tually claiming permanent rights to the land. In addition, over
the course of the twenties. but especially after the 1927 financial
crisis. landlord-controlled local banking declined while local,
prefectural banks were forced to subordinate themselves to large
urban banks under zaibatsu control.
The same decades that witnessed this undermining of the
landlord system by the tenant and labor movements also saw the
rise of private monopoly power and a corresponding relative
decline in the weight of state capital in the economy. As private
zaibatsu corporations slowly gained in power. the class con
sciousness of capitalists increased, as evidenced by the new
forms of industrial organization which gave big business a
stronger voice at the national political level. In effect. the
Japanese bourgeoisie became a fully constituted class in the
decade after World War I and the organizaiional forms which
had once sufficed to articulate its interests changed accordingly.
Starting with the Nippon k01(yo kurabu (Japan Industrial Club)
in 1917, national class organizations and industry-wide profes
sional associations emerged. Included among the former were
the powerful Nippon keizai renmei (Japan Economic Federa
tion) in 1922, and the Zenkoku sangyo dantai (National Federa
tion of Industrialists) in 1931.25
24. Toda ShintarO, Tenn6sei no keizaiteki kiso bunseki (An Analysis of the
Emperor System's Economic Foundations) (Tokyo: Sanichi Shobo. 1947). pp.
77-78. Also see the chart on the changing composition of the ruling in
Ohashi Ryiiken. ed., Nihon no kuikyii kosei (lapan's Class Composition) (To
kyo: Iwanami Shinsho 789, 1971), pp. 26-27.
To further supplement these private business organizations
and to coordinate the activities of state and economy, zaibatsu
executives then strengthened their influence in the House of
Peers and began entering government directly, serving in extra
ministerial bureaus and commissions, charged with promoting
By 1945 the big four zaibatsu (Mitsui, Mitsubishi,
Sumitomo and Yasuda) controlled 32.4 percent of all
investment in heavy industry and nearly 50 percent of
all investment in finance.
industrial cartellization. Simultaneously, bureaucrats, often
acting on the recommendations of these captains of industry and
finance. pioneered new forms of state intervention in the econ
omy, such as the Major Industries Control Law and the Indus
trial Society Law, both enacted in 1931. Japan, of course, was
in the midst of the Great Depression-agricultural prices were
collapsing and party cabinets and bureaucrats were busily draft
ing depression counter-measures-when these new laws to
promote cartels were made. But they did not represent any shift
in the underlying general direction in which the economy was
headed. Even protectionism had its roots in the mid-twenties.
The June 1932 upward tariff revision, for example, marked a
further unfolding of an industrial protection policy which really
began in 1926, with the passage of a tariff-rate revision law.
And protectionist policies in trade and industry went hand in
hand with various long-sought schemes for the rationalization
and standardization of production. In a sense, then, the object of
economic policy at the start of the thirties was to register the
transformation that had occurred earlier, over the previous
decade, in the structure of the Japanese economy. For capital
ists, this meant state aid in securing the home market exclu
sively for Japanese industry, while also helping industry to meet
intensified competition in world markets and to improve the
competitiveness of Japanese exports.
26
More generally, how
ever, it meant a greater role for the state in managing industry's
break-out from an international status quo which subserved West
ern economic interests at Japan's expense. The following exam
ple of how fusion was achieved finally between private and
government manufacturers of iron and steel illustrates many of
these trends.
Iron and Steel
Changes in the iron and steel sector of Japanese industry
between the two world wars, the object of a recent study by
Nagura Bunji, show concretely why the intensified imperialism
of the early I 930s advanced the reform of Japanese capitalism in
exactly the direction many capitalists had long wished to move.
25. Kano Masanao, Nihon no rekishi 27. TaishO demokurashii (History of
Japan, Vol. 27, Taisho Democracy), pp. 387-388.
26. See Irvine H. Anderson, Jr.. The Standard-Vacuum Oil Company and
United States East Asian Policv. 1933-1941 (Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), p.
75: Eleanor M. Hadley. Antitrust in Japan (Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), p.
365: and Nagahara Keiji, ed .. Niho" kei:aishi (An Economic History of Japan)
(Tokyo: Yiihikaku S(lsho. 1970), pp. 2H3-2H8. The largest number of cartels in
heavy industry. the chemical industries, textiles and the foodstuff industry were
formed in 1930 and 19, I
11
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Japan's privately-owned iron and steel firms had achieved, by
the end of World War I, a certain degree of domestic self
sufficiency. Nevertheless, throughout the twenties, they con
fronted numerous problems: particularly the monopolization of
coking coal and iron ore supply sources by state capital (in the
form of the Yawata Iron and Steel Complex and the South
Manchurian Railway Company), and a bifurcated, inefficient
physical structure within which pig iron and stee! products
produced separately by different firms. In additIOn, domestic
steel-mill production capacity always exceeded total demand
for various kinds of steel materials. Obliged to operate at greatly
reduced mill capacity, steel manufacturers could not meet for
eign competition even in the domestic market. In fact, as late as
1929, only 68 percent of all Japanese plants producing steel
plate and sheet were in operation: foreign competition had shut
down the remainder. With foreign imports of iron and steel,
especially from China, Korea and British India, acting as the
main determinant of prices in the Japanese home market, do
mestic makers were unable to set monopoly prices or secure
monopoly profits. 27
In these circumstances, zaibatsu-connected iron and steel
firms formed defensive cartels to resist foreign imports and also
pushed the government to enact other relief measures to foster
the Japanese steel industry. At the same time, the private firms
began to seek greater cooperation with the government -operated
companies engaged in the production of iron and steel. Yet even
these measures did not suffice, by themselves, to overcome the
chronic stagnation in the late-developing iron and steel industry
and tum it into a base for zaibatsu capital accumulation. For that
to happen the state itself had to take the initiative by (a) creating
greatly increased military demand for iron and steel, over
coming the problem of insecurity of foreign .ore
(c) integrating the industry. With the establishment, In Apnl
1933, of the Japan Iron and Steel Works Nittetsu)-agiant.state
capital trust-a fusion was achieved, finally, between pnvate
zaibatsu capital and the largest of the government -operated steel
works. 28
Clearly, one cannot contemplate the successes of the
monopoly bourgeoisie during the 1930s being s.truck by
how close they meshed with the rise of faSCism. HaVIng pen
etrated the bureaucracy, the leaders of industry and finance
succeeded in securing, with strong conservative party support,
governmental aid in numerous forms, while the needs of poor
tenants, minute independent landowners and the urban poor
were being callously disregarded. The acute depression subse
quent to 1929 thus set the stage for the
organizations to begin their full-scale polItical and ec?nomlc
rise. After the shooting of Prime Minister Hamaguchl (Nov
ember 1930) and the start of the Manchurian Incident
(September 1931)-both closely coincident with the sudden
collapse of agricultural prices and the free trade system based on
gold-Japan's industrial and ?egan to.b'y-p.ass
the political parties in favor of a relatIOnshIp With
that was far more dynamic, mutually profitable and InstitutIon
alized than anything yet seen.
Although developed under conditions created by military
27. Nagura Bunji, "Ryotaisenkan Nihon tekkogyo shiron" [A Study of the
Japanese Iron and Steel Industry in the Interwar Period] kenk)'u
(Journal of Historical Studies), No. 489 (February 1981), see especially pp. 1-9.
28. Ibid.,pp. 14-17,54.
initiative, the new relationship between the zaibatsu and the
military was grounded in the mutually shared aim of building a
self-sustaining and self-sufficient bloc economy, which would
be capable of expanding Japanese power in Asia. Here we shall
di vide its development into two stages: 1931 to 1936 and 1937
to 1945. If we emphasize the first stage, then the start of the
China War in mid-1937 seems to acquire a certain necessity
from the viewpoint of economic development.
The Zaibatsu and the Military, 1931-6
Certainly the early thirties saw Japan's economic structure
reshaped by (a) movements of cartellization and rationalization
in industry and (b) an enormous expansion of productive forces,
especially the heavy and chemical industries. In this period of
building-up an arms economy, the objective requirements of
Japanese industry were met by purchases from the West of
machinery and scrap metal and massive imports from colonial
Asia of industrial raw materials, particularly coal and low
phosphorous pig iron (essential for weapons manufacture).
Such imports, in tum, depended partly on the rapid occupation
of new territories in China. Economically, the nearly 12 percent
increase in Japanese exports to the Kwantung Leased Territory
that occurred between 1931 and 1936 meant that industry and
banking in Japan gained from the advance of the Japanese army
in Manchuria an overseas outlet for industrial manufactures and
idle capital. Army aggression in these years also made possible
the large-scale plunder and expropriation of foreign-owned
(mostly Chinese) businesses, raw materials, natural resources
and labor power. For the declining Japanese textile industry this
meant the elimination of a competitor and the acquisition of a
new civilian market in China. Without such assistance and
plunder, a relatively backward Japanese capitalism would have
been extremely hard-pressed at that stage to accumulate,
rapidly, sufficient capital to build a quasi-war economy cen
tered on large zaibatsu enterprises. 29
Yet the exclusion of zaibatsu capital from the virgin land of
Manchukuo was the very premise on which the Kwantung Army
publicly based its planning-a fact often cited in textbook
accounts to support the thesis that the zaibatsu opposed the new
policy of direct, forceful action. Such a view is unneces.sarily
one-sided and naive. One step toward a better understandIng of
the zaibatsu/military relationship is to recognize that the Man
churian Incident represented a clash between Japanese railway,
mining and textile capital and developing Chinese national
capital, which had been struggling throughout the twenties to
restrict the Japanese economic advance. Organizationally, how
ever, the fighting in Manchuria grew out of a carefully planned
conspiracy within the army and then unfolded as an actual war
of colonial pacification. Naturally, at the time, the Japanese
government, with the mass media's eager cooperation, obfus
cated the real causes of the war and justified Japan's actions in
the name of anticommunism and resistance to the Soviet threat,
while making China appear as a country standing in need of
chastisement, improvement and general uplifting by Japan.
(Nations seldom go to war for anything but beneficent pur
poses). Kwantung Army planners of the "incident" and their
29. See the incisive discussion of Japanese capitalism and Manchurian
economic control in Sakamoto Masako, "Senso to zaibatsu" (War and the
Zaibatsu) in Nakamura Masanori, ed., Taikei Nihon gendaishi 4. Sensa to kokka
dokusen shihonshugi (Tokyo: Nihon Hyoronsha, 1979), pp. 49-60.
12
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military superiors in Tokyo, however, sought common goals.
They wanted to mobilize the home population to counter the
agricultural depression and, at the same time, reform the state
under military leadership. In pursuit of these goals they ex
ploited the deep-rooted animus, wide-spread throughout Japa
nese society, against the zaibatsu. To justify the sacrifices they
were asking the Japanese people to bear, the army promised
repeatedly to prevent the zaibatsu from aggrandizing the fruits
of victory, which someday would be a gift for everyone. 30
The "old zaibatsu" (Mitsubishi, Sumitomo), aware of
these purely domestic reasons for their exclusion from Man
churia, were quite content to see the South Manchuria Railway
Company (Mantetsu) and the government assume all the risks in
building the infrastructure for their own future direct invest
ments in the puppet state of' 'Manchukuo. " And they were also
at one with the army about restricting direct investments in
"Manchukuo," so that its industries would not compete with
domestic Japanese industry. As Sakamoto Masako's study has
shown, both army, zaibatsu, and major business federations
were also agreed on the basic goal of seeking to further the
economic development of Japan rather than the autonomous
economic development of Manchuria. 31
Up to 1936 the Mantetsu monopolized most heavy in
dustrialization in Manchuria: indeed, 60 percent of all Japanese
capital invested in Northeast China took the form of purchases
of Mantetsu stock and risk-free debentures. 32 During that same
period, 1931-36, the older zaibatsu were also actively further
ing coal and iron development in Manchuria and securing stabi
lized profits from Mantetsu industrial activities. And through
out the army's advance into North China, nearly all the giant
prestigious monopoly firms worked together as a team. In late
1934, detailed planning by the army got underway for the
economic separation of North China from the rest of China, and
the former's integration into a Japan-Manchukuo-China eco
nomic bloc. Two years later in 1936, Japan's direct economic
advance into North China began, spear-headed by the Mantetsu,
its newly formed subsidiary Hsing-Chung or the China De
velopment Company, that organization's own numerous sub
sidiaries, the Yokohama Specie Bank, the Okura Gumi, which
had long had coal and iron mining rights at Penhsihu, and the
general trading firms of the Mitsui and Mitsubishi zaibatsu,
which had similar rights at Fushun and other places in China and
Korea.
Meanwhile, in the two years from 1934 to 1936, China's
highly competitive textile industry in Shanghai, Qingdao
(Tsingtao), Tianjin (Tientsin) and other North China cities was
being wrecked by Japanese concession-hunters and fortune
seekers representing medium and small capital. In Qingdao, for
example, Japanese textile capital already owned nearly seventy
percent of the textile looms even before the start of the China
War; two years later, in 1939, it owned nearly ninety percent.
The significance of Japan's coercive monopolization of the
North China trade before 1937 can hardly be overestimated. The
total amount of import and export trade going through the six
North China ports ofQinwangdao, Tianjin, Longgou, Qingdao,
Weihaiwei and Chefoo, just in the period 1933 to 1936, was
equal to or exceeded China's total foreign trade. 33
30. Ibid .. p. 57 ff.
31. Ibid., pp. 52-54.
32. Ibid., p. 56.
On the eve of the China War, T.A. Bisson wrote this
description of what was happening in North China:
The center ofthe stage, in the spring of 1936, had been taken
by a specially fashioned technique of Japanese penetra
tion-smuggling operations organized on a mass scale . ..
From the beginning, the Demilitarized Zone had been the
seat ofsmuggling enterprises ofvarious kinds. Through this
area hadflowed the precious stocks ofsilver coin and bullion
in a stream that was at flood in the middle of 1935. An
extensive traffic in narcotic drugs fostered by Japanese na
tionals, especially Koreans, had developed since 1933 in the
railway towns of the zone. Opium and other more deadly
narcotic drugs from Manchukuo, entering via East Hopei
territory, had spread widely through all the North China
provinces .. . The transition to protection of a smuggling
traffic which embraced Japanese commodities in general,
especially with the facilities afforded by East Hopei and
out-of-work silver smugglers, was relatively easy. 34
Clearly, long before the Marco Polo Bridge Incident accelerated
the Japanese economic plunder of china, the puppet "auton
omous regime in Eastern Hebei" was nurturing a contraband
trade in Japanese goods, which also paved the way for the older
zaibatsu combines to begin participating directly in the building
of the new continental empire.
Between 1931 and 1936 overseas expansion was the com
mon response of zaibatsu and military leaders alike to the global
breakdown of the capitalist accumulation process itself. At the
most general level, responsibility for that generalized break
down must be assigned first to the enormous structural im
balances in the distribution of wealth, income and industrial
capacity that had built up ever since the end of the 19th century,
but especially since World War I, in the different national units
of the world capitalist system. A second causal factor was the
imbalances between demand for commodities, including capital
and labor power, and the capacity of different national capitals
to meet it. Japan's private monopoly corporations had always
been tied structurally to state capital and dependent on state aid
in numerous forms. When the breakdown occurred, they were
striving to catch up with the advanced Western economies by
shifting their base to the heavy and chemical industries, and, by
raising tarriff barriers, to keep out competitive foreign imports.
Such a shift presupposed a continuation and extension of the
resources-imperialism that had been practiced at China's ex
pense throughout the 1920s. It also presupposed a continuation
of the fusion, which had been underway at least since the
mid-twenties, between the private monopolies, government
operated industries, and the bureaucracy.
In this context, the functional significance of the Great
Depression and the Manchurian Incident was that, coming on
top of one another, they advanced both trends. The leaders of
government and business responded by quickly reorganizing
trade, currency and financial arrangements along the same lines
33. See Fujiwara Akira's report on "Fascism and War" in Shinpojium Nihon
rekishi 21, Fuashizuku to sensa, Op, Cit., pp. 172-184. The discussion of
Japan's economic advance into China on pages 196-200 is relevant here; also
Kobayashi Hideo, "Nihon teikokushugi no Kahoku senryo seissaku-sono
tenkai 0 chiishin ni" (On the Development of Japan's North China Occupation
Policies) in Nihonshi kenkyu, No. 146 (October 1974), p. 5.
34. T.A. Bisson, Japan in China (New York: The MacMillan Company,
193R), pp. 128-129.
13
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as their stronger Western trading rivals. thereby forging an
exclusive trading bloc in Japan's own East Asian periphery. By
lending their active support to the overriding goal of Japanese
foreign policy during the early thirties. which was to smash the
Western-imposed balance of power in East Asia and replace it
with a new political and economic order dominated by Japan.
Japan's business leaders succeeded in furthering capitalist ac
cumulation on an expanded basis. Business support for new
processes of political mobilization at home and for reform of the
state with a view to further concentrating (but also. at certain
levels, diffusing) power then followed as a corollary to the new
direction in foreign policy. When. at the end of the decade.
Chinese peasant resistance frustrated the army's efforts to build
a stable political superstructure for consolidating the new eco
nomic order, Japan's rulers opted for a widening of the struggle
in China.
Costs and Benefits
Let us see next just who reaped the benefits and who paid
the costs of this zaibatsu/military alliance, after which we shall
consider some of the long-term effects ofthe" 15 years war" on
the structure of Japanese capitalism. For the vast majority of the
Japanese people-not to mention their millions of Asian vic
tims-extremely harmful effects followed from the process of
conversion of Japanese private industry into a command-control
economy geared to waging total war. Conversely, right up until
Japanese imperialism was in its death throes, the giant zaibatsu
found that same process highly profitable, as even a fleeting
glimpse of company profits and workers wages during the
thirties attests.
In the manufacturing sector, surveys by the Mitsubishi
Economic Research Institute of about 200 representative firms
showed that the ratio of profit to total used capital increased
from 1.9 in early 1931 to 7.4 in late 1937. Similar surveys of 10
to IS companies in the mining sector showed the ratio of profit
to total used capital rising steeply from 1.8 to 8.9 during the
same period. 35 A Western authority on the Japanese war econ
omy, J.B. Cohen, suggested similarly high percentage figures
for the first half of the thirties, noting that "The index of
corporate profits (1929= 1(0) rose from 51 in 1930 to 157 in
1936. For a representative sample of companies in manufactur
ing and mining . . . net profits as a percentage of capital rose
from 5.2 percent in 1930 to 16.1 percent in 1936. "36 The
biggest earners, ofcourse, were in production for war and by the
second half of 1936 earnings of from 20 to 30 percent profit on
paid-up capital were being registered by thirty-eight civilian war
contractors for the army and navy, at the very time when profits
from export industries were starting to decline. Thereafter, from
late 1937 to late 1941, private companies in the areas of iron and
steel, shipbuilding, non-ferrous metals and machine manufac
turing doubled and, in some cases, tripled their paid-in capital
and profits, while the biggest increases were registered by the
largest firms in each category: Japan Steel (a Mitsui enterprise).
Sumitomo Metals, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Hitachi
35. See chart in Nakamura Masanori, "Kokka dokusen shihonshugi no
seiritslJ" (The Establishment of State Monopoly Capitalism) in Taikei Nihon
gendaishi 4, senso to kokka dokusen shihonshugi (Tokyo: Nihon Hyoronsha,
1979),pp.16-17.
36. Jerome B. Cohen, Japan's Economy in War and Reconstruction (Min
neapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. 1949), p. 8.
Manufacturing (a Nissan affiliate). 37
The contrast between this profit-taking and the movement
of workers' real wages in private manufacturing industry is
worth noting. According to Bank of Japan statistics, (taking
1926 as 100), the real cash earnings of male workers in private
factories increased slightly between 1931 and 1937, going from
92.0 to 98.0, while during the same period, wages of female
workers declined annually from 77.4 to 71.2.38 However, if
these statistics seem to suggest that imperialist expansion in
China was helping to mitigate the conditions of wage labor
for some. older statistics prepared by the Hitotsubashi Uni
versity Economics Institute show that daily per capita real
wages in manufacturing industry (1934-36= 100) actually de
clined from 107 to 101 between 1931 and 1937.
39
Another
Japanese source also shows the index of real wages in private
manufacturing industry (1934-36= 100) falling between 1931
and 1937 from 109. I to 99.0.
411
With the outbreak of the China
War. however. workers' real wages gradually began to be
standardized at an extremely low level in all sectors of the
economy. thus reducing wage di ffcrentials per industry across
the board. The consolidation process of fascism in Japan. as
elsewhere. was also accompanied by chronic intlation. Over the
whole period from 1934-36 to 1945. nominal wage-rates
tripled. going from 100 in 1934-36 to 289.9 in 1945. But the
actual cost of living in Japan during that same period rose
seven-fold to 705 percent. As a result. in the final phase of the
Japanese war economy-the years of the Pacific War-real
wages fell to what was in effect a starvation level. far below
anything experienced by the Germans at any time under the
Hitler regime. In fact. before Pearl Harbor. in the first four years
of the China War alone, the index of real wages fell from 100 in
1934-36 to 81.9 in 1940, a difference of 18.1 points
41
It IS hardly surprising, therefore. that with the start of the
China War, the state was forced to intervene in the labor market
to legally control (freeze) wages, tie workers to their jobs. and
dissolve the trade unions. After reaching a prewar peak of 7.9
percent of the work force in 193 I, the percentage of workers
enrolled in labor unions fell by 1940 to O. I percent. In that same
period, police intervention in the arbitration of labor disputes
rose steadily while union participation declined. going from .'1i1
percent of the total number of such disputes in 19.'17 to 1.'1
percent in 1938,8 percent in 1939 and nearly none in 1 9 4 0 . 4 ~
37. Koyama Hirotake, Nihon gunji kogyo no shiteki bunseki (An Historical
Analysis of Japanese Military Industry) (Tokyo: Ochanomizu ShobO, 1972),
p.264.
38. ljihon ginko tokeikyoku, Meiji iko honpo shuyo keizai tokei (Hundred-Year
Statistics of The Japanese Economy, prepared by The Bank of Japan, Statistics
Department, 1966). p. 74.
39. Hitotsubashi Daigaku Keizai Kenkyiijo, ed., Kaisetsu keizai tokei (Tokyo:
Iwanami Shoten, 1953, p. 126.
40. Kajinishi Mitsuhaya, Kato Toshihiko, Oshima Kiyoshi and Ouchi
Tsutomu, Nihon shihonshugi no botsuraku III (The Fall of Japanese Capitalism,
Volume III). (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1953. 1977), p. 828.
40. See Nihon minshu no rekishi 9, sensoto minshu (History of the Japanese
People Volume 9, War and the People) (Tokyo: Sanseido, 1975), p. 177. For a
more recent study see footnote 43.
42. Ibid., p. 181. It would be wrong to conclude from this that, under condi
tions of war and mobilization, civilian resistance ceased altogether. On the
contrary, as Awaya notes (Vo\. 9, p. 181), worker frustration and dissatisfaction
built up and vented itself in such forms as absenteeism, deliberate slacking on
the job, and even outright sabotage of equipment and tools. The year 1939 saw
1,120 labor incidents involving the participation of 128.294 workers. Of this
14
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After that date, the new economic order required the dissolution . periodic recessions in the twenty years subsequent to 1960 then
of the labor unions and the introduction ofconscripted Japanese
labor and the forced labor ofKoreans. The general conditions of
labor, like the standard of living of the Japanese people as a
whole, then deteriorated to such an extent that the bureaucracy,
in pursuit of the war effort, was obliged to intervene directly
against landlords by offering tenant cultivators increased
incentives.
1937-1945
It was precisely in this context of human misery and im
poverishment for the majority that the zaibatsu rose to a position
of unprecedented power in the post-1937 (or full wartime)
economy. At the very end of their first period of expansion
(1931-36). the 14 largest zaibatsu combines controlled slightly
less than one quarter of the paid-in capital of all Japanese
companies and about 30 percent of the paid-in corporate capital
in heavy industry. 4.1 Thereafter. three kinds of monopolistic
concentration occurred: concentration of capital in six large
zaibatsu banks. of capital in the hands of a small number of
integrated zaibatsu combines. and of production in leading
zaibatsu enterprises in each industrial sector By 1945 the big
four zaibatsu (Mitsui. Mitsubishi. Sumitomo and Yasuda) con
trolled 32.4 percent of all investment in heavy industry and
nearly 50 percent of all investment in finance. The increased
position of the remaining eleven zaibatsu combines was minor
in c()l11parison to the gains made by these four giants during the
four ycars of the Pacific War. In her study of zaibatsu concentra
tion Eleanor Hadley remarks that:
COlllparing the proportion ofinvestment outside Japan by the
Hi!! FOllr alllong the 9 in 1941 to their position among the 10
in I 94fi. \Ie.find that the Big Four wentfrom 18 percent to 80
percellf. 111 slIch circumstances it is hard indeed to imagine
that there could h{l\'e beel! any fundamental antagonism
hefll'een the big. older combines and the military. 44
Her judgement however. as we shall see in a moment, tends to
overestimate the unity of the zaibatsu-military embrace while
slighting the internal contradictions.
Interestingly. the period straddling the war, from the late
1930s to 1960. saw a significant increase in the degree of
paid-Up capital concentration of Mitsui. Mitsubishi. Sumitomo
and Yasuda. which went from 10.4 percent in 1937 to 13.6 in
1960. Similarly. the seven largest industrial groups. which
include the big four plus the Sanwa Bank. Dai Ichi Kangyo
Bank and Industrial Promotion Bank. increased their degree of
capital concentration from 14.4 percent before the war to 19.5
percent by the early I 960s. 45 A dialectic of high growth and
number, 358 cases involving 72,835 workers qualified as strike actions. The
two largest of these strikes occurred in Okayama Prefecture at the Tama
Shipbuilding Yard (where 6,500 workers staged a work slowdown) and in Kobe
at the Kawasaki Heavy Industries (where 48,000 workers staged a similar work
stoppage). After 1940, stepped-up police interventions reduced the number of
such incidents; but throughout the Pacific War years strike and sabotage inci
dents continued.
43. Yamazaki Hiroaki, "Senjika no sangyii kiizii to dokusen soshiki" (The
Industrial Structure and Monopoly Organizations Under Wartime) in
Fuashizumuki no kokka to shakai 2, Senji Nihon keizai (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku
Shuppankai,1979),p.239.
44. Hadley, Op. cit., p. 57.
45. Yamazaki Hiroaki, Op. cit.,p. 288.
further increased, far beyond what these figures suggest. the
degree of monopoly concentration and centralization of capital
in the Japanese economy.
The concentration trend in industry and finance during the
period of the zaibatsu/military alliance may thus appear weak in
comparison to later phases of concentration. Nevertheless. it
paved the way for what was to follow after the war. One of its
lasting effects was the decline in the ability of traditional
zaibatsu "holding companies" to finance. and thereby control.
subsidiary firms and combines within their orbit. and the cor
responding rise of big bank control over industries and trading
firms within each zaibatsu group. This type of wartime "zai
batsu dissolution' clearly anticipated the postwar reorganization
of zaibatsu combines around core banks rather than family
owned holding companies. 41>
Another lasting influence of the period of the' 'New Econ
omic Order." which was based on Nazi German notions of a
total-war economy. was the company-controlled employee as
sociation or union. of which there were many kinds and into
which the majority of Japanese workers were compelled to
enroll. But perhaps the most important economic legacy of this
period arose on the ideological plane, in the principles of the
so-called control associations. Control associations (tosei kai)
in vital industries were established originally on the basis of the
September I, 1941 "Major Industries Group Ordinance" (Jiiyo
sangy6 dantai rei). 47 Within a year twelve control associations
had been fonned in nine different divisions of industry. As the
war dragged on towards defeat, other industries and banks
established similar horizontally-organized "self-control"
associations. These bodies, though numbering eventually in the
thousands, never developed on schedule or in accordance with
their original conception. From the outset, jurisdictional con
flicts beset them-conflicts either with the old zaibatsu or
ganied as vertically-integrated empires spanning many indus
tries, or with bureaucrats who resented delegating their care
fully guarded powers to "private" bodies of businessmen cho
sen from within each industry rather than appointed from with
out by the bureaucracy. Also, the "leader principle,"
(juhrerprinzip), by which each subdivision of industry would
have a single supreme boss, did not work well in the context of
Japan's late-developing industrial structure and distinctive cor
porate practices. 48,
Yet some, like Shibagaki Kazuo, have argued that the
triumph of the ideological principles on which the control as
sociations were predicated, and not their failure of implementa
tion. was of lasting significance. The businessmen's control
associations subscribed to the ideology of free competition, the
priority of public welfare, and the self-regulation of industry by
leaders chosen from within. Such principles they couched in the
46. Ibid., especially pages 235 to 289; also John Roberts, Mitsui: Three
Centuries ofJapanese Business (New York: John Weatherhill, Inc., 1973), p.
353.
47. Shibagaki Kazuo, " 'Keizai shintaisei' to tiiseikai" (The 'New Economic
Order' and the Control Associations) in Fuashizumuki no kokka toshakai 2,
Senji Nihon keizai, p. 325.
48. Ibid., p. 323, 329. For the German "Control Associations", inaugurated
by Munitions Minister Fritz Toot in April 1940 as part of German capitalism's
"self-responsibility of industry" system, see Berenice A. Carroll, Design For
Total War: Arms and Economics in the Third Reich (The Hague and Paris:
Mouton, 1968), p. 222
15
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terminology of the "New Economic Order," though what they
meant, in effect, was a regime under which finance and mono
poly capital strengthened their dominance in the economy,
while the state agreed to confine itself only to general system
maintenance functions. With the establishment of the control
associations, and the transfer to them of broad admin'istrative
and public authority, the zaibatsu secured predominance for
their ideological principles, while advancing a step further their
own emancipation from excessive bureaucratic control. The
control associations thus represented the last attempt of late
developing Japanese capitalism to reform itself from within. 49
Still, against this argument for regarding the control as
sociations as an index of finance capital's hegemony, on the
ideological plane at least, one must set the fact that little transfer
of authority from government ministries to control associations
actually took place. In fact, as Hikita Yasuyuki noted, control
associations were excluded from whole industries which were
the nucleus of military production, such as aircraft and weapons
plants. 50
The rapid advances of Japanese monopoly capital during
the thirties and early forties exacerbated contradictions within
the ruling bloc and greatly complicated the bureaucracy's task
of regulating the gains of the economy while insuring, at the
same time, that the zaibatsu subserved the cause of war. But by
exploiting relative differences in the power positions of "old"
and "new" zaibatsu, by utilizing the lever of state-controlled
industries, and by skillfully fostering consensus under the
emperor-who was himself ever active behind the scenes in a
higher coordinating capacity-by doing all of these things, the
ministries and the military were able to maintain their overall
hegemony and continue the war until the emperor finally made
the decision to surrender.
Now, to complete our discussion, let us go back and have a
look at the political party component of emperor-system fas
cism. What role did the parties play in fostering and sustaining
that complex process of harsh political repression, mass con
formism and group mobilization which accompanied Japanese
industry's precocious advances from the late 20s to the early
40s?
Parties and Electoral Politics in the Thirties
The Diet and the established parties were similar to other
constituent elements of the emperor system formed in late Meiji
in the sense that oracular sovereignty was as much their leg
itimating principle and protective shield as it was of other, more
powerful, organs of the state.
51
But unlike those others, the
political parties began their rise to power within a Diet that met
for less than three months each year and that was constitution
ally permitted to superintend only the most limited powers of
control over the budget and the right to offer advice and consent
on legislative matters. The Diet also included-on a par of
authority with its "democratic" element, the House of Rep
49. Ibid .. pp. 320-324.
50, On this point see Hikita Yasuyuki. "Fuashizumuka no dokusenkan tiisii to
tenniisei kenryoku no dokujisei'" (Contlicts Among the Monopolies and the
Independence of the Emperor System Under Fascism) in RI'kishigakll ke/lk1'l1.
No. 451 (December 1977), pp. 44-50.
51. Inumaru Giichi, "Senzen Nihon no kokka kenryoku to tenniisci'" (State
Power and the Emperor System in Prewar Japan) in Rekishi hyoro/l, No. 245
(December 1970), pp. 18-19.
resentatives-an imperially appointed House of Peers, ex
pressly contrived to block the popular will. Moreover, like the
cabinet, it was subject to the controlling influence of two other
bodies: the Privy Council and the Genra, later Jiishin, who made
recommendations to the emperor on the appointment of the
prime minister. No wonder that many contemporaries a ~ later
historians regarded such an institution as a mere constitutional
. outer skin" of an absolutist state structure, which was exactly
what its architects intended it to be,
Although the Diet's activities were not lacking in historical
or political meaning, what needs to be remarked here is that it
occupied, and was never able to break out of, an extremely
inferior structural position within the emperor system, Fur
ther,unlike the ministries, the established parties lacked the
flexibility, leadership and authority needed for conciliating the
di vergent interests of the dominant classes and strata. Japan's
political parties were not traversing a path toward two-party
government during the 1920s and so they could not, and did not,
diverge from such a path during the 1930s. Let us look more
closely then at the prewar conservative parties from which
today's ruling LOP is directly descended.
Starting with the Rice Riots of 19 18 the Genro allowed
cabinets to be chosen by the head of a political party, who could
include in it members of his own party. Hara Kei's cabinet of
1918-21 was the first of such "party cabinets" but its establish
ment reflected the will of the Genro and the emperor's advisers,
not that of the Diet. Thereafter, Japan's bourgeois-landlord
parties formed a succession of cabinets which functioned in
behalf of zaibatsu and landlord interests, In order to stabilize the
power of the ruling bloc during the twenties, the parties fulfilled
four distinct, classic roles:
(a) they coopted. middle class strata that could not be
recruited effectively by repressive means;
(b) they helped to suppress and demobilize peasant and
working class struggles against the system of discrimination in
the countryside, as well as struggles for a fairer distribution of
wealth and a measure of democracy, both of which challenged
the system's stability;
(c) they worked to tum class resentments and social crises
outward by whipping up support for war and for imperialist
expansion; and
(d) they tried to conciliate and contain disputes between
dominant groups of the ruling bloc. 52
However, the revision by emergency imperial edict in
1928 of the Peace Preservation Law (passed by the party cabinet
of Kata Komei during the 50th Diet session in 1925) created
new mechanisms for beating back the bourgeois-democratic and
revolutionary movements of the 1920s. At the same time they
allowed some party functions to be shifted onto the judicial and
police apparatuses and branches of the state, thereby hastening a
change in the form of the Meiji regime to one that would soon
have both absolutist and fascist features. When the general
election of 1928 came, opening the door to mass politics
through implementation of the 1925 Manhood Suffrage Law,
the established parties had no choice but to increase their re
liance on zaibatsu money (which seems to have become slightly
harder to obtain) and to continue maneuvering (chiefly at the
expense of officialdom) for more bureaucratic power and in
search of votes from a broader segment of society.
52. Nakamura Masanori. "Kindai tennosei kokkaron'", Op. Cit.. pp. 55-56.
16
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I
I
1
When in 1932 the era of so called "party cabinets" gave
way to the era of "national unity cabinets," the established
parties continued to function as special appendages of the state.
But unlike the twenties, when they worked to frustrate the
political and economic demands of newly mobilized peasants
and workers, now they were compelled to politicize those same
subordinate classes in an effort to regain lost legitimacy, while
at the same time forging closer ties with the military. The parties
need to be assessed, therefore, from the angle of their transfor
mation from demobilizing agents in the twenties into mobilizing
agents of the subordinate classes in the thirties. Also worth
paying attention to is the subordination of the electoral process
itself to the larger process ofspiritual and defense mobilization.
At the start of the 1930s a violent phase of class struggle in
Japan coincided with a heightening of national liberation strug
gles in China and the onset of the Great Depression. In these
circumstances, the very idea of political parties and of parlia
mentarism as such came to be discredited in the eyes of many
Japanese. Under depression conditions, in fact, most sectors of
the population welcomed the army's dramatic victories on the
foreign front and its bold initiatives at home in breaking the
characteristic deadlock of Japanese corrupt-politics-as-usual.
Having already eroded their own legitimacy through their pur
suit of unreasonably partisan policies during the twenties, the
major parties now perceived it to be in their interests to whip up
war fever over Manchuria in tandem with the private fascist
organizations to which many of the leading politicians had close
ties. Thereafter they abetted the movement, led by the local
Reservists Associations, to "Clarify the National Polity" by
discrediting the organ theory of the constitution propounded by
Professor Minobe. In 1934-35, while this kokutai meichO
movement was at its height and Japanese public life was being
subjected to Shinto rituals and beliefs, the bureaucracy decided
to advance a new level of national mobilization by undertaking
an "election purification campaign. "
The professed aims of the first campaign-in which party
officials themselves expressed approval and support-were to
"purify" the political world, curb the rising trend of voter
abstentions and reduce campaign corruption. 53 In May, four
months before the start of the Fall 1935 prefectural assembly
elections, the Home Ministry ordered "election purification
committees" formed in every do (circuit), fu (metropolitan
district) and ken (prefecture). To furnish coordination for them
at the national level, it then established an "Election Purifica
tion Central League. " And with that the government entered the
business of electoral campaigning: by press, radio and movies;
by mobilizing Shinto shrines; by encouraging people to offer
prayers to the dieties of heaven and earth, and to swear oaths
before the gods; lastly, by mobilizing people to participate in
politics at the lowest administrative level: through the buraku
and chOnaikai organizations.
