1920’s and 1930’s
In spite of the social tensions evident in Japan after World War I, Japan enjoyed a certain economic prosperity in the 1920’s. This was due partly to the conciliatory policies of its foreign minister Shidehara Kijuro (1872-1951), who advocated international cooperation and closer ties with the Western democracies under the umbrella of the League of Nations, in which Japan was a major player, being one of the Big Five and a member of its Council. This conciliatory policy was also helped by the absence of a visible threat to Taiwan and Korea, Japan’s colonial holdings in Asia. As long as it was uncertain whether China’s nationalist leaders under Chiang Kai-Shek would be able to unite that country, it was difficult for right-wing nationalist-militarist groups to fault the government of Japan. The mid-1920’s witnessed the height of the so-called Taisho democracy, named after Emperor Taisho (personal name: Yoshihito; 1879-1926), who reigned from 1912 to 1926 but was confined to the palace due to illness beginning in 1921. We have seen that Japan had terminated its Siberian intervention in 1922, and it went on to renounce its claims to the Shandong peninsula in China, established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1925, signed a number of international treaties to reduce armaments, accept the political status quo in East Asia, and even signed the 1928 Kellog-Briand Treaty that formally outlawed war.
It was probably Japan’s low-profile foreign policy that enraged those of its citizens who called for an activist and tougher policy against those whom they viewed as Japan’s enemies. Top among these enemies were the Chinese nationalists, the Soviet Communists, and the Western democratic powers.
Those who supported right-wing radicalism argued that Japan faced a mortal “red” danger from the Bolsheviks and a similar “white” danger from Western democracies. The leaders of both threats were perceived by some Japanese people to be Jews. Jews were seen as endorsing universal
as opposed to national values, supporting trade unions and strikes in vital services, and espousing women’s equality, freedom of the press, and mod-ernization in all spheres of life. It is only in view of this that it is possible to explain the interest that a number of Japanese thinkers began to show in antisemitism in this country with barely any Jews.
Right-wing thinkers claimed that Japan faced a major threat from the rise of forces over which it had no control: Chinese nationalism, which aspired to unite all the forces in China and terminate Japanese ambitions in that country, international communism, which supported Chinese nationalism, and the Western powers that denied Japan a foothold in their colonies in Asia—Britain in India, Burma (today’s Myanmar), Malaya (now known as Malaysia), and Hong Kong; France in Indochina; Holland in Indonesia; and the United States in the Philippines. It became evident to those thinkers that while the West spoke highly of democracy, equal-ity, and progress, it applied these lofty ideals only to Europe and North America—not to their overseas colonies. The Western democracies were thus accused of hypocricy and “double-speak.” Japan now found itself classed with Germany and Italy as a “have not” country, facing the supe-riority of the Western militaries, led by those of Britain and France. The Soviet Union was still boycotted in the international community and had not yet been admitted to the League of Nations. The United States chose to remain isolationist.
However, as long as Japan’s economy functioned properly, right-wing thinkers found it hard to influence the moderate policies of its civilian lead-ers. When the Japanese economy began to show signs of growing pains, which started with the 1927 banking crisis and increased sharply with the collapse of the international economic system after the October 1929 Wall Street meltdown, much depended on the response of the Japanese govern-ment to the internal and external crises. However, the failure of successive Japanese governments to deal effectively with the deepening economic crisis, the collapse of the market for silk, which was Japan’s major export, and the dramatic growth in unemployment and growing poverty in the agrarian sector led to increasing demands from the middle class for the establish-ment of a strong governestablish-ment that would know how to deal with the exis-tential issues that now faced Japan. The direction was evident: the Japanese armed forces were seen as patriotic, possessing a virtuous spirit and samurai values, and being a pure non-corrupt body, and it was widely felt that they would be the institution that would save Japan from its loss of direction, economic collapse, national degeneration, and social disintegration.
31
Nazi Antisemitism and its Influence in Japan in the 1920’s and 1930’s
In the mid-1920’s, a number of Japanese scholars began to show inter-est in the theories of a right-wing nationalist party in Germany, little-known at the time, called the National Socialist Workers Party. It was headed by an Austrian-born former corporal named Adolph Hitler (1882-1945), who was unknown outside Germany but who was making a name for himself in radical right-wing German politics.1 Few in Japan, though, read his book Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”). The first part of the book was written while Hitler was serving a prison term in Bavaria’s Landsberg jail following the failure of his attempted putsch (uprising) in 1923. The second part was written in 1925-1927, after his release.
If those Japanese people who did pay attention to the book had delved into it deeper, they would have found some unpleasant and basically neg-ative descriptions of their own country and race and of Asian people in general. Parts of Mein Kampf were translated into Japanese as early as 1925 and apparently provoked little interest.
One of the many problems with the tract had to do with Hitler’s racist doctrine and his attitude to the “Yellow” race. Racism stood at the heart of his beliefs, which were based on the inequality not only of individuals but also of entire races. The Aryan race, headed by the Germans, was of course considered the master race. They were the elite of humanity, the “creators of culture.” The Jews were described as the exact opposite, “destroyers of culture.” All other nations, including Japan, were at best “transferers of cul-ture.” Those who read the Japanese translation may have noted the distinc-tion Hitler made between Aryans and other races, ascribing to the “Yellow”
races an inferior position. After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, and when Mein Kampf was again distributed in Japan in 1937, Hitler’s views on the Asian peoples were largely not made available to Japanese readers. His position, though, had not changed: the Japanese were placed between the master race and the hated Jews.
Doubts lingered in Japan over the validity and true value of Hitler’s racial doctrines. It was also somewhat difficult for Japanese readers of Mein Kampf to relate to Hitler’s views of the Jews as the sources of all evil and enemies of not only Germany but also the entire world, partly because they had little experience with Jews, and those very few who had more experi-ence with them generally had a positive view of them.
But as Japan slowly became isolated from the Western world, some sought the culprits responsible for this situation. Thus it was easy to sell Hitler’s ideas about the Jews to a growing number of Japanese officers, intel-lectuals, and even academics. The new Japanese antisemites now accepted
the idea that Jews were headstrong and known for their practice of mutual assistance. It was bandied about that while they refused to assimilate into other peoples, the Jews penetrated every sphere they could, dominated the Western banking system in order to dominate capitalist countries, directed the international economy, media, cinema, theater, literature, and arts, and exploited the entire world through the capitalist and nation-undermining Marxist theories. The Jews were seen as disseminators of liberal, secular, universal, democratic, and Marxist ideas. One writer, Sakai Shogun (1870-1939) argued that Christianity, which emerged out of Judaism, destroyed the Roman Empire, and that religion was a Jewish reactionary notion. Jews, he argued, were attempting to subjugate the world by denying national-ism and extolling cosmopolitannational-ism and universalnational-ism. Similar charges were leveled at Jews by the Soviet communists at the same time.2
Another Japanese scholar argued that the Jews had already succeeded in dominating Britain and the United States and had caused those two nations to degenerate. Now they were trying to undermine Germany from within. The Jews were the ones who had stabbed Germany in the back at the end of the First World War by spreading the poison of revolution in the German army and navy, they were the ones who had pushed the United States into the war, and furthermore they had spread communism.3 Such ideas fell on open and willing minds in Japan of the mid-1930’s, especially after many Japanese people began to feel that the West was trying to rein in Japan’s expansionist ambitions on the Asian mainland. The best proof of this effort on the part of the West was the policy of Western nations towards Japan’s seizure of Manchuria beginning in 1931.