Of Showa^[*] Politics but Not in It

In an account of limited scope such as this one, some injustice to the subject and his concerns is unavoidable. Nuances are missed, insights overlooked. I have not, unfortunately, been able to capture the rich variety of voices with which Warera articulated its criticisms and program for social reconstruction. True, Nyozekan was Warera : but both were more than synonyms for each other, and both changed. At the risk of schematizing too much, I must now try to put Nyozekan in some kind of perspective by considering his work in the light of the diverging paths taken by three major contributors to the journal, Nyozekan himself, Oyama Ikuo^[*] , and Kawakami Hajime. The latter two had been associated with Nyozekan at the Osaka Asahi . Kawakami's reports of prewar London, and his enormously famous Binbo monogatari^[*] (Tales of poverty) had appeared on its pages. Oyama^[*] , whose career up to 1932 in many ways parallels that of Hobhouse, had despite student protests been forced to resign his post at Waseda University in the wake of the violent "Waseda Incident" of 1917, and joined the Asahi 's editorial staff.^[143] Along with Nyozekan, he had left the paper at the time of the "White Rainbow" trial and was prominent among the founders of Warera . Each of the three men used the journal as a home base from which to pursue their linked, but increasingly divergent, destinies. In the decade between 1922 and 1932, each of the three made a choice of weapons in the social struggle that drove them apart, never, to be sure, into mutual hostility, but nonetheless apart.

This was the period punctuated, in 1925, by the enactment of universal male suffrage and the Peace Preservation Law. While the former vir-

tually guaranteed the mushroomlike growth of legal "proletarian" parties, the latter sought to ensure that none of their programs could ever become reality. In this sense, we may say that the left hand knew what the right hand was doing, and vice versa. By 1925 Oyama^[*] , having been reinstated at Waseda, was regarded as the opinion leader among progressives. He was as ever idolized by his students. He and Kawakami, professor of economics at Kyoto University, reigned as the "Twin Bulwarks of the East and West" (Tozai no soheki^[*] ) among publicists of the left social movement. Between 1921 and 1925 Kawakami had "drawn close" to Marxism. Along with his monthly, Shakai mondai kenkyu^[*] (Studies in social problems), Kawakami published a translation of Marx's Wage Labor and Capital and authored Yuibutsu shikan ryakkai (An outline of the materialist view of history) and Shihonshugi keizaigaku no shiteki hatten (The historical development of capitalist economics). The latter work was criticized by Kushida Tamizo^[*] , Kawakami's student and a Warera contributor, for its moral idealization of the proletariat. This and other criticism—notably that of Fukumoto Kazuo that Kawakami's work had an inconsistent and deficient theoretical foundation—prompted Kawakami to embark on an intensive and selfcritical examination of his Marxism.

The enactment, meanwhile, of universal male suffrage and the political organization of the proletariat was in the eyes of both Oyama^[*] and Kawakami a signal opportunity. Oyama, with Nyozekan's support, was the first to take the plunge, when in 1926 he accepted the chairmanship of the newly formed Worker-Farmer Party (Rodo Nomin To^[*] , or Ronoto^[*] ). Compelled on this account to resign once again from Waseda, Oyama stood for election to the Diet from Kagawa. True, the Ronoto was regarded as the legal arm of the Communist Party. On the other hand, Oyama had the support of the local peasant movement. Admittedly, the association with Bolshevism was dangerous, but Oyama was probably not prepared for the viciousness of the Tanaka government's repression of the party. He was, needless to say, defeated. Nyozekan commented mordantly that "If Oyama could have gotten elected, so could have one of the stone lanterns at the [nearby] Kotohira Shrine."^[144] (Oyama's dramatic campaign slogan turned out to be prophetic. "In this election," he proclaimed, "we are headed to a battleground—and to our graves." Two years later, Yamamoto Senji, a Kyoto University biologist elected on the Ronoto ticket, was stabbed to death by a right-wing terrorist.) Oyama was soon pushed to the forefront of the legal left. He weathered the dissolution of the Ronoto by official order following the mass arrest