Before drawing any conclusions as to the significance of
these electoral purification campaigns and mid-thirties elec
tions, let us try to situate them historically. The prefectural as
well as the general elections of the mid-thirties were intimately
connected with the establishment of a fascist political regime
53. Awaya Kentarii, "1936-37 nen si>senkyo ni tsuite" (On the 1936-1937
General Elections) in Nihonshi kenkyii, No. 146 (October 1974), pp. \07-124.
My discussion of these elections draws on Awaya's careful analysis and re
search results.
and occurred in a specific stage of reorganization of ruling class
hegemony. Between early 1934 and early 1936 a political stale
mate prevailed at the national level in Japan; while at the local
level, within villages, self-cultivating peasants and small land
lords espousing pro-military nohonshugi (lit., agriCUlture is the
base-ism) were rising into positions of leadership, forming part
of the mass social base for emperor-system fascism. (Its other
"base" was, ofcourse, the bureaucracy). Simultaneously, radi
cal right-wing groups were reorganizing and joining in the
fanatical "Movement for the clarification of the National Pol
ity. " This movement, which the emperor allegedly balked at,
began in February 1935 with the Minobe Incident in the House
of Peers: an attack on retired professor Minobe Tatsakichi's
interpretation of the constitution, which, it was charged, made
the emperor's sanctity and absolute nature conditional. The
Seiyiikai, seeking to overthrow the incumbent cabinet, ex
ploited but was unable to control the movement. Rather, from
its inception, KOdo-ha officers led the kokutai clarification
movement through their control over the Military Reservists
Associations. S4
By the end of 1935, the kokutai clarification movement had
come to engulf the entire army and had kindled anew the
public's sense of unease. In an attempt to curb the army's
politicization, rival senior Tosei-ha officers then dismissed the
representative Kodo-ha figure, Inspector-General of the Army,
Mazaki Jinzaburo. This action touched off a series of
events which led, finally, to the February 26, 1936 coup at
tempt, in which twenty young Kodo-ha officers, leading some
1,454 "righteous army" troops, paralyzed the capital for four
days. The unsuccessful February 26 coup was precipitated by
the Kodo-ha officers' assessment of the international situation
confronting Japan in 1935-early 1936, and by their reading of
the general election results of the previous week, in which the
Seiyiikai lost seats and the Social Mass Party made notable
gains. Essentially, it was a counter-revolutionary action de
signed to hasten the campaign for national reconstruction under
army leadership.
It was also a pivotal event marking a speed-up in the fascist
reorganization of Japan's state structure. In the wake of the
"righteous army's" coup attempt, the Tosei-ha completed its
purge of Kodo-ha officers and of petty-bourgeois radicalism
within army ranks. Thereupon followed the signing of the
Anti-Commintern Pact with Nazi Germany in November 1936,
and the entrance of intellectuals into the councils of govern
ment, symbolized by the formation of the Showa kenkyukai
(Showa Research Association), a brain trust for Konoe Fumi
maio; the most popular political figure in Japan after the em
peror. Finally, in June 1937, Konoe formed his first cabinet and
public calm returned momentarily to the nation.
Such was the broad political context in which the electoral
activity of the mid-1930s must be situated. In the years 1935 to
1937, where politics at the national level was concerned, most
Japanese voters may have continued to believe that party gov
ernment and electoral politics were both quite beyond restitu
tion. But they also felt just as strongly that outright military
dictatorship was also not a feasible alternative. All efforts by the
54. Oki Yasue, "Kokutai meicho undo to gunbu fuashizumu" (the Kokutai
Clarification Movement and Military-Clique fascism) in Kikan gendaishi. No.2
(May 1973), pp. 194-259; Nakajima Kenzo, Shtiwa jidai (the Showa Era)
(Tokyo: Iwanarni Shinsho, 1957), pp. 89-90.
17
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Home Ministry to weaken the two major parties, undermine
their private political campaigning, and curb party corruption
and voter abstentions, came to nought against this basic feeling
of the electorate. The first purification campaign had only a
slight impact on curbing party evils, and reducing the voter
abstention rate, despite the allegedly reduced amount of money
available to the major parties for vote-purchasing.
The second purification campaign, geared to the February
1936 general election to the Diet, was equally unsuccessful in
getting the electorate to choose good, "pure" Dietmen who
would reform the Diet in accordance with the Army's wishes.
The Seiyiikai, running on a platform attacking both Professor
"emperor organ theory" and the Minseito's advo
cacy of' 'national unity" and support for the Okada cabinet, lost
the February 20th election and became the number two party,
while the Minseito rose to first place. The 19th Diet election was
also notable for the increase in strength registered by the Social
Mass Party (Shakai taishuto), which won 18 Diet seats while
other "proletarian parties" won 4 for a total of 22 seats. 55 This
socialist vote, however, was by no means indicative of anti
militarist, anti-fascist sentiment on the electorate's part. The
dominant wing of the Social Mass Party was pro-government,
pro-military, and even less inclined to resist the fascist current
than the major conservative parties.
The 20th general election, held in April 1937-the last
before the "Imperial Assistance Election" of April 30,
1942-exhibited an even greater degree of direct police and
military control over campaigning and speech-making than the
1936 election. Yet the voter abstention rate was unpreceden
tedly high; the Seiyiikai and Minseito (which made common
cause against the Hayashi cabinet) both won, while the Social
Mass Party scored a further gain of 37 seats and 9. 1 percent of
the total vote. Again, however, these results did not in them
selves demonstrate any anti-fascist, anti-militarist inclination of
the electorate. 56
What then can be said in general about the purification
campaigns and the electoral results of the mid-thirties? First, it
must be kept in mind that even where the outcome is not largely
predetermined, elections and participation in voting do not per
se enable most people to realize their essential interests, let
alone their real intentions. 57 Second, one can say that the
Japanese male electorate (women were not allowed to vote) at
least registered its uncertainty about the direction in which the
country was headed and, in so doing, opened the way to the
resignation, on May 31, 1937, of the cabinet of General
Hayashi. However, third, the bureaucracy gave the election
55. Awaya, Op. cit., p. 115. At the time of the 1935 prefectural assembly
elections (as Awaya notes on pp. 108-109), out of 9,330,7S I eligible voters,
6,823,238 actually voted while 2,507,543 abstained, for an average national
abstention rate of 26.3 percent. This compared with an abstention rate of 19.4
percent in 193 I and 26.3 percent in 1927. The urban abstention rate was even
higher: 38.2 percent in 1927, falling to 27.9 percent in 1931 and rising once
again to 37.5 percent by 1915. Major cities like Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe had
abstention rates of approximately 50 percent. Indeed, right up to 1937 all the big
cities registered extraordinarily high abstention rates.
56. Ibid., p. 123.
57. For a discussion of elections and voting under Fascism (' 'the exceptional
state form") see Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third Inter
national and the Problem of Fascism (London: New Left Books, 1974), pp.
324-327; for voting in the liberal democratic state see Carole Pateman, The
Problem of Political Obligation: A Critical Analysis of Liberal Theory (New
York: John Wiley & Sons, 1979), pp. 83-91.
results the contents that it wished. Thus the Home Ministry read
them as a demonstration of the limitations of its successive
purification campaigns as mechanisms for securing electoral
control. In that respect, as Awaya Kentaro has argued, the
elections spurred the bureaucracy to new levels of organiza
tional activity, out of which emerged new measures and new
machinery for reconciling fascism with the preservation of the
outward constitutional foml of the Meiji state structure. Thus
the individual Japanese voter in the expanded electorate of 1936
and 1937 was utterly unable to control the country's leadership
cliques. Given the choices available to him, regardless of how
he cast his vote, the results of the two general elections would
not have been able to prevent the drastic shift to the right of the
old ruling elites which was then underway.
Up to 1937 the fascization of the state structure had cor
responded to the gradual suppression of the Diet's and the
party's limited representative functions. The parties fought their
battles in the Diet, campaigned for electoral votes and preserved
the image of an intact (but utterly spurious) pluralism. Real
power resided with the groups around the emperor (who were
simultaneously members of the bureaucracy), the tosei-ha mili
tary officers in whom the emperor reposed his trust, and the
zaibatsu. Within this constellation of forces the parties and the
Diet survived because they acted as constraints on certain forms
of radicalism, while also doubling as apparatuses of the imperial
state through which new renovationist forces could enter poli
tics. The preservation in Japan of an attenuated "democratic"
mechanism was thus highly efficacious for the rise of fascism.
In the second half of the thirties, as the crisis of Japanese
state capitalism deepened, an overly intensive, rigid and literal
application of the emperor principle-i.e. a genuine cult of the
emperor-began undermining the very status quo it was in
tended to protect. It did so by abetting the quest for new,
younger leaders to replace the old (Choshu-Satsuma-based)
ruling elites. This crisis, which parliamentary politics reflected,
was not a "crisis of the State in all spheres" 5 8 as extraordinarily
severe as that experienced earlier by either Italy or Germany.
Indeed, it was not a hegemonic crisis at all in the sense of a
withdrawal of allegiance to the emperor by major segments of
the bourgeoisie and proletariat. For the real rulers of bourgeois
Japanese society still had sufficient ground on which to stand to
reshape the national consciousness of emperor and kokutai.
Having ample room for maneuvering, they were able to justify
their own continued, but more immediate, domination of polit
ics and the economy in a reorganized power bloc of military and
"reformist" bureaucratic groups,-and they were fused, just
as in Europe, with the leaders of industrial and finance capital.
In this process, "compromise" as a tactic of bourgeois politics
was not replaced so much as it was subordinated to (what
Gramsci termed) the long-term' 'project of achieving an organic
unity of all the bourgeoisie'S forces in a single political or
ganism under the control of a single centre ... "59
The quest for such an organic unity of all political groups in
Japanese society began in 1933 when Matsuoka Yosuke, a keen
admirer of Mussolini, launched an unsuccessful campaign for
58. Antonio Gramsci, "Observations on Some Aspects of the Structure of
Political Parties in Periods of Organic Crisis" in The Modern Prince and Other
Writings (New York: International Publishers, 1968), p. 174.
59. Quoted in Christine Buci-Gluckmann, Gramsci and the State, transl. by
David Fernbach (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980), p. 107.
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I
voluntary dissolution of the parties, in accordance with the
principle of ikkoku ittai (one nation, one body). Yet not
until the very end of the decade, with the promulgation of
Konoe's bureaucratic plans for a new political order, did the
major parties themselves abandon all resistance to fascism and
begin taking the initiative in trying to realize their own disband
ment. The Seiyiikai. the Diet's second largest party. was then
divided into an orthodox camp (Hatoyama Ichiro in alliance
with the Kuhara Fusanosuke faction) and a smaller "reform
camp" dominated by new zaibatsu industrialist Nakajima Chi
kuhei, founder of the Nakajima Aircraft Corporation. In the
larger Minseito, Machida Chiiji headed the majority faction and
Nagai Ryutaro the smaller reform faction. In both major parties,
the reform factions, together with the leaders of the Diet's
splinter parties, advocated all along the goal of a new, single
party for the entire nation. 60 Finally in October 1940, the second
Konoe cabinet formally established the "Imperial Rule Assis
tance Association," into which all the Japanese political parties
were formally dissolved.
Yet even within this loose. contradictorv structure. the
parties. during the four years of the Pacific were able to
reestablish their factions. maintain jihal1 (constituencv) ties.
and survive. Recent academic scholarship on the parties has
made much of this fact in an effort to justify historicallv the
postwar democracy. as well as the trend of permanent
tive .party rule. The point. however. is not that the parties
survIved. but that. being: outside the bounds of decision-makin!!
hearing on the war. they could not control the real
holders. Thus they did not further the quest for solutions to the
nation's problems during the 30s; nor meet the domestic popula
tion's dire need for peace; nor develop strategies for checking
the abuse of power by the bureaucracy and by groups around the
emperor. In these most crucial respects. what the "people's
representatives" did during the 30s and early 40s was of dis
tinctly marginal importance. To find the roots of Japanese
democracy. one must look to democratic struggles "from be
low" rather than to those conservative parties and politicians
60. Edward 1. Drea. The 1942 Japanese General Election: Political Mobiliza
tion in Wartime Japan (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas. Center for East Asian
Studies. 1979). pp. 4-5.
f
who originally prepared the ground for Japanese-style fascism
and upon whom the postwar constitution had, ultimately, to be
forced.
Conclusion
The preceding discussion focused on the Japanese state.
and, more particularly, on chains of events, economic forces
and social groups contributing to its reorganization up to a
certain point. Emperor-system fascism was anchored in the
institutional legacies and authoritarianism of the Meiji Restora
tion, as well as in the breaks with those legacies that occurred
during the political struggles of the late 20s and 30s. It was a
transient, incomplete, composite and "recomposed" dictatorial
form. characterized by the autonomy of its component elements
vis-a-vis one another yet their ideological subordination to the
emperor. the leadership role of the military and police apparat
uses, and the increased presence of zaibatsu representatives in
the ruling administrative structure. It arose on the East Asian
historical stage at an acute moment of the Great Depression,
powered by many different trends, motivations and circum
stances, of which the following were crucial:
The military establishment's desire for modernization
and expansion to meet an alleged "Soviet threat" and its advan
position within the state for implementing foreign pol
ICY and spending strategies which, simultaneously, served the
needs of capital.
The civilian bureaucracy's growing political activism
. . . '
motivated largely by morbid fear of revolutIOnary movements
abroad and their destabilizing effects at home on oppressed
peasants, workers and intellectuals.
The industrial and financial bourgeoisie's increasing
organization of its class interests, and its participation in gov
ernment in support of policies of intensified imperialism, politi
cal repression and economic autarchy. With the start of indus
trial rearmament and the building of the bloc economy, heavy
industry had its profitability restored, light industry gained new
opportunities on the Asian mainland, and the marriage of the
zaibatsu monopolies with the forces of fascism was launched.
The end result was an ever-expanding war and, through the
of war, a great transformation of Japanese society,
gUided from above."
Illustrations from t;avel brochure courtesy ofBeatrice
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Nineteen-Thirties Japan: Fascism?
by Gavan McCormack*
S t u d e ~ t s of Japanese history, being introduced to the disci
pline at university, frequently express astonishment at the de
gree to which the field is rent with uncertainties and divisions, in
particular at the way in which even fundamental categories are
still debated. Was Tokugawa Japan feudal ornot? Was the Meiji
a revolution or not? If a revolution, what sort? Was Meiji Japan
capitalist? Or state capitalist? Why did the country tum to
imperialist expansion? Was Taisho Japan liberal or democratic?
Was 1930s Japan fascist? Was Japan in the 1930s and 1940s
essentially defensive or aggressive? Part of the problem is that
the Japanese experience, particularly when viewed backwards
from the perspective of the technologically and industrially
advanced society it is today, looks in many respects like the
European; and the temptation is strong to explain it in terms of
categories that were developed to account for European history.
But Japan is both like and different. Is it like enough to be of the
same genus and to be meaningfully analyzed by the same
terminology, or is it so different as to be, literally, sui generis?
One solution is to describe Japanese phenomena by use of a
general term drawn from Western experience, together with a
qualifying term implying either reservations (such as proto-,
quasi-, pseudo-, or semi-fascism) or uniqueness (such as Japan
ese, or emperor, or emperor-system). Unfortunately, such de
vices commonly leave as many questions begged as answered.
However, to say of any phenomenon that it is totally
specific is to say that, in a fundamental sense, it is incom
prehensible. Although every phenomenon is made up of some
elements of human unpredictability and unprecedentedness, the
historian must attempt to make sense of it by identifying those
other components which are general, thus making sense of the
specific historical event by demonstrating its links with ante
cedents and consequences and by pointing to parallel but not
identical phenomena which share similar antecedents and con
sequences. Consideration of such relationships allows the
formulation of hypotheses towards an explanation of the inter
relatedness of historical phenomena.
* I am grateful to a number of people for critical comment and suggestions on
an earlier drati of this paper. in particular to Helene Bowen. Herbert Bix, Grant
Evans. Pat Flanagan, Jon Halliday. and Steven Large. I a!.me am responsible for
all views expressed. This essay was originally submitted to the Symposium on
Alternate Models for Understanding Japanese Society which was held in con
junction with the First National Conference of the Japanese Studies Association
of Australia, Canberra. in May 1980. The paper will also appear in a 1981
edition of Social Analysis along with other presentations from that conference.
A terminology expressive of such inter-relatedness is es
sential to the process of making sense of history. Generic
terms-like class, revolution, fascism-can only be usefully
employed if there is a core of meaning to them on which a
general consensus exists, though beyond that core there may
also be a penumbra of debate. The problem with the concept of
"fascism" is whether there is such a core of certain meaning as
to render the term useful, both generally in historical and social
science debate and specifically in analysis of the phenomenon of
1930s Japan.
The term "fascism" is used along a very broad spectrum of
meanings. At its most specific, and attracting the widest con
sensus among scholars, it is applied to the movement under
Mussolini which dominated Italy between 1922 and 1945. As
the term is broadened to cover movements and governments of
analogous character in other countries the scholarly consensus
shrinks. German National-Socialism, long allied to Mussolini 's
fascism, is first candidate for inclusion in the category, but there
is no unanimity even on that. Some scholars see fascism as a
general Europe-wide phenomenon of the inter-war years ( 1919
1945). Few Western scholars among those who concern them
selves with the general problem of fascism would include 1930s
Japan in the category; some would also want to include certain
Latin American countries, or would extend the term into the
post- 1914 period, using it to apply to all
extremist and nationalist movements with authoritarian and
tightly hierarchical structures and anti-democratic, anti
liberal and anti-socialist ideologies which founded iluthori
tarian or totalitarian regimes. or aimed to do so .
In practice, this may simply mean any form of non-socialist
dictatorship. And at a further level of generalization the word
fascism has been extended to cover a range of phenomena so
broad, from Nixon to Gaddafy to Hua Guofeng, that it must be
seen more as an epithet than a specific political category.
The looseness and imprecision of a category of analysis of
this kind is of no mere academic concern, since in the eighties
forms of illiberal and anti-democratic states abound, while the
assault on the values of democracy and humanism takes place
not only in capitalist states but in states which pretend to be
I. Wolfgang Schieder, "Fascism," in C. D. Kernig (ed.), Marxism. Com
munism and Western Society: A Comparative Encyclopedia. Vol. 3 (1972).
New York. p. 282.
20
I
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socialist, thus making doubly necessary the process of discrim
inating understanding and scrupulousness on the part of those
who, like myself, believe that humanist and democratic aspira
tions can only be fulfilled under socialism.
In this context, it may be useful to set out at the outset the
perspective from which I approach the problem. Socialist anal
ysis of the fascist phenomenon, I believe, has to start from two
general propositions:
I. That serious mistakes were made in the name of social
ism in the attempt to understand fascism in the past, and that
from these mistakes on a conceptual level there followed
tactical and strategic errors which had disastrous conse
quences for the progressive forces of that time. So the social
ist has to begin analysis from a perspective of opposition to
the Stalinization from which such effort flowed .
2. That in the contemporary situation precise and dis
criminating analysis of the forms of reaction, in a situation
where the forms of reaction are as various as they are today,
is the other necessary precondition for the elaboration of a
contemporary strategy that will not repeat the errors of the
past; therefore lumping together indiscriminately all reac
tionary regimes as fascist is not only not unhelpful and
unscientific, it is a contemporary form of Stalinism with
consequences as potentially serious as the last.
The "fascism" literature is vast, labyrinthine, and often
contradictory. The debate commences from the recognition that
there was something common underlying the wave of reaction
that swept much of Europe between the wars. Its seedbed was
the social, economic and political upheavals of the immediate
post-war, which bred a tum against liberalism, democracy and
socialism. Consequently, it was the international socialist
movement that first identified and attempted to define the phe
nomenon at the time of the rise of Mussolini to power in Italy. 2
Successive congresses of the Communist International debated
the issue from 1922, with varying degrees of urgency but also,
since the rise of fascism coincided roughly with the rise of Stalin
to dominance within the C. P. S. U. , in an increasingly sterile and
doctrinaire way.
The Stalinist Interpretation
The identification of fascism as a form of bourgeois repres
sion under capitalism came early. In 1924, it was described as
"one of the classic forms of counter-revolution in the epoch
when capitalist society is decaying." The identification with
capitalism was strengthened at the 5th Comintern Congress
(June-July 1924) when Zinoviev declared th\lt social democracy
had become a wing offascism, to which Stalin soon afterwards
added: "Fascism is the bourgeoisie's fighting organization that
relies on the active support of Social Democracy. "3 At the 6th
Congress, in 1928, fascism was represented as the final, and
necessary form of bourgeois-capitalist rule. In other words, it
was in a sense welcomed as evidence of the final convulsions of
a dying capitalism confronted with the growing strength of its
gravedigger, the proletariat.
The consequence of this was the "social-fascist" line, as a
result of which communists in Europe concentrated on opposi
2. Schieder. p. 291.
3. Quotes from Schieder, pp. 294 & 292.
Cover ofGondo Seikyo' s Kun-min kyO-chi ron (Governing through Cooperation
between Throne and People), 1932. influential rightist text. Courtesy o/Gavan
McCormack.
tion to social-democrats. Die lnternationale proclaimed in
193 I: All the strength of our party must be thrown into the
struggle against social-democracy."4 Claudin summarizes as
follows:
The mistakes were in this case the reflection ofa deep-going
sickness: atrophy ofthe theoretical faculties, bureaucratiza
tion of the organizational structures, sterilizing monolithic
ity, unconditional subordination to the manoeuvres of Sta
lin's camarilla, and -asa result ofthesefactors-widening
divorce between the Comintern' s policy and the actual situa
tion, internationally and within each country. 5
By 1933, Hitler was in power in Germany, and at the 13th
Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist Interna
tional in December 1933 the connections with social democracy
were played down in the definition of fascism as
the open. terrorist dictatorship ofthe mtJst reactionary, most
chauvinist and most imperialist elements offinance capital. 6
This formula was formally adopted at the 7th Congress in
August 1935. When communist parties were instructed to join
with social democrats in common struggle against fascism, in
what became known as the popular front, it was a step forward,
4. Nicos Poulantzas. Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and
the Problem of Fascism (London: New Left Books, 1974). p. 160.
5. Fernando Claudin. The Communist Movement: From Com intern to Comin
form (Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1975). p. 166.
6. Jane Degras (ed.). The Communist International. 1919-1943. Vol. 3 (1929
1943) (London: Frank Cass, 1971), p. 296. Also see p. 359.
21
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however belated, but it was a tactical shift that did not reflect
any significant advance in comprehension. Concentration on
the effort to perceive and expose the capitalist essence of
fascism meant that minimal attention was paid to questions of
ideology, social or class analysis, or culture. The relationship of
base and superstructure was given an instrumental, economistic
and a priori definition.
Side Currents
However, if Stalin dominated the mainstream of commu
nist thinking, particularly from 1928, there were also side cur
rents. Some, like Karl Radek and Clara Zetkin, recognized as
early as 1923 the petty bourgeois roots and appeal of fascism
and admitted that the appeal extended through "broad social
groups, large masses which reach far into the proletariat."
Zetkin, addressing the Executive Committee of the Communist
International in 1923, described it as a "movement of the
hungry, the suffering, the poverty stricken, the frustrated."7
Secondly they felt that fascists, once in power, would make
their peace with capitalism and implement a capitalist program.
Thirdly, they distinguished fascism from reactionary traditional
regimes, like the "feudal-capitalist groups" in Horthy's
Hungary. Fourthly, they understood that a strategy of mobiliza
tion of the proletarian and petty-bourgeois masses was indis
pensable if a long period of fascist domination was to be
avoided.
8
Another line of thought was suggested in 1930 by August
Thalheimer, a German communist who had been expelled from
his party. Thalheimer pointed to an analogy between fascism
and the 19th century phenomenon of Bonapartism, as a form of
bourgeois dictatorship, but an anomalous one in which the
bourgeoisie actually experienced political repression at the
hands of a state which functioned as an intermediary between
the bourgeoisie and the working class. Bonapartism had been
identified by Marx in 1871 as "the only possible form of
government at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost its
capacity to rule the nation and the working class had not yet
acquired that capacity. " Thalheimer revived the notion of class
equilibrium and of the class autonomy of the regime in this
model as potentially relevant to understanding the fascist phe
nomenon. The bourgeoisie in the crisis ofthe 1930s were having
to "hand over political authority to the fascists, in order to
preserve their social power."9
Others, like Gramsci, Trotsky, and the Austrian Otto
Bauer, developed theses based on this notion. The concept of
separation of political and social power was certainly more
suggestive of an explanation of the role of the bourgeoisie in
fascism than in the Comintern's orthodoxy of dictatorship by
big capital, though to Bauer that was the end result, and fascism
was a process of transition from "a limited by the
entire bourgeoisie-limited, that is, by democratic institu
7. Francis L. Carsten, "Interpretations of Fascism," in Waiter Laqueur, Fas
cism: A Reader's Guide (New York: Wildwood House, 1976), p. 418; and John
W. Cammett, "Communist Theories of Fascism, 1920-1935" in Science and
Society (Spring 1967), p. 151.
8. Schieder, p. 291.
9. Schieder, p. 294; Poulantzas, pp. 59-60; Jost Diilffer, "Bonapartism, Fas
cism and National Socialism," in Journal of Contemporary History, 11:4
(1976), p. III; and Wolfgang Wipperman, "The Post-war German Left and
Fascism," in the same issue ofJCH. p. 189.
tions-to the absolute dictatorship of large-scale capitalists and
landowners. " 10
A further suggestive approach was made by Franz Bor
kenau, who in 1933 also interpreted fascism as a transitional
phenomenon, but in the context of revolutionary developmental
regimes which prepare the way for the establishment of indus
trial capitalism. In the same category he included William of
Orange, Cromwell, Bismarck, Kemal Ataturk, Jiang Jieshi
[Chiang Kai-shek], and contemporary Japan. He thus opened
the way to theories which concentrated on fascism in the context
of stages of economic development, though he did not himself
elaborate on the problem. His view of fascism as the hallmark of
early capitalism directly contradicted the Comintern view of it
as marking capitalism's final death throes. He did not, however,
deal with the problem of the anomaly of the success ofthe fascist
movement in underdeveloped Italy and industrially advanced
Germany; indeed he had not considered it possible in the
latter. \1
Trotsky shared with the Comintern the view that fascism
was "the last -ditch struggle of moribund capitalism, " but real
ized that it was in origin a plebeian movement, "a spontaneous
movement oflarge masses" although' 'directed and financed by
big capitalist powers." He too interpreted the Bonapartist idea
in terms of transition but the transtion between parliamentary
government and i.e., the transitional Bonapartist phase
was not equivalent to but preliminary to fascism. The Hinden
berg administration in Germany was thus a "bureaucratic-pre
fascist government in the interests of the propertied classes, "
but this "Bonapartist military police dictatorship" was a
temporary and unstable form. 12 When it proved too weak to
crush the working class and when "open civil war on the
proletariat" became necessary, the way was then opened to
fascism.
Finally, the most undogmatic of all pre-war Marxists was
the Italian, Angelo Tasca (A. Rossi). In 1938 he wrote:
Fascism is a dictatorship,- such is the starting point of all
definitions that have so far been attempted. Beyond that there
is no agreement. . . Our way ofdefining fascism is to write
its history. 13
In looking thus briefly at the outlines of prewar Marxist
thinking about fascism, it is necessary to say that Stalinism was
disastrously mistaken, but that other Marxist views, however
suggestive in some respects-especially the notion of a dicta
torship that was needed to overcome a situation of class equilib
rium-were no more than suggestive. Serious and thorough
analyses of the relation of the fascist movements to monopoly
capital and to other social forces was scarcely begun.
Postwar Strains
It is obviously much more difficult to sum up the main lines
of the post-war debate. Its most notable feature is the entry of
10. Schieder, p. 295; for subsequent shifts in Bauer's position, see Gerhard
Botz, "Austro-Marxist Interpretation of Fascism" in JCH. 2:4 (1976), pp.
131-34.
II. Diilffer, p. 114.
12. Robert S. Wistrich, "Leon Trotsky's Theory of Fascism" in JCH. 11:4
(1976), p. 157. Also see Poulantzas, pp. 61-62.
13. A. Tasca, The Rise of Italian Fascism. 1918-1922 (New York: H. Fertig.
1966), p. 337.
22
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1
significant non-Marxist elements. Indeed, one major trend in
the wartime and early post-war years was the equation of
fascism and Stalinist communism, as both types of totalitarian
ism, societies marked by the absence of those autonomous
institutions which, in a "pluralistic" society mediated between
state and individual. The idea itself had been present in some
liberal-democratic circles before the war and the advent of cold
war in Europe made some such equation of past and present
enemy politically convenient to both conservatives and liberals.
Likewise, in the early post-war climate, there was no crack in
Stalinist dogmatism and thus no advance in analysis of the left
either; if anything, there was regression. Thus Wipperman aptly
notes of the "debate" in Germany:
Whereas in the Federal Republic, fascism was compared
with and even equated with communism, in the GDR it was
identified with capitalism. 14
Among the adherents ofthe "totalitarianism" school there were
some major differences, such as whether Italy should be in
cluded under such a heading or not, but the best-known formula
tion did include Nazism, Italian fascism, and Soviet and East
European regimes all under the category of "totalitarian
dictatorship. " IS
The scientific value of such theories was in inverse propor
tion to the ideological animus which inspired them, yet they
retained considerable influence nevertheless throughout the
1950s. On the left, the precondition for advance was the break
up of Stalinist hegemony in the communist movement, and on
the right the entry upon the path of peaceful coexistence, com
bined with the realization that analytical categories that did not
distinguish between capitalism and communism, even in the
most extreme or distorted forms of fascism and Stalinism, were
simply not very useful. Eugen Weber concluded, "The fact that
both communisms and fascisms are violent and monistic in no
way proves that they are the same. "16 Each in short, has to be
studied as a kind of capitalist or a kind of communist state.
A second, potentially more fruitful, line of inquiry has
been that originally adumbrated by Borkenau in the 1930s, the
relation of fascism to stages of economic development.
Borkenau, as noted above, saw fascism as a form of develop
mental dictatorship accompanying industrialization in back
ward countries. He thus believed it impossible in Germany,
although he considered Russia by 1929 to be fascistY The
question is obviously important to the typology and definition of
fascism, since any category which includes both Germany and
Italy is suspect for implicitly denigrating the importance of
economic factors. A case might persuasively be put for seeing
Mussolini's regime as developmentalist-and indeed that is
how it saw itself-but the German case is obviously different.
Some, notably A. James Gregor, make light of the problems
and blend political elements of totalitarianism theory with this
economic developmentalist approach to link fascist regimes
with communist and also third-world non-communist regimes
as national developmental dictatorships.18 Others, notably
14. Wippennan, p. 194.
15. Carl Friedrich and Z. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship andAutocracy
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1956).
16. Eugen Weber, "Revolution? Counterrevolution? What Revolution?" in
Laqueur, p. 449.
17. Ernst Nolte, Three Faces ofFascism (New York: Mentor, 1969), p. 24.
Henry Turner, explain the German case by means ofa paradox,
seeing National-Socialism as "utopian anti-modernism," that
is to say obviously using modem military technological and
social techniques but with the anti-modem purpose: "to obtain
vast stretches of Lebensraum for the purpose of an extensive
de-industrialization and de-urbanization of Germany. : . ."19
At all events, the differences in terms of phases of economic
development and economic experience in Germany and Italy
prior to and during their fascist experience would appear to be
substantial,20 whatever the common shared aspects of political
structure stemming from the recent unification and a social
structure in which traditional ruling class remained at the helm
of a modernizing state.
Bourgeois scholars are inclined to want to set aside the
theoretical problems of definition, partly becaus they
see further research as necessary to elucidate substan
tive problems, but also because ofa more fundamental
ideological reason; too many of the paths of theoretical
inquiry lead to various formulas for the association of
fascism with "liberalism, middle-class society and
capitalism, " a trinity to whose defense bourgeois
scholars are quick to rally.
The most systematic formulation of a hypothesis linking
modernization (used here in the sense of transformation of
agrarian, traditional society by industrialization, urbanization
and secularization) with fascism is probably that of A.K.F.
Organski. Organski argues that the period preceding a fascist
takeover is marked by three patterns:
I. clearly detectable, long-range, rapid economic growth;
2. large-scale social mobilization with a heavy component
ofrural to city migration;
3. vast and rapid political mobilization, particularly acute
just before the fascists come to power. 21
He suggests as one index of the critical phase that period when
the percentage of males in non-agricultural sector is between 40
and 55. He locates the "core of fascism" in the combination of
horizontal cleavage between elites, one ascending and the other
threatened, and vertical cleavage between elites and the major
ity of the economically active and increasingly mobilized popu
lation. Organski summarizes his argument as follows:
The fascist formula therefore consists of enabling the tradi
tional elite to keep control in its own non-modern sector, to
resist together with the modern elites a breakdown of the
elitist system, and through the fascist movement to repress
and rechannel the demands ofthe mobilized sector ofsociety.
Moreover it permits the elites in the modern sector to retain
control oftheir portion ofsociety and to continue the process
18. James A. Gregor, The Ideology ofFascism (New York: Free Press, 1969).
19. Henry A. Turner, Reappraisals ofFascism (New York: New Viewpoints,
1975), p. 118. Foran exchange between Gregor and Turner, see World Politics,
Vol. 24, No.4 (July 1972) and subsequent numbers.
20. Alan S. Millward, "Fascism and the Economy," in Laqueur, pp. 379-412.
21. A. K. F. Organski, "Fascism and Modernization," in S. J. Woolf (ed.),
The Nature ofFascism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1968), p. 23.
23
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ofmodernization within its confines. Finally the system pLays
a major roLe in generating savings by obtaining from .the
economically active mass in the modern sector a major
sacrifice in consumption. 22
It is noteworthy that this fonnula assumes that the elites are
in control of this process, and in a sense it resembles the old
Comintern thesis which held fascism to be the agent of monop
oly capital; for Organski it appears to be the agent of traditional
elites plus monopoly capital. Not surprisingly, he sees fascism
as a "highly contradictory, unstable, and temporary" system.
Whether such a complex hypothesis can be developed into a
formula capable ofcomprehensive testing against the date of the
range of candidate countries seems doubtful. Even if it can, the
fact that such a scheme allows no room for autonomous political
movement by the petite bourgeoisie, or indeed by any class
forces outside the ruling class bloc, opens it to serious objection.
A vfrlant of Organski' s modernization fonnula has been
proposed by Alan Cassels, who attempts to classify all Euro
pean fascist movements according to economic growth criteria.
His formula is
that fascism where it appeared in Less advanced regions
tended to look ahead to a stepped-up modernization of the
community. albeit without the normal dislocations attendant
upon progress. while in the aLready modernized nations
fascism preferred to Look back to a Legendary past. . . .23
Thus, what appears on the one hand as "nihilistic, racist, and
regressive" is on the other the "agent of modernization along
progressive, corporativist lines." It is an attractively neat and
comprehensive formula, but has the ring of an ex post facto
rationalization; a formula which explains opposites by declaring
them equal actually explains little.
Another variant of the modernization approach is devel
oped by Barrington Moore, Jr., for whom fascism constitutes a
capitalist-reactionary way to accomplish the transfonnation
from agrarian, peasant-based society to industrialized urban
society (the other major transition fonnulas being capitalist
democratic and revolutionary-communist). In Moore's view,
Germany, Italy and Japan are characterized by the problems of
the late industrial developer: the pre-industrial elites in these
societies were not displaced by revolution and thus were cast in
the historically anomalous role of directing the process of
"revolution from above" to try to rationalize and modernize
their societies, while at the same time ensuring that they retained
their social dominance. To this end, mobilization and repression
were necessary, and the contradictory nature of the combination
in tum necessitated militarism.24 Moore's perspective is at a
high level of generalization. He does not elaborate on the
dynamics of the class relationship by which working class and
petty bourgeoisie are mobilized or manipulated in mass move
ment to achieve elite ends, nor does he discuss the crucial
relationship between phases of fascist movement "from be
low" and "from above." His understanding of the Japanese
case draws on the interpretation of Maruyama Masao, which is
discussed below.
