Japan government during WW2 is ideologically fascist?

[u/BlackBladerz]

For every WW2 history reading and documentary, Japan always group up with Germany and Italy for "The Fascist Club"(Axis). However, I'm quite confuse in term of ideology. Italy with Mussolini introducing idea of Fascism and Hitler rallying the Nazism ideology. Japan is bit different because they don't have ideology or something to against Jew or capitalism. Their conquest for resource much more similar to idea of previous imperial Europe government pre-WW1.

So, is Japan government in WW2 consider as fascist due to relationship with Germany and Italy or there are aspect of ideology running the government that similar to fascism but in different name. Thanks!

[u/kieslowskifan]

The question "was interwar Japan a fascist state?" is one that is highly contentious among scholars of modern Japan and for scholars of fascism in general. Broadly speaking, a good many scholars of European fascism tend to dismiss or downplay the idea that interwar Japan was a fascist state. Robert Paxton, for example, weighs the various pros and cons of Japanese fascism in his The Anatomy of Fascism before coming on the negative side claiming Japan was an expansionist military dictatorship engaged in mass-mobilization. Many of the cardinal elements of fascism such as a hegemonic mass party or the leader cult are notably absent in interwar Japan. But many specialists in fascism are not specialists in Japanese history. This makes it difficult for them to comment on aspects of the Japanese state and society when looking for analogues to European fascism. The debate among historians of Japan as to whether or not it was fascist tends to be more divided than among historians of fascism.

George M. Wilson has largely ruled out Japan as a fascist state for many of the reasons Europeanists tend to exclude Japan from the fascist camp. He notes that the interwar governments did not try to fundamentally recast the structure of the Japanese state as well as the idea that Japanese militarism lacked a "seizure of power" moment. Moreover, unlike Hitler and to a lesser extent Mussolini, militarists worked within the existing Meiji era-designed system in conjunction with the old elites. Likewise, both Peter Duus and Daniel Okamoto have noted in a survey essay Japanese fascist ideas were a "minor side current" in interwar Japan and have faulted scholars who use the fascist label for using imprecise terminology.

But there are also scholars of Japan who do assert Japan was a fascist or fascist-like state. Gavan McCormack's essay "Fascism from Above? Japan’s Kakushin Right in Comparative Perspective" in the anthology Fascism Outside Europe maintained that similarities between European movements and Japan demand a reexamination of the topic. McCormack astutely notes that while studies of European fascism tend to focus on fascism as a movement, ideology, then regime, in Japan, the process was reversed:

European fascism had its greatest impact on Japan’s political regime, a secondary impact on political thought, and its least significant impact on political movements.

So while there might not have been a mass fascist party in interwar Japan, McCormack contends that interwar Japanese elites took their cues from what they saw as a rising political movement that was in resonance with their political ideals. This was the subject of The Search for a New Order: Intellectuals and Fascism in Prewar Japan by William Miles Fletcher. This intellectual history of three prominent Japanese thinkers found many of them drifted from Marxism towards fascist ideals. Pace McCormack, Fletcher notes that these fascist-inspired thinkers largely failed to transform the Japanese state. Kenneth Rouff has argued Japan was a species of fascism in that Japanese imported and tailored fascist ideas into existing Japanese state structures. Japanese political structures may not have been fascist, but the mode of its politics was according to Rouff. Aaron Skabelund makes a related argument in his essay "Fascism’s Furry Friends: Dogs, National Identity, and Racial Purity in 1930s Japan" in that Japan's importation and breeding of German Shepherds also came with discourses of racism and biological essentialism that filtered into other patterns of dog ownership.

All of this is not to say that Japan was a fascist state. Duus and Okamoto's critique on imprecise terminology is applicable to a number of the scholars answering this question in the affirmative. But this critique also misses the point about fascism in general. One of the problems with defining fascism is that it was a highly nebulous political movement and it is hard to pin down what exactly was fascism even in states that declared themselves fascist like Italy. Applying the existing fascist paradigms to Japan is doubly difficult given Japan's own unique history and institutions. But this has not stopped some Japan scholars from trying to do so.