of Communists and their sympathizers in March 1928. And despite "blistering" criticism by the Communist Party (which followed the lead of the Comintern), Oyama^[*] was among the founders of the Shin Ronoto^[*] in 1929, and finally elected to the Diet in 1930 as a representative from Tokyo's fifth electoral district. After the Manchurian Incident, however, Oyama felt that the tide of reaction had made his political activity both futile and dangerous. On the advice of Nyozekan, Maruyama Kanji, and others, Oyama and his wife left Japan for the United States in February 1932. They returned sixteen years later.

The formation of the Shin Ronoto proved to be the parting of the ways for Kawakami and Oyama. The former, along with Hososako Kanemitsu, had been intimately involved in founding the party as a transitional organ in anticipation of a resurrected JCP. But the Party, now underground, regarded the new organization as a rightist-deviant betrayal, and vilified it from the first. Before long Kawakami and Hososako adopted this line. From this point onward Oyama, already considered a Communist and sellout to Russia by the bourgeois parties, was enrolled among the "betrayers" of the left. As for Kawakami, he had already been expelled from the university following the March 1928 arrests. Returning to journalism and translation, he wrote a "Leninist" Tales of Poverty : II, began translating Capital in 1931, translated the Comintern's 1932 Theses for Akahata , and finally joined the Party later that year. After this "supreme moment" in his life, Kawakami went underground, but he was arrested in January 1933. Although he foreswore any further active involvement in the movement, Kawakami never repudiated the ends or means adopted by the Party: he remained a "theoretical" non-apostate. Kawakami's subsequent career need not detain us here. Let us merely take stock of what became of Nyozekan's Warera colleagues. Oyama went into politics, though to Nyozekan's mind he did not possess the necessary ambition, guile, or sangfroid, eventually finding exile the only logical step to take. Kawakami moved from legal to illegal political activity, was arrested, and spent five long years in prison. The point is that both men did what Nyozekan would not and could not: joined the organized struggle for political power. Nyozekan's personal motto, it will be recalled, was danjite okonawazu : "[Be] resolute in not taking action." With the passage of suffrage in 1925, this position obviously took on new meaning. Not that Nyozekan's contribution would have been greater had he chosen to okonau , to act. The point is that the political fates of Oyama and Kawakami clearly suggest what might have happened if he had.

Nyozekan, Oyama^[*] , and Kawakami were all three of them consistent. But we come now to a point in the story where drastic shifts in direction became the order of the day as the left responded to the reactionary political situation. Aside from complete submersion in unpolitical life (the "cocoon" option), one choice open to public outsiders was repudiation of the left and some degree of active involvement in rightist politics. This was tenko^[*] in the "classic" sense of Sano Manabu, Nabeyama Sadachika, Hayashi Fusao, and Akamatsu Katsumaro. But this is to view the matter too narrowly. The broader question, beyond the organizational impact of mass defection from the JCP, concerns the generalized "return to Japan" (Nihon e no kaiki ) by leftist intellectuals after 1933. Here, unlike Oyama and Kawakami, Nyozekan was involved. However, we can treat his "return"—the issue of tenko broadly conceived—only after considering the crisis that engendered it. We must, in short, place Nyozekan and ourselves amidst the cross-currents of Japanese fascism.

By the last years of the 1920s Warera was on its way to becoming a financial basket case. Loss of revenue through periodic run-ins with the censors and postal authorities, fires, and the death of a long-time patron in 1929 all took their toll. The whole tenor of the times seemed to militate against Warera 's survival. The "rise of the military" and right-wing terror against the backdrop of depression needs no rehearsal here.

