Tosaka Jun and Fascism

This post begins to consider how Japanese scholars have justified the use of the term ‘fascism,’ and I thought it important to start with Tosaka Jun, who wrote during the period which some define as fascist. Tosaka was a Marxist philosopher who published many of his thoughts on fascism in Japan in his book, The Japanese Ideology, and various other publications prior to his arrest in 1938. He was released in 1940, but reincarcerated in 1944 – he died in jail the following year, just before war’s end. This post will probably be very confusing or cluttered – I struggle with interpreting philosophical texts, and Tosaka’s is as complex as any. Writing this is more to help get my thoughts in order than to present a decent overview of his theories.

As an analyst of fascism, Tosaka has his limits. Marxist that he was, Tosaka was consistently unwilling to recognise the involvement of fellow socialists in Japanese fascism. Kita Ikki, for instance, at times described himself as a socialist yet in retrospect is viewed as one of the most important figures in Japanese fascism; he especially influenced the participants in a failed 1936 coup which Maruyama Masao amongst others has characterised as the apogee of fascism in Japan. Tosaka was also, in his frustration at the state of Japanese politics, overeager to equate any and all non-Marxists with fascism, including numerous overtly antifascist liberals. However, his writings still offer some convincing insights on the shape of fascism and Japan and the value of that term.

The 1930s had seen the rise of an ideology Tosaka calls Japanism, proliferated less through politics than through culture. Japanists often vocally rejected fascism as a foreign import and engaged in debates with self-proclaimed Japanese national socialists throughout the period. They instead adopted a form of traditionalism predicated on an authentic, transhistorical Japanese culture. However, as Reto Hofmann has argued, many of these writers still embodied fascism; their rejection was only a ‘fascist critique of fascism.’[1] In their search for an authentic culture, their appeals to a mythical past, and their search for a national totality, the Japanists were heavily fascistic even as they rejected the term.

For Tosaka, the military outlook of Japanism was core to Japanese fascism, and the military itself was defined by its relation to the ‘commander-in-chief’ (the emperor). Under the Meiji Constitution, the military was effectively only accountable to the emperor, which Tosaka describes as a ‘special privilege.’ If the military is defined by its relation to a sacred leader or ideal, class stratification within it breaks down – the figure of the soldier becomes universal. Indeed, Tosaka writes in The Fate of Japanism that, in the language of Japanists and the state, the entire nation, especially rural Japanese, were described as ‘soldiers.’ This language is familiar; the Nazis similarly militarised culture and society in pursuit of a totalitarian nation. More to the point, the ideological transformation of all Japanese into soldiers, and the transformation of the soldier into a privileged subject through the emperor, worked, in Tosaka’s formulation, to unify all individuals under the ideal of the nation.[2]

A more interesting piece for me, though, is The Police Function, released in 1935 and reprinted in 1937. Tanaka makes some very interesting observations. First, that the institution of policing was breaking down the division of public and private within Japanese society. The Kempeitai or ‘Thought Police’, in controlling the private realm of thoughts, writing and the family, had rendered the private public. The police had thus become responsible for a developing totalitarianism and were, in this sense, analogous to the Nazi state.

Secondly, and more crucially, Tosaka theorises what makes a gang. His essay was a response to the police’s new commitment to prosecuting right-wing gangs after years of targeting only the left, though Tosaka points out that only the most insignificant of gangs are dealt with by the police purely to present themselves as nonpartisan. For Tosaka, a gang seems to have two key features; first, that it is motivated by a ‘principle’ or ‘ideal pretension’, and second, that it is violent. The vigilantes who murdered anarchists and Koreans following the 1923 Kanto Earthquake were motivated by the principles of xenophobia or anticommunism; the Seiyukai, Tosaka writes, has political principles and would become a gang if one of its members were to attack someone on the Diet floor.[3]

These ideas interest me because they imply that fascism is akin to ‘gang-ness.’ Tosaka makes this idea clear in his writings, describing the police as a manifestation of vigilantism.[4] But importantly, he justifies this assertion be recounting the police’s militarisation, including ostentatious parades and uniforms. Militaristic aesthetics, it seems, equate for Tosaka ‘gang-ness.’ As we’ve seen, a core component of Japanism was its transformation of Japan into a nation of soldiers – does this not equate to a gang-ification of society? After all, the Japanese state and military in particular was committing imperialistic violence in the name of a principle, emperorism: Tosaka’s two qualifiers of ‘gang-ness.’

Scholars have sometimes argued that Japan was never fascist due to the absence of a mass mobilisation in the style of German Brownshirts or Italian Blackshirts. These groups operated effectively as gangs – independent, at first criminal organisations based on shared principles. What Tosaka’s work seems to imply, at least to me, is that in Japan it was the military and police who served this function. In this sense, any expression of militarism can be viewed as embodying Japanism and, by extension, fascism. I would not go so far as to call all militarism fascistic, but Tosaka’s work does help to conceive of how the military can easily slide into fascism.

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[1] Reto Hofmann, The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915-1952 (Cornell, 2015), 81.

[2] Tosaka Jun and John Person (trans.), ‘The Fate of Japanism: From Fascism to Emperorism’, in Ken C. Kawashima et. al. (eds.), Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader (Cornell, 2013), 59-68.

[3] Tosaka Jun and Ken C. Kawashima (trans.), ‘The Police Function’, in Kawashima et. al. (eds.), Tosaka Jun, 97-102.

[4] Ken C. Kawashima, ‘Notes toward a  Critical Analysis of Chronic  Recession and Ideology: Tosaka Jun on the Police Function’, in Kawashima et. al. (eds.), Tosaka Jun, 255-273.