22. Organski, p. 33.
23. Alan Cassels, Fascism (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1975), p. 172.
24. Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy:
Lord and Peasant in the Making ofthe Modern World (Boston: Beacon, 1967),
The relation of fascism to class is an issue which remained
little understood in the prewar and wartime literature, when
Marxists in particular tended to be imprisoned in the categories
of monopoly capital dominance and inclined to concentrate on
the fascist state rather than fascist movements. Seymour Lipset
in 1959 reopened the discussion with the argument that fascism
was a phenomenon of the middle class, whose nonnal demo
cratic instincts turned to extremism under the impact of eco
nomic crisis. Although the categories he employed have been
criticized as simplistic, and a more common subsequent view
has been to see fascism as a petty-bourgeois dictatorship, a great
deal of empirical work has been done since then in an attempt to
clarify the precise nature of the class forces involved. 2S
Quite a different approach has been followed by some of
the most influential Western scholars. Ernst Nolte has proposed
an interpretation of fascism in metapolitical, almost mystical,
terms of "practical transcendence" - that is to say, the attempt
to overcome the limitations of particular ties, including, imp
licitly, those of class. Eugen Weber too sees it as a kind of
populism rather than a movement tied to the interests or aspira
tions of a particular class, although he recognizes its appeal to
the petty bourgeoisie and to workers. 26
It was the writings of Nolte and Weber in particular that, in
the early 1960s, served to undennine the crude "totalitarian
ism" approach. Although little interested in questions of class
analysis, both were much inteested in the notion of revolution,
and it was to this that they helped shift attention. But while Nolte
saw fascism as being essentially counter-revolution, especially
"anti-Marxism," to Weber it was rather an "alternative" re
volution, which "looks more like the Jacobinism of our
time. "27 -Another more recent, and highly acclaimed work on
Italy, by Renzo DeFelie, also stresses the revolutionary char
acter of fascism. He locates it boldly in the tradition of the
Enlightenment and affinns a revolutionary character not only
for fascist movements but also for the regimes, which were
revolutionary in the sense of opening the way to a mass society
and away from "the traditional elitist politics of the old liberal
state. "28
Although there is a distinctly positive flavor to DeFelice's
appraisal, which is confined to Italy, Weber proceeds from
drawing attention to similarities in the revolutionary radicalism
of communist and fascist movements, to imputing also a certain
similarity in performance to regimes set up in the name of both
systems. These similarities are of a kind which might well be
admitted by a serious contemporary Marxist humanist, but the
latter could not reach the conclusion of Weber, that revolution
itself is "anachronistic" and all revolutions equally and neces
sarily "false." Therein lies the path via liberalism back to
conservatism. Totalitarianism theory, in this revised and modi
fied form, has many followers, however, who conclude from
25. Seymour Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (New York:
Doubleday-Anchor, 1960); Ernst Nolte, "The Problem of Fascism in Recent
Scholarship," in Turner, pp. 27-29.
26. Nolte, 1969, pp. 537ff.
27. Eugen Weber, Varieties of Fascism (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1964), p.
I 39;.and Weber (1976), p. 444.
28. Renzo DeFelice, of Fascism (Cambridge: Harvard Uni
versity Press, 1977); also Michael Ledeen, "Renzo DeFelice and the Con
troversy over Italian Fascism," in JCH. 11:4, pp. 270, 279. Geoffrey Bar
raclough makes a similar point in a series of articles in New York Review of
p.442.
Books. Oct. 19 and Nov. 2 and 16, 1972.
24
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the analogies between fascism and communism (read usually.
Stalinism) as revolutionary movements and/or states that it is
revolution itself that is the poisoned enterprise. Thus revolution,
to Weber, is
the violent and successful embodiment ofone sort ofreaction
which, in due course, becomes another sort ofreaction. 29
Marxist Analyses
Within the tradition of Marxist writing, there has been
much less recent attention to analysis of fascism than one might
expect; probably the major work has been that of Nicos Poulant
zas. Poulantzas is critical of the orthodoxy established by the
Comintern theses of the 1930s. For him, the fascist state is a
type of exceptional state which may emerge under the capital
ism of the imperialist phase, or the phase of the interventionist
state. His approach is a development of the"class equilibrium"
Bonapartist theory of Thalheimer and Gramsci, but differs from
them in that he sees the working class in both Italy and Germany
as already defeated before the rise of fascism so that the bour
geoisie "remained the principal aspect of the principal contra
diction." Petty bourgeois discontents provide the focus of the
mass fascist movement, but they are taken over and exploited by
big capital in the process of securing its dominance.
The end of the process is the establishment of the domi
nance of a new class fraction, monopoly capital, within the bloc
of bourgeois forces. Fascism, therefore, marks for Poulantzas
the positive resolution of contradictions within the power bloc in
favour of the big bourgeoisie, and marks a "forward rush" by
capitalism. His, therefore, is a Marxist variant of the' 'moderni
zation" interpretation. 30
The major problem in this approach is the one which lies at
the heart of the Comintern thesis his book is written to criticize;
he is unwilling to conceive of any autonomous functioning of
the fascist movement. He sees the first phase of fascism in
power as one of petty bourgeois rule, but this, in the last
analysis, is merely a force which regulates development to
secure the domination of big capital, something which promotes
"the expanded reproduction of the conditions of capitalist re
production, that is, reinforcing class exploitation and class
domination. "31 Now this may be true, but it is not necessarily
true, and the point is not argued convincingly. Instead, the
phenomena of fascism are manipulated in a dogmatic way to
reinforce fundamental preconceptions about monopoly capital
dominance. In particular, to assume that German national so
cialist policies were adopted in the fundamental interests of
"expanded capitalist reproduction," rather than constituting an
aberration in capitalist development, is to beg a crucial and
highly contentious question. Thirty-five years after the passing
of Hitler and Mussolini from the historical scene, the theoretical
kernel of fascism remains to be cracked by Marxists. T. W.
Mason observes:
It was apparently the case that both the domestic and the
foreign policy ofthe National Socialist government became,
29. VVeber(1976),pp. 449, 454,455.
30. Poulantzas, pp. 61,72, 100.
31. Poulantzas, pp. 250, 9S. Also see Anson Rabinbach, "Poulantzas and the
Problem of Fascism," New German Critique, No. S (Spring 1976),
pp. 157-170.
from 1936 onwards, increasingly independent of the influ
ence ofthe economic ruling classes, and even in some essen
tial respects ran contrary to their interests. This relationship
is, however, unique in the history of modern bourgeois
society and its governments; it is precisely this that must be
explained. 32
Though there are valuable insights in Poulantzas' work, in
particular on the question of the role of the state as organizer of
hegemony (a concept derived from Gramsci), it is the dynamics
of the relationship between petty bourgeoisie, big bourgeois
fraction, and state that he fails to elucidate.
Western Schools
At this point, the discussion may be resumed by saying that
the principal characteristic of studies of fascism in the West
the area where, if at all, such a phenomenon certainly existed
is division. At a fundamental level, there is not even anything
remotely resembling a consensus on the question of whether
Italy and Germany are both to be described as fascist,33 while
the differences deepen as the question turns to whether fascism
is to be categorized as a phenomenon of finance capital dictator
ship, petty bourgeois dictatorship, petty bourgeois dictatorship
in the interests of the big bourgeoisie, whether it is revolutionary
or counter-revolutionary, whether it is atavistic or moderniza
tion-oriented, a form of totalitarianism or not, and if so, akin to
communism or not. Not surprisingly, the use of such a term has
been attacked by leading scilOlars in the field as "a blunt
instrument for political analysis," an "unhelpful" abstraction,
a "catchword" which "explains little and produces many
cliches. "34
Bourgeois scholars are inclined to want to set aside the
theoretical problems of definition, partly because they see
further research as necessary to elucidate substantive problems,
but also because of a more fundamental ideological reason; too
many of the paths of theoretical inquiry lead to various formulas
for the association of fascism with "liberalism, middle-class
society and capitalism,'" a trinity to whose defense bourgeois
scholars are quick to rally. 35 So what they have to offer is either
more empirical research or some variant of totalitarian theory or
modernization theory. Conversely, and perhaps inevitably,
Marxists criticize the linking of fascism with revolution, with
progress, and with the Enlightenment tradition. Recent Marxist
32. T. VV. Mason, "The Primacy of Politics: Politics and Economics in Na
tional Socialist Germany" in VVoolf (ed.), p. 167. Mason reiterates a point that
had been made by Gramsci, Thalheimer, Trotsky and Lukacs. For a recent,
generalized discussion of this theme in the context of Marxist theory, see Theda
Skocpol, States and Social Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1979), pp. 26-29.
33. The differences are stressed as crucial, whether the main interest of the
scholars concerned be Germany or Italy, and some would go so far as to say that
Italy. whence the word derived. was itself not fascist, either because it was not
totalitarian enough or because the authoritarian-modernizer category is more
appropriate. See Cassels. p. 164; DeFelice; Ledeen, pp. 271-72; Karl Dietrich
Bracher, The German Dictatorship (New York: Praeger, 1970); Bracher in
Laqueur; Zeev Sternhell. "Fascist Ideology" in Laqueur. pp. 315-376;
N. Kogan, "Fascism as a Political System," in Woolf. pp. II-IS; and Turner.
34. Respectively, see Alistair Hennessy, "Fascism and Populism in Latin
America" in Laqueur, p. 292; Hugh Trevor-Roper, "The Problem of Fas
cism," in VVoolf, p. 19; and Karl D. Bracher, "The Role of Hitler: Perspectives
of Interpretation." in Laqueur, p. 21S.
35. VVipperman, p. 200.
25
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writers like Poulantzas, however, even while criticizing the
economism of Stalinist conceptions of fascism dating from the
1930s, offer a heavily economistic view themselves, in which
the central dynamic of fascism is none other than the process of
big capital establishing its dominance. Further the tendency
among some on the left to identify any anti-socialist or au
thoritarian, or anti-democratic system as "fascist" looks dis
turbingly like a contemporary version of the disastrous "social
fascism" line ofthe 1930s. On this point, Vajda is surely correct
to state that the bourgeois state in the phase of monopoly capital
has not, in general, found "fascist" formations to be advantage
ous or necessary, and instead:
the stable organization 0/ monopoly capital has been
achieved in the/orm o/manipulated democracy. 36
There is, for all this, a degree of consensus among theoreticians
of fascism in the West. The consensus covers several important
points. Fascist regimes are to be distinguished from conserva
tive-traditional (or "conservative-authoritarian-military bu
reaucratic") regimes.
37
Regimes like those of Franco and
Salazar lack the "radical dynamism" that is the hallmark of
fascism and thus fall within the second of these two cate
gories.
3K
Second, and closely related to this, the fascist state is
distinguished from the normal bourgeois state by a radical
rupture, an invasion of the state apparatus "from the outside,"
after which the state apparatus is "dismembered" by the
"exogenous" factor of fascism. This implies the existence of a
mass movement, which is seen as either a "definitive charac
teristic" or "crucial," and often associated with the dominance
of a charismatic leader.39 Third, there is general, though not
un i versal, agreement that fascism is a European phenomenon
to scholars like Nolte quintessentially European-the "char
acteristic trend of the inter-war years," to DeFelice" A Euro
pean phenomenon," to Turner "uniquely European. "40
Remarkably few of the Western scholars involved in the
resurgence of interest and research on fascism pay any attention
to Japan. Of the few who enter into discussion of the issue most,
like Linz, exclude Japan on one or other of the grounds men-.
tioned above-the absence of radical discontinuity or of any
fundamental distinction from reactionary conservative rule, and
as "lacking the soul and romanticism, the activism, and the
mass participation of fascism." Those few Western scholars
who would include Japan in the fascist category are mainly
those who belong to the "developmental dictatorship"
school. 41
Japan
Here we tum to consider how Japan has been treated by
Japan specialists, both Western and Japanese.
The idea that the concept of "fascism" might be relevant
to understanding what was happening in Japan dates roughly
36. Mihaly Vajda. Fascism as a Mass Movement (London: Allison and Busby.
1976), p. 17.
37. Juan J. Linz. "Comparative Study of Fascism" in Laqueur. p. 102: Kogan
in Woolf. p. 5.
38. Paul Hayes. Fascism (London: George Allen and Unwin. 1973). p. 189:
and Vajda, p. 14.
39. Poulantzas, pp. 331-35; Kogan, pp. 13-15; Vajda. p. 13.
40. Nolte. p. 21; DeFelice, p. 175; Turner. p. 112.
41. Linz. pp. 103, 109; Gregor. p. xiii; Sternhell. p. 130.
from the early 1930s. The attempted coup of March 1931, the
Mukden Incident of September of the same year and the assassi
nation of the last party premier in 1932 were all pointers to a
process of political change which might ~ e understood in the
light ofexperience in Italy and movements elsewhere in Europe.
From the outset, one issue was raised as focal. Could the
incremental changes along the lines of gradual intensification of
reactionary and repressive rule (under the Tanaka, Hamaguchi,
and Wakatsuki cabinets) be of such a kind as to warrant seeing
the Japanese state as becoming (or having become) fascist? Or,
was it the movement for radical reform of the nation, the
movement which had roots in particular in the army and which
had played such a large role in the events of 1931, which was
fascist? That issue was to remain at the heart of the problem of
understanding the political phenomena of 1930s Japan both
before and during the war. The position that Maruyama was to
popularize in the early 1950s under the rubric "fascism from
above" was already referred to in 1932 by the apt formula' 'cool
fascism." Thus Hasegawa Nyozekan wrote in 1932: "I believe
in Japan too that it is not by violence but by legal means that a
cool fascism is in the process of being firmly established ...
Middle-class fascism will presently be assimilated within cool
fascism. " Others stressed rather the distinctness of the "fascist
movement" from the institutions of the existing state, and
believed that it was the beginnings of such a movement that
could then be discerned. The Hasegawa view appears to have
been the one which won most early favor, but there were those,
like Shinohara Satoshi, who as early as 1932 criticized as
undialectical the assumption that fascism would develop in
Japan by either one or other of these lines. Of course he was
right, and the key to understanding what happens in Japan lies in
developing a correct grasp of this dialectic. 42
The second basic problem facing those attempting to un
derstand what was happening in Japan lay in determining what
kind of state 1930s Japan had. In particular, what was the
precise relation of class forces, was Japan a bourgeois state, and
how should the emperor system (tennosei) be understood? Ap
proaches to this problem, probably inevitably, became inextric
ably' entwined with the subordination of the Japanese Com
munist Party to Moscow's centralized Stalinist control. The
combined effect of the external imposition of Stalinist influ
ences and the increasing difficulties faced internally from re
pression saw debate on the Japanese left shrivel in the 1930s
from a concern over the character and strategy of the. Japanese
revolution to increasingly sterile and academic debate over rival
formulas for comprehending Japan's social formation.
Suffice it here to note on this complex matter that the 1932
Theses ad9pted by the J.c. P. established as orthodoxy the view
that the Japanese formation was to be characterized as imperial
absolutism (tennosei ::.ettaishugi) , not, as some had been in
clined to argue. a bloc of mixed class forces within which the
bourgeoisie had been gradually establishing its hegemony. The
Theses were critical of the tendency to "use the spectre of
imminent fascism to beautify the existing tennosei," since
42. Abe Hirozumi, Nihon fashi:umu kenkyii josetsu (Introduction to the study
of fascism) (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1975), pp. 10-14. Also see Abe Hirozumi,
"Nihon fashizumu no kenkyu shikaku" (Perspective on the study of Japanese
fascism) in rekishigaku Kenkyii, No. 451 (Dec. 1977), pp. 2-11. Maruyama
Masao: Thought al1d Be/ull'ior ill Modern Japal1ese Politics (London: Oxford
University Press. 1963), or Cel1dai seiji I/O shi.wJ to k'JdtJ (Tokyo: Miraisha.
1964).
26
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Thirteenth National Conference ofPeasant Union Representatives, 1934. Note
constant police surveillance. Courtesy ofGavan McCormack,
fascism, defined by the Comintern as the final stage of bour
geois-capitalist rule, could not, by definition, be on the cards in
Japan,43 The strategy to cope with Japan's peculiarly backward
tennosei formation was bourgeois-democratic revolution. The
orthodox (Stalinist) left, the so-called "Koza" group, clung
determinedly to this notion of an autonomous tennosei, of
uncertain class compositin and therefore heavily transcendent in
character. An alternative view was propounded by the group
known as Rono, who held that capitalism was already en
trenched in Japan under bourgeois dominance; the tennosei was
a survival from the past, with neither class nor material founda
tions, and fascism was a very real present threat. As, through the
1930s, Japan was sucked deeper into the vortex of repression/
agression, debate around these two poles became increasingly
arcane and scholastic in character.
"Tanin" and "Yohan"
Curiously, this debate was refracted in English in a some
what less dogmatic and more ambiguous form than strict ac
cordance with the 1932 Theses should have allowed, The sole
comprehensive Western language pre-war study devoted to the
problem of Militarism and Fascism in Japan was written in
43. Abe, p. 17.
27
1933 by two Soviet Japanologists, Oscar Tarkhanov and Evgeni
Yolk, under the pseudonyms O. Tanin and E. Yohan, and the
book was originally published in London in 1934.44 Tanin and
Yohan (referred to thus since the book is generally known under
those names) took their stand basically on the koz.a position,
stressing the backwardness of the Japanese social formation, the
incompleteness of bourgeois control, the scale of "feudal rem
nants," However, although they conclude that the movement in
Japan is "reactionary chauvinist," rather than "fascist," they
leave room for some uncertainty by also using terms like "social
fascist" to describe trends in labor and social-democratic circles
to support imperialist adventures in China, and on occasion also
use the expression "military fascist." They also allude to the
concept of a bloc of class forces which had been dismissed by
the 1932 Theses:
the Japanese reactionary chauvinist movement, taken as a
whole. is the instrument not only offinance capital but also of
the Japanese monarchy which represents a bloc oftwo class
forces:finance capital and semi-feudal landowners . ...45
44. O. Tanin and E. Yohan. Militarism and Fascism in Japan (London: Martin
Lawrence. 1934). For the identification of Tanin and Yohan, see V. N. Niki
forov. SOl'iet Historians on the Problems o/China (Moscow, 1970). pp. 139ff.
45. Tanin and Yohan. pp. 266-67.
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What is even more curious about this book is the fact that it
also contains an Introduction written by the Comintern author
ity, Karl Radek, who disputes their interpretation by arguing
that the evidence presented in the book was quite sufficient to
establish the fascist character of the movement. To Radek, the
dominance of monopoly capitalists seemed clear, and the au
thors were wrong to stress the semi-feudal survivals in the
Japanese state as much as they did. Following the formula
"Whenever monopoly capital was victorious, it created a ten
dency to replace democracy. the hidden form of the dictatorship
by big capital, by its more or less open forms," Radek con
cluded that that was what was happening in Japan.
46
Neither
within the Comintern nor within the J.C.P. was there room for
debate of this kind later in the 1930s. Radek was purged in 1937.
E. H. Norman
The only other major pre-war Western work dealing with
the Japanese question which will be considered here is E. H.
Norman's Japan's Emergence as a Modern State.
47
Norman
found that Japan had "some of the characteristics of fascism,
but it lacks the distinctive features of a fascist dictatorship." In
particular, he stressed the importance of the role of the bureauc
racy which "blocked the victory of outright fascist forces."
Norman was writing seven years later than Tanin, Yohan and
Radek, and those years had witnessed the collapse of the ex
tremist right's campaigns of 1931-36 and the consolidation of
an illiberal and antiliberal state, fully mobilized and controlled
under bureaucratic and military dominance. However, the
above remarks could scarcely be considered a final and con
sidered judgment on the conceptual question.
The Cold War
The wartime years did not lend themselves to detached or
objective study of the theoretical issues, but the signing of the
Tripartite Pact in September 1940 did lead to a common loose
identification of Japan as forming, with Germany and Italy, part
of the "fascist camp." After the war, the politicization of
academic research on fascism in the West along the lines of the
"totalitarianism" orthodoxy has been dealt with above. The
exigencies of the Cold War had no less profound political effects
on post-war Japanese studies, but of a different, quite specific
kind. Reintegration of Japan into the Western camp under a
conservative, bureaucratic, and business leadership demanded
an explanation of the war that was largely exculpatory of main
stream Japanese conservatism. Totalitarianism, with its identi
fication of fascist and communist systems, was inappropriate
because it would be threatening to those eIePlents of the Japan
ese elite who had been prominent in the 1930s; fascist theory
itself, unless modified by being recast in the totalitarianism
mold, had too strong associations deriving from its Marxist
connotation of capitalist dictatorship. The solution was found in
the development of a theory of "militarism. "
The theses adopted at the International Military Tribunal
for the Far East, and widely adhered to thereafter in Western
writings on Japan, was that of a takeover of the country in the
early 1930s; "militaristic cliques and ultranationalist secret
46. Tanin and Yohan. p. 9.
47. E. Herbert Nonnan. Japan's Emergence as a Modern State (New York:
Institute of Pacific Relations. \940).
The gap in perception between historians and social
scientists of Japan and the rest of the world on this
question of fascism has been extraordinarily wide,
possibly wider than it is on any other single issue: to
most Japanese scholars Japan was fascist; to almost all
Western scholars it was not.
societies resorted to rule by assassination, and thereby exerted
great influence in favor of military aggression.' '48 The rivalry
between opposing military factions, kodo and tosei, each with
differing views on strategic priorities and to some extent differ
ing emphases in their interpretation of the kokutai, was elevated
into the fundamental contradiction. The fatal flaw in the state
was located in the constitutional framework, in which the lines
of differentiation of military and civil jurisdiction had been left
unclear, leaving a predisposition to the sort of takeover which
eventually occurred. Militarism, a category little referred to in
analysis of European movements of the 1930s, became the
orthodoxy among Western scholars writing on Japan.
Comprehensive illustration of this case about Western
orthodoxy from the literature should not be necessary. Albert
Craig is one influential example:
But Japan in this period is better labeled militarist than
fascist. The basic state apparatus was not new or revolution
ary, but merely the 'establishment' overlaid by controls and
permeated by an unchecked spiritual nationalism. 49
Though not all would be as explicit about their substitution
of the label "militarist," the consensus that 1930s Japan was
not fascist is remarkably wide. It covers virtually all Western
writers on the 1930s, including George Wilson [1968, 69],
James Crowley [1966], Mark Peattie [1975], Richard Smethurst
[1974], Gordon Berger [1976, 77], Ben-Ami Shillony [1973],
Richard Mitchell [1976], Peter Duus and Daniel Okimoto
[1979], as well as, without exception so far as I know, the
writers of general texts. Even the solitary Western language
Marxist study of modem Japan, by John Halliday, concludes his
discussion of this point most inconclusively:
Moreover, most of the criteria used to categorize Japan as
fascist in, say, 1940 or thereabouts do not define specifically
new phenomena within Japan . .. If Japan was 'fascist' in
1941, it should perhaps be called 'fascist' in 1915. There
was a definite stepping up of the campaign to smash all
autonomous organizations of the working class in the later
1930s, but this was not on the scale ofItaly or Germany.
Although I would reject the term 'fascist' for the regime,
it is true that there was afascist movement in Japanfrom the
1920s to 1945 . ...50
48. James B. Crowley. "Military Foreign Policy" in James Morley (ed.).
Japan's Foreign Policv, /868-/94/ (New York. 1974). Also see Crowley's
Japan's Questfor Autonomy: National Securitv and Foreign Policy, /930-/938
(Princeton. N.J.: Princeton University Press. 19tih).
49. E. O. Reischauer, J. K. Fairbank. A. Craig. East Asia: The Modern
Transformation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1965), p. 605.
50. Jon Halliday, A Political History of Japanese Capitalism (New York:
Pantheon, 1975). pp. 139-40.
28
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I
In short, Western scholars on Japan argue that the absence
of a charismatic leader, or a mass fascist-style party, or a
sharply delineated point of transition, or of repression on the
scale of Nazi Gennany (death camps), or the presence of ap
I
parently unbroken continuity between the institutions and elites
of Meiji and 1930s Japan, are of sufficient to make
I
inappropriate the application of the label "fascist" to Japan.
Barrington Moore appears to be the one to couch his argument in
tenns judged crucial by many in Japan: the stage of development
1
I
reached by Japanese capitalism. He also appears to be the only
one to give credence to the scheme elaborated by the most
influential of Japanese non-Marxists, Masao Maruyama. This
gap in perception is in itself an astonishing fact, worthy of close
from the sociologist of knowledge.
Masao Maruyama
Maruyama's argument is, in brief, that Japan's path to
fascism was significantly different from the European in that the
"fascism from below" of the European fascist or Nazi mass
movement type was blocked in Japan from 1936, but that a
fascist state was nevertheless carried out by and through organs
of the existing state apparatus.
For all that Maruyama's influence has been great within
Japan-according to Oishi Kaichiro, the theoretical and con
ceptual structures established by Maruyama in the 1950s have
still not been transcended
51
- he stands apart from the main
schools within which fascism theorists have divided. Indeed in
the taxonomy of Japanese fascism theories drawn up by Abe
Hirozumi, Maruyama is one of a small group, which Abe dubs
the' 'modem political science faction" which is a sub-section of
"pure fascism" theory, which in tum makes up one of five
major groups into which theoreticians of the prewar state divide,
along a broad spectrum ranging from "absolutism" to "pure
fascism. ' '52 With the exception of the Maruyama contributions
of the 1940s and 1950s, nothing of this debate has been trans
lated into English, and most of it has been ignored even by those
scholars in the West who must be presumed to be familiar with
it. 53
There are serious problems about Maruyama's approach.
First is the failure to elucidate the relation of "from above" and
"from below" in any dialectic or dynamic way, with the result
that the defeat of the latter is seen to lead, in some paradoxical
way, to the triumph of the former. it is as if fascism had been
established in Europe as a result of the crushing of Mussolini
and Hitler.
A second major problem arises from the imprecision of his
categories of definition. Hashikawa Bunzo in 1964 pointed out
that Maruyama's thesis fails to establish adequate criteria for
distinguishing fascism from ultranationalism, particularly since
he locates the origins ofthe fonner in the Meiji state system. The
three distinctive points that are especially emphasized in the
fascist ideology of Japan-' 'family-system tendency,"
"agrarianism," and the idea of "the emancipation of the Asian
51. Oishi Kaichiro, "Kindaishi josetsu" (Introduction to contemporary his
tory) in Nihon Rekishi. No. 14 (Kindai. i) (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1975), p. 52.
52. Abe, pp. 30-85.
53. For the French translation of one important article, see Furuya Tetsuo,
"Naissance et developpement du fascisme Japonaise," in Revue d' histoire de fa
deuxieme guerre mondiafe. No. 86 (April 1972), pp. 1-16.
29
The argument that the concept of "fascism" may be
inapplicable to Japan because there was no mass base
for it, and because there was no radical disjuncture
between pre-fascist and fascist Japan, since Meiji in
stitutions continued to function, may therefore rest
upon a too superficial understanding of the degree of
change in state and society in this period.
nations or the so-called Greater Asia principle" -might
equally well also refer as definitive characteristics of ultra
nationalism. 54
A more recent critic, Tsutui Kiyota<!a, looking at Maru
yama's writing on the subject as a whole, identifies a set of six
defining points offascism (i.e. as distinct from the three particu
lar points mentioned already which relate to Japanese fascism),
which points could equally well be used to identify the "totali
tarian" system described by Friedrich and Brzezinski and others
(discussed above).55 At this level, therefore, his description is
as applicable to Stalinism as to fascism. Tsutui also points out
that Maruyama carries over the old Comintem notion of fascism
as being a fonn of' 'counter-revolution' '56 without ever clarify
ing what he understands by revolution, and in relation to this
category his division of Japanese fascism into the three peri
ods-preparatory period, period of maturity, and consumma
tion period-is far from clear.
Furthennore, in his appraisal of the character' of German
National Socialism and in his understanding of the character of
the Japanese extremist movement of the early 1930s (its "lack
of mass base or roots"),. Maruyama's argument betrays the fact
that it is based on empirical research whic,h was of a very
tentative kind, and on conclusions from that research which
have since been widely challenged.
Finally, Maruyama's discussion of the social basis of fas
cism in tenns of the "pseudo-intellectual" segment of the petty
bourgeoisie- "small factory owners, building contractors,
proprietors of retail shops, master carpenters, small land
owners, independent farmers, school teachers (especially in
primary schools), employees of village offices, low-grade offi
cials, Buddhist and Shinto priests" - is quite arbitrary Y Sub
sequent detailed research allows a much more discriminating
54. Hashikawa Bunzo (ed.), Chokokkashugi (Ultranationalism) (Tokyo: Chi
kuma Shobo, 1964).
55. Tsutui Kiyotada, "Nihon fashizumuron no saikosatsu" (Reinvestigation
of the Japanese fascism debate) in Chi no KokOgaku (Jan.-Feb., 1976), pp.
16-37.
56. Maruyama, p. 269.
57. Maruyama, p. 57.
I
I
f
I
I
l
l
t
t
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understanding. Matsuzawa Tetsunari, for example, distin
guishes the support for the atavistic "return to origins" follow
ers of agrarianists like Tachibana Kozaburo and Gondo Seikyo,
which was to be found primarily among village youth, espe
cially cultivating farmers, and teachers, while the "develop
mental control" faction, associated with Kita Ikki, NishidaZei,
Ishihara Kanji, and the Young Officers, was strongest among
the middle strata of Japanese residents in North-East China
("Manchuria").58
These brief critical comments on Maruyama's work are not
intended to suggest it is without value. For all its problems, his
theses on the interaction of fascism "from above" and "from
below," and his focus on the uneven character of Japanese
capitalism, with its combination ofconcentrated monopoly cap
ital and a very backward rural sector, serve to direct attention to
crucial areas. But this work is now dated. And it is only part of a
rich diversity of debate which deserves to be known too.
Japanese Marxists
The Marxist literature on fascism has been prolific and,
partly because of its scale, defies brief resume. Some points,
however, are clear.
The lineage of the 1932 Theses, while not broken, has
worn thin. The prewar"Koza" characterization of the Japanese
state as "tennosei absolutism," adapted post-war to "tennosei
fascism," for long provided the conceptual framework for anal
ysis. The basic idea was that "tennosei absolutism" developed
through capitalism and imperialism to the point where the
tennosei absolutist state performed the functions of fascism,
even while retaining some elements within it that were feudal or
semi-feudal. It was a formula that stretched both logic and
language, and that looked very much like eclectic manipulation
of the categories of different state and social formations. Either
tennosei is a unique state and social system with strong feudal
elements and therefore scarcely consonant with fascism, or else
at some point the absolutist Meiji state was transformed within
by capitalism so that the feudal came to constitute a mere shell.
The second alternative raised the further problem of how such a
shift in class relations and state structure can be accomplished
without revolution. Some recent Japanese writers have at
tempted to solve, or at least avoid this problem by use of the
"Bonapartist" theory of a transitional dictatorship appropriate
to a phase of class equilibrium which they suggest operated in
Japan in the 1920s, preparing the ground for fascism in the
1930s. Others have simply retreated from the complexities of
the theoretical issue and the term "tennosei fascism" has been
avoided in the 1970s in the writings of scholars who relied upon
it earlier. 59 In short, the "fascism" question raises still serious
and unresolved theoretical questions for the Japanese left.
The scale of the questions unresolved has led other schol
ars, of what might be termed a positivist or neo-rightist bent, to
argue for total rejection of the term "fascism." One such is Ito
Takashi.60 Like many recent writers in Europe, Ito argues that
"fascism" is an unscientific, primarily vituperative term. How
58. Matsuzawa Tetsunari, "Tenno teikoku to Nihon fashizumu" (Emperor's
empire and Japanese fascism) in Rekishi Koron, No. 6:2 (1980), pp. 57-69.
59. Abe, pp. 6-7, 127.
60. Ito Takashi, "Showa seijishi kenkyii no ichi shikaku" (A perspective on
research in Showa political history) in Shiso (June 1976), pp. 215-228; and Ito's
Nihon no rekishi (History of Japan), vol. 30 (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1976).
ever, while the proposal to revise the political terminology is not
in itself objectionable, it does become so unless it is allied to an
alternative conceptual framework which serves better to make
clear and discriminating sense of the experience of the period.
Yet Ito has only the word "reform" or "renovation" (kakushin)
to offer, blurring the distinction between movements of left and
right against the status quo, and open to serious question be
cause of its strongly approvative associations. Precisely for this
latter reason this was a word much preferred to "fascism" by
rightists in the 1930s. The proposal now for the substitution of
such a word for "fascism" in the political lexicon looks too
much like a proposal motivated by political considerations of a
neo-rightist character.
Among the scholars on the left who have moved beyond, or
sidestepped, the problems endemic in the 1932 Theses some
real advances in understanding have been made. Furuya Tetsuo,
for example, stresses only two fundamental dimensions: sup
pression and mobilization.
But ifthe decisive characteristic which distinguishes fascism
from other forms of dictatorship is none other than the
uniform organization ofthe masses at the level ofdaily life,
the complete elimination of the roots of resistance and the
mobilizing of the people in accordance with the wishes of
authority . . .61
This carefully two-sided emphasis, stressing not only repression
but also the organizing and mobilizing of the masses, helps to
clarify the distinction hitherto often not very clear, between
conservative reaction and fascism.
62
It also brings him very
close in approach to recent formulations by leading European
scholars, like DeFelice.
In Europe, the crushing of the socialist movement and the
mobilizing of the masses were goals which, for specific histori
cal reasons, could not be accomplished without the develop
ment of mass-based parties of a fascist type. In Japan, the
revolutionary movement was two-fold and developed very un
evenly; it was both colonial and domestic-based. Consequently
counter-revolution took a very different and specific form in
Japan: violent counter-revolutionary warfare in the colonies,
combined with total repression of a specific, generally bureau
cratic, highly efficient kind in Japan itself. In China and Korea,
or against Chinese and Koreans in Japan, Japanese repression
and exploitation was as violent and as rapacious as fascism in
Europe, but in Japan itself the paraphernalia of Nazi terror was
generally not necessary.
The reverse side of Furuya's coin, the organization and
mobilization of the masses down to the level of their daily life, is
a process with which Western readers are in general not very
familiar. The creation and elaboration of the "Peace Preserva
tion" system, particularly after 1925, was obviously crucial,
though it is generally seen only under its negative, repressive
aspect. Within the decades that followed, there emerged gradu
ally within the army and bureaucracy forms of ideology and
organization, with distinct links leading down into the masses,
which were quite new. Organizations and movements which
played a part, not only in counter-revolutionary repression, but
61. Furuya Tetsuo, "Nihon fashizumuron" (Discussion of Japanese fascism)
in Nihon Rekishi, No. 20 (Kindai, 7) (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1976), p. 84.
62. Yamaguchi Sadamu, Gendai fashiZlImliron no sho choryu (Currents in
contemporary fascism debate) (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 1976), p. 231.
30
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also in this process of positive mobilization, included: the R e ~
serve Association, the Air Raid Defense organization, special
organizations for the mobilization of youth, women, education
alists, religious people, the labor movement, the mass media,
and sporting and cultural organizations.
63
The case for the
development of "fascism" in Japan calls for close attention to
these areas to see whether a drastically different tennosei, a
mass-mobilized, totalitarian tennosei, did actually develop in
the 1930s. The spirit of the age is summed up in the slogan
"extinguish self in service to the state" (Messhi hoko). The
argument that the concept of "fascism" may be inapplicable to
Japan because there was no mass base for it, and because there
was no radical disjuncture between pre-fascist and fascist Japan,
since Meiji institutions continued to function, may therefore rest
upon a too superficial understanding of the degree of change in
state and society in this period.
A proper understanding of these processes requires also
close attention to the role of civilian bureaucrats, for the new
ideology of this period, whether called "fascist" or not, was not
the sole prerogative of army men, "militarists," and members
of ultranationalist societies. Awaya Kentaro quotes a 1933
Memo by a leading "reformist" Home Ministry official, Kan
Taro, entitled "Private opinion on the problem of thought
policy":
In general, the mass psychology in meetings and demonstra
tions, the feelings of celebration, the feelings of tension in
ceremonies and the like, play an important role in the mobil
izing propaganda which rouses the people's spirits. 64
The" clarification of the national polity" (kokutai meicho)
movement, launched with a strong bureaucratic backing
in August 1935, is just one of a set of movements within a
highly orchestrated control system culminating in the "General
Mobilization of the Nation" (kokka sodoin) system adopted in
1938, to which Western writing on Japan has so far paid little
attention. Furuya describes in the following terms the relation
ship between bureaucratic, military, and civilian elements in the
consolidation of the system:
So it could be said that the shape of Japanese fascism was
becoming rather distinct at the time ofthe "Clarification of
the National Polity" movement. The determination of basic
political direction was carried out under the leadership ofthe
military and military views were taken as crucial. Next, it
was the responsibility of the bureaucrats to carry out the
necessary investigation, planning, and policy formulation.
Then, the role of civilian rightists was to envelop the whole
people in a harmonious atmosphere, suppressing or reduc
ing to submission resistance to the national defense state.
The people were organized in small groups capable of mu
tual control and mutual surveillance, and the function of
promoting this organizing process and imbuing it with patri
otic consciousness was expected ofthe Reserve Association,
the Youth Association. the Men's Association (sonendan)
whose organization was promotedfrom this time.
65
63. Awaya Kentaro, "Fashizumuka to minshii ishiki" (Democratic conscious
ness and fascistization) in Eguchi Keiichi (ed.), NihonJaschizumu no keisei,
Vol. of Taikei Nihon gendaishi (Tokyo: Nihon hyoronsha, 1978), pp. 251-302
passim.
64. Awaya, p. 291.
65. Furuya, pp. 114-15.
1
.
I
t
Recent Western Writing
The most recent Western language contributions to the
theoretical debate display interesting evidence of substantial
I
convergence with the Japanese in the directions taken. Miles
Fletcher has drawn attention to the enthusiastic cooperation
I
given by influential intellectuals, in particular Royama Masa
michi, Ryu Shintaro, and Miki Kiyoshi, to the "movement
!
aimed at eliminating the base of party politics in the Diet and the
market economy in Japan," and working for the creation of a
I
"mass-based 'national organization' to bind the citizen to the
state. "66 He demonstrates fairly clearly that Maruyama was
f
wrong in suggesting a common intellectual attitude towards
fascism of "antipathy that amounted almost to passive
I
j
resistance. "
Peter Duus and Daniel Okimoto, after dissecting the cur
rent fascism literature to demonstrate its inconsistencies and the
unsatisfactory nature of fascism as an analytical concept, go on
to propose a possible alternative paradigm of "corporatism."