Overall, Warera in its last years continued along the lines suggested in the two Critiques . But now certain problems only adumbrated there—because as social developments they were present then only in germ—came to the fore. A good deal of attention is given to the Japanese role in Manchuria, especially that played by the army and the South Manchurian Railroad (Mantetsu). Nyozekan's concern was not the autonomous function of these organizations. He asked, rather, how they fit into the larger dynamic of the expansion of Japanese capitalism, and how this dynamic in turn was tied into the mutual relations of the Japanese bourgeoisie in the state and political parties. That is, Nyozekan, though he would not have used the term, was moving toward an analysis of "superstructural" problems as such in Japanese capitalism. It is intriguing to note in this connection that in 1926 and 1928 Nyozekan made month-long speaking tours of Manchuria and North China, both at the invitation of Mantetsu itself.

At the same time, Nyozekan continued to write on the related problems of ideology and consciousness. In 1932 Iwanami published a long article by Nyozekan on the production of ideology, which dealt with art

in its relation to the "reality" of social movement, a theme he had treated a decade earlier. By this time, however, Nyozekan found himself sharing the current with such Marxist literary critics as Kobori Jinji and Kurahara Korehito.^[145] But it is well to remember that inevitable and "conscious" evolution, not a vanguard-directed social revolution, remained Nyozekan's chief value position, despite their shared categories of analysis.

As the earlier sketches of the careers of Oyama^[*] and Kawakami show, the late 1920s and early 1930s marked a final act in the "late Taisho^[*] " discovery of society. The logic of radicalization was playing itself out: Warera published its final issue, the 128th since 1919, in March 1930. Included in its pages was a short announcement of a change in title, to Hihan —Criticism. For twelve years, Warera had "put the whip" to society and history; the contrivances of the mind, conscious and unconscious, had about run their course, while "like a mule that has overeaten," society would seem to have stood stock still. That is, the problem remained a problem, and now "new energy, new weapons, new methods" were needed to "kick" society in the mind and force it to move.^[146]Hihan made its first appearance in May 1930. With the Esperanto subtitle La Kritiko Socialista (later just La Kritiko ) the journal ran for four years, publishing forty-two issues, of which two were banned, others censored so severely as to be illegible.^[147]

Oyama Ikuo had been insisting since 1925 that the proper role for Warera was as the "theoretical organ" of the working class, an explicit link between the proletariat's theory and practice.^[148] Nyozekan had demurred, first because he did not want to set the journal up as an arm of the "vanguard" within the organized revolutionary struggle. As Royama Masamichi^[*] points out, Nyozekan regarded the Bolshevik idea of a vanguard party as an anachronism and a weapon specific to the far more backward conditions Lenin had faced in Russia.^[149] We saw earlier that Nyozekan regarded revolution as historically and socially unnecessary for Japan. Yet he speaks of the need for "new energy, new weapons, new methods" to "kick" society and "make it move." All very vague and allusive language, to be sure. Clearly Nyozekan is signaling a break from the counsels of patience in the earlier Critiques . As Tanaka Hiroshi remarks, Nyozekan had replaced Warera 's essentially moral critique of the state as an abuser of power with analysis and critique of the state as the instrument of a late-capitalist ruling class. In this respect, the earlier Critiques are transitional, since the link between change in the social relations of production and in social consciousness is clearly made. Ta-

naka is careful to point out that if anything, the change from Warera to Hihan represents an intensification of critical focus rather than an embrace of "the unity of theory and practice."^[150] Nevertheless, one senses a drop of despair in Hihan . The confidence that had animated Warera , that change would come "as surely as the hands of a clock turn" is missing. Had Nyozekan misjudged the volume and force of the reactionary tide he had identified a decade before? Hihan vibrates with the perception that "something" had happened, a qualitative change in world (and hence Japanese) politics and society, ominous in nature and not soon to disappear. Japan, in short, was turning fascist.