They argue that the 1930s was a period of "general impulse
toward managed economies that was on the rise all over the
I
world," and in the Japanese case it saw the "formative period of
I
a managerial state or polity, in which a dirigist bureaucracy
became the central element in the formation and execution of
national policy.' '67 What Japanese intellectual and political
leaders sought was a way of combining industrial growth with
social harmony and consensus.
I
Their hypothesis has to be considered seriously, and its
implications are somewhat broader than the authors suggest, for
Duus and Okimoto do not look at the question of the degree to
I
which contemporary Japan was created in the 1930s. Yet it is
!
precisely the successful combination in today's Japan of growth
I
with social harmony that is so widely acclaimed and even put
forward as a model. One is reminded of the lines of the company
song sung at Matsushita Electric in the 1960s:
Harmony and sincerity,
Grow, industry, grow.
I
Contemporary Japanese Directions
Many Japanese scholars would accept the broad outlines of
the Duus and Okimoto argument, but protest that that, pre
cisely, is fascism. To do so, of course, they must resort to the
I
notion of "cool" fascism originally raised in the 1930s. It is
significant that this theme is developed with a sharp contem
porary relevance by scholars in Japan today who are close to the
popular "citizen's movements" that have been engaged in
struggle against Japanese state and corporate power on a wide
range of issues for the past fifteen years. Muto Ichiyo, of the
Ampo editorial collective, wrote in the early 1970s of the trend
in Japan towards "democratic fascism," and saw danger not so
much in dramatic events such as the attempted coup by Mishima
Yukio as in deep-rooted elements of popular culture that con
stituted a predisposition towards fascism: "clinging to the status
quo, fear of change, obedience to orders from above, the con
66. Miles Fletcher, "Intellectuals and Fascism in Early Sh6wa Japan," in
Journal ofAsian Studies. Vol. 39, No. I (Nov. 1979), pp. 39-63.
67. Peter Duus and Daniell. Okimoto, "Fascism and the History of Pre-War
Japan: The Failure of a Concept." inJ.A.S., 39: I (Nov. (979), pp. 65-76.
31
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ception of the government as always superior. "68
Shimizu Tomohisa, a professor at Japan Women's Uni
versity, in a 1980 symposium on "Fascism and anti-fascism,"
actually expressed the broad view that the principal overall
pattern of world development in the thirty years since the end of
World War Two had been fascism. 69 The continuance of par
liamentary institutions was, he argued, little guarantee against
fascism, since basic rights were being eroded, even willingly
given up, by citizens. The pattern in Japan, in particular, ap
pears to Shimizu one of creeping bureaucratic control and cor
responding cramping of grass-roots, democratic decision
making power. Popular consent is immaterial to the fact of the
process, as the range of "cooperation" requested by the au
thorities to cope with the "extremist student" threat, or with the
oil/energy crisis, or with a possible earthquake crisis, or with
rebellious peasants (at the site of Narita airport), is gradually
expanded.
A closer understanding of the role of the bureaucracy in
determining the character of 1930s-style repression might lead
contemporary scholars to pay more attention to the underlying
trend in such phenomena, even to reflect on the significance of
the apparently trivial detail of local government reorganization
in the late 1970s that Shimizu records: the removal of local
initiative and the establishment of central control over local
"community centers," important, apart from the general prin
ciple involved, because of the potential this involves to deprive
groups not recognized by the authorities of a place for meeting,
discussion, and organization. The creation of "artificial com
munity structures closely integrated with the administrative
structure"70 was a strategy deliberately followed by the Home
Ministry in the 1930s too.
Conclusion
There is no easy resolution of the problem set out in the title
of this article. Four general points may, however, be stated.
- 1. Abe Hirozumi is clearly right in saying that
Honestly speaking, one cannot escape the impression that
research on Japanese fascism is very divided and confused
on the theoretical level. Confusion in fascism theory is not
confined to Japan but . .. since the late 1960's is a world
wide phenomenon. 71
Whether a generic concept so much disputed can be of value for
analytical or descriptive purposes may well be doubted. Yet,
until such time as a clear and unambiguous new terminology is
developed, there is no alternative to the continued use of this
word, preferably in precise and specific senses only.
- 2. Insofar as fascism is to be used as a generic term in
history and the social sciences, and subject to real doubts as to
whether it should be, it would seem to be widely agreed that it is
a phenomenon of capitalism in a time of crisis, its historic role
being to consolidate bourgeois dominance by neutralizing or
crushing opposition and mobilizing the active support of the
68. Muto Ichiyo, "Mishima and the Transition from Postwar Democracy to
Democratic Fascism," in AMPO, Nos. 9-10 (1972?), p. 49.
69. Shimizu Tomohisa, "Fashizumu e no fukuju toteiko no ronri" (Theory of
submission to and resistance against fascism) in Symposium with Kitahara
Atsushi and Kato Haruyasu, Rekishi Koran. No. 51 <Feb. 1980), pp. 10-33.
70. Duus and Ok imoto, p. 71.
71. Abe, p. 5.
masses. But in its origins there are commonly strong anti
capitalist currents and in its mature phase the relationship is
never purely instrumental. It is far from clear whether it is a
phenomenon confined to capitalism of any particular phase of
development and whether it can develop "from above" as well
as "from below." A fuller understanding of it will probably
also call for much closer attention to ideological and cultural
elements in the superstructure of the capitalist state, 72 and to the
dynamic relationship between them and the capitalist base.
Whatever conclusions are eventually reached on these broad
questions, and into whatever generic category the phenomena of
I 930s Japan are fitted, what is important is that the nature ofthe
system be understood, that the characteristics of internal repres
sion and external aggression be acknowledged and that the
presence of at least some universal elements in the Japanese
tennosei state be recognized. 73
- 3. The gap in perception between historians and social
scientists of Japan and the rest of the world on this questIon of
fascism has been extraordinarily wide, possibly wider than it is
on any other single issue: to most Japanese scholars Japan was
fascist; to almost all Western scholars it was not. Japanese
writers may need to pay more attention to the methodological
and theoretical issues raised in the Western debate; they do,
nevertheless, pay a great deal more attention to the Western
debate than could be said in reverse of their Western counter
parts. There, conceptualization about state and social formation
in pre-war Japan is engulfed in a cloud ofanti-Marxist prejudice
so thick that even consideration of the issue ofclass in Jap!ID has
scarcely begun. And of course the language barrier, important
as it may be in Japan, does not prevent the translation into
Japanese of very substantial portions ofthe Western debate. The
reverse simply does not happen.
-4. Current western research stresses the danger of
fascism as something that necessarily involves a radical dis junc
ture between "normal" bourgeois institutions and something
quite new and different which arises out of a mass-based move
ment to replace them, generally in a dramatic and obvious way.
Prewar Japanese history is seen as more or less sui generis,
certainly strongly marked by tradition and continuity of Meiji
institutions. One trend of recent Japanese research is to reverse
this and to see the German and the Italian experience as unique
and exceptional examples of a general phenomenon, the
"fascist" state. Is it possible that 1930s Japan may constitute a
truer model of a fascist state than the Italy of Mussolini and the
Germany of Hitler? Whether defined as "fascist" or not, the
process described by Hasegawa in 1932 as "cool fascism,"
meaning the mobilization of the masses of the people to serve
state purposes, through means which are heavily bureaucratic,
within structures that are superficially democratic, and accord
ing to processes which ensure the consent of manyof the people
to their enslavement, may constitute a model of "creeping"
fascism, or democratic" fascism, or corporatism, " which is
of real universal relevance not only to historians but to con
cerned observers of worldwide political trends in the last quarter
of the twentieth century.*
72. See Anson Rabinach, "Unclaimed Heritage: Ernst Bloch's Heritage ojOur
Times and the Theory of Fascism, " in New German Critique. No. II (Winter.
1977), pp. 5-21.
73. Mibu Shiro, "Nihon fashizumu kenkyii ni yosete" (About research on
Japanese fascism) in Rekishigaku Kenkyii No. 451 (1977), pp. 12-19.
32
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Marshall Islands: America's Radioactive "Trust"
A Photographic Essay
SAN FRANCISCO\
..
\<>- Q..MANILA U ---I

,) .. .' I
C "':'" .' :-'. '':;)
-__.__ .____ J
II'e :." '
.:"""'r:?' " ""."" . ':'. "';'.
TRUST TERRITORY
v
Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands
(Micronesia) covers a land and ocean area
of 3,000,000 square miles.
Micronesia is the only United Nations "strategic" Trust
eeship, which allows the U.S. to use the islands for
military purposes. This Trusteeship Agreement, signed
by the U. S. in 1947 also bound it to protect the Microne
s ians ,. against the loss of their land and resources" and to
"protect the health of the inhabitants."
Up to the 1940's Micronesians, like other Pacific islan
ders, were self-sufficient, living from the ocean and land.
34
The Marshallese were expert craftsmen and navigators,
traveling hundreds of miles on the open ocean on outrig
ger canoes, using only the waves, wind and stars as
navigational guides.
Bikini Atoll in early 1946. Seeking an area far from
American population centers to test its nuclear bombs,
the United States looked to the Micronesian islands in the
western Pacific.
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Marshall Islands
ealC1NI ATOll
'"
'..J
MfoIJ..
Ct IXINGELAP A1llll
({
AlliNGNAE"lla:L QONGEI!IK AlCLl
'{'1QIIC ATOll
AlCAAlOI.l
JELtOl5 t. IS.
WElANG A1OI.L
...
WAE ATOI.L .....:::::::\
AIovt.A1!lU.

'\OIJE ATou.
'lAfATOll.
KWA..IALEIN ATOll
ua,s.
NAMUATOIl.'
<I
AlllNGLAPALAP ATou.

AIINOA1Il.L
MAJUAO 6r
<*'l AUl ,

,
The people from Bikini and Enewetak were among the
most isolated and least westernized of the Marshall Islan
ders.
In January 1946, Navy officials in Washington D.C.
announced that Bikini would be used for the first atomic
bomb tests. The Americans told the Bikinians that the
scientists were experimenting with nuclear weapons' 'for
the good of mankind and to end all world wars. "
The 166 Bikini people, and later 145 Enewetak people
(the second atoll used for nuclear testing) had little choice
but to leave their homes. They were evacuated quickly
and with little planning to small uninhabited islands where
they faced severe food shortages.
35
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But the U. S. ignored these provISIons and tested 66
atomic and hydrogen bombs that devastated the health of
the people and rendered many of the islands uninhabi
table.
The Nuclear tests on Bikini and Enewetak contaminated
hundreds of Marshallese on nearby islands with radioac
tive fallout. Today. many people suffer from a high inci
dence of thyroid disease and cancer, miscarriages, still
births and other radiation caused sickness.
,
Moreover. a 1977 government report shows that thyroid
cancer is more common among people exposed to low
level radiation than in those exposed to a higher level.
Marshallese have protested inadequate medical treatment
by U.S. government doctors. Typifying the attitude of the
medical program, the Atomic Energy Commission re
ported in 1957: "Even though ... the radioactive con
tamination of Rongelap is considered perfectly safe for
human habitation, the levels of activity are higher than
those found in other inhabited locations in the world. The
habitation of these people on the island will afford most
valuable ecological radiation data on human beings. "
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In 1969, the A.E.C. conducted a limited cleanup ofBikini
and declared the atoll safe for habitation. But in 1978,
when more than 130 people were living on Bikini, the
people had to be evacuated as they had absorbed high
levels of radiation.
During the late 1970 s the U. S. has attempted to clean up
Enewetak, site of 43 nuclear tests. Following the $200
million cleanup and rehabilitation, the resettlement of
certain islands in Enewetak proceeds. But the shadow of
the aborted attempt to rehabilitate Bikini casts doubt on
the safety of the islands of Enewetak.
Unsure of whether or not to believe U.S. government
scientists, today, Marshallese are actively seeking "inde
pendent" medical and scientific advice about their health
and their islands' .
The full set of 118 slides from which this essay was taken
is available for $75 (individual/non-profit groups) and
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about this slide presentation, write:
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The largest radiation cleanup ever undertaken produced
this dome at Runit Island, Enewetak Atoll, containing
thousands of tons of plutonium contaminated soil. This
island will be off limits forever, but islands within four
miles have been declared safe for "picnicking and food
gathering. "
THE UPDATED, REVISED
MARSHALL ISLANDS CHRONOLOGY
IS HERE!!
It contains information on the United States nuclear
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including: the resettlement of the Bikini and Enewetak
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servicemen and resulting health problems; the Army's
key missile testing range at Kwajalein; job and pay dis
crimination against Marshallese employees at the missile
range; the attempts to resettle the former N-test sites of
Bikini and Enewetak; and much more information on the
34-year U. S. administration of Micronesia.
Originally published in 1978 as a 12-page report, the
new 198 I edition has been expanded to 36 pages, includ
ing more than 25 photographs and maps and a detailed list
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The Atomic Bomb and the Citizens of Nagasaki
by Sadao Kamata and Stephen Salaff
Introduttion: A Path to Peace
Hiroshima is a universally recognized name today, but
Nagasaki, the second city to suffer atomic bombing, is less well
known, and in fact its destruction three days after Hiroshima
seemed anticlimactic to many observers.l The damage to both
Japanese cities would be dwarfed in scale by any future nuclear
holocaust, but the joint "Hiroshima-Nagasaki" experience,
which changed the world forever, still constitutes the indispens
able base of knowledge for an understanding of the human and
environmental decimation which would be wrought by nuclear
war. The way we choose to remember these two bombings will
determine whether the human community can assimilate the
meaning of these weapons before they are used again, and act
decisively to spare our planet from the nuclear nightmare with
which it is now threatened. This article is dedicated to helping
cultivate the rationality, creative imagination and commitment
to human welfare necessary to ensure that Nagasaki will be the
last place on earth where nuclear weapons were ever used*
The march of events recounted in the first section of the
following pages shows that the atomic bomb was not needed to
end World War II, but became rather a major factor fostering
disunity in the anti-fascist alliance and the opening salvo of the
long nuclear arms race. Nagasaki's unique history complicated
the struggle of the Hibakusha ("A-bomb exposed persons") to
overcome the injuries they suffered in the bombing. Owing to
the particular circumstances of Nagasaki, the
movement for rehabilitation and international peace organized
* Acknowledgements. The authors appreciate the informed and skillful coop
eration of Professor Seiitsu Tachibana, Nagasaki Institute of Applied Science,
whose language abilities and knowledge of atomic bomb problems has mate
rially assisted their mutual understanding. Stephen Salaff is grateful for the
helpful insights on the religious, ethical and historical aspects of the Nagasaki
experience shared by the following members of the Department of Religious
Studies, University of Toronto: Professors Gregory Baum, Ernest Best, Heinz
Guenther, Joseph O'Connell, and Cyril Powles. Salafffurther thanks Professors
Jerome Ch'en, York University. Edward Norbeck. Rice University, and Janet
W. Salaff, University of Toronto, for reviewing earlier drafts of this manuscript.
The support of Professors Hans Blumenfeld, University of Toronto. and Lee
Lorch. York University. is also acknowledged.
I. The only concerted effort undertaken thus far outside Japan to elucidate the
effects of the A-bomb on Nagasaki is the non-fiction novel by journalist Frank W.
Chinnock, Na!?asaki: The Forgotten Bomb (Cleveland: World Publishing Co.,
1969), which in graphic detail descrihes the holocaust and portrays the courage
of its victims.
by its citizens has been challenged by formidable local as well as
national and international obstacles. The following two sections
spotlight the impediments to the recovery of the Hibakusha and
the city of Nagasaki posed by its traditions of politically
passive Catholicism, direct administrative subordination to the
national government under Tokugawa rule, and economic con
trol by the giant Mitsubishi Corporation. The next two sections
introduce Hibakusha testimonies describing the formation of
the anti-A and -H bomb movement in reborn Nagasaki, while
the last section views through the eyes of Nagasaki citizens the
saga of Japan's nuclea.-powered ship, the Mutsu, now berthed
in nearby Sasebo against the wishes of many prefectural resi
dents concerned about nuclear proliferation. Nagasaki's ardent
nuclear disarmament effort relies strongly on the mobilization
of world opinion for a ban on all nuclear explosions and for the
total abolition of nuclear weapons.
The Bombing of Nagasaki:
A Warning of "Others to Follow"
Directly by the nuclear disarmament move
ment, the United Nations General Assembly declared on 24
November 1961 that the use of nuclear weapons is contrary to
"the spirit, letter and aims of the United Nations" and to "the
rules of international law and to the laws of humanity. " Nuclear
weapons are directed, not against one enemy alone, but against
"mankind in general. "2 This resolution, although its sense is
2. UN General Assemhly R"'iolution 1653 (XVI). 24 November 1961. was
followed by General Assemuly Resolution 2936 (XXVII) of 29 November
1972, which proscribes the u:,e or threat of force in international relations and
declares for the permanent prohibition of the use of nuclear weapons.
The world's Catholic bishops addressed the dangers of nuclear warfare at
the Second Vatican Council on 7 December 1967 as follows:
All\' act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or
extellsive areas a/on!? with their population is a crime against God and man
himself
The 1961 and 1972 UN resolutions and the Vatican Council II appeal were
buttressed by the comprehensive recommendations for arresting and reversing
the n\!clear arms race issued by the Holy See on 7 May 1976. (UN Document
A/ AC.181/ L "Strengthening of the Role of the United Nations in the Field of
Disarmament.") These uniwal proclamations articulate what the Hibakusha
of Japan and non-governmellldl organizations for disarmament and develop
ment worldwide term the "newly aware" public opinion demanding bold action
to liquidate nuclear weapons.
38
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clearly prospective, challenges the North American contention'
that atomic bombs were patriotically dropped on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in August 1945 as legitimate weapons of war to
compel a prompt Japanese surrender and to forestall large num
bers of allied casualties. Collateral decisions of the General
Assembly lend further political and moral weight to the ongoing
campaign for the enactment of a "Bill for the Relief of A
bombed Survivors," based on the principles of national in
demnity, which is promoted by the six opposition parties in the
Japanese Diet. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were attacked with
A-bombs even though the United States government knew that
by early 1945 Japan had broken down economically and strate
gically, and that "a large element of the Japanese Cabinet was
ready in the spring [of 1945] to accept substantially the same
[surrender] terms as those finally agreed on."3
Soon after Japan's decisive military reverses at Saipan,
Tinian and Guam in the Mariana island chain in July 1944, a
surrender movement developed in Tokyo, which feared not
defeat but domestic revolution and the demise of the imperial
polity. Prince Konoe, three times premier of Japan and Emperor
Hirohito's favorite senior statesman, who spoke for many of the
top business and government leaders, reluctantly acknowledged
in his February 1945' 'Memorial to the Throne" that Japan had
"already lost the war," recommended its termination "as
speedily as possible," and warned that if hostilities were pro
longed "a Communist revolution" reinforced by "Soviet in
tervention" would overthrow the imperial institution.
4
The
position of the war party was undermined by the fall of Okinawa
in June 1945, "fter which the Supreme Council for the Direction
of the War (the "inner cabinet" of the six chief military and
government leaders) admitted defeat. On 12 July, Tokyo's
ambassador to the Kremlin was instructed to enlist the Soviet
Union, not yet a military combatant in the Pacific War, as a
mediator between the Anglo-U.S. and Japanese goverments.
The Supreme Council cabled him that' 'unconditional surrender
is the only obstacle to peace."5 Japan's aversion to uncondi
tional surrender was well known at the time, since U. S. intelli
gence, whose cryptographers earlier had broken the Japanese
diplomatic codes, intercepted the 12 July cable and relayed its
contents to Washington.
3. Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and
War (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), p. 628. As Secretary of War in
1940-1945, Stimson from the inception took full responsibility for the man
ufacture and use of the atomic bomb.
4. Robert J.c. Butow. Japan's Decision to Surrender (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1954), pp. 47-50. Konoe argued:
I
The situation in Japan is such that every possible factor favorable to the
accomplishment of a Communist revolution is on hand. There is poverty in
the life of the people. a rise in the voice of labor, and an expansion of
pro-Soviet feeling growing Ollt of an increase in enmitv against American
and Britain . .. with defeat staring liS in the face we shall simply be playing
I
into the hands ofthe Communists ifwe elect to continue a IVaI' wherein there
I
is no prospect of victory.
Konoe's "Memorial," Butow, pp. 48-49. In fact, beginning in mid-August
1945, the Communist Party and other expressions of the "voice of labor"
I
! emerged from severe persecution with appreciable popular support. Konoe's
logic was shared by other top leaders who regarded preservation of the emperor
system and its polity as the supreme cause. Ariatsu Nishijima, Why the Atomic
I
Bombs Were Dropped [Genbaku wa Naze Toka Saretaka] (Tokyo, 1971), p.
152. The supreme ruling circles of Japan were "extremely sensitive" to the shift
in power relations between capitalism and socialism following the Soviet
victory over nazi Gennany. Nishijima, p. 154.
~
5. Butow, pp. 124 and 130.
In the Yalta Agreement signed by Stalin, Roosevelt and
I

i
Churchill on II February 1945, it was decided that "in two or
three months" after the surrender of Germany (which occurred
on 8 May 1945), "the Soviet Union shall enter into the war
I
!
i
against Japan on the side of the Allies."6 Before the A-bomb
was tested, President Roosevelt and President Truman, who
succeeded him on 12 April, had welcomed the prospect of
military assistance from the USSR in routing the vaunted Japan
ese K wantung Army, which possessed an independent indust
rial base in China. The military chiefs advised that Soviet
I
intervention was needed to spare the lives of several hundred
thousand U. S. troops which would be lost in an invasion of f
Japan. I
The atomic bombing of Nagasaki, the consequence of
Washington's multiple-bombing imperative, under
scores the callousness of the fixed policy resolve to cast
atomic bombs upon an unwarned, conclusively beaten
nation-a nation ravaged by terrible conflagrations
from fire bombing of civilian targets, defenseless
against further heavy air and close-range naval
strikes, and whose leaders in the self-interest of their
own class were desperately suing for peace.
With Truman's concurrence, the Kremlin rebuffed the
Japanese diplomatic maneuver of 12 JUly. The ultimate demand
for unconditional surrender was issued at the Potsdam Confer
ence on 26 July over the signatures of Truman, Churchill and
Chiang Kai-shek (in Chiang's absence). Stalin's signature,
which would have strengthened the Potsdam Proclamation and
might have helped occasion an earlier surrender, was never
sought. 7 Nevertheless, the rapid destruction oftwenty-two divi
sions of the million-man Kwantung Army in Manchuria by the
Soviets following Moscow's declaration of war as scheduled on
8 August aided the group in the Japanese government that was
insisting on acceptance of the Potsdam terms.
On 9 August, the Supreme Council and all government
ministers held a prearranged conference with the Emperor, dur
ing which he advocated immediate capitulation, and on 14
August Japan accepted the surrender terms of the Potsdam
Proclamation (although the Kwantung Army continued its re
sistance for another fortnight). A small group of poorly or
6. Stalin had promised at the three-power Teheran Conference (November
1943 and January 1944) that the USSR would join the war against Japan as soon
as the Gennan army was beaten and destroyed.
7. According to Herbert Feis:
[IlfStalin had been asked to subscribe publicly to the Potsdam Declaration
... , it is possible that the immediate response by the Japanese government
might have been quite different-and indicative ofa willingness to surren
der on the proferred terms if given assurances about the future of the
Imperial Institution. In that case there would have been no need or occasion
to use the bomb.
Herbert Feis, Japan Subdued: The Atomic Bomb and the End of the War in the
Pacific (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 96.
39
1
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ganized, fanatical young field-grade officers on the night of 14
August tried to stage a coup d'etat to renegotiate the surrender
(to "protect the future status of the Emperor and the Throne").
But the stillborn putsch did not gain the support of the troops or
of the population. 8 After Japan signed the instruments of surren
der on 2 September, the U.S. permitted the retention of the
imperial dynasty, which it knew weeks before was the virtually
sole Japanese surrender condition, even of the diehard con
spirators.
An invasion of the Japanese homeland, with its expected
large allied casualty toll, was not anticipated before November
or December 1945, by which time Japanese resistance would
surely have collapsed for other reasons. Thus the lives of few if
any U.S. fighting men were saved by the atomic instrument. The
chronology of atomic diplomacy shows that the idea of the
demonstrative mass destruction of Japanese cities took root in
the planning of the U.S. Armed Forces when they gained
control of bases in the western Pacific and the skies over Japan in
late 1944. A Target Committee of Army Air Force ordnance
specialists and atomic scientists, guided by official instructions,
decided in May 1945 that Kyoto, Hiroshima and Niigata were
the best A-bomb objectives, and recommended not to try to
pinpoint industrial zones but to "shoot for the center" of these
cities.
9
The members of the Committee agreed, too, that the
initial use of the atomic bomb should be "sufficiently spectacu
lar for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recog
nized when publicity on it is released." 10
On 31 May 1945, an Interim Committee on atomic policy
was set up by presidential authority under the chairmanship of
Secretary of War Stimson, with representatives from the State,
War and Navy Departments and the foremost scientific circles
of the Manhattan Project. Thj:: Committee advised the President
that the most profound psychological impact on Japan and the
world would be achieved by using two atomic bombs as rapidly
as possible in sequence without prior warning on cities harbor
ing military installations or war plants employing a large num
ber of workers, closely surrounded by workers' homes and other
buildings most susceptible to damage. II President Truman's 25
July Directive to the Strategic Air Force to deliver additional
A-bombs after the first "as soon as made ready by the [Manhat
tan] project staff" was definitive, unrestrained and irrevo
cable. 12 Since responsibility for timing the A-bomb sorties was
delegated to the bomber command on Tinian Island, Washing
ton never scheduled a pause to monitor the Japanese response to
the first assault and the entry of the USSR into the war. The
atomic bombing of Nagasaki, the consequence of Washington ' s
multiple-bombing imperative, underscores the callousness of
the fixed policy resolve to cast atomic bombs upon an un
warned, conclusively beaten nation-a nation ravaged by terri
8. Butow, pp. 210-223.
9. Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, The New World: A History of
the United States Atomic Energy Commission (University Park, Penn.: Penn
sylvania State University Press, 1972), p. 365.
10. MajorJ. Derry and Dr. N.F. Ramsey (both members of the Target Commit
tee) to General Groves, 12 May 1945. The target selection process was traced by
Martin Sherwin, A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), who cites the Derry-Ramsey letter on pp.
229 and 268.
11. Stimson and Bundy, p. 617.
12. Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, Vol. I: Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday and Co., 1955), p. 420.
ble conflagrations from fire bombing of civilian targets, de
fenseless against further heavy air and close-range naval strikes,
and whose leaders in the self-interest of their own class were
desperately suing for peace.
Washington was accurately appraised in December 1944
that the U. S. Army's Manhattan Project would probably enrich
sufficient uranium for a gun-type (Hiroshima) bomb by about 1
August 1945, and would produce enough plutonium and master
the more complicated technology for an implosion-type (Naga
saki) bomb sometime in the latter part of July 1945.13 The
detonation of a prototype plutonium bomb at Alamagordo, New
Mexico, which measured up to Washington's highest expecta
tions, coincided with the opening of the U .S.-U.K.-U.S.S.R.
summit conference at Potsdam on 16 July 1945. The Nagasaki
bomb itself was ready for delivery by 6 August. (The materials
for a third A-bomb, also a plutonium device, were assembled by
about 24 August. 14) The effect of the unconditional surrender
doctrine was to keep Japan fighting until atomic bombs were
delivered in succession.
Stimson advised Truman in April 1945 that in major mili
tary matters the Soviet government had always carried out its
obligations to its allies, and in fact often exceeded its
promises. IS But already in late April the deterioration in U.S.
Soviet relations had reached crisis proportions, and the new
administration, troubled perhaps by what in spite of Stalin's
Yalta commitment it took to be ambiguity in Moscow's policy
toward Japan, never shared Stimson's firm conviction in the
reliability of the Soviet Union. Paramount was the policy of
utilizing the extraordinary bombs to shock Japan violently and
to establish postwar world hegemony. After the technically
flawless twenty-kiloton' 'try-out for judgment day" in the New
Mexico desert, the need felt for Soviet military assistance had
declined and "further diplomatic efforts to bring the Russians
into the Pacific war were largely pointless." 16 What little com
mitment there was in the U.S. administration forthe collabora
tive international postwar control of atomic energy all but
vanished.
President Truman had already issued the A-bomb strike
order, and the enriched uranium for the Hiroshima bomb had
arrived at Tinian, when the Postdam Proclamation warned
13. Lt. General Leslie R. Groves, Report to General George C. Marshall, 30
December 1944, in The Conference at Malta and Yalta, 1945, Foreign Relations
of the United States, Diplomatic Papers, Publication 6199 (Washington, D.C.:
U.S. Department of State, 1955), pp. 383-384. Groves was Commanding
General of the Manhattan Project and Marshall was U.S. Chief of Staff.
14. Sherwin, pp. 231 and 268, citing Manhattan Project files of 23 July 1945.
On 10 August 1945, however, General Groves reported that the third bomb
could be ready for combat use on 18 or 19 August. Barton J. Bernstein, "The
Perils and Politics of Surrender: Ending the War with Japan and Avoiding the
Third Atomic Bomb," Pacific Historical Review, February 1977, p. 10. Bern
stein cites the letter of Groves to General Marshall of 10 August 1945 in Top
Secret Manhattan Project Files 5, U.S. National Archives. The pilot of the third
bombing plane was scheduled to be Claude Eatherly, who from the recon
naisance aircraft on 6 August sent the all-clear weather signal to the B-29 which
attacked Hiroshima. Ronnie Dugger, Dark Star: Hiroshima Reconsidered in the
Life ofClaude Eatherly (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1967), pp. 76-77.
15. Sherwin, p. 157. citing the entry of 23 April 1945 in the Stimson Diary.
16. Stimson and Bundy, p. 637. Winston Churchill wrote in Potsdam a few
days after Alamagordo; "It is quite clear that the United States do not at the
present time desire Russian participation in the war against Japan." Winston
Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy (Memoirs, Vol. 6) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1953), p. 639.
40
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Aerial view ofNa/?asaki before the atomic bombing. 7 August 1945. Courtesy of
International Cultural Hall. Nagasaki City.
Japan that its alternative to unconditional surrender was
, 'prompt and utter destruction. " The prospects for terminating
the war short of atomic bombings were damaged, not only by
the U.S. failure to seek Stalin's signature on the Proclamation,
but also by the Truman administration's failure to disclose
that the U. S. had come into possession of a much more destruc
tive weapon than the world had ever known. Use of the weapon
to jolt the Soviet Union already led the U.S. agenda, and the
rationale for the atomic secrecy at Potsdam included "quite
possibly the fact that the American government could not reveal
these matters to the Japanese without revealing them to the
Russians. "17
Washington aimed not only to destroy as many Japanese
city dwellers as possible and to test the damage and after-effects
of the new weapon on open cities, 18 but also to warn the Soviet
Union and "all mankind" that the first A-bomb "was not an
isolated weapon, but that there were others to follow. "19 As an
earnest of the willingness and intention of U. S. government and
military leaders to produce and use a sequence of A-bombs to
establish their (ultimately unattainable) goal of nuclear supre
macy, the bombing of Nagasaki presaged postwar U.S. nuclear
armament and preparation for nuclear war.
17. Feis, p. 88.
18. The target cities were embargoed against conventional air attacks in mid
July, to facilitate the planned surveys of destruction after atomic attack.
19. Karl T. Compton, "If the Atomic Bomb Had Not Been Used" The
Atlantic Monthly, December 1946, p. 55. Physicist and science admin'istrator
Karl Compton, a leader in the Manhattan Project, served on the seven-member
1945 Interim Committee on atomic policy and men on General MacArthur's
occupation staff in Japan. Stimson and Bundy endorse Compton' s view mat the
second bomb signified a conceivably "unlimited" atomic arsenal. On Active
Service, p. 630.
Aerial view of Nagasaki after the atomic bombing. Courtesy of International
Cultural Hall, Nagasaki City.
The works of Stimson, Butow and Feis reveal that the
shifting political configuration in spring and summer 1945,
when Washington was beginning to confront the USSR as the
enemy, did not permit the categorical acceptance of Stalin's
Yalta commitment to open the essential second front in the Far
East. These considerations foreclosed planning based, not on
the exercise of atomic power, but rather upon the early, close
and effective integration of U.S. and Soviet forces and policies
to compel Japan's surrender. The view thattandem A-bombings
were necessary to achieve victory is held primarily by those,
including most recently Joseph Alsop in the New York Review of
Books, who underestimate the strong options which would have
been provided by the extension to the Pacific War of the alliance
against Hitler fascism. 20
The capriciousness of the U.S. "brink-of-surrender"
atomic bomb policy is made even more evident by the roulette
like process that led to Nagasaki. Kyoto was initially favored as
the largest A-bomb objective, the renowned ancient capital and
center of Japanese civilization. But Stimson erased Kyoto from
the target list on the grounds that the bitterness which the atomic
destruction of this cultural and religious shrine would cause
I
t
20. "Was me Hiroshima Bomb Necessary?: An Exchange," New York Review
of Books, 23 October 1980, pp. 37-42. The participants in me exchange were
Joseph Alsop and David Joravsky.
41
!
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In the wake of Japan's capitulation and occupation by
the U.S. armed forces, a Civil Censorship Code was
promulgated by the Counter-Intelligence Branch of
General Headquarters, prohibiting aU reporting on
the atomic suffering. Information on the real nature
and extent of the damage was regarded as detrimental
to the United States, and until the peace treaty signed
by Japan with the U.S.-allied combatants came into
force in April 1952, it was a crime for Japanese to
write or broadcast factual data on the atomic bombing.
might tum the Japanese against the U.S. in the postwar era
should ttouble develop with the USSR in the Far East.
21
The
prime targets then chosen in the order of their importance to the
U. S. leaders became Hiroshima and Kokura (now Kita Kyushu,
situated between Hiroshima and Nagasaki), followed by Niigata
and Nagasaki. The pilots of the bombing planes were given
leave to roam above these cities seeking the ones offering the
most suitable conditions for destruction.
The exemption granted to Kyoto did not extend to Naga
saki, notwithstanding its prominence as Japan's historically
most international city and despite its allied prisoner of war
camps.22 In the words of historian Martin Sherwin, "It never
occured to Stimson that the destruction of any city, or two cities,
might be considered 'wanton.' "23
21. According to Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Baily II, No High Ground
(New York: Harper and Row, 1960), p. 122, Stimson considered that the
A-bombing of Kyoto would have been a "wanton act."
22. The population of Nagasaki in 1945 included over 10,000 Korean workers
and about 650 Chinese. Under conditions of racial chauvinism, manipulated by
Japanese militarism, many Koreans were brought to Japan as laborers during the
colonization of Korea, and commandeering, drafting and forced immigration
increased their number to over two million as World War II neared its close. An
estimated 7,000 Koreans toiled in Mitsubishi's Nagasaki industrial complex
during the war, most of whom lived in makeshift temporary dwellings near the
workshops. In these flimsy shacks the Koreans underwent even more serious
damage than Japanese coworkers. There were delays in extending relief and first
aid to them later, and few survived. Pak Su Ryong, "The Silent Ashes of the
Bombed Koreans," in Give Me Water: Testimonies ofHiroshima and Nagasaki
(Tokyo: A Citizens' Group to Convey Testimonies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
1972), pp. 34-35.
The Fukuoka No. 14 POW camp at the Mitsubishi Shipyard in Saiwai
machi, and the No. 12 POW camp at the Kawaname Shipyard in Koyagi, both in
Nagasaki, held war prisoners from Australia, Indonesia, the Netherlands, the
U.K., U.S. and other allied nations. On 2 January 1943 about 470 prisoners
were sent from Singapore to Camp No. 14, of whom about 370 remained in
August 1945. Jidayu Tajima, "What I Saw in War-Prisoner Camp on August 9,
1945," in Report from Nagasaki on the Damage and After-Effects ofthe Atomic
Bombing (Nagasaki: Nagasaki Preparatory Committee for the International
Symposium on the Damage and After-Effects of the Atomic Bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 15 February 1978), pp. 46-47. The Headquarters,
U. S. Army Strategic Air Forces, Guam, communicated to the War Department
on 20 July 1945 that an allied prisoner of war camp (Fukuoka No. 14) was
located one mile north of the center of Nagasaki, and asked whether this
intelligence had any bearing on atomic targetting. Washington replied, "Tar
gets previously assigned for Centerboard [the mission of delivering atomic
bombs on Japan 1remain unchanged. " General Carl Spaatz, Commander of the
Strategic Air Forces, to General George Marshall, 31 July 1945, and Pasco to
Spaatz, 31 July 1945. Cited by Sherwin, pp. 234, 269.
23. Sherwin, p. 231.
The town of Niigata, on the west coast, 255 kilometers
north of Tokyo, was not an important industrial center and was
perhaps listed because of its proximity to the Soviet Union. The
A-bomb squadron commanders on Tinian decided that Niigata
was too small and too distant from their launching field, and
they erased it as an objective. The Air Force bombing plane
which reached the chief target Kokura on the morning of 9
August discovered that the aiming point was obscured by a pall
of clouds and smoke. The aircraft circled three times, but
fearing the loss of fuel, flew southwest to drop the second
atomic bomb. on Nagasaki. Nagasaki's citizens were thus made
to substitute in death and destruction for those of Kokura,
Niigata and Kyoto, and a new season of torment was decreed.
The Era of Suppression
In the wake of Japan's capitulation and occupation by the
U.S. armed forces, a Civil Censorship Code was promUlgated
by the Counter-Intelligence Branch of General Headquarters,
prohibiting all reporting on the atomic suffering. Information on
the real nature and extent of the damage was regarded as detri
mental to the United States, and until the peace treaty signed by
Japan with the U.S.-allied combatants came into force in April
1952, it was a crime for Japanese to write or broadcast factual
data on the atomic bombing. 24 Almost all early works by Japan
ese authors dealing with Hiroshima and Nagasaki were cen
sored, and only after lengthy appeals and protests was publica
tion permitted. All media were strictly forbidden to mention the
censorship operation itself. While the Hibakusha were thus
being deprived of their history, the Atomic Bomb Casualty
Commission established in 1947 by the Department of De
fense 'and the Atomic Energy Commission to investigate the
long-range medical effects of radiation on the human body, but
lacking a healing mission, secured a monopoly on research and
study of atomic bomb casualties. 25
The data initially collected in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were
classified top secret by the occupation authorities. . . . Sev
eral Japanese medical scientists risked severe penalties to
hide pathological specimens and autopsy reports, but appar
ently not very successfully. Most ofthe data were discovered
24. The Truth Concealed: White Paper on Damage ofAtomic Bombs (Tokyo:
Japan Council Against A- and H-bombs [Gensuikyol, December 1964), p. 6.
(First published in Japanese in 1961 by the Scientists Commission of
Gensuikyo.) Throughout the greater part of the occupation period, from Sep
tember 1945 to November 1949, the Civil Censorship Detachment enforced
strict censorship over all Japanese media-newspapers, radio, film, theater,
recordings, books, magazines and pamphlets. Japanese publication of John
Hersey's compassionate book Hiroshima, which originally appeared in The
New Yorker in September 1946, was not permitted until March 1949.
25. Since it placed a ban on the publication ofwhat was discovered and studied
by Japanese researchers, the United States has systematically obstructed
the reliefof victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki . ... The ABCC was set up
so that the Americans responsible for the atomic bombing would be able to
follow up studies on their victims after the war, in order to prepare experi
mental materials for afuture nuclear war . ... The Commission has never
given medical treatment to victims ofHiroshima and Nagasaki.
No More Hiroshimas!, Japan Council Against A- and H-bombs, Tokyo, August
1970,.pp. 9-10. The major findings of the various studies conducted by the
Commission on the delayed radiation effects of the A-bomb are reported in
Radiation Effects on Atomic Bomb Survivors, Technical Report 6-73 (Hiro
shima and Nagasaki: Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, 1973), pp. 6-10. In
April 1975 the ABCC was succeeded by the Radiation Effects Research Founda
tion, supported equally by the governments of Japan and the United States.
42
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and shipped to the United States with all other material
collected. The United States was anxious to keep details of
the effects ofthe atomic bombs secret mainly because ofthe
rapid deterioration of postwar relations with the Soviet
Union. 26
Public relief measures for the atomic victims were dis
couraged and in cases prohibited by the occupation authorities.
"After about 1948, blood diseases, centering around acute
leukemia, began to develop in the victims, and the prevalence of
cataracts due to exposure to irradiation was also observed.
However, these facts were known only among a limited number
of physicians and it was not allowed to publicize them. "27 In
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the censorship and virtual ban on the
dissemination of medical information and research results' 'was
tantamount to regarding the existence of the survivors itself as
criminal, for by the very fact that they were living witnesses to
the massacre, they were forcing the nation and the world to be
reminded of the unprecedented crime which the offenders
wanted to hide. Under the seven-year occupation, the survivors
became an untouchable subject. "28
The Nagasaki Medical College, founded by Franciscan
missionaries, and long the principal medical facility in the city,
was located 700 meters from the atomic hypocenter, and was
totally destroyed. Most of the teaching staff and the 530 mem
bers of the medical student body were killed. Nevertheless,
emergency medical teams under Dr. Takashi Nagai and his
colleagues at the College, ignoring their own injuries, under
took rudimentary treatment of victims at several temporary
relief stations.
The bomb burst above a point only 500 meters from the
Urakami Catholic Cathedral, located near the Medical College
in the narrow U rakami Valley. The historical seat of the Roman
Catholic Church in Japan, Nagasaki in 1945 was populated by
about 12,000 Catholics, clustered around the Cathedral and the
adjacent concentration of Mitsubishi industrial plants. Approxi
mately 8,500 Catholics perished from direct exposure to the
bomb, about 12 percent of the fatalities. After the bombing,
only a few damaged stone statues of saints in the rear courtyard
remained of the Urakami Cathedral.
Nagasaki was opened to European traders in 1570 and
developed as the chief port for all of Japan's foreign intercourse.
Catholicism, introduced by Iberian missionaires in the mid
sixteenth century, flourished for several decades. After the
Tokugawa unification of Japan in 1603, all other cities except
Kyoto were governed by politically decentralized feudal lords,
but Nagasaki was controlled directly by the Tokugawa shogun
ate in Tokyo, which cruelly persecuted the city's Catholic
population and expelled the missionaries from Japan in 1637.
29
Although Christianity'S roots had gone deep among its con
verts, it ceased to exist as a public religion in Japan. The Church
26. Frank Barnaby, "The Continuous Body Count at Hiroshima and Naga
saki," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. December 1977, pp. 49-50.
27. "History of Medical Care for Atomic Bomb Victims," Working Document
11-4 (English) of the International Symposium on the Damage and After-Effects
of the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, August 1977.
28. The Truth Concealed. p. 6.
29. "The Japanese leaders were desirous of retaining profitable trade relations
with the Europeans, but they gradually came to the conclusion that for national
safety and political stability, Christianity must go." Edwin O. Reischauer,
Japan: The Story ofaNation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), p. 93.
survived relentless persecution in Nagasaki without priests or
open worship by means of crypto-Christian prayer rituals and
incantations handed down by rote within Nagasaki families for
over two centuries. 30
With the forced entry of foreign traders in the 1850s, and
the definitive onset of western modernization after the over
throw of the Tokugawa shogunate in the Meiji Restoration of
1868, European missionaries returned to Japan, and Nagasaki
restored its trade with merchants of many nations. The doc
trinally and politically passive Catholic community came into
the open once again, accepting the lead of politically conserva
tive and colonial-minded secular priests assigned from China
and Indochina to Japan by the Paris Foreign Mission Society
(Societe des Missions Estrangeres de Paris, the first religious
institute of secular priests devoted exclusively to foreign mis
sions). In order to avoid calling attention to themselves, even
after religious persecution had partially abated, the Catholics
refused to question state policies. The Nagasaki community of
believers in 1895-1924 built the largest Catholic cathedral in the
Far East as a memorial to the three-century quest for religious
freedom by the Urakami parishioners.
After the war all the Nagasaki Hibakusha struggled to
endure their severe physical handicaps and economic destitution
in an atmosphere of social and political repression. The pious
Catholics, who could find no other outlet for their anguish,
earnestly attempted in the manner of old to seek their spiritual
salvation in prayer and faith, and viewed the holocaust as a later
day martyrdom faced by their creed. Many emphasized the
positive value of their suffering and interpreted the A-bomb as
a mysterious act of Divine Providence, provoked by the sins of
mankind. They conceived the ordeal of Nagasaki as an op
portunity for redemption in the mystical body of Jesus Christ
and the Church as its extension, a supreme sacrifice by the elect
for the sake of a new and universalist culture of peace. In the
spiritual climate that fostered obedience to economic, social and
administrative power since the days of the Tokugawa shogunate
in Nagasaki, many Buddhist leaders, who interpreted suffering
30. The Tokugawa shogunate suppressed the 1637-1638 Shimabara insurrec
tion of 30,000 Catholic peasants against religious repression and collection of
heavy annual tributes. This revolt was used as an added pretext to cut all but a
trickle of relations with Europe and to complete the seclusion of Japan. Set in the
vicinity of Nagasaki, the popular novel Silence by Shusaku Endo (London: Peter
Owen, 1976) describes the unsuccessful attempt by European missionaries to
convert seventeenth-century Japan to Christianity. It is possible that the peasants
of the Shirnabara Peninsula and Amakusa Island and their Catholic feudal lords
who led them in tragic revolt envisaged the formation of a Catholic repUblic.
43
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as an inevitable part of the evil of material being, also remained
passive after the bombing.
Forbearance in the face of evil is evident in the eleven
works written as sources ofobjective, humanitarian information
under occupation censorship in 1945-1950 by the stricken
Catholic physician Dr. Takashi Nagai. 31 In We ofNagasaki, Dr.
Nagai described the anguish that prevented him from leaving his
shelter to cross the open spaces to the ruins of his neighborhood;
"I was shaking with fear .... Any instant now there might be
another great flash overhead." Dr. Nagai also pointed to guilt,
one of the lasting consequences of the flight reaction. Those
who survived had abandoned their neighborhoods while friends
and family died. Many of the survivors felt that they had saved
their own lives without stopping to help their neighbors and they
were constantly haunted by that realization. Dr. Nagai's manu
script The Bell of Nagasaki [Nagasaki no Kane], which de
scribes his experience of the bombing, was completed in August
1946. Printing was halted by the dis information tactics of the
occupation authorities, who permitted it in April 1949 only with
the incorporation ofcountervailing documentation-a record of
Japanese military cruelty in Manila, compiled by the intelli
gence division of U. S. General Headquarters. 32
Dr. Nagai, his followers, and other Catholic faithful,
standing on the ground of "unprejudiced" observers, were
reluctant to question the responsibilities of either the aggressive
Japanese state which caused the war, or the U.S. leaders who
cast the bomb upon them. Many citizens turned their minds
inward, just as the clandestine Catholics were once forced to do,
but when the time and conditions ripened, they began to move
creatively in their own fashion and gave expression to their
activist sentiments. The principal examples (to be discussed
below) are the Nagasaki of Young Hibakusha Men
and Women, the Association of Hibakusha Teachers, and the
Nagasaki Testimony Society [Nagasaki-no Shogen-no Kai] un
der Dr. Tatsuichiro Akizuki. They have become new bearers of
the citizens' movement in Nagasaki against the bomb.
In 1945, one of Dr. Nagai's younger colleagues at the
Nagasaki Medical College, and a member of the disaster relief
team at the badly damaged Urakami First Hospital (renamed the
31. Takashi Nagai, We of Nagasaki: The Story of Survivors in an Atomic
Wasteland (New York: Duell. Sloan and Pearce, 1951); The Bell ofNagasaki
[Nagasaki no Kane l. 1949; Survivors Under the Atomic Clouds [Genshi-gumo
no Shita ni [kitel. 1950. In We ofNagasaki, written for publication in English.
Dr. Nagai collected the accounts of eight relatives and neighbors who were
survivors of the Nagasaki bombing. Dr. Nagai died of radiation illness in 1951.
32. The cruelty and criminality of the Japanese in Manila should. however. be
examined in its own right. Hibakusha poetess Sadako Kurihara has written:
When we say "Hiroshima,"
Does anyone respond, with gentle sympathy,
"Ahh, Hiroshima"?
When we say "Hiroshima," we hear "Pearl Harbor."
When we say "Hiroshima," we hear "the rape ofNanking."
When we say' 'Hiroshima," we hear the fiery massacre ofManila,
Where women and children were driven into trenches
And burned with gasoline.
When we say' 'Hiroshima."
What we hear is an echo offire and blood.
Kurihara concludes that the peace movement of the survivors and their sup
porters must renounce Japan' s imperialist legacy in Asia. and its postwar policy
of rearmament. which again threatens the Asian people (' 'the weapons that have
been abandoned in name must be abandoned in truth"). "When We Say
Hiroshima." [Hiroshima to in tokil. by Sadako Kurihara (translated by Wayne
St. Francis Hospital after the war), was Dr. Tatsuichiro
Akizuki, a twenty-nine-year-old Buddhist. Akizuki was ini
tially critical of Nagai's Catholic romanticism and did not ac
cept his stand of fatal acquiescence to the bombing as Divine
Providence. Then Akizuki contracted tuberculosis, and under
the influence of Catholic believers and fathers he embraced the
doctrine of the spiritual fruitfulness of suffering and converted
to Catholicism in October 1948. In the wake of Nagai's death on
I May 1951, Akizuki pledged himself to work for the complete
prohibition of nuclear bombs. He published his Documents of
A-bombed Nagasaki [Nagasaki Genbaku ki] in August 1966.
33
Dr. Akizuki, now the-ChiefPhysician of the St. Francis Hospi
tal, serves as President of the Nagasaki Testimony Society. As a
Catholic peace activist representing the contemporary con
science of Nagasaki, he is one of the Hibakusha most closely
associated with the disarmament messages issued by Pope John
II in Nagasaki and Hiroshima in February 1981.
A Castle Town of the Mitsubishi Kingdom
Mitsubishi, one of the four giant corporations in modem
Japan, has long held a firm economic grip upon Nagasaki and its
inhabitants, and it has operated after the bombing to repress the
remembrance of 1945 as a stimulus to activity against nuclear
weapons.
Founded in 1870, two years after the Meiji Restoration,
Mitsubishi transformed Nagasaki into its main stronghold and
one of the hubs of the shipbuilding industry in Japan. In 1884,
Mitsubishi leased the government-owned Nagasaki Shipyard,
the first western industrial structure in Japan, which along with
its engine works expanded to occupy a three-kilometer frontage
along Nagasaki's well-appointed harbor. Mitsubishi became a
manufacturing licensee of Duerr, Parsons, Sulzer, Vickers,
Westinghouse, and other noted occidental marine builders and
engineers. The Nagasaki Shipyard, along with the Mitsubishi
Aircraft Company, evolved into Mitsubishi Heavy Industries,
established in 1934. Mitsubishi thrived on the government's
war policies, which it also helped to promote, profiting and
expanding from the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), the
Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), and Japanese participation
in World War I. During the fascist period 1931-1945, Mitsu
bishi, like the other zaibatsu, adapted itself easily to the new
structure, transforming itself into a partial organ of the fascist
state.
The Mitsubishi arms works was opened in Nagasaki in
1917, and in the 1930s, under the patronage of the military,
which was rapidly expanding the production of weapons and
military equipment for aggression abroad, the concern built up
three munitions factories in the Urakami Valley. Dedication of
the major industries in Nagasaki 'to armaments production
brought with it the militarization of the social and cultural life of
the citizens, whose rights were suppressed and who in the
prevailing war hysteria were politically silenced.
The hypocenter of the atomic bomb explosion was situated
at a point approximately 1,300 meters from each one of this trio
of Nagasaki plants: the arms manufacturing facilities at Ohashi
(model 91 torpedo bombs for airplanes) and Morimachi
33. Mr. Keiichi Nagata. a Nagasaki high school teacher. translated Dr. Aki
zuki's book. which published as Nagasaki 1945 (London: Quartet Books.
Lammers. 1981). 1981).
44
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Ohashi Factory, Mitsubishi Arms Works, after the bombing. Courtesy ofInter
national Cultural Hall, Nagasaki City.
(oxygen-driven torpedoes for submarines), and the Mitsubishi
Steel Foundry at Morimachi. Also located along the Urakami
River and 1,800 meters from the hypocenter were various build
ings of the Mitsubishi Shipyards (the large battleship Musashi,
and many cruisers and destroyers), the Mitsubishi Steelworks at
Saiwaimachi, and the Mitsubishi Electrical Machinery and Ap
pliances plant. Along with the rest of the Japanese industrial
plant, however, Mitsubishi's armaments production was grind
ing to a halt by mid-1945 and the munitions industry in Nagasaki
was nearly paralyzed by U.S. air raids conducted in early 1945.
Nagasaki was a military bastion only in name. At the time of the
bombing, more than 40,000 industrial proletarians, including a
significant number of Catholic workers, were employed by
Mitsubishi in Nagasaki, as well as war-mobilized students,
technicians of the Imperial Navy, and foreign prisoners of war.
Approximately 3,000 Koreans had been brought to toil in the
Mitsubishi Shipyard, and another 4,000 in the arms manufactur
ing plants. Scores of medium- and small-sized subcontracting
factories which supplied parts to Mitsubishi were clustered in an
area adjacent to the hypocenter. Thus, most of Nagasaki's
working population and its families in the Urakami Valley
perished.
After the war the Mitsubishi industrial base of shipbuild
ing, machinery and metal working was rebuilt from rubble to
become the motor of the Nagasaki economy and the wielder of
tremendous influence in shaping Japan's postwar economic
upsurge. Nagasaki once again became a castle town of the
Mitsubishi empire, and in spite of the nominal decartelization of
the giant pre-1945 zaibatsu monopoly groups as the principal
bearers of the spirit of Japanese militarism, Mitsubishi's mili
tary-industrial affiliations were fully reorganized and strength
ened. The Mitsubishi group today is Japan's largest and strong
est corporate conglomerate, whose activities have expanded to
markets in every comer of the globe. Constant modernization of
45
I
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i
production facilities and technological innovation by the Mitsu
i
bishi Nagasaki Shipyard led to world records in the 1970s for the I
launching of oil tankers. 34
More importantly for the Hibakusha of Nagasaki, Mitsu
bishi carries out the large-scale engineering and construction of
Japanese nuclear power plants and the manufacture of other
I
nuclear fuel cycle equipment. Mitsubishi utilizes reactor tech
I
t
nology licensed from the Westinghouse Corporation (Mitsu
bishi's relationship with Westinghouse dates back to the early
twentieth century), but is developing the capability of supplying
standardized nuclear power plant units to electrical utilities and
goverment corporations on an autonomous basis.
I
Furthermore, big concerns such as Mitsubishi, which fol t
low the traditions they established as prewar and wartime arsen i
als, are rapidly expanding their arms output. The development
of Japan's military industry was initially the result of U.S.
military orders for the Korean War (1950-1953), and Mitsu
bishi's revival at this period was spectacular. In recent years,
Japan Defense Agency contracts have constituted about one
quarter of the value of all contract items of Mitsubishi Heavy
Industries,35 and weapons manufacture is closely linked to the
34. Mitsubishi's annual trading transactions approach $44 billion, equal to
about one-quarter of Japan's national budget. Mitsubishi's Nagasaki Shipyard,
at its crest in the late l%Os and early 1970s, registered the world's largest annual
launching tonnage (five million tons deadweight) in 1974. The outlook for
ocean-going shipping after the petroleum crisis and the subsequent world-wide
recession is not bright, but Japan's petroleum dependence is still great and a
parti!!l recovery has been registered by some of the leading shipyards in Naga
saki Prefecture.
35. Statistics on Mitsubishi weapons contracts are from Japan's Contribution
to Military Stability in Northeast Asia, Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific
Affairs, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Govennent Printing Office, June 1980), p. 42.
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utilization of the latest advances in science and technology by
the Mitsubishi Group. With its worldwide information network
and contacts with the U.S. armaments industry, developed
through years of heavy industrial and defense licensing transac
tions, Mitsubishi has acted as a bridge between the weapons
sector in Japan and foreign military-industrial companies.
Many local citizens have strongly protested against the
manufacture of the main units for the Japanese Navy in the
Nagasaki Shipyard of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries: anti-sub
marine ships, torpedoes and missiles. (Mitsubishi's manu
facture of the nuclear vessel M utsu and Nagasaki's resistance to
this ship is discussed below.) Along with Mitsubishi' s influence
on Nagasaki's industry and economy, this robust conglomerate
also has a depressing effect on the consciolisness of Nagasaki
citizens, reinforcing the "economy-oriented" trend which has
long been prevalent among the city's leaders. The movement of
the Hibakusha for social and educational reform has to grapple
with the l i ~ e l i h o o d fears of the thousands of citizens employed
by corporations inherently opposed to social change or protest.
The imminent threat of unemployment or ignominious demo
tion for political and social activism discourages many Mitsu
bishi workers and their families from political participation.
Since the 1964 merger of its Nagasaki, Kobe and Yokohama
components, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has been successful
in dividing the trade union organization of its workers and
isolating militant peace activists. This has encouraged ultra
rightist groups in their attacks against the peace movement and
peace education in Nagasaki.
Rebirth
Although hindered by strict occupation censorship,
Catholic mystical traditions, and the repressive influence of the
Mitsubishi Corporation, the Hibakusha movement grew up in
the midst of the ruin and confusion left by the bomb and has
gained in vitality over the years. The Hibakusha found it ex
ceedingly difficult to regain their footing from the severe urban
destruction and chaos and the obliteration of the Nagasaki civic
community. To begin activities for self-help and mutual assis
tance, the distressed survivors organized a Victims League in
December 1945. The individual and collective atomic bomb
narratives written by Dr. Nagai and other creative citizens at
their places of work, homes and schools, although circum
scribed by the restrictions on discussion and publication im
posed by the Occupation Press Code, were the product of a
movement for self-expression, human dignity and rehabilitati
on.
36
These testimonies represent the beginning of the move
ment for concretizing the painful and desperate Hibakusha
experience, both for contemporaries and as an inheritance for
future generations. The literature of the Hibakusha who lived
through the most severe years of misery, suffering and struggle
marks the origin of peace education in postwar Japan. Dr. Nagai
36. These early Nagasaki Hibakusha accounts include: Nagasaki: A Record of
the A-bomb Experiences of Twenty-Two Survivors [Nagasaki: Nijuninin no
Genbaku Taiken Kiroku), 1949 (One of the accounts is by Dr. Nagai); Survivors
Under the Atomic clouds [Genshi-gumo no Shita ni [kite], 1950, edited by Dr.
Nagai, a collection of compositions by Hibakusha children of the Yamazato
Elementary and High Schools, where 1,300 pupils perished by the bomb; The
Atomic Bomb Accounts of Nagasaki Seiki Employees [Nagasaki Seiki Genshi
Bakudan ki}, 1949. This volume contains thirty-nine personal accounts and the
wrote that' 'those who have survived cry out in one voice 'no
more war,' and those who left this world all had this desire at
their last moment. "37
Many readers of the Hibakusha testimonies from 1945 to
the present have undergone the "third exposure" to the A
bomb, and have become atomic sufferers through the printed
page. The victims of the first exposure are those dead or dying
from the atomic explosions directly, while the second exposure
sufferers are the Hibakusha who entered the A-bombed cities
afterward and were contaminated by residual radioactivity. The
third wave comprises all persons influenced by the experience of
the first two groups and by the broad movement against A- and
H-bombs.
In May 1949 the Japanese Diet passed laws for the con
struction of a peace memorial city in Hiroshima and an interna
tional cultural city in Nagasaki. The citizens of the two cities
endorsed this legislation, and on 9 August 1949 the reconstruc
tion plans for Nagasaki came into effect. A campaign of Naga
saki citizens and Hibakusha organizations, encouraged by Dr.
Nagai, urged that the remains of the Urakami Cathedral, which
symbolized the tragedy of A-bombed Nagasaki, be preserved as
a monument to all H ibakusha and as a warning to future genera
tions of humankind, similar to the unreconstructed and symbol
ically effective A-bomb dome, the frame of a building destroyed
by the atomic explosion in Hiroshima. But the metropolitan
Nagasaki administration in 1958 cleared the ruins and built the
Cathedral anew on the same site, and has left few official
reminders of the atomic bomb. Placing its emphasis on achiev
ing a high level of industrial production and on the tourist
industry, the urban administration has rebuilt with less remem
brance than in Hiroshima. 38
The Japan-U.S. Mutual Security Treaty, signed on 8 Sep
tember 1951 simultaneously with the San Francisco Peace
Treaty, and still in force (as amended in 1960) as Japan's
military policy, promoted Japan's high growth economy in the
framework of a close diplomatic, economic and military al
liance with the United States. Under the early tutelage of U.S.
technology and economics the postwar Japanese national and
prefectural governments committed themselves to growth in
gross national product and expansion of industrial scale as
supreme national goods. Japan has sacrificed its social infra
structure to achieve rapid economic growth, and has to a large
extent abandoned many of the humanistic values embedded in
the limited democracy of earlier decades, whose development
was severed for the people by the onset of fascism and World
War II. Major social security programs have been left in the
hands of the private sector as part of the reinforcement of
corporate economic control.
The Japanese government, under Article 19 of the San
Francisco Peace Treaty, surrendered the right to demand repara
tions for the A-bombings from the United States. "Japan there
fore bears the responsibility of instituting a Hibakusha aid law
37. Nagai, "The Origins of the Bell of Nagasaki" [Nagasaki no Kane no
Yurai], in The Collected Works of Takashi Nagai [Nagai Takashi Zenshu)
(Tokyo: Kodansha, 1971), pp. 403-404.
38. The present population of Nagasaki is about 450,000, approximately one
half that of Hiroshima, and partly for this reason the influence of Mitsubishi is
concentrated more intensively than that of any single industry on the city of
Hiroshima. The per capita income is less in Nagasaki, a difference which may in
part be historical, but reflects also the uneven regional development ofcapital
transcript of a round table discussion among H ibakusha. ism in Japan.
46
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providing for full state compensation.' '39 The Diet promulgated
in 1957 the Law for Health Protection and Medical Care for
A-bomb Victims, creating a benefit program within the scx;ial
security framework providing for biannual governmental medi
cal examination and treatment for proximally exposed surviv
ors. The 1968 Law for Special Measures for A-bomb Victims
went somewhat beyond the primarily medical benefits of the
1957 Law and reflected the Hibakusha demand for livelihood
security. A total of approximately 370,000 Hibakusha have
secured a Health Notebook for A-bomb Victims issued by the
Ministry of Health and Welfare, becoming eligible thereby for
certain forms of medical treatment and financial compensation
under these two laws. In many respects these laws provide little
more than token medical care, and thousands of survivors have
not yet obtained Health Notebooks, while second and third
generation victims are not entitled to receive them. The Korean
Hibakusha of Nagasaki and Hiroshima now living in South
Korea, whose number exceeds at least 10,000 receive no relief
or aid from either the Japanese or South Korean governments.
On 7 December 1963, the District Court of Tokyo handed
down a long and complex decision on claims for compensation
lodged against the Japanese government by Shimoda and
Others, five residents ofHiroshima and Nagasaki (The Shimoda
Case).40 The Court concluded that the atomic attacks caused
such severe and indiscriminate suffering that they violated the
most basic international legal principles governing the conduct
of war, but that the claimants lacked a remedy, since interna
tionallaw does not yet allow individuals, in the absence of an
express stipulation in a treaty, to pursue claims on their own
behalf against a government. The Court stated that today:
We have the Lawfor Health Protection and Medical Care for
A-bomb Victims . ... u ~ it is clear that a law of this scale
cannot possibly be sufficient for the relief or rescue of the
sufferers of the atomic bombs. The defendant state caused
many nationals to die. injured them, and drove them to a
precarious life by the war which it opened on its own author
ity and responsibility. Also, the seriousness of the damage
cannot compare a moment with that ofthe general calamity.
Needless to say the defendant state should take sufficient
reliefmeasures in this light . .. . It cannot possibly be under
stood that the above is financially impossible in Japan, which
has achieved a high degree of economic growth after the
war.41
I
The historically and politically compromised government
of Japan, which avoids acknowledgment of Tokyo's responsi
bility for the aggressive war, has virtually ignored the Shimoda
verdict, and, while extending palliatives for the principal grie
vances of the Hibakusha, seeks to discredit lmd blunt the force
of their movement for restitution. As the percentage of
H ibakusha in the population decreases and the victims gradually'
become older and enfeebled (the average age of the Hibakusha
I
j
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39. No More Hiroshimas!. March 1979, p. 8.
40. The plaintiff in the Shimoda group from Nagasaki, Mr. Suji Hamabe, lost
his wife and four daughters to the A-bomb. Age fifty-four in 1945, he worked at
the head office of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.
I
1
41. An English translation of the Judgment was published in the Tokyo legal
periodical Hanrei Jiho, cited as 355 Decisions Bulletin 17 by Richard A. Falk
and Saul H. Mendlovitz, eds. The Strategy ofWorld Order. Vol. 1 (New York:
World Law Foundation, 1966), p. 352. Falk and Mendlovitz reprint the Judg
menton theirpp. 314-354.
in February 1981 was 57.4 years), the vicious cycle entrapping
them becomes more serious-atomic sickness, acute poverty
and unemployment, family disintegration and social neglect.
Victimization by both the U.S. and Japanese governments com
pounds the morbidity cycle enveloping the Hibakusha. but they
are still determined to renew and strengthen their commitment
to solidarity and peace.
In the surge of expression which began after the Peace
Treaty came into force in April 1952, and following the initial
period of self-help and localized Hibakusha relief groups, a
wider institutional phase was set into motion. An exhibition of
pictures l::y the Hiba!cusha was held in 1952, along with a
display of the Hiroshima Panels, a series of paintings of bomb
stricken Hiroshima by the artists Iri and Toshi Maruki, who lost
relatives and many friends there. These were the first efforts to
bring home graphically the atomic horror, and made it possible
for many victims to speak publicly for the first time about the
bombings. The inception in 1952 of the campaign to assist the
young atomic-bombed women of Hiroshima, who were branded
with accumulations of scar tissue known as keloids, gave vital
impulse to the national effort for Hibakusha medical care legis
lation. This project sent twenty-five young women victims and
two surgeons to the United States in the spring of 1955, where
the young women underwent over one hundred plastic surgery
operations at New York's Mt. Sinai Hospital to help overcome
their disfigurement.
A profoundly tragic reminder of the atomic bomb catas
trophes was the radioactive fallout from the hydrogen bomb
exploded at the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands on I March
1954, which contaminated vast areas of the Pacific Ocean, and
inundated the Japanese tuna fishing trawler the Lucky Dragon
and its 23-member crew ,then fishing in nearby waters. The
blast was the first in a series of six H-bomb tests over the Bikini
Atoll conducted by the U. S. in an effort to recover the nuclear
advantage it had lost when the USSR tested its first atomic bomb
in 1949. The thermonuclear explosion showered radioactive
nuclear fallout on the MarshallIslanders, and over 600 ships and
their crews operating in or passing through adjoining waters,
and fish caught there had to be destroyed. In response to this
disaster, thirty-five million persons in Japan (one-third of the
national population) signed an appeal for the prohibition of
nuclear tests and nuclear weapons. The suffering and sacrifice
of the Lucky Dragon and the Marshall Islanders recalled for all of
Japan the Hiroshima and Nagasaki holocausts, which for the
first time came to be considered not merely regional calamities,
but subjects of utmost concern for the whole Japanese people
and the human race.
The peace campaign of 1954-1955 led to the founding of
the Nagasaki Association of Young Hibakusha Women by
Chieko Watanabe and four contemporaries in June 1955.
Chieko Watanabe was sixteen years old in 1945 and had been
mobilized for labor in the Mitsubishi Electrical Machinery
Plant, 2,500 meters from the hypocenter, when the A-bomb
struck. Pinned under a steel beam, her spine and lower limbs
were crushed, and she is confined to a wheelchair and has been
repeatedly hospitalized. The new Association appealed to the
World Mothers' Assembly held in Switzerland, 7 July 1955:
A burst offire wiped out Urakami and robbed 70,000 people
oftheir lives in a single flash. Our wounds have driven us to
despair. self-contempt and subterfuge. We have somehow
remained alive, but we are ignored as ifcrouching in obscure
I
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47
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corners of society, while our daily livelihood is always in
peril. Our wounds and keloid scars make it difficult for us to
find jobs and husbands. Ten years in dark disappointment,
sorrow, and inhuman life! The miserable hell by A-bomb
which we suffered should never again be allowed to happen
again anywhere in the world. 42
Speaking twenty-three years later, Ms. Watanabe asked:
Just what kind ofpeople are the Hibakusha? As I see it, the
Hibakusha are those individuals who were forced to experi
ence the first strike ofthe possible annihilation ofhumanity in
t h ~ future . ... Listen to these words, which the personal
experience ofthe bombing compels me to utter. The next time
nuclear weapons are used, the human race will not sur
vive.
43
The First World Conference Against A- and H-bombs was
convened, in Hiroshima, August 1955, where Hibakusha re
ported the actual conditions of atomic suffering for the first time
to the world. Directly afterward, the Nagasaki Association of
Young Hibakusha Men was founded by Senji Yamaguchi and
other youths in October 1955. Senji Yamaguchi was burned and
scarred while a 14-year-old war-mobilized student in the Naga
saki bombing, and has undergone four surgical operations for
keloids. He suffers from radiation-caused hepatic lesions and
leucopenia. Mr. Yamaguchi, who is now a Nagasaki architect
and Vice President of the Nagasaki A-bomb Victims Council,
began petitioning the Japanese Diet for relief of the Hibakusha
at state expense in 1954, just after the Bikini disaster. Speaking
at a 1980 rally in Tokyo urging the enactment of compensatory
H ibakusha relief legislation, Mr. Yamaguchi stated the main
principle of his 25-year-long fight for Hibakusha relief:
Our demand for the immediate enactment of a law for relief
of all Hibakusha is not only a Hibakusha demand, but also
the demand of all people in Japan, and of the whole world,
for "No More Hibakusha!"
In November 1955, the Young Women's Association and
the new Young Men's group were united into the Nagasaki
Association of Young Hibakusha Men and Women, consisting
of fourteen men and thirty-one women. The Nagasaki A-bomb
Victims Council was established as the unified center of the
city's Hibakusha movements in December 1955. These organi
zations helped to convene the Second World Conference
Against A- and H-bombs in Nagasaki in August 1956. In that
year also the Japan Confederation of A-bomb Victims Organi
zations (Hidankyo) was created as the major unified relief or
ganization for all Hibakusha in Japan.
Youth, Educators, and the Testament of Nagasaki
In the new Nagasaki people's movement, the younger
generation played a central role. This same cohort of leaders,
now in their fifties and sixties, has consistently campaigned to
strengthen and unify the Hibakusha and all citizens for the
enactment of comprehensive relief measures and for the aboli
42. This appeal is paraphrased from Chieko Watanabe, To Live in Nagasaki
[Nagasaki ni [kiru] (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha, 1973), pp. 75-79.
43. Chieko Watanabe, speech to the 1978 International Non-Governmental
Organizations Conference on Disannament, Geneva, 27 February-2 March
1978.
tion of nuclear weapons. A-bombed while in their critical teen
age period, when they were most sensitive and impressionable,
this group possessed the capacity for self-understanding and
self-assertion. The iron chain of military discipline had
snapped, and they experienced the constitutional renunciation
of belligerency, and the democratic reforms in education, labor
and trade union legislation, and the agrarian sector, as an op
portunity for emancipation. Although these innovations were
equivocal and inconsistently applied, they exercised a positive
influence on Japan's domestic political life in the early post-war
years. The atmosphere of liberal democracy and the willingness
to tolerate political diversity were followed, however, by a
wave of repression against the labor movement in 1947, after
which the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 resulted in further
pressures and restrictions on peace activists.
Even though they despaired of recovering their health, the
Hibakusha pledged themselves to build a democratic, anti
militarist Japan on the basis of the country's new Constitution.
In contrast to the glorification of war and death in battle of the
1931-1945 emperor system, the new Constitution, although its
anti-militarist clauses are increasingly under attack as Japan
steadily rearms, affirms that each person has the right and duty
to pursue peace and happiness. Peace and democracy are also
strongly emphasized in the postwar Fundamentals of Education
Act. School teachers took responsibility for describing honestly
and accurately the cruel and inhuman effects of atomic bombs,
and for instilling in youth the reason and foresight necessary to
prevent nuclear war. The Japan Teachers Union resolved in
1953 that peace education should be central to the entire educa
tional process in Japan. The Association of Hibakusha Teach
ers, organized in Nagasaki in 1970, has published a four
volume text, The Atomic Bomb Reader for Children. 44
In maturing from adolescence to adulthood, the Nagasaki
youth leaders needed to grapple with the conservative climate of
passive conformism and respectful obedience to the established
authorities fostered and maintained over a long period of time
under the direct rule of the Tokugawa shogunate. Nourished by
the democratic, anti-war vision and by peace education, these
youths undertook a revolution in their political, cultural and
spiritual outlook, and contributed greatly to building a positive
new spiritual culture and citizen's consciousness.
In the 1970s there occured a new invigoration in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, as Hidankyo and its supporters intensified their
relief litigation campaigning. Hidankyo had by late 1981 gath
ered ten million signatures toward its goal of 20 million names
calling for the enactment by the Diet of comprehensive
Hibakusha relief legislation based upon the principle of state
compensation. Hidankyo is now also conducting a series of
"People's Tribunals" on "The A-bombings as a Violation of
International Law, and the State's Responsibility for the War."
The relief measures advanced by Hidankyo, to an extent now
embodied in the joint opposition party Hibakusha assistance
bill, constitute the minimum material redress owing to the
Hibakusha, but since the human and spiritual damages to the
44. The first of these volumes, for lower classes in primary school, was
translated under the title In the Sky Over Nagasaki: An A-bomb Reader for
Children (Wilmington, Ohio: Wilmington College Peace Resource Center,
1977). The Hibakusha teachers have thus far not secured the full agreement of
the Nagasaki Board of Education to use their textbook series in the school
curriculum.
48
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\
I
I
victims can never be adequately compensated financially or'
legally, they stand witness on behalf of all humankind for the
abolition of nuclear weapons.
Additionally, the Hibakusha were most likely inspired,
albeit indirectly, by the gathering anti-pollution revolt of the
Minamata disease victims. Beginning in the late 1940s, hun
dreds of fishermen, farmers and their families in the town of
Minamata in Kyushu, not far from Nagasaki, were poisoned by
methyl mercury wastes discharged into their bay by the nitrogen
fertilizer plant of the Chisso Corporation. Today there are over
1,200 certified Minamata disease patients, and another 7 ,000 or
more persons have applied for government certification. Medi
cal authorities estimate that there are at least 10,000 more as yet
undiscovered, perhaps latent victims of mercury poisoning in
the Minamata area. In 1969, against great odds, 112 anguished
claimants of twenty-nine families collectively filed a lawsuit for
compensation from the Chisso Corporation, and in March 1973
secured from the court an historic $3.2 million indemnity
judgment.
The revitalization of the Hibakusha has been possible
because they have found suitable new forms of expression and
solidarity, in activities involving all local citizens. These ac
tivities include the compilation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima
testimonies and experiences by the Nagasaki Testimony Soci
ety, founded in March 1969 under the leadership of Dr.
Tatsuichiro Akizuki to oppose nuclear weapons, aid Japanese
and foreign A-bomb victims, and broadly convey the experi
ence of the Nagasaki A-bomb tragedy, especially to the younger
generation.
Cognition through the senses, or more correctly the shock to
sensibili!J, through photopraphs, pictures and retold stories
ofexpertences ofthe atomic bombing has been decisive [in]
reaching out to human sensibility [and helping] the people of
Japan and the world arrive, within the shortest possible time,
at a recognition ofthe need to abolish nuclear weapons. . . .
Those who make such an appeal should first give full play to
their own creative imagination, helping others to awaken
their own imaginations also. The objective, it must be
stressed, is not to strike terror into people's hearts. As
Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe observed, fear is passive,
while imagination is active, and Leads people to action. 45
The Nagasaki Testimony Society utilizes the main mass
media of Nagasaki-radio (the broadcast of 200 typical
Hibakusha testimonies), television (one thousand morning
broadcasts of five-minute testimonies), and the daily press. The
Testimony Society publishes an annual compilation of
Hibakusha case histories and the quarterly journal Testimonies
of Nagasaki [Nagasaki no Shogen], edited by Sadao Kamata.
Among the more than 1,000 first-person accounts published by
the Society are those from Hibakusha now resident in South
Korea, Australia, the Netherlands, Britain, and the United
States. The Nagasaki Institute of Peace Culture (NIPC), a divi
sion of the Nagasaki. Institute of Applied Science, inaugurated
publication in 1978 of Studies of Peace Culture [Heiwa Bunka
Kenkyu] to examine the damage and after-effects of the atomic
bombings, the conditions ofthe Hibakusha, and problems ofthe
nuclear arms race, nuclear proliferation and nuclear disarm
45. Shingo Shibata, "The Role of Philosophy in the Prevention of Human
Extinction," Scientific World, 1978, No.4, p. 23.
49
ament. The NIPC seeks to cooperate in all its activities with
other research workers and institutions in Japan and throughout
the world.
The Odyssey of the Mutsu:
A New Ordeal for Nagasaki
Hibakusha organizations, trade unions, scientists, and
numerous other groups of citizens rallied vigorously in Naga
saki and skirmished in small boats against the nuclear-powered
cargo ship Mutsu, which in October 1978 arrived in Sasebo, the
second largest city oLNagasaki prefecture. Completed by the
governmental Japan Nuclear Ship Development Agency in
1972, the Mutsu reminds many Nagasaki residents of the or
deals they underwent in World War II, the atomic bombing, and
the difficult postwar years of recovery. They likewise oppose
the increasing use of Sasebo as a supply and refueling base by
warships of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, and the calls of the nuclear
weapon-capable Seventh Fleet aircraft carrier Midway into the
Sasebo naval base have aroused the determined opposition of
Nagasaki Prefectural citizens.
The nuclear reactor of the Mutsu was designed and con
structed by Mitsubishi Atomic Power Industries with basic
Westinghouse naval propulsion technology. The antiwar and
environmental protection movements in Japan argue that the
Mutsu, apart from its potential (but speculative) uses in com
mercial maritime cargo transport, is one of the steps being taken
by government and industry to test reactors for nuclear sub
marines and prepare the way for military applications of nuclear
energy at sea, and later for the acquisition of nuclear weapons.
Peace and ecology groups claim that the Mutsu was improperly
inspected by the government, which failed to uncover, or con
cealed the basic errors in its design. But even before the Mutsu 's
initial voyage, Mitsubishi began planning for a second nuclear
powered ship with a much larger reactor, and the Ministry of
Transportation formulated a construction program for a series of
nuclear container ships.
The fishermen of Mutsu Bay in Aomori Prefecture in the
north of Japan, where the ship was originally homeported,
opposed the testing of the Mutsu, claiming that it would con
taminate the sea with radioactive wastes, and they hindered its
sailing for almost two years. The use of government coastguard
boats and the providential intervention of a typhoon, which
compelled the fishing boats blockading the ships to take shelter,
finally broke the deadlock on 25 August 1975, and the Mutsu put
out to sea on the next day. But four days later and 800 kilometers
from Mutsu Bay, the reactor of the Mutsu sprang a radiation
leak. In order to return the powerless, drifting freighter to Mutsu
Bay, the government was forced to accept most of the Aomori
fishermens' demands, including removal of the Mutsu within
six months and freezing the ship's nuclear reactor. The Mutsu
remained an idle phantom during four subsequent years of tense
negotiations between these fishermen, local and regional gov
ernments, and state agencies. Finally, the Sasebo city author
ities announced that they would accept the Mutsu in Sasebo port
for repairs, since Sasebo Heavy Industries Co., the Mutsu repair
contractor and the city's major industry, was in trouble due to
the recession in the shipbuilding industry. The Nagasaki Pre
fectural Assembly voted in June 1978 to admit the vessel. The
repair work on the radiation shielding and other defective com
ponents of the Mutsu being carried out at Sasebo by the Mitsu
bishi companies is scheduled to extend through August 1982.
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The Hibakusha of Nagasaki champion the cause ofnucleaI'
non-proliferation and a complete ban on all nuclear explosions.
as important measures against the nuclear arms buildup. They
firmly oppose the possession or manufacture of nuclear
weapons by Japan, and the introduction of nuclear weapons into
the country. The Hibakusha are aware that the awesome force
which killed their kinfolk and neighbors, and maimed them for
life. now courses close to home through the Mutsu. and they
know of no guarantee that this force will not be used to kill
again. They know that Hiroshima was not one of a kind. and that
what happened there can be repeated many times over. Their
ranks constantly eroded by illness, contesting against the
attrition of time on human capabilities, they persist in the
struggle to spare humanity the horror they experienced. The
conscience of humanity was taken by surprise in 1945, but now
the Hibakusha bear witness that never again will it be possible to
say about nuclear weapons that "We didn't know. "*
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A Review Essay
I by Glenn D. Hook
I
It was thirty-six years ago, on August 6, 1945, that Colonel
I
Paul W. \ibbets and his crew, military men representing the
United States in the Allied War against the Japanese Empire,
flew their B29, Enola Gay, from the Tinian Air Base to
Hiroshima in order to drop a 12.5 kiloton uranium 235 bomb
dubbed "Little Boy" (after Franklin D. Roosevelt) on this
I
I
enemy city. The hypocenter of the bomb was in the vicinity of
Shima Hospital; the time, approximately 8: 15 a.m. A few days
later, on August 9, 1945, Don Albury and his crew left the
I
Tinian Air Base to drop a 22 kiloton plutonium 239 bomb over
Kokura, Kyushu, only to find a heavily clouded sky. "Fat
Man" (after Winston Churchill) was thus destined to detonate
I
over Nagasaki. The hypocenter of this bomb was in the vicinity
of the main intersection in the township of Matsuyama; the time,
approximately 11:02 a.m.
The release of the first of those two bombs invoked a
metaphor from Colonal Tibbets on his return; "The atom bomb
... went down like a clap of thunder. "1 To this day Albury, a
commercial air line pilot, willingly expresses his feelings on
dropping the bomb; "I felt a little sad but I never felt any
remorse" because its contribution to ending the war early saved
lives.
2
General Curtis Lemay, who commanded the atomic
bombings, was in 1964 awarded the First Order of the Rising
Sun for his contribution to the development of the Japanese
Self-Defense Air Force.
The book under review, * however, is not concerned with
the victors; in fact, the above names do not appear in the book.
Nor does the book mention the award to the commander of the
atom bombings. Rather than the metaphors, justifications and
symbols of the victors or state, Hiroshima and Nagasaki focuses
on the victims of the war: the children, women and men (both
military and non-military) who were killed, maimed or injured
as a result of the atomic bombings. It is the most well-docu
mented, thoroughly detailed scientific study of the immediate,
short-term and long-term effects of the bombings to appear in
any language. The book was originally published in Japanese in
1979, and improved and revised for publication in English in
1981. It was published simultaneously in Japan, the United
* A similar review was published for the peace research community in illler
national Peace Research Association Newsletter. vol. 14. no. 4, 1981. The
author is the Assistant Editor of the newsletter.
I. Quoted in newspaper on exhibition in the Peace Museum in Hiroshima.
News Chronicle. August 8, 1945, p. I.
2. Asahi Evening News. Oct. 16, 1980, intervicw with Don Albury.
HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI: THE PHYSICAL,
MEDICAL, AND SOCIAL EFFECTS OF THE
ATOMIC BOMBINGS, by the Committee for the
Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the
Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Trans
lated by Eisei Ishikawa and David L. Swain. Tokyo:
Iwanami Shoten, Publishers, 1981, xlv, 706 pp. Bib
liography, tables, illustrations, maps, photographs,
appendices, index. Published in the United States by
Basic Books, New York. $37.50.
States, Europe and South East Asia. It is a lengthy work, replete
with several hundred figures, charts, maps and photographs,
and has appendices, a bibliography running to about one thou
sand entries, and an index. It is written in a lucid style, with few
of the awkwardnesses associated with translations from Japan
ese, uses technical terms sparingly, though naturally less so in
the medical sections, and strives for objectivity. It is about the
death, and about the' 'death in life" of those who, as a result of
the decision of the U.S. leadership, the size and characteristics
of their city, the quirks of nature and of individual patterns of
life, were to become the victims of the first or second (in fact,
ten people were exposed to both bombs) calculated use of
atomic bombs on human beings.
The book should nevertheless not be considered a defini
tive work, it is more precise to locate it on a continuum of
information on the bombings from 1945 on into the future. No
work on Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be definitive; this is
precluded by the sheer paucity of exact data on the bombings as
well as on the nature of the effects of the bombings on the
victims. The memorial centotaph located in the Peace Memorial
Park, Hiroshima, for instance. still continues to record the
names of atomic bomb victims in the "Books of the Past."
Victims continue to die or exhibit symptoms of atomic bomb
illness, and the possible use of these weapons continues to
threaten omnicide. In short, the atomic bombings are part of a
process going forward into the future as well as back into the
past.
The scientific study of the effects of the atomic bombings
was started immediately after the bombings by doctors and other
scientists at the same time that they attempted to assist the
victims. In November 1945, however, the General Head
quarters, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers imposed a
ban on the publication of information on the atomic bombings,
though this did not entirely prevent scientists and doctors from
carrying on their work, particularly on radiation aftereffects.
The signing of the Peace Treaty in 1951 gave Japanese scientists
the freedom to publish openly their research results. Scientific
studies on the effects of the atomic bombings increased there
after, particularly after 1954, when the Japanese fishermen
aboard the "Lucky Dragon No.5" were exposed to radioactive
fallout from a U.S. hydrogen bomb test on Bikini atoll in the
Marshall Islands. Research by social scientists did nut get a start
until around 1950, and still does not stand comparison with the
research of the physical scientists. It was not until the 1960s that
significant research findings on the social effects of the bomb
ings were produced.
This book concentrates on the scientific and social scientific
51
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Nagasaki, in the vicinity oflwakawa township (700 meters south-southeast from the hypocenter),
10 August 1945. The burned corpse is presumably that of a mobilized student who was exposed
to the atomic bomb while walking along the prefectural highway. (Photograph by Y{)suke Yama
hata.)
effects of the atomic bombings, but this does not mean the
whole spectrum of work on the bombings is covered. In
addition to the thousands of articles forming the background to
the present work, several thousand other works falling outside
the main scope of the book exist-novels, short stories, diaries,
paintings, movies, and so forth, as well as numerous social
scientific works not of direct concern. As one of the editors
stressed, the present volume is not meant to appeal to the readers
emotionally, but from the scientific standpoint.
3
In this, the
book has generally succeeded.
Despite these efforts to compile data on the atomic bomb
ings, the authors point out a number of reasons why a total
picture cannot be given. In the first place, the Japanese govern
ment had no sense of responsibility to protect the people's life
and livelihood, so no thorough data collection was conducted. It
was not until 1965 that a survey was conducted by the Ministry
of Health and Welfare, and this was more a sop to the citizens'
movement than a serious effort to grasp the true nature of the
situation, the report being roundly condemned in all quarters. A
later report published in lCJ77 was also "inadequate" (p. 16).
Secondly, the sheer lack of prior experience of a catastrophe of
this magnitude made it difficult to determine exactly how to
proceed. Thirdly, the psychological shock suffered by the
atomic bomb victims produced "keloid of the heart" and
"leukemia of the spirit" (p. 14). Fourthly, as mentioned above,
restrictions were imposed by the victors, who were more in
terested in the destructive power of the bomb than in the"suffer
ing and loss of life of the people. I would add a fifth point -the
integration of Japan into the U.S. "Far East" strategic sys
tem-because this created a major division in Japanese politics
and society in general between conservatives, in favor of the
U. S. alliance, and progressives, pushing for "unarmed-neutral
ism," thereby making "peace" a political issue rather than a
3. Yomiuri Shinbun, evening edition, July 14, 1979.
Photo from book being reviewed.
subject for scientific inquiry. As many of those conducting
research on the effects of the atomic bombs, particularly among
social scientists, took the side of the victims and peace move
ment, this made government support and co-operation in re
search on the atomic bombings even harder to obtain.
The efforts giving birth to the present volume can be
located specifically in the movement to produce a "white
paper" on the atomic bombings which gained momentum in the
1960s. More immediately, the book follows in the steps of a
report presented to the UN in 1976 by the mayors of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki; an international symposium on the problems of
the victims held in Japan in 1977; and the 1978 attendance ofthe
two mayors at the UN Special Session on Disarmament. The
volume is thus an attempt to provide to the international com
munity a more detailed, accurate and updated edition of infor
mation on the atomic bombings than is contained in these
reports, or in the earlier report presented to U Thant in 1967. It
could also be considered the rational companion to the emotive
Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Sur
vivors, published in 1981 under the editorship of the Japanese
Broadcasting Corporation.
Building on the research findings of the post-war period,
the scholars involved in the production of this book have at
tempted to provide information from the fields of physics,
medicine, social sciences, and the humanities. The work is the
co-operative effort of thirty-four scholars commissioned by
three editors who were involved in the project from the outset,
and the two translators who rendered the work into English. It is
an unusual book in many ways: it is a truly co-operative en
terprise, though one is often left to wonder who wrote what; it is
a work commissioned by the two local governments, the first
time the cities have reached such an important consensus; and it
is considered an unofficial sort of "white paper" on the atomic
bombings, despite. the inclusion of certain points of controversy
(discussed later).
The book's foreword, English preface and ten pages of
52
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written introduction on "The Atomic Bomb: Challenge of Our
Time" are followed by four parts: (1) "Physical Aspects of
Destruction"; (2) "Injury to the Human Body"; (3) "The
Impact on Society and Daily Life"; (4) "Toward the Abolition
of Nuclear Arms." Part one is approximately 60 pages long,
comprising six chapters on such topics as the effects of thermal
radiation, blast, heat rays, and fires. The nearly 230 pages of
part two are divided into three chapters: "Injury to the Human
Body Following Exposure to the Atomic Bomb"; "Body Injury
in the Initial Stage-Acute Stage of Atomic Bomb Inquiry";
"Aftereffects and Genetic Effects." The latter is by far the
longest chapter, and deals with keloids, blood disorders, ocular
lesions, aftereffects among exposed women, malignant tumors,
chromosome changes, and other damages to human beings. The
three chapters of part three devote nearly 170 pages to the
bombs' impact on society and daily life; the breakdown of
community, loss of wealth, occupational and marriage prob
lems, foreign atomic bomb victims, psychological shock, evo
lution of the victims' attitudes, and so forth. 'The final part is
qualitatively different from the other three, the l00-odd pages
here being divided between two chapters on "Relief and Medi
cal Care for A-bomb Victims," and "Government Administra
tion and Citizens' Movements." Here such subjects as the
atomic bomb casualty commission, developments since the
Bikini incident, the citizens' movements against atomic
weapons, and peace education are taken up.
We are left to extract something from this vast array of
data. Should it be the number killed? The list of maladies atomic
bomb victims still sJlffer from? The story of the atomic bomb
orphans? We can do no more than grasp at information to try to
make sense of the vast, incomprehensible array of damage
visited on the living and non-living of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
in August 1945. But even here we are at a loss to translate the
experience into our own. Figures can ofcourse be gleaned from
the book. We are told that 88 percent of the people within a one
kilometer radius of the epicenter died instantly or within a few
weeks of the bombings, and that by November 1945 approxi
mately 200,000 were dead; 130,000 in Hiroshima and 60,000
70,0000 in Nagasaki. But what individually meaningful sense
can we make of these statements? My own immediate emotive
reaction is that 200,000 is far too much of a round figure. Yet it
jolts one to the realization that we are not only talking about
over-killing, of the quantity of death, but of the fact that each
digit represents an individual human life. Rationally, I know the
bodies cannot be counted.
We also learn the details of the atomic bomb diseases that
still linger on to claim the lives of atomic bomb victims
leukemia, cancer, sickness due to rapid aging, and other mal
adies. Occasionally, the anger breaks through; "Microcephaly
remains one of the ill-fated aftereffects of exposure in utero to
the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One who meets
these unfortunate microcephalics has no alternative but tb con
sider the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to
have been a crime" (p. 217). The story of the atomic bomb
orphans, both young and old, is told, but we are unable to find
out the exact number of what happened to all but a few of them
afterwards. Wherever we tum in the book, we find incomplete
ness, but this is a result of the nature of the atomic bombings as
well as of the impediments to research. The atomic bombings
may in fact be beyond our capacity fully to understand, but
reading this book shows how important it is to try. It helps make
the abstract knowledge of the horrors of war more immediate
and concrete; the pictures of scarred bodies, the detailed de
scriptions of nuclear-related illnesses, the post-bombing dis
crimination against the victims, all bring home the human
tragedy behind the metaphors, justifications and symbols of the
atomic bombing.
Still, this does not mean no grounds exist for criticizing the
work. In the first place, while the book does mention that "aidto
foreign survivors and disposal of their dead took second place to
the care of Japanese victims" (p. 462), the authors have no
compunction in lambasting an American reporter for his lack of
concern for the (Japanese) victims of the bomb (p. 15). Sec
ondly, except for the brief mention of foreign victims, the book
does not fully attempt to locate the atomic bombing in the
historical process leading up to August 1945, that is, to see
Japan as aggressor as well as victim in the war, a point of
particular concern for readers in South East Asia. TIiirdly, the
discussion of peace education' in Japan simply points to the
restrictions imposed by the political setting, and ignores the
inherent weakness of the peace-education movement in Japan.
Finally, as an extension of the whole project into a more global
context, even a brief consideration of the meaning of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki compared to other human tragedies, such as
Auschwitz, would have given the work deeper significance.
4
The publication of the book in the United States, however,
drew criticism for different reasons. 5 For American reviewers,
the point of concern was the reason given in the book for the
dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan-the U.S. desire to
establish strategic supremacy over the U.S.S.R. in the cold war
era. Thus, to the Japanese authors, ". . . this historically un
precedented devastation of human society stemmed from essen
tially experimental and political aims" (p. 335). While the
reviewer for the New York Times
6
cannot basically"... see
how the evidence can be e a ~ in any other way," the reviewers
4. Japanese reviews ofthe book also pointed to otherwealmesses. Forexample,
in the November 1979 issue of Shizen, the author points out the book does not
mention the major contribution made by the U.S. 's Atomic Bomb Casualty
Commission in advancing the understanding of leukemia. The reviewer for the
Tokyo Shinbun, August 4, 1979, mentions among other things the failure of the
book to pay sufficient attention to the residual effects ofplutonium in Nagasaki.
5. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem to have strongly
influenced the attitude of the Japanese people towards the future use of nuclear
weapons, in comparison to Americans. For example, in a nation-wide poll
conducted in 1953 by the Asahi newspaper the pollees were asked: "It has
recently been stated by members of the U.S. Senate that the use of nuclear
weapons to win the Korean War is permissible. What do you think about this
opinion?" In favor, 6%; Cannot be helped, 4%; Against, 73%. In contrast, a
1961 Gallup Poll of Americans shows 81% of the pollees agreed that, "In order
to defend the Free World, we must be prepared for thermonuclear war." Only
4% agreed that, "Ifthermonuclear war occurs, it will be the end. Communism is
better than that. "
The Japanese people also regard the dropping of the atomic bomb on these
cities as something that "cannot be forgiven." In a nation-wide survey con
ducted by the Japan News Network in 1975, for example, the pollees were
asked: "What do you presently think about the dropping ofthe atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States?" The responses showed: "Could
not be helped as it was war," 16%; "Even if it was war, from the perspective of
humanity, it can never be forgiven," 58%; 24% could not decide; and 2% did
not answer.
These sentiments are even stronger in the cities themselves. Forexample, a
1975 survey conducted in Hiroshima by the Chugoku Broadcasting Company
indicated it "Could not be helped as it was war," 17%; and it "Can never be
forgiven," 70%. In Nagasaki, a survey conducted by the Nagasaki Broadcast
ing Company showed that 10% thought "it could not be helped" but 77% felt
"itshould never be forgiven."
6. The New York Times Book Review, August 9, 1981.
53
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for the Washington Post,7 Time,8 and The Village Voice,9 all
call into question the Japanese interpretation. The evidence
supporting either position cannot be debated in a review, hence,
let me make two related points. Firstly, this interpretation is not
cut from Japanese cloth, but was imported from revisionist U.S.
historians of the 1960s, gradually coming to replace the U.S.
and Japanese governments' interpretations; that is, that the
bombs were used to end the war quickly and save (American)
lives. Secondly, the fact that in a short review of a 700 page
book all of the authors pay attention to this passage indicates the
continuing moral dilemma of Americans over their use of such
inhumane instruments of killing, despite the official interpreta
tion that it helped win the war sooner.
Another point of interest in these reviews is the choice of
accompanying pictures which show, for example, the atomic
mushroom, the ruins below the epicenter at Hiroshima,
"ground zero" at Nagasaki, pictures of full-scale models of
"Fat Boy" and "Little Boy." Perhaps coincidentally, these all
indicate an interest in the power of the bombs, not the suffering
of the victims. In this respect, the reader's response on seeing
these pictures may be different from that of one of my Japanese
students on seeing the picture of an atomic bomb victim: In
I once saw the picture oj' a \'ictim in Hiroshima. I cannot
ji)rget the eyes of the victim. The eyes expressed nothing.
There was 110 suffering. no agony. no grier nothing at all of'
hUlI1un spirit. When I SlIW the eres, I recalled the eyes of' a
primiti!'e lIlonke\' , because both of them, the eyes of the
\'ictim and the eyes ofthe monkey, did IlOt show allY signs of
inner life. BlIt there was a great chasm benveen them, since
the eres of'the lI1ollke\' showed I'irality. I also remember a
famous "icture Ofll Cambodian or Vietnamese girl who \\'llS
escllpingjrom a bombing raid. This girl showed the dark side
ot' hUll/an nllture by her flaked body and crying face. On the
contrar\" the eyes of'the victim did not have any messaRe.
Nevertheless, my heart was grasped by them.
Thirdly, there was a divergence of opinion among the
reviewers on exactly what Americans already knew about the
atomic bombings. According to the New York Times Book
R('I'ieH', .. As everyone knows by now, they [the bombs] did a
simply unimaginable amount of damage"; II Time, "Some of
the details are agonizingly familiar: trees and utility poles turned
into charred matchsticks ... earthquake-resistant buildings
crumpled by the shock waves; human flesh burned 21/2 miles
from the targets. Less well known, perhaps: the sticky black
rain, triggered by hot ash and dust blasted up into the cold air,
that showered deadly radioactive fallout on the cities": 12 and
the Washington Post Book World, "Although we are all living
in the shadow of nuclear destruction, the world community,
except Japan, knows little of the realities of the atomic bomb
ings." D That these and other American magazines gave prime
space to review the book suggests an intense interest in the
effects of the atomic bombings. That opinions vary so widely
The WlIsllIllglOll Post Book World. Augu,t 2. 19K I
X. Tillie, August 17. 19RI.
9. The Vililige Voicl'. August 12-18.1981
10. M". Noriko Nishida. Slightly edited for clarity
I I T h ~ NCII' VOl'/.; Times Book Review, ibid.
12. Tillie. ibid.
13. The Washington Post Book World, ibid.
suggests detailed knowledge of the bomb has not permeated
even among American intellectuals.
Finally, in comparison to reviews of the book by Japanese
in 1979, American reviewers seemed less inclined to locate the
work in the context of the.tittllre. For the Japanese, the publica
tion of the book, particularly the planned English version, was
viewed as one important step along the road to nuclear disarma
ment and prevention of nuclear war, or as a means to help
improve the aid for atomic bomb victims. For the Americans, in
contrast, it was viewed more as a description of what had
already happened in the past, less than a step towards the future,
none of the authors mentioning the problem of aid for atomic
victims, despite the fact that Americans who have become
victims of atomic tests in the United States are now trying to take
political action.
The opportunity to review this book as well as the reviews
of the book prompted me to again visit the Hiroshima Peace
Museum. Everything felt familiar-the school children chat
ting and giggling as they peeked into the glass cases, the multi
national crowds, American military, American, French,
German and Australian tourists, the old and the young, the men
and the women. Even the comments written in the book at the
exist had not changed in character since my last visit: "No More
Hiroshimas," "Peace Forever," "Peace. Peace," "No More
Wars." For some, of course, a trip to Hiroshima may be like a
pilgrimage, for others, it is a stop on a busy tourist trip, or a
requirement of the school. But as a result of the visit, someone
may decide to take individual action for peace. In the same way,
reading Hirushima and Nagasaki makes every reader aware of
the human tragedy and suffering of war, and in the same way
may influence someone to make an individual contribution
towards the realization of peace.
The huge anti-nuclear demonstrations that sprang up to
oppose the location of a new round of U. S. missiles in Europe in
the summer and fall of 1981 are a reaction to nuclear weapons on
the level of the people. In voicing opposition to the location of
these missiles, Europeans were expressing an understanding of
the most fundamental lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
namely, that in the final analysis, it is the people who suffer
most as a result of war. Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be a
valuable source book for building up an awareness of this fact.
In other words, the book is of iconoclastic significance, an
atomic image breaker.
This is important, because three images of the bomb exist:
the first, as accepted by the U.S. leadership, centers on the
image of the power of the bombs in winning the war; the second,
found among the Japanese leadership, includes also the sci
entific and technological superiority of the U.S, in forcing the
Japanese defeat; the third rejects the fornlertwo images to focus
on the suffering of the !'ictillls of the bombings. That the third
image is starting to permeate the peace movement in Europe is
indicated by the neologistic symbol "Euroshima." It is not only
the cry of "No More Hiroshimas" and "No Euroshima" that
needs to be made, however; in order to link local concerns with
concern for the globe as a whole, the protestors' lexicon needs to
expand to include a cognate of "No Terrashima." An annual
reading of this book on August 6 or 9 may help to build up an
awareness of the death and suffering caused the first time the
atomic homh was exploded ahove the inhabitants of terrafirma,
and encourage individual action to ensurc this never happens
again. Pcrhaps in this lies the significance of the book for the
future. *
54
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"Someone Else's Feet" A Short Story
by be Kenzaburo
translated by Ruth W. Adler*
Our Life was a succession of quiet days spent placidly
inside thick wall of phlegmatic indifference. We lived in a
strange state of imprisonment, entirely cut off from the outside,
yet we had no thought of escaping nor the least enthusiasm for
news of the outside. You could say that, for us, the outside
world just didn't exist. Inside our wall, we lived quite fully and
cheerfully.
Not that I ever tried to penetrate this wall. It's just that it
was securely closed and it kept us imprisoned. That's a fact. We
were in an asylum. But it never occurred to us to force a deep
crack in that invisible wall of passivity so that we might free
ourselves from its confines.
The place was built on a high plain near the sea. We were in
a ward for minors-part of a sanitorium for patients with spinal
tuberculosis. I, at nineteen, was the oldest. Next was a fifteen
year old, the only girl. The rest, five in all, were fourteen years
old. Our ward consisted of individual rooms and a sunroom. At
night, we were assigned two to a room, but during the day we
basked in the sun in the huge sunroom, lined up along side each
other on lounges. We were a quiet group. We'd whisper to
gether softly, giggle with suppressed laughter now and then, or
simply lie perfectly still letting our bodies, burned brown, relax
quietly. Aside from occasionally yelling for the nurse to bring a
bed pan, we passed the long monotonous hours in motionless
silence.
We had no illusions about ever being able to walk again. I
guess that's what decided the hospital director to set us up as a
special sort of miniature society. He put us all together in an
isolated ward across the lawn from the adult ward. It had come
off pretty well. Except for one of the fourteen-year-olds. He'd
made a few unsuccessful attempts at suicide and finally ended
up sunk into silence in a corner of the sunroom. The rest of us
lived for whatever little pleasures we could drum up.
And believe me, we were blessed with pleasures. Espe
cially certain casual little pleasures which the nurses in our
section were in the habit of favoring us with-either because
they were worried that we'd dirty our sheets or underwear. or
* English language translation copyright December 1981, by Ruth W Adler
"Someone Else's Feet" was first published in the magazine Shin Cho (August
1957).
55
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maybe just out ofcuriosity on their part. There was even one boy
who'd sometimes have a nurse push him back to his own room
in his wheeled lounge chair even in the daytime. Some twenty
minutes later, he'd come back looking very smug and self
satisfied, accompanied by the nurse, her cheeks flushed crim
son. We'd greet him with suppressed laughter and snickers.
And so, relaxed and comfortable, giving no thought to
time, we passed our days full of enjoyment. But after this fe llow
came, things began to change. Little by little. But persistently.
And the outside world began to rear its head.
He turned up in the sunroom one May morning. He had
heavy, bulky casts on both legs. Everybody went right on
whispering and giggling as usual, making a conscious effort to
avoid staring at him, but still he seemed embarrassed and ill at
ease. After a while, he got up the nerve to start talking to me
since my chair was right next to his.
"I was studying literature in college," he told me in a thin,
low voice. "My legs are completely useless now. They're going
to take the casts off in three weeks. They have no idea how it will
tum out, but the doctors says most likely it'll be hopeless. "
I nodded indifferently. The group in this ward, myself
included, were all pretty much fed up with hearing about each
other's illnesses.
"How about you?" he asked, raising his shoulders and
peering at me. "Is your condition very serious?"
"I can't remember any more. And even if I don't re
member, this sickness is never going to let me go as long as I
live. "
"You must bear up," the nurse scolded, leaning over the
back of my chair. " You shouldn't say such pessimistic things.
Be patient!"
"Well, my feet are wOl)derfully patient, even if I'm not,
aren't they?"
"Did it bother you-what I said?" the student asked in a
choked voice.
"What?" I asked, surprised.
"Well, it's just that I'm not used to this.
"You ought to be friends, you two," the nurse decided. "I
think I'll have you both share a room from now on. After all, the
others are just children. "
Just then one of the boys came over in his hand-propelled
wheel chair.
"Hey, did you happen to notice my blood test report?"
"No," the student looked puzzled.
"It's posted right there up by the door," he went on
earnestly. They gave me six tests already, but every single one
was negative. The doctor was really disappointed. 'How do you
think you'll ever contract V.D. if you just sit around your room
in your wheel chair!' he asked me."
The nurse tittered and the others all muffled their snickers
at this old joke, but the student blushed and bit his lips and didn't
say a word.
The boy rolled his chair back to his friends and said in a
loud stage whisper.
"What a square! No sense of humor!"
Once more, there was the sound of suppressed laughter as
the boy made a face in mock disgust.
It was a nuisance to have to share a room with the student at
night. All that afternoon he had sat silent, lost in thought. After
supper, I lazily watched the lengthening shadows on the lawn as
was my usual habit until I was carried back to my room. But
deep down in a comer of my consciousness, I was very much
aware of him.
After the nurse had tucked me in with a sheet-covered
blanket, she went over to the student's bed. I glanced at the
white swell of his naked abdomen beyond her swinging auburn
hair. An incipient yawn stuck in my throat like a tiny hardened
pear.
"Stop that!" the student cried out violently. "Quit it!"
He was breathing hard, his face puffy with shame. The
nurse, raising her face from his abdomen and pursing her soft,
moist lips, looked surprised.
"I just want to keep you clean all the time. It's better to do
it now so you won't get your underwear dirty. "
Breathing heavily and rapidly, he glared at her in silence.
"Now there you are! See! Just look at that!" said the nurse,
looking down at his lower abdomen. "You're not being honest!"
"Put the sheet on," he replied in a voice hoarse with
humiliation.
And when the nurse left the room after putting the towel in
a metal basin, he began to cry in a stifled voice. I very carefully
suppressed a laugh that was tickling my throat like a tiny worm.
After a while he called out in a tentative voice:
"Hey, you awake?"
"Mmm." I answered, opening my eyes.
"They're treating me like a dog," he muttered. "I once
fooled around with a dog like that when I was a kid, getting it
excited. But now they're doing itto me!"
Must be a terribly lonely feeling, I thought, turning around
to look at him again.
"Oh, you don't have to feel ashamed in front of me. We all
make the nurses do it. "
"That's terrible! A habit like that-I can't stand it!"
"Oh?"
"You guys shouldn't stand for it either," he went on
heatedly. "I'm going to talk to them all in the sunroom about
this tomorrow. We ought to have the guts to improve our
existence. I can't stand the atmosphere in the sunroom either."
"Sure. We ought to create a political party or something,"
I remarked.
"I'll do it! I'll round them all up and we'll take a hard look
at our life in this ward. And I'll form a group to discuss
international affairs. We could even talk about the threat of
war!"
"War?" I burst out, surprised. "What the hell have we got
to do with war? That's no concern of ours."
"No concern of yours, you say!" he shouted in astonish
ment. "I never thought I'd hear someone my age talk like that!"
Hell, I thought, this fellow's come from the outside
outside this thick, phlegmatic wall. He still has the atmosphere
of the outside world stuck to him.
"Listen, I'm going to go on living this way for dozens of
years. And I'll die like this," I said. "Nobody is shoving a gun
into my hands! War is for guys who can play football."
"You're dead wrong!" he interrupted, exasperated. "We
have arightto speak, too! We have to stand up for peace, too!"
"We can't move ourlegs," I snapped, "even if we wanted
to stand up. We're a bunch of human wrecks who drifted into
this building. What do we know about foreign affairs!"
"That's damn irresponsible thinking!" he countered, "It's
vital-especially for us-to join hands and become a united
force. We should act together with the movement outside the
hospital. "
''I'm not joining hands with anybody! I have nothing in
56
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common with anyone who can stand on his own two feet and
walk. The bunch in here-stuck in their beds without being able
to walk, just like I am-they're my kind. They keep making up
to people trying to ingratiate themselves, the stubborn pigheads!
We all look alike. We're all equally repulsive. I don't even want
to join hands with them!"
"But don't you see we should do all the more, just because
we're all in the same boat? We have a common bond."
"A union of outcasts! Cripples helping each other," I said
angrily, my throat swelling. "You can bet your life, I'm not
doing any such rotten thing!"
He glowered at me, but my threatening attitude forced him
to keep quiet.
I unfastened the metal bed frame and hastily took out some
sleeping pills which I had been hiding from the nurse. I closed
my eyes. My chest was heaving with emotion. The nurse came
in and, with her usual dovelike cooing, put her hand on my
belly. Half-asleep, I pushed her away. Ifhe can resist, I thought,
so can I. Still, I'd better keep an eye on him. After the nurse put
out the light and left, I fell into a deep sleep as if I were sinking
into a hole in a bed of soft, yielding clay.
The student began his campaign the next morning. He
started off with great enthusiasm, talking to the boys in the
wheel chairs nearest him. He was met with a mixture of ridicule
and indifference, but that didn't stop him. All morning long he
went around in his wheelchair talking with great amiability.
After lunch when the nurse let out the story of how he had
rejected that small daily pleasure, the boys snickered quietly for
a while. Then they began to take a slight interest in him. Little
by little, they began to gather around and by evening they had
lined up their chairs in a circle to talk with him. Even the girl,
who never showed any interest in anything but books on grow
ing flowers.
But I stayed where I was, quietly sprawled out in a comer
of the sunroom. Deliberately avoiding him, I stared at a dirty
spot on the ceiling which I fancied looked rather like the head of a
camel. The unaccustomed sense of isolation made me feel
weird. Up until yesterday, although I may have spent a whole
day in silence, it had been a day that was happy and full. But
today my throat felt hot and peculiar, as if there were something
trying to come up out of it.
I started a conversation with the boy who had tried to
commit suicide. He hadn't joined the group around the student
yet and was sitting silently next to me reading a book about
vampires.
"You scared of vampires?' ,
The boy slowly raised his thin face. He looked at me with
dark-circled eyes and nodded. Ordinarily he would have pre
tended not to have heard me and gone on reading. I could tell
that he was also aware of the group around the student with their
self-conscious grins and their enthusiastic chatter.
"They are scary, aren't they? It's horrible -being drained
of your blood like that without even knowing it! And there's so
many ofthese stories about vampires!" he answered in a hoarse,
brooding voice.
"Once I went to bed with my window wide open, hoping a
vampire would show up," I told him. "And then when I felt a
huge vampire sucking away greedily at my withered leg, skinny
as a baby's arm, it felt strange and creepy and I really thought
my whole body was going to be tom to pieces!"
I gave a low cackle, but he didn't even crack a smile. He as
grimly biting his lips. I let my head fall back on the chair with a
soft thud. The student and the boys kept on laughing. Somehow
the sound was subtly different from their usual obscene
snickering.
He's really doing all right, I had to admit grudgingly.
"How's the political situation?" I taunted him when we
were back in our room that evening.
"They were all ears," he answered, perfectly serious.
"There's going to be a big difference in their lives from
now on. You can bet on that!"
"Why don't you have an election," I mocked. "Borrow a
speaker from the hospital office!"
"I do wish you'd join us, too," he went on without a trace
of anger.
I shifted uneasily in the bed. My belly and the skin just
below my hips felt sore and itchy. Scratching vigorously, I
mulled over what he had said. A persistent guy, I mused, going
so far as trying to get me to join.
"After all," he continued, "what we have to do at this
point is recover a feeling of normalcy. We have to be confident
that we're normal human beings, too, like anyone else. If we
can do that, we won't react to things abnormally."
"But we're not normal, are we?" I countered.
"We are just as long as we think of ourselves as normal."
"That's just plain out and out deception!"
"I don't think so. I believe that if we think of ourselves as
normal, we'll all be able to recover our ordinary human pride
and dignity. Then life will be the way it should be. "
Two nurses came in with our bedpans. With hardly any
effort, the buxom nurse with the chestnut-dyed hair lifted me up
and set me on the pan. The odor of my own urine was suffocat
ing. The short nurse, supporting the student's bare buttocks with
her palms, peered intently beneath.
"So much for your grand 'ordinary human pride and dig
nity'!" I called out.
Still on the bedpan, he turned his flaming face around with
an effort and said,
"Yes. We have to get back our pride."
"Watch out! Don't spill it!" His nurse warned.
I laughed quietly as the nurse carried me back to my bed,
her nostrils flaring as she breathed heavily with the exertion.
The next day, the would-be suicide was taken to the gen
eral ward to see his parents who had come to visit, and so I
watched the student and his coterie all by myself as I lay on my
couch in a comer of the room. He had asked the nurse to buy
some of the daily papers for them and he was reading them
aloud and explaining the news to the crippled children around
him. We never used to read newspapers. We found novels and
wild fantasies much more interesting. Newspapers with their
daily reports of the numbers of people killed in traffic acci
dents-what possible meaning did that have to us? But now,
there they all were sitting around him, mouths hanging open in
utter absorption.
His voice, full of excitement and enthusiasm, giving a
detailed explanatin of the university system of the Soviet Union,
irritated me. The one girl in our ward, her hand resting on his
chair, followed his rapidly moving lips with the eyes of a
younger sister gazing at an adored older brother. This, too, irked
me.
After our nap time, my whole body felt oddly hot and itchy
for a long time as I lay there on my back. Next to me, the boy had
returned from his visit and the nurse was nagging him, over and
over, with monotonous insistence.
57
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"Oh, come on! Be brave! Have the operation. You know
your mother's been crying her eyes out for you to have it. Come
on, be brave! You're a man, aren't you?"
"I'm not having the operation," the boy muttered stub
bornly. "I don't want to walk. Even if the operation works and
I'm able to walk and run, I'll always be a runt like I am now. I'm
sick and tired of hearing about that operation!"
"Oh, come on! Get up your nerve! You must get well. A
person should be able to walk. Come on, now. Be brave and
make up your mind!"
"I've had enough of this. The doctors said they don't know
w h ~ t h e r or not I'll be cured even if I do have the operation,
didn't they?"
"Listen, if you're cured, you'll even be able to ride a bike.
Come on, do it!"
"Hey!" I yelled to the nurse with a jerk of my head.
"Leave the kid alone!"
She picked herself up from his lounge chair and gave me a
dirty look. The boy, oblivious to my words, turned his attention
eagerly to the study group.
That night the student said with evident satisfaction, "To
day I talked about the Asian democracies. Especially about their
significance in relation to the world democratic movement.
Would you believe it, not a single one of them had ever heard of
Mao Zedong! I'm thinking of calling our group the'Know-the
World-Society.' I'm having some study materials sent from
home."
"You certainly are full of enthusiasm, aren't you?" I said
as coldly as I could. "Why don't you all do some research on the
rehabilitation of cripples in socialist countries, or something?"
"Hey!" he said, his eyes lighting up. "I read a special
issue on that in some magazine once. I must remember to
mention that tomorrow. "
Can he really be that simple or is he putting me on just to
annoy me, I wondered. Anyway, whichever it was, he was
covered with an armor of insensitivity, impervious to every
thing, and whatever I said simply bounced right off him. I felt
bone weary as if I had been under tension the whole day.
The group flourished with amazing success. It really both
ered me to see them accept his leadership so meekly. I felt
powerless and frustrated.
Only one week after he had come, the atmosphere in the
sunroom had undergone a complete change. The whispering
and coarse suppressed laughter were gone. The room was con
stantly filled with bright smiling faces. Even the nurses partici
pated in the discussions now and then and the hospital director,
pleased with the new atmosphere, subscribed to a number of
periodicals for the students.
And-a monumental thing-I found out that they had all
soon given up those sanitary pleasures, those pleasurable little
habits that they'd been sharing with the nurses. I discovered this
from little things the nurses let slip in their chatter. Then I
became aware, with a vague sense of irritation, that as far as this
particular matter was concerned, even I was having my life
changed just like the rest of them.
The changes developed, the student maintained, because
the crippled boys had become accustomed to thinking of their
ward as some kind of small, abnormal society. But now, be
cause of his simple activities, they had come to understand and
to believe that there was nothing at all abnormal about their
ward. "And," he went on, blinking his small good-natured
eyes, "normal life has a charm for everyone. What's more, it's
helping them regain their pride and self-respect. Without that
there can be no society. It'd be a good idea if you joined us,
too. "
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\
r
But the unsuccessful suicide and I continued to remain
aloof and refused to join. He would still go on watching them
from his comer of the sunroom, but if anyone of them called out
to him to come over, he'd suddenly wrap himself up in a cold,
unresponsive shell and pretend not to hear. And all the while,
the nurse would go on hounding and pestering him the whole
day long, whispering her monotonous refrain through sheer
force of habit.
"Listen, you're the only one of them who has a chance of
being cured. Come on, now. Go ahead and have the operation
and walk! Be brave! Try to do it! You won't be sorry!" Her
voice pursued him with a deep-rooted obstinacy.
Not long after that, I began to run a slight fever. The
director examined me and attributed it to the fact that I had
become overly sensitive of late and he gave permission for me to
remain in my own room even during the day.
Day after day, I killed time in my dark room trying to find
the answers to a never-ending stream of questions. But as soon
as I'd hear them laughing in the sunroom, I'd lose the thread of
my reasoning and would have to start all over again from the
beginning.
One morning, some three weeks after he had first come to
our ward, the student was taken by two nurses to the examina
tion room in another ward. He came back later in the afternoon,
still wearing the plaster casts. He went right to bed without a
word to me or to the nurses, but he didn't seem to be sleeping
and he kept tossing about restlessly all the time.
I wanted very much just to have a casual chat with him, but
I restrained myself from doing it.
j He spoke to me later, after supper.
"It looks hopeless." His face was drawn and there were
dark circles under his eyes. "'The doctor says my legs seem to be
1
already beyond hope. Just as I expected."
I
I nodded. saying nothing, and looked out the window at the
I
I
utterly dark expanse of night sky beyond the grove of trees. It
looked like a canal brimful of water.
"I won't be able to walk outside by myself anymore," he
said, also looking out at the night. "No matter how long I live,
j I'll never have a chance to meet any French people. I won't be
able to go on a boat ... I won't be able to swim.... "
For the first time, I felt a surge of tenderness toward him.
I
1
"Oh, don't take it so hard! Listen, we'll probably live on
peacefully until we're sixty or so!"
1
"Sixty!" he choked. "Another forty years in this unstable,
; ~
crippled condition! I can just see myself getting to be thirty,
i,.
forty-still lying sprawled out in this rotten wheel chair." He
1
!
groaned between clenched teeth.
Guess I'll get to be forty, too, I thought to myself. By then
I
I'll probably be going around with a quiet smile and a wise look.
And I'll be sitting on the bedpan with the nurse holding me. My
thighs will be all dried up, withered and blotchy. I really will
I
,
I have to be patient.
1 "Say, doesn't the sky look like a canal?" I said. "There's
1
'I. a big ship cruising slowly along it trailing a dark wake."
"For me, there's no longer any such thing as freedom," he
said, lost in thought.
His rich, splendid freedom is sailing off upstream in that
canal in the sky, I mused.
The next morning we were awkward and ill at ease with
each other. He was terribly ashamed of having admitted his
weakness to me. And from that day on, he was more enthusi
astic than ever about the activities of his group. He no longer
urged me to join them. I continued to stay in my room quietly
and lost all touch with what was going on with them. But from
roundabout questioning here and there, I gathered from the
nurses that they were starting some kind of new movement.
It seemed that it had something to do with sending a written
statement to the newspapers about banning atomic and hydro
gen bombs.
One night after coming back to our room, he sharpened
some pencils and set to work diligently writing a short essay. He
didn't say a word to me. I acted as ifI hadn't the slightest interest
in what he was up to.
One morning there was a tremendous racket in the sun
room. I could hear happy shouting and lots of laughing. I tried
not to pay any attention, but it was no use. I broke down and
called the nurse, and for the first time in weeks, asked to be
taken to the sunroom in my lounge chair.
The boys were gathered around the student, all eyes on a
newspaper spread out open in front of them. They were all
talking at once, obviously very pleased about something. I
stayed in my comer of the room as usual next to the isolated boy
and put on a great show of indifference. But I watched the
excitement. Some of the nurses were looking at the paper over
the boys' shoulders, clucking and making all sorts of admiring
little noises. The boy nextto me was pricking up his ears, but he
couldn't make out a word. Then the nurse who had brought me
into the sunroom came over and said to me in great excitement,
"There's something about this place in the paper! They
printed a letter the boys sent in. They even have everybody's
name! In print! And all exactly right!"
You could tell from the way she spoke the name of the
left-wing paper that she was really impressed.
"And in headlines all of four inches big in such a famous
paper! It says: Crippled Children Oppose Atom and Hydrogen
Bombs. Can you imagine!"
Someone in the group yelled out to the boy,
"Hey! Come on over here. You, too! They have got your
name here, too! Come on, for goodness sakes!"
The boy started in surprise and tried to sit up. The nurse ran
over and dragged his chair over to the others. The student
clapped him gently on his thin shoulder and they all laughed
together, filling the room with the sound. I looked the other
way.
That afternO<'n, the would-be suicide was taken out of the
sunroom, followed by lively shouts of encouragement from the
student. He's probably found the nerve for the operation, I
thought. So their stupid commotion is not completely
useless....
All the same, when the student starts talking to me in his
reserved way that evening, right off I get obstinate again. I just
can't help it.
"We all collaborated on a collection of articles. We're
going to send them to the newspapers and the foreign embassies.
They're all on the theme of opposition to the atom and hydrogen
bombs. Anyway, I'm glad I've made them realize that we have
ties with outside society, too."
"That the newspapers accept and print your stuff," I
answered as coldly as possible, "is simply because you're all
cripples with spinal T.B. A bunch of strangers will read it,
pitying your helpless, crippled smiles. And they'll gush, 'Gee!
Take a look at this! Would you believe, even cripples think
about things like this!' "
"You'd better keep your mouth shut! If I hear you say
S9
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anything like that in front of the others, I'll let you have it!" he
fumed, his voice quivering with rage.
But the one who was most crushingly enraged, most hope
lessly angered by what I had said, was my own self.
That night after she put out the lights, the nurse brought the
girl from next door on her couch, just as she was, into our room
and wheeled her next to the student's bed. Then she left. I kept
quiet and pretended to be asleep.
"I was just too happy to sleep!" the girl whispered apolo
getically. "All night long I've been wanting to talk to some
body. So we've got some power, too! How about that!"
They whispered together for a long time. I tried my best not
to stay awake. But since I couldn't move my arm to reach for my
sleeping pills, I had to lie there, awake and motionless, in utter
frustration.
Just as dawn was breaking, there was a grating sound made
by the plaster cast and the student, raising himself up , kissed the
girl. The touching of their lips made a soft, wet sound.
I was filled with a feeling of tenderness, but deep within it,
there was also a feeling of anger struggling to the surface. I did
not fall asleep until daylight.
That morning after breakfast, the student was taken to the
examination room. I dozed lightly until almost nQOn. Then I
went out to the sunroom still feeling that creepy, crawly sensa
tion you get in your scalp when you haven't had enough sleep.
The student hadn't come back yet and the boys were singing
together in low voices, grouped around the girl who seemed
relaxed and pleased. As they lay on their backs on the couches,
the song of the crippled boys floated up to the high skylight and
then streamed back down. I drowsed off again as I listened to it.
Suddenly the singing stopped and it was completely quiet.
Shifting my unbearably heavy hips, I sat myself up and looked
out the window. The student was walking. Falteringly, like a
newborn animal-on the shining green lawn in front of the open
door of the examination room. My chest felt strangled.
Concentrating carefully, he watched the grass intently as
he walked a distance of nearly three yards and then turned back
to retract his steps. The doctors and nurses observed him with
professional impassivity. Then he lifted up his head and tried
again, widening his pace. The sun-the May sunshine
poured over him as he walked with his chest thrust out. There
was applause. I sawall the crippled children, including the girl,
clap joyfully.
The sound ofthe clapping reverberated and filtered through
the glass window, but the student never once turned around to
glance at our ward. He's embarrassed, I thought. Emotion
welled up in my throat. So he did make a crack in our thick,
phlegmatic wall! He really had restored our hopes for the out
side, I thought, my throat dry .
A small, but beautiful, bud of hope began to unfold in my
heart.
Lightly supported by a nurse, the student walked back into
the examination room and when the door closed with a bang in
the sunlight, a sound of deep breathing, like an escaping sigh,
filled the sunroom. Then everybody began talking and laughing
noisily. The boys were all carried away, laughing wildly in loud
voices as if they were having fits. The girl had a glazed expres
sion on her face and kept nodding, full of pride. I stayed on the
sidelines, still keeping to myself, but I was just bursting to clap
them on their shoulders and join in their loud talk.
We waited. But he didn't return even after a very long
time. The nurse came and announced lunch, but not a single
person responded. We went on waiting with infinite patience.
By two 0' clock my empty stomach was killing me. But I waited.
The boys had finally tired of talking and were lying, exhausted,
on their couches. But still, they kept on waiting with un
diminished eagerness. I bet they can't remember how many
years it's been since they waited with such anticipation that they
were exhausted like this, I thought. Although I had never paid
any attention to time, now I found myself constantly looking at
the clock on the wall.
Then the door of the sunroom opened. The student came
in. He was wearing a pair of soft blue trousers.
Full of expectation, every eye was focused on him as he
stood there with his hand resting on the doorknob.
He had a frozen, non-committal expression. It didn't look
right, somehow. Like a person with stiff muscles. There's no
reason for it, I thought, hard-pressed for an explanation. What
can be wrong? He's distant. Cold. Why should a person stand
ing on his own feet look inhuman? It shouldn't be because of
that. . . . He thrust out his chest almost as if he were pushing
through his own hesitation, and with a stiff smile flickering
across his face, went over to the boys.
One of the boys stretched out his arm as he sat there on his
couch and spoke timidly,
, 'Mind if I touch your leg?
At last, relieved smiles filled the room. The student moved
himself close up against the boy with deliberate joviality. The
boy touched the student's thigh with his fingers. Then he lifted it
with both hands and began to stroke it. He kept on, persistently,
repeating the action over and over. I watched the boy, his mouth
half open, eyes shut, breathing hotly.
Suddenly jerking himself away, the student spoke
harshly,
"OK, quit it! Come off it, will you!"
The delicate rapport between the student and the boys was
shattered and crumbled into bits. An ugly iciness filled the air
between the cripples and the healthy young man. The student
flushed in consternation and did his best to recapture the mood
they had once shared. But the boys, lying on their backs, had
already rejected his attempt. Rebuffed by them all, he stood
there supported by his legs, his chest outthrust.
"Takashi-san!" a middle-aged woman standing at the
door to the sunroom called out, looking around in a sort of
self-important way. "Hurry up, Takashi-san!" I noticed that
she had a rough, unyielding jaw just like that of the student. He
turned around, his mouth twisted, and just like that, walked to
the door. As he closed the door, he directed a feeble look of
appeal toward me. I turned my face away coldly.
With the closing of the door, that crack in our thick,
phlegmatic wall knit together like a wound and vanished.
With vacant looks of bewilderment, they all lapsed into a
dazed silence. The nurses came with the long-delayed lunch.
We ate it with the gloomy sounds of people who had completely
lost their appetites. After the meal, the girl shut herself up in her
room. The afternoon stretched on. We were thoroughly ex
hausted. Outside on the well-kept lawn, shadows of the build
ings were fading, and the air had turned cold.
"Hey!" I called to the nurse. "Hey, take me to my room!"
She took me, just as I was, lying on my couch, and no
sooner were we out in the corridor when there was a burst of the
old familiar laughter-sneaky and obscene. That suppressed
laughter which had disappeared so completely during these past
few weeks. The nurse rolled my couch along and whispered into
60
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\
i
I
1
my ear with her hot breath,
"Do you have to go? You look terrible!"
I thought to myself: well, I was on the lookout against that
fellow. He was a fake, after all. A feeling of triumph rose up
within me-then faded away abruptly. And a vast darkness
overwhelmed me. I clamped my lips together firmly, and when I
heard the door of my room close behind me, I said,
"How'd you like to clean me up?"
"Hmm?"
"Now you wouldn't want me to get my underwear dirty,
would you?"
"Oh!" she said, breathing with slight difficulty. "I see! I
get it! You know, it struck me that everyone's been a little
peculiar lately! I was wondering ...."
At the start, her cold dry palms touched me roughly. She
kept it up, apparently satisfied.
"Yes. Very peculiar, somehow or other .... The whole
time, these last few weeks ...." *
The
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Review Essay
by Gail Omvedt
Morton Klass' book is perhaps the most important analysis
of the Indian caste system to come out of western scholarship in
the last thirty years. It comes at an opportune time-when the
economic and social crisis of Indian society has reached the
point where caste divisions among the toiling masses have
become a major weapon of the ruling classes and "atrocities
against Harijans" have leaped into the front pages of all daily
papers. From brutal landlord attacks and gun battles in the more
feudal areas of Bihar (Belcchi, Pipra) to kulak-engineered mass
campaigns in the more capitalist areas (Kanjhawala), from mass
programs against dalits in western India's "land of saints"
(Marathwada) to the land of Gandhi (Gujarat) where riots have
recently broken out over the issue of reservations, no part of
India is immune from the poison of casteism.
Such events have forced the Indian left to rethink their
analysis of caste. Major theoreticians of almost every left party
are publishing pamphlets on the issue of caste; new political
trends are emerging from datil and socialist backgrounds that
talk of ' 'combining caste and class struggle' , ; and there has even
been a communist organization the Satyashodhak Communist
Party, *formed around this issue.
This indicates that the Indian revolutionary movement is
reaching a point where it cannot go forward without confronting
the problem ofcaste. Yet there is no adequate theory. On the one
hand, though there have been brilliant historical works by such
scholars as D.O. Kosambi and Devisprasad Chattopadhyay,
there has been almost no theoretical analysis of caste by Marx
ists that does not dismiss the phenomenon as superstructural
maya.! The previous tendency among Marxists has been
to reject all talk of caste as simply a western academic
conspiracy,
to see it only as a "weapon" of the ruling class without
analyzing what the objective basis is that makes it possible to
use that weapon,
to describe it simply as a survival of feudalism without anal
yzing whether it gave any specific shape to that feudalism which
is relevant today,
Jowe thanks to Bharat Patankar for discussions leading to the writing of this
review.
* The SCP is a small organization, founded by a breakaway CPI (M) organizer,
in Dhale district of Mabarashtra. The name "Satyashodhak" is taken from the
main radical organization of the non-Brahman movement.
I. This also includes analyses made by Marxist non-India specialists. e.g.
Claude Meillassoux, "Are There Castes in India?" Economy and Society.
2, 1973.
CASTE: THE EMERGENCE OF THE SOUTH
ASIAN SOCIAL SYSTEM, by Morton Klass. Phila
delphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues,
1980. 212 pp.
and to argue that organizing on common economic issues will
be sufficient to bring about class unity and that caste will (like
women's oppression) more or less automatically disappear with
the achievement of revolution. All this is now proving inade
quate to deal with the crisis. Thus, historical materialists have
failed to deal with caste and, on the other side, the major
academic theories of caste (and on this point the Marxists are
right) that have been put forward up to now have been from
idealistic and voluntaristic viewpoints, that often include or give
support to a racist element.
The result has been a yawning gap in the scientific under
standing of Indian society. Klass' book is a major step towards
filling that gap because he takes a basically materialistic (if
"eclectic," as he says) approach in his analysis. Because of the
importance of the issue and because Klass' book is one that is
not likely to be automatically available to or read by those who
might benefit most from it-particularly activists in India or
other Marxist scholars who do not specialize in Indian anthro
pology-I will try to summarize his arguments and then add a
couple of critical points.
What Caste Is and How It Began
The object of Klass' efforts is not to describe the "es
sence" or "functioning" of caste but to describe its origin and
development as a concrete historical phenomenon, i.e., the
"South Asian Social System." To begin with, he succeeds
fairly well in showing that almost all current theories of caste,
including those which avoid the issue oforigins, in effect end by
leaving the field to the "racial theory" originated by British
administrators in the 19th century. This theory is broadly that
caste originated when invading light-skinned" Aryans" (Indo
Europeans or Sanskrit speakers) conquered native darker
skinned" Dravidians," and restrictions on intermarriage and an
interlinked hierarchy developed as a means of subordinating and
integrating the conquered population. This theory was quickly
picked up first by the Brahman elite who used it as a kind of
modern justification of their social superiority (they could argue
that ultimately high-caste Indians were as good as Europeans
and see the origins and core of Indian culture as being in the
Vedas), and then by social and cultural radicals form the non
Brahman movements who turned it upside down to argue that
native "Non-Aryan" and "Dravidian" peoples had a superior,
equalitarian society before they were conquered by the high
castealiens. Today it is the most widely believed explanation of
caste in India, and of all Indian scholar-politicians perhaps only
the ex-Untouchable leader Dr. B.R. Ambedkar rejected the
theory.
62
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At the academic level, as Klass notes, some version of tile
racial conquest theory was accepted even by such scholars as
Max Weber, while the more sophisticated anthropological
theories of today implicitly give it support because of their
idealism.! That is, in identifying the caste system with the
ideology that backs it up, scholars such as Louis Dumont,
McKim Marriott, almost inevitably link this ideology to the
high Brahmanical forms of Sanskritic Hinduism which had their
roots in the Vedas and so caste is identified with the religion and
social system that arose out of the "Indo-European conquest."
The idea that the system could have come into existence before
the ideology was fully developed is incompatible with their
approach.
Klass' arguments against the racial or Aryan conquest
theory are fairly simple: Caste is stronger in the south and in
areas which have seen the least invasions; there is evidence of
many Indian cultural traits among pre-Aryan peoples including
the Harappan civilization; and there is no real evidence at all of
any massive invasion and conquest by a racially distinct and
light-skinned people. In the process he makes a basic statement
of his materialism:
Just as ill the case ofreligion , the Vedic system-which here
means the classic varna system-remains the justificatory
lIlId explanatory shell. The caste system is clearly not the
classic varna system, even though Hindus believe that castes
hm'e derived (or degenerated) from these varnas. Whatever
the justificatory framework for believers, we can say-as in
the case of the religious system-that the actuality or con
tent of the socioeconomic system has an ancestry different
from that o/'theframework (p. 63).
What then, is caste'? Klass' approach is outlined in a
chapter on "The Units of the Caste System." Subcastes, or as
he calls them, "marriage-circles," are the fundamental units
into which every member of the society is born. They exist as
"corporate groups" within which a person must marry. Nor
mally they are also the group within which other close social
relations (e.g., interdining) are carried on. They have certain
rules of behavior (from marriage rules to preferred occupations
to particular standards of "cleanliness" and relations of social
distance with other subcastes) and enforce these by sanctions
including expulsion; and they have a general rank within the
socio-economic heirarchy of their area. These subcastes (known
as potjatis, biradiris, etc.) are grouped intojatis which gener
2. The currently dominant anthropological theories. which I have argued arc
mainly idealistic, are those of Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchus (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1970) and McKim Marriott and Ronald Inden.
"Caste Systems" (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1974, pp. 982-991) and "Towards
an Ethnosociology of South Asian Caste Systems" (in Kenneth David. cd. Th"
New Wind: Changing Idelllities ill SOl/th Asia (the Hague: Mouton. 1977>.
Alternative Views are presented by Joan Mencher. "The Caste Systel1l Upside
Down orthe Not-So-Mysterious East." ClIrrelll Anthropology Volume 15. No.
4, December 1974; and Gerald Berreman. "Race. Caste and Other Invidious
Distinctions in Social Stratification" in Race Vol XIII. No, 4 (Apri I, I Rtlt
while Mencher and Berreman both make valid points. neither offers a theory oj'
the Indian caste system as such: Mencherdenies its acceptance by the low castes
and stresses class, while Berreman stresses the similarity with race ---hoth ot
these are rather different matters.
Those who are concerned to develop a theory should also c'onsult the works of
B,R, Ambedkar, especially '"Annihilation of Caste" and "Castes in India."
both in Collected Writings Volume I (Government of Maharashtra, 1979). and
The Untouchables and Who Were the Shudras?
ally have an occupational name and are the' 'caste" of a person
in the sense that he/she is known to the wider society by a jati
name and not by a subcaste name; and in tum eachjati claims a
particular ranking within the all-Indian varna system.
The point here 'is that nearly all social scientists will agree
on these basic characteristics of the caste system. But the differ
ence between Klass and the dominant school of anthropology
today is that the anthropological idealists define caste in terms of
an assumed' 'essence" that lies behind these characteristics and
provides a logical framework for the system of related subcastes
and jatis. For example, for Louis Dumont and his followers
caste is the system of rules of "purity and pollution"; for
McKim Marriott and Ronald Inden and others caste is a cor
related set of rules that define "code and substance." In con
trast, for Klass caste is simply the concrete system of inter
related and coexisting marriage-circles, and this is a "system"
not in a functionalist sense but because the entire society is
composed of such groups so that expUlsion from one means
expUlsion from the society-no person can be "adopted" into a
marriage-circle in which entrance is only through birth. The
ideological justification or "framework" for this system is a
separate and ultimately secondary factor for Klass.
Klass goes on to describe the economic functioning of the
traditional caste system, which according to him is basically one
way of carrying on agricultural production. Most jatis have
occupational names because economic relations are the most
important aspect of the relations between the castes. There is
no exchange of women and very limited social relations be
tween castes; what they do mainly is to provide economic
services (and secondarily cultural and political services) for one
another. At the village level this is organized in terms of what
has been called the jajmani system in the broader sense in
which it includes not only artisan services but also the services
of subcastes who provide labor on the land as tenants or as
mainly untouchable field slaves. Such services are not primarily
exchanged for money or goods. Rather they are provided
throughout the "duties" ascribed to the caste, and in return
those who do not directly control agricultural production receive
certain traditional shares in the produce as well as other socio
economic perquisites (e.g. rights to share in particular ways in
religious festivals, social functions and the like). This system
and this again is in contrast to a functionalist approach-does
not operate automatically but rather is always under the control
of a "managerial caste" or "allocative center," that is the
subcaste or marriage-circle of those who basically control the
village land.
3
What then can we say about the origins ofthe system'? Here
Klass turns to a famous thesis of Levi-Strauss that has not yet
.l It is for this reason that I call it broadly a type of feudal mode of pro
duction,i.e .. production was centered on agriculture. and land was broadly
controlled not hy the state nor the basic producers (though both had some kind of
()f claims) hut by the local elite ('"dominant caste" in the case of
such as Vellals. Rajputs, Bhumihars. Brahmans etc;
the J!(iti! or headman sections in the case of cultivating ryots); these in tum were
the lowest rung in a diffuse and decentralized JXllitical hierarchy ranging up to the
ra I'lS and emperors. Those who call this a system of S"'llC (i)flll of Asiatic soc'iety
or trihutary mode (e.g. Kate Currie. "Problematic \iodes and the Mu)!hal
Social Formation, Insurgent Sociologist, Sprin)!, ILJXO I. do so only hy luokin)!
at the higher level political relations and not at villa)!e le\'el relations of
production, There are any number of good descriptions of the intcrlinkage of the
traditional political system and relations of prodL1l'tion. those hy
Kathleen Walter Neale, Richard Fox, and S, Shivkumar
63
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been integrated into a theory of caste, that is, the comparison of
"caste"-based and "clan"-based systems put forward in an
essay on "The Bear and the Barber" (the "bear" represents the
totemic names of clans; the "barber" represents the normally
occupational names of castes). Levi-Strauss argues that a caste
society and a clan society have similar structures at a very
general level that can be seen as logical transformations of one
another. Castes are endogamous-that is, they do not give
daughters outside and have primarily economic relations with
one another. Clans are, in contrast, exogamous-that is they
exchange daughters externally but are generally economically
self-sufficient and have no necessary economic relationship
with one another defined in terms of a division of labor. Castes
have mainly an economic relationship with one another and
their required marriage relations are internal; clans have re
quired marriage relations with one another and their economic
relations are primarily "internal."
At this general level, Klass agrees with the contrast, but
adds two points. The first is that on the one hand castes may
contain "clans" (examogous groups normally exist within sub
castes) and that in tum the tribes within which clans exist do not
normally exist in isolation in a geographical universe but gener
ally as relatively small units within broad regions of many tribes
which have some minimal interaction. His second point is that
while it is true that each system can be seen as a logical
transformation of the other, historically the transformation
could only be one way: it makes sense to see a clan society
evolving into a caste society but not vice versa. The reason is (at
the risk of making an obvious point) that clan or tribal societies
ae associated with a hunting-and-gathering or horticultural
economy, while caste is linked to a developed agricultural
economy generating a substantial surplus.
Klass' theory is now beginning to emerge. He then goes on
to ask, in terms ofgeneral anthropological theory, what happens
to a clan-type society when new forms of agricultural produc
tion begin, when a surplus emerges and economic stratification
develops. He refers to anthropologists who described two types
of clan or tribal societies: those based on elans which are
equalitarian in the sense that all who claim descent from the
original or assumed founder or ancestor are socially equal as
members, and those based on inequalitarian clans or lineages in
which there is stratification within the lineage based on nearness
of relationship to the ancestor or to other group members. In
lineages there is differential membership, often a more' 'aris
tocratic" section exists and at points the relationship becomes
so distant that a person is no longer defined as a lineage member.
The consensus of most anthropologists making such a distinc
tion has been that inequalitarian lineage-based societies have
found it relatively easy to adjust to the rise of a surplus and
economic inequality. They simply provide a framework within
which an aristocratic class and and an inferior laboring class can
more or less gradually develop. But equalitarian clan-based
tribal societies cannot make this type of adjustment and so have
been assumed to be a kind of evolutionary "dead end."
It is at this point that Klass adds the final piece to his
puzzle. We cannot assume that anything is a "dead end," and in
fact equalitarian clans can adjust to the rise of inquality-by
evolving into castes! Specifically what he argues is that in
pre-agricultural India the whole subcontinent was an area pri
marily inhabited by tribal groups based on an equalitarian clan
system. As wheat and rice agriculture began to develop thou
sands of years ago, culminating in the Harappan civilization, a
64
process of widespread social innovation took place also, in
which all over the subcontinent castes began to emerge. The
process was one in which certain tribal groups could gain
control in an agriculturally more productive area-these be
came the dominant landholding or "managerial" castes
while others moving in would claim a part of the new surplus
being produced in exchange for providing certain kinds of
specialist services, as barbers, carpenters, priests, or (if they
were economically very weak) as simple dependent field labor
ers. Once the process of caste formation became established,
invaders could fit into it as well, and this is essentially what
happened to those Indo-European tribes who actually did wan
der into India. And the Vedic and later Hindu religious and
philosophical systems developed as an "explanatory frame
work" for an already existing social system-a framework that
certainly influenced the development of that system and perhaps
was even crucial to its survival, but which was not (idealists take
note) equivalent to the system itself.
Subcaste, Caste, State and Class
Morton Klass puts forward his argument as a hypothesis, a
theory to research and prove or disprove. The strength of his
case rests at present on its strong logical plausibility in contrast
with the implausibility and bankruptcy of racial conquest (or
mere occupational) theories of caste origins. Scholars tend to
ignore the racial theories, and radicals have been polemicizing
for some time against the current idealistic theories of caste. But
without anything concrete to put in the place of racism and
idealism, the result has been to leave a vacuum. a non-analysis
at the theoretical level, ofindian caste and its relationship to an
exploitative mode of production. It is this non-analysis that is
now proving an obstacle in the context of the struggles of the
Indian masses and the problems they are facing of caste divi
sions and caste oppression, and it is here that Klass' approach
offers a way forward.
Nevertheless, this is only a way forward and not a complete
theory. There are some points I would like to raise here concern
ing the deficiences in Klass' approach. They are interlinked,
and they are perhaps all related to the fact that a theory of
"caste" is not equivalent (as Klass' title implies) to a theory of
"the South Asian social system" -and ultimately to the fact
that Klass can be called at most a materialist, not a historical
materialist!
The first issue is the relationship between what Klass calls
the "marriage circle" (subcaste) and the jati. which is what
most usually translate as the "caste." According to Klass, it is
only the subcaste that is real and functions at the actual unit of
the system because only it has existence as a concrete corporate
unit with mechanisms for enforcing behavior. The jati. in con
trast, is simply a cluster of subcastes with no such corporate
existence of its own, no means of enforcing approved behavior,
and is merely the name by which people are known to other
subcastes members locally. But on this point Klass is wrong. In
traditional (pre-British) caste-feudal society, there were actu
ally two types of mechanisms for enforcing caste-prescribed
behavior. One was indeed the subcaste-but the other was the
feudal state, including all of its representatives from the raja or
maharaja at the top down to the village "rulers" (dominant
caste,headmen, etc.). The state was particularly concerned to
enforce jati behavior, i.e., to see that members of each jati
followed their prescribed caste duties, did not infringe the
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general social rules of relationships with other jatis, did not seek
to emulate higher jatis, etc. In addition the rajas also often
served as courts of appeal for decisions (e.g., decisions of
expulsion) made by subcaste councils.
Because of this, the jati did in fact have a stronger social
reality than Klass admits. We may say that the subcaste was
indeed the basic unit ofthe caste system, but the jati or caste was
the basic unit of the whole society, that is of its social division of
labor, and this was enforced and maintained by the two mech
anisms of the subcaste as a corporate unit and of the caste-feudal
state. Now ofcourse the situation has changed: since British rule
and then the formation of the post-colonial state, the state
mechanism of enforcing caste has been revolutionized, and the
jati now exists only as a cluster of subcastes.
And this brings up the issue of the modem transformation
of the caste system. Here controversies have been raging: is
"caste" dying away? is the "caste system" being replaced by
something else, by "classes" or by something like "ethnic
groups"?
Answers to this question seem to depend largely upon
one's theories about caste. As far as concretely describing what
was happening, there is fairly broad agreement: Caste rules of
behavior are no longer enforced so strictly as before and in many
cases, except for marriage, rules are widely broken. There is
now considerable economic differentiation within every caste
and subcaste, so that each now has members of all classes from
worker and agricultural laborer to at least middle class employee
and often rich farmer and bourgeoisie. At the same time there is
a broad correlation: that is, low castes are poorer on the whole,
and upper castes have monopolized the higher class positions.
Along with this differentiation, castes seem to be emerging as
broader groups that compete with one another in the political
and economic arenas, and their middle class and bourgeois
leaders use their caste membership and caste appeals against one
another and against the unity of the proletarianized members of
various castes.
All of this is very "untraditional" caste behavior. Does it
mean that the system is fundamentally changing? For most
Marxist scholars and activists, the attitude up to now has been to
say "yes" -that caste will be overcome and replaced by class
as capitalism prevails over feudalism, or if "caste" remains it is
simply a sign that feudalism or feudal relations remain. This
now seems to be erroneous: for capitalist relations are spreading
and new classes are clearly developing, even in the rural areas,
and yet some of these most capitalistically-developed areas
(northwest India, Maharashtra, Gujarat) have seen the worst
caste riots. In some sense, something we must call "caste"
clearly continues to exist.
For the schools of anthropological idealists, the answer to
the question has also been "yes.'; Ifcaste is defined in terms of
an ideal essence or certain "rules of behavior, " then a change in
this essence or these rules mean a fundamental change in the
caste system. Thus for example, Stephen Barnett, who holds to
the "code and substance" theory, argues that the "code"
aspect of caste is vanishing (that is, rules of behavior are no
longer fundamental to defining a caste) and only the "sub
stance" aspect remains so that now castes are defined in terms
of blood and inherited membership. For him this means that
castes are fundamentally changing into something different, and
he suggests that they are becoming like "ethnic groups. "4
But for Klass, caste is not fundamentally changing. His
argument is simple:
perity ... Endogamy is crucial, however . .. The rule of
endogamy is necessary for the maintenance ofthe total caste
system. In other words, the issue is not 'purity ofdescent' but
maintenance of distinct boundaries over time between the
units. Without these boundaries, the particular structure
lacks any mechanism for enforcing all the rules of the sys
tem. Everything rests on this keystone of distinct and
bounded units and therefore upon endogamy. Were it ever to
become possible for individual households-in large num
bers and with ease-to continue over time outside the
bounds of the marriage-circle, the system would undergo
massive structural revision . ... None ofthe many changes
and stresses South Asia has experienced in the last century,
however, has significantly altered the rule of endogamy.
Occupations change, rules ofdiet and association have been
drastically revised, even the ideological underpinnings ofthe
system have been challenged and in some cases swept away.
But still, an expelled household of any marriage-circle, of
any region [in the South Asian countryside] finds it almost
impossible to obtain spouses for the children. Andthe system
continues, remarkably unimpaired. S
Here I think Klass is basically correct-but incomplete.
The marriage-circle (subcaste) and its mechanisms for enforc
ing membership and behavior remains, and thus one core of the
caste system remains. And because it remains, the caste-sub
caste membership of any individual has an important determi
ning effect on his/her position in the entire society (including
class, political system, etc.), and at the same time the survival of
caste in this sense continues to provide a material basis for the
retrogressive, hierarchical ideology of caste superiority
inferiority, purity-pollution, etc. that is not simply equivalent to
racial ideologies elsewhere. But at the same time, the funda
mental changes that have taken place in Indian society mean that
this caste system now has a different relationship to the entire
mode of production-so that at points caste does seem to be
functioning much as "ethnic groups" do elsewhere.
The final point has to do with the relation between "class"
and "caste," an issue now much debated in India. The tradi
4. See Stephen Barnett, "Approaches to Changes in Caste Ideology in South
India," in Essays in South Indian Society.
5. It is noteworthy that Ambedkar, also, the foremost leader of the movement to
destroy the system, stressed in Annihilation of Caste that only intermarriage
could do so-but then he went on to ask how and under what conditions this
would be possible, and concluded that Hinduism was such a fundamental feature
backing up the system that only its destruction could ensure the end of the
system. It is on this point that debate continues- for Ambedkar's solution here,
the Buddhist conversion, has not successfully posed a challenge to Hinduism as
a whole. while the other remedies suggested by him (nationalization of land and
basic industries which he had proposed to be included in the constitution) are
equally far away.
65
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tional Marxist position has simply been to say that "it's really
class struggle, it only has the fonn ofcaste struggle. " As against
this, trends are now developing to say that "class struggle" and
"caste struggle" exist as parallel phenomenon, both important,
which must be interlinked; this view puts the working class in
leadership of an "economically" defined class struggle and
datits and low-castes in leadership of a "socially" defined caste
struggle, but does not really show their interrelationship. One
version of this even claims (and from a claimed marxist point of
view) that prior to British rule there were no "classes" in India,
only"castes" and the struggle between castes.
6
Klass' himself has little to say on this issue; in fact he does
not subject the concept of "class" to any analysis at all. At
points he does seem inclined to say that "caste" was really a
substitute for "class" as a way of organizing a stratified society
(hence the title of the book!). But this rests on an implicit
definition of class as an "open" (not birth-defined) economic
grouping, a definition drawn from bourgeois sociologists. If in
contrast, we take a Marxist definition of class as defined by the
relations of production, we must come to different conclusions.
That is, wherever there is an exploitative mode of production,
wherever the surplus is "pumped out" of basic producers under
the control and to the benefit of non-producing exploiters,
classes must exist. Wherever there is surplus and exploitation,
classes exist in some fonn-the question is which fonn? Here it
can be said (very briefly) that in Indian feudal society classes
were fundamentally shaped through the caste system (so we call
it a "caste-feudal society") whereas today with the develop
ment of capitalist relations and the separation of economic,
political and social spheres that is characteristic of capitalism,
"classes" and castes" are coming to exist as separate, but
linked phenomenon. 7
6. This is the thesis ofSharad Pati!, of the Satyashodhak Communist Party.
7. It is to be noted that Marx usually spoke of the"social relations of produc
tion". His most extensive passage on the subject is as follows:
The specific economic form. in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out
THE ASIA MAIL
"AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES ON ASIA AND THE PACIFIC"
Here important work needs still to be done in developing
our analysis of Indian society. The important conclusion,
though, for the present is that the caste system (some core of it)
still exists in India; it is not withering away and will not automat
ically or easily vanish, and though it is no longer the fundamen
tal defining feature ofIndian society it still plays a central role.
Exploiters still use caste appeals to divide the masses and there
are still sections (dalits and other low castes) who are particu
larly oppressed because of caste. Hence there is a need for a
conscious and central fight against caste oppression itself, a
fight in which dalits and their organizations can and must playa
leading role. But here is a basic transfonnation in the relation
ship of caste to the mode of production; new and revolutionary
multicaste proletarianized classes have come into existence (as
well as multiclass exploiting classes). A fight on a caste basis
alone, or by dalits alone cannot be sufficient to destroy caste.
This can be done only by the entire toiling masses taking up this
fight as a crucial part of the revolutionary transfonnation of
society.*
ofthe direct producers. determines the relationship ofruler and ruled. as it
grows directly out of production itself, and in tum, reacts upon it as a
determining element. Upon this. however. isfounded the entireformation of
the economic community. which grows up out of the production relations
themselves. thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always
the direct relations of the owners of the means of production to the direct
producers. a relation always naturally corresponding to labour and its
social productivity. which reveals the innermost secret and the hidden basis
ofthe entire social structure. and with it the political form ofthe relation of
sovereignty and dependence. This does not prevent the same economic
basis-the same from the standpoint ofits main conditions-due to innum
erable different empirical circumstances. natural environment. racial rela
tions. external historical influences. etc. from showing infinite variations
and gradations in appearance. which can be ascertained only by analysis of
the empirically given circumstances. (Capital, Vol. III, pp. 791-792).
For a fuller development of this position, see my paper "Caste, Class, and
Politics .. , in Land. Caste and Politics (special issue of Teaching Politics. edited
by Manorarjan Mohanty, Delhi University, forthcoming). The volume also
contains important articles on the varying forms of class and caste in Punjab,
Bihar, U.P., West Bengal. Orissa, Andhra and Gujarat.
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,
,
Review Essay
by Gail Omvedt
So far in modern world history. social revolutions. though
they have entailed elements ofclass conflict. have plainly
not conformed to Marx's theoretical expectations or mor
al vision. They have occurred in agrarian countries
caught hehind foreign competitors. not in the most ad
vanced capitalist industrial nations. And even those rev
olutions that have expropriated domestic capitalist classes
in the name ofsocialist ideals have hardly resulted to date
in the prosperous. democratic communist societies en
\'isaged by Marx. (Skocpol, p. 292)
Theda Skocpol's major work, States and Social Revolu
tions, does not take a Marxist perspective at all. Instead it
situates itself quite happily within the bourgeois-academic game
in which clashing and contesting theories serve as an arena for
the scholar to pick out bits and pieces here and there, subtract
ing. adding, mUltiplying and synthesizing to come out with
his/her own new grand theory.
This may sound a bit harsh for such a highly praised book,
and of course one cannot criticize a scholar for failing to choose
a particular theoretical framework. Skocpol herself is quite open
about not being a Marxist-about simply using certain elements
of what she considers Marxist theory and taking Marx's hypoth
eses and vision as "points of reference." (292) But because she
cannot, or does not, situate herself within a Marxist theoretical
framework sufficiently to really comprehend the logic of the
theory and its ongoing development and debates, she ends up by
not understanding it at all. And so, like most bourgeois sociolo
gists. she gives us only the most superficial and inadequate
version of Marxism, a straw man to use as a counter to her own
theoretical perspective (basically a Weberian one). She even
conc ludes by reiterating most of the vulgar objections to Marxist
theory: 10, Marx expected socialist revolutions in advanced
capitalist societies, but they came in backward ones instead and
with decidedly nonsocialist features, etc. , etc.
And the result, I would argue, is that the often impressive
historical analysis and concrete hypotheses about particular
social developments she formulates are vitiated. Her overall
theory is incapable of foreseeing revolutionary events occurring
after the writing of the book. At a theoretical level she cannot
provide guidelines for analyzing revolutions other than those
she focuses on. and develops her framework around. At a
practical level-for a Marxist this is the most significant test of
theory-her work fails to provide any basis for formulating
revolutionary strategy to deal with the states and social struc
tures confronting us in the modem world.
Let me try to illustrate this by discussing Skocpol's defini
tion and conceptualization of revolution. issues of methodol
ogy. and the problem of the state.
STATES AND SOCIAL REVOLUTIONS: A COM
PARATIVE ANALYSIS OF FRANCE, RUSSIA
AND CHINA, by Theda Skocpol. London: Cam
bridge University Press, 1979, 407 pp.
Revolution
Social revolutions have heen rare but momentous occur
rences in modern world history . ... Social revolutions
are rapid. basic transformations of a society's state and
class structures; and they are accompanied and in part
carried through by class-based revolts from below. (3-4)
It is clear that the operative word in Skocpol's definition
here is rapid: revolutions for her are the major, dramatic convul
si ve events of modem history.
But this is not really the Marxist definition, for as she
notes, "Marx sees revolutions as emerging out of class-divided
modes of production, and transforming one mode of production
into another through class conflict." (8) This is awkwardly
phrased but roughly accurate, and what should be stressed is that
the crucial aspect is not rapidity but the transformation of the
mode of production.
Not only does this definition imply that slower, uneven and
less dramatic transformations in such societies as England,
Sweden etc. can equally be called "revolutionary," it is also
crucial to any analysis of Skocpol's major cases, France, Russia
and China. Here we can see her distortion of Marxism. She
begins by proclaiming her novel, major thesis. namely that the
three are' similar revolutions whereas for Marxists they are
fundamentally different: France is a bourgeois revolution; Rus
sia, a "proletarian-communist" one; and China, a "national
liberation revolution" (40-40. But if our starting point is the
mode of production-or more accurately with the transforma
tion from one mode of production to another-we can see that
indeed they are similar. All three began from a hasically feudal
(agrarian) society. and proceeded in varying ways either to, or
through a period of bourgeois development.
It is no light matter that Chinese Marxists call their revolu
tion a "new democratic" one. Mao Zedong himself was very
clear on the issue: "A revolution in a colonial and semi-colonial
country is still fundamentally bourgeois-democratic in its
social character during its first stage." he writes in On New
Democracy. He then goes on to explain that in the era of
proletarian revolution (a reference to the world context, which
Skocpol and some other Weberians tend to consider as uniquely
their contribution) the bourgeoisie cannot lead such a revolu
tion. The proletariat must and can lead it and can carry on to a
socialist stage; hence the term "new democratic." (Selected
Works. Vol. II. p. 344) In fact it is inaccurate and unscientific to
speak of a "national liberation revolution" -a hybrid classifi
cation which Marxists and third world peoples themselves rare
ly use-because the social significance of national liberation
movements is determined not so much by the fact they fight
67
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colonialism but by the fact that they generally do take place in
backward, agrarian, semi-feudal societies and are faced with
tasks of industrialization, construction of a modem state system
and a scientific culture, etc. And to the extent this is true, the
Chinese revolution and other third world revolutions do indeed
have something quite fundamental in common with the French
revolution. (They also have major differences-and Skocpol
outlines some of these.)
Up to this point, far from "refuting" a Marxist analysis,
Skocpol's work can help to deepen it. But this is not a perspec
ti ve she is ready to accept.
Methodology
Skocpol bases her work on "comparative historical metho
dology," one of the favorite approaches of bourgeois sociol
ogy, whose logic is that of Mills' "method of agreement and
differences. "
- (I) "Agreement": If there are several cases having in
common the phenomenon to be explained, then the factors in
which they differ can be said to be causally irrelevant, while the
antecedent factors they have in common can be said to be
causally explanatory.
-(2) "Difference": A case in which the phenomenon
needing explanation is present can be contrasted to cases in
which the phenomenon is absent but are otherwise as similar to
the first case as possible (i.e., "all other things being equal").
In this situation the antecedent factors that are present only in the
first case can be said to cause the phenomenon in question.
This is a mechanical, external form of logic-and it con
trasts not only with Marxist methodology but with any form of
historical explanation whatever, where the explanatory method
is based on logically comprehended internal connections of
events, in which models of society and social behavior tested
continually against empirical facts are utilized.
Skocpol's analysis is useful and convincing where it uses
such a form of historical logic, and her comparison of different
cases is simply frosting on the cake. The problem with the
comparative-historical method is that a rigorous form of mec
hanical, external logic can almost never be applied to historical
events, since it is generally almost impossible to find sufficient
historical cases that are both "independent" enough to be
treated as really separate cases, and similar enough to isolate
variables to be compared. The "all other things being equal"
criterion can almost never be satisfied. For the really important
types of events-revolutions, industrialization, origin of any
social structures-there are never more than a few truly inde
pendent cases and sometimes only one. As a result, attempts to
apply such logic often fall back on a kind of pseudo-com
parison. For example, Skocpol at one point claims that "the
European world economy was unique in that it developed within
a system of competing states. " (21) This is part of her argument
for the importance of state structures, but her context makes it
clear that she is talking of the era ofcommercialization and indus
trialization. Certainly in most social formations throughout his
tory, economic exchanges have occurred across political bound
aries. To take one example, the Indian social formation from the
beginning had an economic and social structure that encompas
sed a system of a particular type ofcompeting feudal states. And
in this case it is nonsense, literally, to say that Europe was
"unique" in its political characteristics in this period because
there is no other case it can be compared to or to say that Europe
68
as a whole was "unique"in being the site of the first and hence
only independently developing industrial revolution.
This methodological issue is not a trivial one, because
Skocpol uses her conclusions in a dual way-the duality, I
think, being inherent in her method. On the one hand she derives
certain generalizations from her study which are then applied on
a universal basis. These are that social revolutions occur in
relatively backward agrarian societies, with landlord-peasant
struggles as the main class dynamic, against states that are
weakened and broken down through crisis and international
pressures, and with a revolutionary process that then constitutes
new strong states. This is then taken to imply that such major
revolutions cannot occur in advanced industrial societies against
strong states, and so (as the beginning quotation indicates) Marx
is proved wrong. This is Skocpol the anti-Marxist sociologist.
On the other hand, and often at the same time, she argues
that because the situation (world context, class structure, etc.) is
fundamentally different (Le., the' 'all other things being equal"
criterion is not satisfied), the patterns she outlines cannot be
generalized. This is Skocpol the cautious comparative historian
speaking, and here she identifies three basic types of revolu
tions: (I) the" classic social revolutions" she studies; (2) those
she has not studied, from Mexico to Ethiopia, which were
primarily revolutions in small colonial countries very vulner
able to international pressures (287-88); and (3) future potential
revolutions in capitalist societies which "would, I can only
suppose, have to take a very different form and occur under
quite different international conditions from the great historical
revolutions" (292-3).
One example should make the dual (self-contradictory) use
of the method clear:
Still more fundamental limits on the generalizability of the
classic social-revolutionary patterns can be traced to histori
cal transformations, relevant on an international scale, in
the forms and bases ofstate power. Especially since the end
of World War II, as dozens of new nations have emerged
from colonialism in a world economically dominated by
capitalism and militarily dominated by rival superpowers,
modern weapons technologies and bureaucratic-profes
sional forms of military organization have diffused to virtu
ally every sovereign state. . . . One consequence has surely
been to make social revolutions much less likely over all than
they might otherwise have been if most new nations lacked
modem militaries (289, emphasis mine).
Here Skocpol first says that one cannot generalize, and then
proceeds to generalize-using the same causal factors as a base!
As for the prediction itself, the example of Iran is a recent, most
important refutation.
It is very commonplace to argue from the nature of already
existing revolutions that another kind of revolution cannot oc
cur, e.g. anti-landlord peasant revolutions are possible but,
once a "Stolypin reform" is carried through and a new broad
based kulak class is stabilized, no agrarian revolution is possi
ble; with consolidation of a strong parliamentary democratic
state, an overthrow of the state cannot occur, etc. All of these
have no more logic than saying that, because something has not
yet happened, it will not happen.
In fact, the most we can say is that social revolutions have
not yet occurred in industrially advanced countries with histori
cally strong state structures where the proletariat is the biggest
social class. There is certainly nothing in Skocpol's analysis or
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any other analysis of the very short (in tenns of human history
and evolution) period of 2-300 years to suggest that such revolu
tions are impossible. There is on the contrary every evidence to
suggest that the major revolutionary transfonnations so far
(which have mainly been diffeent versions of a bourgeois
democratic revolution, with some of them proceeding in very
faltering, zig-zag ways towards the construction of socialism)
have stood at the beginning of a longer process of world-historic
transfonnation and in some ways have only laid the groundwork
for further steps. To be a bit more specific, there is evidence that
the most recent revolutionary movements and processes, for
example in Iran, Nicaragua and El Salvador (and Poland?) are
beginning to occur in countries that are no longer overwhelm
ingly agrarian, where the proletariat has a bigger role, and
where the state has to some extent been constituted already as a
relatively stable bourgeois state.
One should at least distinguish between the general Marx
ist method and the specific hypotheses of Marx concerning
capitalism and social revolution. The fact that the French,
Russian and Chinese revolutions did not occur in advanced
capitalist societies cannot be used to disprove either the general
method or the specific hypotheses. As far as general theory is
concerned, Skocpol's study fails to provide a convincing basis
to generate these that can be applied outside the scope of the
cases she studies. Where she does make predictions, these can
be shown to be disproved by historical experience. On the other
hand, the patterns and empirical generalizations she uncovers in
the case of Russia, France and China can just as easily be
handled within a Marxist framework.
Peasant Revolts and the
"Comparative-Historical Method"
The general point that Skocpol's most convincing interpre
tations are not really based on a "comparative-historical meth
od" can be illustrated by looking at her thesis on the role of
agrarian structures in peasant revolts.
Her argument is that one major explanatory factor for the
weakness, strength or absence of anti-landlord action can be
found in the nature of the peasant community. In France an
existing but weak village' community produced at the time of
revolution weak anti-landlord actions (tithes, dues, etc. were
abolished but landlords' or rich peasants' lands were not
seized). In Russia a strong village community facing a weak but
exploitative nobility produced strong anti-landlord action (sei
zure of all lands, including in some cases those of rich peasants
who had individualistically defied the community). In China
peasants with no real community ties and largely individually
subordinated to a well-organized .gentry produced no real anti
landlord action until the Communist Party intervened to make
agrarian revolt possible.
If a refers to the village community (a I = a weak village
community, a
2
= a strong village community and a
3
= no village
community) and x refers to the nature of anti-landlord action
(x I = weak, x
2
= strong and x
3
= none), we then have
aI ____ X I
(France)
(Russia)
(China) (England and
Prussia)
l

I
I
l
t
I
This is all intuitively quite convincing, but is has very little to do !
with either Mills' "method of agreement" or "method of dif !
ferences" because there is no real attempt to balance out or
I
I
discoUnt other potential causal variables, even when the cases of
England and Prussia are added.
!
,
At this point, another argument can be made. Skocpol !
,
discounts the influence of ideology, but it should be noted that a
libertarian and individualistic ideology was prevalent through
out society at the time of the French revolution, while an
equalitarian, collectivistic one accompanied the Russian revolu
tion. (To assume that such national and middle-class generated
ideas never reach the peasantry is very questionable). Ifwe refer
I
to the ideological factor as b we have, for France and Russia,
!
(France)
(Russia)
Now which is central? And once we add China, where the
intervention of the Communist Party with its equalitarian and
collectivist ideology made agrarian revolution possible, we
have:
a1b l ____ xI
(France)
(Russia)
(China)
A very different outcome, that would suggest after all, on the
ground of comparative historical method, a significant role for
ideology!
In fact, however, Skocpol' s argument about the role of the
village community carries conviction because it makes sense: a
tenuous village community in which most households operate
basically as individuals provides some unity for fighting land
lord claims but will tend not to touch property; a strong village
community which still maintains traditions of periodically dis
tributing land will provide a basis for radical takeover of land
and action against individual accumulation of land even by rich
peasants. Ultimately the strength of Skocpol's case rests on the
kind of essentially internal logic that good historians use. The
value of bringing in comparative historical cases lies not in the
fact that they combine to give a actual "proof" but rather in
highlighting the factors she wishes to emphasize.
The State
The feature of social revolutions that is most strongly
highlighted in the study is the political factor. Skocpol, like
most Weberian sociologists, would have us believe that Marx
ists have ignored the state, although she is forced to recognize
that considerable theoretical work has been done recently (26
28). In fact, there is a large body of Marxist analysis of the state
(though many Marxists may still find it inadequate as yet),
particularly in connecting different types of state structures with
different modes of production. There is no doubt that such
theories go back not only to Engels and Lenin but to the early
Marx and his references, deriving partly from Hegel, to the
importance of the differentiation of "civil society" and "politi
cal society" in the capitalist mode of production.
But none of this really interests Skocpol. For her the only
issue with regard to the state is whether it is seen as "autonom
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ous" or not. And her definition of the state as well as her use of
the concept throughout the book is simply an organizational one
which implies that the only significant variables are the "size"
and' 'strength" of these structures:
The state properly conceived is no mere arena in which
socioeconomic struggles are fought out. It is, rather, a set of
administrative, policinR and military organizations headed
and more or less well coordinated by an executive authority.
Any state first and fundamentally extracts resources from
society and deploys these to create and support cooercive
and administrative organizations . . . . The administrative
and coercive organizations are the basis of state power as
such. (29)
Given this definition, it is no wonder that she can conclude that
Russia, France and China have had fundamentally similar polit
ical outcomes in strengthening state power, for her very con
ceptualization excludes other relevant features about the nature
of the state.
It is certainly true that revolutions confront a state in crisis
and, if they are successful, they end by strengthening the state.
But this bit of information by itself is of no use to Marxists or
anyone else who wants to make a revolution. Communists know
very well they are not only organizing class conflict, but are also
facing as state that is composed of organizations and structures.
The real debates are: can some of these structures be worked
within and used to bring about revolutionary transformation? If
so, how? Or are they fundamentally connected with bourgeois
society to the degree that they can only be opposed (the "Euro
communist" issue)? What possibilities do state organizations
allow for being infiltrated and subverted from within as opposed
to simply being confronted (the issue of working in the military,
of supporting or organizing government employees or police
strikes, etc.)?
These are crucial issues of revolutionary strategy. Having
any kind of debate on them presupposes dealing with the thesis
that some political or administrative structures are fundamen
tally "bourgeois" or "feudal" and hence incompatible with
socialist society (or a transition toward such a society)-that
individuals within state organizations do not simply act as
"organization men" controllable by a bureaucracy but are peo
ple having class interests and identities (or other group identities
such as being women or members of oppressed nationalities)
separate from the interest of the state. But these are the very
points denied by Skocpol's Weberian approach which projects a
rigidified bureaucracy that exists outside of and beyond social
classes and modes of production.
Conclusion
There is much to be learned from States and Social Revolu
tions, for it gives useful, comprehensive and convincing sur
veys of three of the major world revolutions. As a social histo
rian Skocpol comes across as extremely competent. And she is
enough of a socialist to be open about her basic sympathy for
revolutions and her belief that they are needed in capitalist
societies as well.
But her overall conceptualization is confusing and in the
end her analysis of the past fails to provide theoretical weapons
with which we can analyze and change the present. Her often
crude caricatures and dismissals of Marxist theory (the theory
that after all continues to guide most revolutions) are the most
unfortunate part of the book. There is no compulsion on anyone
to be a Marxist, and certainly non-Marxist scholars can and do
provide empirical material and theses crucial to a deepened
understanding of social processes. Further, Marxism after all is
not a finished theory; there are numerous problematic areas
(including the analysis of the state) in which theoretical and
practical work has to be done. But Marxism is the only social
science which is capable of being developed to provide an
overall scientific analysis.
Skocpol does not have to believe this-but as a scholar she
has some responsibility for giving a fair presentation of what
Marxist theory is, and this is what she does not do. After a token
nod at "mode of production" she essentially identifies Marxism
as dealing only with classes and no other kinds of social struc
tures. She wrongly argues that Marxism is a largely volun
taristic theory which ignores the period of structural crises that
make revolutions possible (15-16) and she even implies that the
theory which makes imperialism one of its central foci ignores
"trans-national relations" (l9)! For that matter, the whole
discussion of Marxism throughout the book makes it clear that
Skocpol has learned her Marxism second-hand, largely in dis
cussions at university seminars or by reading secondary aca
demic interpretations of Marx, rather than through an intensive
study of Marxist texts or among practicing Marxist activists
trying to understand their own situation.
In the end the most disappointing thing about the book is
that it fails where it promises most-in giving a theory of the
state and revolution. One of the things that we need most today
("we" here meaning those concerned about revolutionary
change in societies like India or the U. S.) is an adequate theory
of the nature and functioning of bourgeois-democratic state
forms, which none of the hitherto successful big revolutions
have had to confront. And Skocpol offers no help. She con
cludes only that:
Because it seems highly unlikely that modern states could
disintegrate as administrative-coercive orRanizations with
out destroying societies at the same time, a modern social
revolution would probably have to flow gradually, not cat
aclysmically, out of a long series of "nonreformist re
forms, " accomplished by mass-based political movements
struRglinR to democratize every major institution from the
economy to the political parties, army and civil bureaucracy
(293).
This is consistent with her "organizational" approach to the
state. It includes no conception that new political forms may
have to be created or that bourgeois-democratic structures might
have to be fundamentally challenged and transformed. It im
plies that gradualism or "cataclysm" can be a choice of re
volutionaries, that movements can achieve "progress towards
disarmament and peace" before they control or overturn state
power. It is the conclusion, finally, of an academic innocent.*
70
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Review
REALITY AND FICTION IN MODERN JAPANESE
LITERATURE by Noriko Mizuta Lippit. Armonk,
N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1980.
by Stephen W. Kohl
Over the course of the past ten or fifteen years we have
witnessed a very clear and dramatic development in the field of
Japanese literature studies in the United States and other Eng
lish-speaking countries. The study of Japanese literature in the
post-War period began, as it must, with the work of a cadre of
dedicated translators. For a time most of the work being done
was translation with only an occasional effort in the direction of
critical analysis or interpretation. Indeed, most critical work
appeared in the form of doctoral dissertations and consisted
largely of recondite studies aimed at a small audience of special
ists. Such studies typically took the form of critical biographies
beginning with the most prominent writers of the modem period
Tanizaki, spread to treatments
of less popular, less well-known writers. Through the combined
resources of the Dissertation Abstracts and the Twayne World
Authors Series and a number of university presses, many of
these critical biographies became readily available.
The job of translation must and certainly will continue as
long as Japan continues to have one of the most active and
exciting national literatures. As the work of new writers is
introduced, the need for critical biographies will also, no doubt,
continue. But the last two or three years have witnessed a new
development with the appearance of critical studies of a broader
nature. These are of two types. One type centers on the history
of Japanese literature as seen in works like the English transla
tion of Shuichi Kato's Japanese Literature: The First Thousand
Years and Donald Keene's World Within Walls.
1
The second
type of critical study is composed of works that focus on certain
groups of writers or on thematic issues. Beginning with Masao
Miyoshi's The Accomplices ofSilence and Makoto Ueda'sMod
ern Japanese Literature we have seen a steady outpouring of
such works. More recent offerings have included J. Thomas
Rimer's Modern Fiction and Its Tradition, Janet A. Walker's
The Japanese Novel of the Meiji Period and the Ideal of Indi
vidualism and Gwenn Boardman Petersen's The Moon in the
Water: Understanding Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima. 2
Noriko Mizuta Lippit's new book, Reality and Fiction in
Modern Japanese Literature, takes its place in this last and most
I
I. Kata Shuichi, A History ofJapanese Literature: The First Thousand Years.
(Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1979). Donald Keene, World Within Walls:
i
Japanese Literature of the Pre-Modern Era, 1600-1867. (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1976).
2. Miyoshi Masao, Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel,
I
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). Ueda Makoto, Modern Japa
nese Writers and the Nature o.fLiterature. (Stanford: Stanford University Press.
1976). J. Thomas Rimer, Modern Japanese Fiction and Its Traditions. An
Introduction. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978). Janet A.
1
Walker, The Japanese Novel ofthe Meiji Period and the Ideal ofIndividualism,
,
I
recent group. The author's intention in this volume is "not to
survey the history of modem Japanese literature or to treat all
major writers, but to present a perspective which will help
illuminate some of the central concerns of modem Japanese
writers, and especially their concern about the relation of their
art to the self, reality, and Japan's cultural tradition. "3 In her
introduction the author traces the history of modem Japanese
literature from the I-novel ofthe early twentieth century through
the work of Tomioka Taeko, a poet and novelist who came to
prominence in the 1970s. In this introductory overview she
shows the process of development and reaction as various au
thors sought to come to terms with the questions raised by their
own perceptions of art, self, reality, and cultural tradition. The
Introduction is followed by eleven chapters, each devoted to a
writer, a group of writers, or a literary movement or episode in
the development of modem Japanese literature. These chapters
are arranged more or less chronologically and so, despite the
author's disavowal, the book does show the historical develop
ment of modem Japanese literature.
As the author points out, the development of modem
Japanese literature has been a complex and uncertain process.
On the one hand writers have a rich literary tradition of more
than a thousand years; a tradition that refuses to be ignored. On
the other hand there are compelling new vistas opened by their
increasing familiarity with Western art and literature. Each
artist dealt with in this study has had to come to terms with this
situation, often in ways that require a radical definition of the
self. The essays are neatly arranged, beginning with a discus
sion of Shiga Naoya, who had a very clear perception of his self
and who simply defined everything in terms of that self, to the
final chapter on Tomioka Taeko, where it is shown that a
woman also has a self. In between we find artists searching for
definitions of the self in the past, in esthetics, politics, realism,
I
and fantasy. While there can be no single right answer to this
I
I
issue, Lippit provides a good overview of the enormous range
and vitality of modern Japanese literature as well as a glimpse of
the energy that has driven its development.
In the individual chapters we see some ofthe author's chief
concerns, principally the literature of dark romanticism, both in
Japan and in the West, as well as the development and nature of I
the notion of women's liberation in Japan and its relationship to f
Marxism and to proletarian consciousness. One of the conse
quences of this is that the essays are of varying quality and
strength. In general, the author has a tendency to be redundant
and meandering when writing in broad terms about historical
developments or literary theory. Her writing is excellent, how
ever, when her attention is more narrowly focused on topics of
particular interest to her. This is especially apparent in the
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). Gwenn Boardman Petersen. The
I
Moon in the Water: Understanding Tanizaki, Kawahata. and Mishima. (Hon
olulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1979). 3. Lippit. p. 12.
71
I
I
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chapters on Tanizaki. Miyamoto Yuriko, and Tomioka Taeko.
These, of course, are precisely the chapters dealing specifically
with dark romanticism and with the process of women's liber
ation.
Other chapters are less well handled. [n particular, the one
on Kawabata seems not only uninspired, but overly simplistic in
its interpretations. For example, "When Komako removes her
geisha makeup in front of the mirror in Shimamura's room, her
clear skin IS revealed and merges into the mountains and the
whiteness of the snow in the background, while her bright red
cheeks shine in the center. In the tableau created by the mirror,
the reality fades away gradually, and the symbolic essence of
Komako's cleanness and nature fuse into one another to create
Shimamura's dreamworld."4 While there is no question that
this is so, the author has ignored any mention of the other side of
Kawabata's carefully crafted counterpoint, which is the sad
reality that her freshness has been obscured by her geisha
makeup. She has been wilted and smudged by her contact with
Shimamura. Surely the point of this is not simply that Komako
was once clean and pure, but rather that Shimamura wants to
grasp and possess beauty, but as soon as he touches it, it is lost.
This same willingness to find a unified image rather than a
contrasting one appears again on page 128 where Lippit dis
cusses the final scene from Snow Country and sees the Milky
Way as the "all inclusive symbol of Shimamura's yearning for
unity." Again, this may be so, but we have to see this cold,
crystal-clear phosphorescence in contrast to the throbbing, rag
ing fire in the cocoon warehouse. It is difficult to ignore such
obvious contrasts as these, not to mention the contrast between
Komako and Y6ko, but Lippit prefers to see them as unities
rather than contrasts.
Five of these eleven chapters, including some of the best
chapters, have appeared previously in print. Apparently they
were included here without any significant modification. It is
unfortunate, however, because a great deal more could have
been done to link the disparate chapters by further developing
certain ideas. In the early chapters the author makes an im
portant issue of the redeeming power of the use of ironic tragi
comedy, especially in her discussion of Tayama Katai's story
Futon. But she fails to point out a variation of this ironic
tragicomedy in her discussion of Kawabata's House of the
Sleeping Beauties. Surely the title Nemureru Bijo suggests the
parallel with the Western fairy tale" Sleeping Beauty, " except
that, in Kawabata's version, far from being a handsome prince,
old Eguchi is an ugly, liver-spotted old toad. He cannot revive
the princesses with a kiss, but can only slobber over them
impotently, and finally ends up killing one of them rather than
bringing her back to life. Certainly the ironic, tragicomic parody
is an important feature of Kawabata's art just as it was for
Tayama Katai, but such links are'never fully exploited in Lip
pit's book.
Similarly, in the chapter on Mishima there is a discussion
of his enthusiasm for Nietzsche's concept of Apollonian-Dio
nysian duality (though here again, curiously, Lippit sees it as a
single, unified thing rather than as a contrasting pair). There are
definite similarities here between Mishima's and Akutagawa's
concern and enthusiasm for Nietzsche's concept. We see this
explicitly expressed in several of Akutagawa's works. particu
larly Hell Screen (Jigokuhen 1918). In the case of both writers
4. Lippi!. p. In
this is a concern that is fundamental to their views of self, art,
and reality. Inclusion here with little revision, however, con
tributes to the rambling and redundant quality of some parts of
the book. On page 76 we have the assertion that in Japan "there
was neither a firmly established bourgeois class nor a religious
orthodoxy" against which artists could rebel. On page 86 (but in
the next chapter) we are again told, "In Taisho [sic] Japan there
was no orthodoxy of religion; nor was there a fully developed
and established bourgeoisie." Though the statement may be
true, no reasonably attentive reader need be told it twice in ten
pages. And so, while individual chapters may be well written
and informative, more could have been done to strengthen the
author's main thesis if some of the themes common to several
writers had been exploited rather than spread through chapters
that are individual and largely unrelated units.
The chapter dealing with the development and collapse of
the proletarian literary movement is good. This is the first
reasonably comprehensive treatment of that movement and of
the government's reaction leading to the conversion or Tenk6 of
many of the writers involved. Earlier treatments in English
merely give an eye-glazing litany of factions, how they splin
tered on ideological grounds, and lists of obscure, second-rate
writers and magazines. Because of their complexity and trivial
ity these earlier studies are virtually unreadable. Lippit, by
contrast, avoids much of the mind-numbing detail and centers
her discussion on the long-term implications of this enforced
conversion.
This chapter provides important background and context
for the earlier chapter on Miyamoto Yuriko. * Lippit is at her
best in this chapter on Miyamoto where there is a firm ideologi
cal basis and a life of commitment and development to discuss
and interpret. This account of the personal odyssey of growth
and liberation is clearly very important to Ms. Lippit personally.
Both here and in the chapter on Tomioka Taeko we see this
expressed in the vigor and enthusiasm of the writing. In both
chapters, Lippit's accomplishment is considerable. It is ex
tremely difficult to write a meaningful essay on a writer when
you have to assume that your audience has not read that writer's
works. Two stories and some fragments by Miyamoto have
been translated, and none of the fiction of Tomioka. 5 And yet
Lippit is able to provide concise plot summaries of key works
and to discuss both authors and their works in a way that is
meaningful and interesting.
One of the consistently irritating things about this book is
the editing, which can only be called sloppy. For the most part
this has to do with the inconsistent use of diacritical marks and
with misspellings. While it would be impossible to list every
case of editorial failure in this book, since they appear on
virtually every page, the reader can refer to page 72 as an
* In the Bulletin ol Concerned Asian Scholars, Vol. 10, No.2 (1978), see
Noriko Lippit's "Literature, Ideology and Women's Happiness; the Autobio
graphical Novels of Miyamoto Yuriko," and her translation of Miyamoto's
"The Family of Koiwai." Also in Vol. 12, No.4 (1980), pp. 18-19, we
published Lippit's translation of "Blind Chinese Soldiers" by Hirabayashi
Taiko. The first number is available for $2.50; the second for $4.00. -The
Editors
5. Tt.te two stories of Miyamoto's that have been translated are "Banshii
Plain," tr. by Yukiko Sakaguchi and Jay Gluck. Ukiyo, cd. by J. Gluck, New
York, Vanguard Press, 1963, pp. 73-80; and "The Koiwai Family." tr. by
Noriko Mizuta Lippit, Bulletin o(Concerned Asian Scholars, 10:2 (April-June
1978). pp. 10-17. There are also selections from the novel Nobuko. tr. by Brett
Nee, Bulletin olCol1cerned Asian Scholars. 7:4 (1975), pp. 44-51.
72
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