Hihan , with some hints in the last issues of Warera , can be read as an attempt to analyze and counter the threat of fascism theoretically. Nyozekan's articles on the subject were in short order prepared for publication as a book. Appearing on 20 November 1932, Nihon fuashizumu hihan (Critique of Japanese fascism) was banned the same day, and reissued in heavily censored form on 12 December.^[151]

How and when did Nyozekan come to view Japanese fascism as a possibility? At what point did the development of Japanese politics and society seem to him congruent with what contemporary European and Soviet analysts described as fascism? To what degree, and with what differences? For a public outsider with Nyozekan's background to broach this issue in print was clearly a risk. Vis-à-vis not only the state, but also the Japanese left, he was walking a tightrope. Hence the second strand of our discussion: Where did Nyozekan's critique situate him? To what consequences did the Critique and his other activities during these years lead? What, in other words, were the personal consequences of his public stance? Finally, what legacy did Nyozekan's experience leave for other, later public outsiders?

Limitations of space permit only a rough outline of how these two strands are woven together in the Critique . The "imported" theories of fascism that inform Nyozekan's analysis all shared the perception that fascism was a form of counterrevolution. Thus its definition and analysis were of greatest concern to the revolutionary forces, for whom the fight against it was an urgent theoretical and practical necessity. It was not until 1933 (with some exceptions) that non-Marxists began to direct their critical attention to fascism. Nyozekan's work, since it dates from 1928–31, naturally reflects the viewpoints and concerns of revolutionary Marxist writers, both those working within Comintern orthodoxy and others who formed the various "side currents" of the debate.

The identification of a tide of reaction after the events of 1917–18

was, of course, common to all parties. The first wave had come with the attempt by the West (and Japan) to encircle and destroy the Soviet Union; next, there was the role of social democracy in the collapse of socialist revolutions in Germany, Hungary, and Austria; and, third, the assumption by Mussolini of power in Italy. This wave of counterrevolution appeared to most analysts in the revolutionary camp as an attempt by parliamentary regimes in late-developing capitalist states to shore up a declining finance capital by means of petty bourgeois (in some cases social democratic) shock troops. Thus between 1922 and 1931 the Comintern was led to define fascism as (in 1924) "one of the classic forms of counterrevolution in the epoch when capitalist society is decaying." As Stalin put it, fascism was "the bourgeoisie's fighting organization" and relied "on the active support of Social Democracy."^[152] It is beyond my purpose to examine the consequences for the left—widely acknowledged to have been catastrophic—of the Comintern's identification of "social fascism" as the greatest enemy of the proletariat. In any case, when after 1928 Stalinism "fell like a hood" over Soviet culture,^[153] potentially fruitful and liberating debate on fascism was an early victim, bringing with it "a widening divorce between the Comintern's policy and the actual situation, internationally and within each country."^[154]

Now although the concept of fascism rested on the "economic" assumption that capitalism had entered its final crisis, it is important to keep in mind that the crisis itself, while springing from wartime destruction and economic dislocation throughout the 1920s, was also social and political in expression. Indeed one of the egregious failures of the Comintern theses on fascism was the neglect both of the interclass (social) and cultural (ideological) aspects of counterrevolution. Although the 1929 crash and Hitler's rise to power in 1933 did force a tactical shift—the call for communist parties to join with social democracy in an antifascist "Popular Front"—this "did not reflect," one critic notes, "any significant advance in comprehension."^[155]

These developments, of course, came after Nyozekan had published his analyses. For him, late 1931—the aftermath of the Manchurian Incident—represented the climax of the process up to that point. Thus it is all the more interesting to note the similarities between Nyozekan's ideas and those generated from among the "side currents" of the contemporary European debate on fascism. Indeed, it was only here that attempts were made to flesh out the phenomenon's social and cultural dimensions. None denied what Gavan McCormack calls the "capitalist essence" of fascism. But its contradictory ideological tendencies, strength

among the petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and the mechanisms by which the fascist movement articulated with capitalist states would have lain virtually unexamined were it not for such unorthodox commentators as Karl Radek, Clara Zetkin, and August Thalheimer. One can see in their insights strands of thought shared with Nyozekan. How this is so will become clear in due course. The question of influence is impossible to resolve and may be irrelevant. But the congruence in certain areas is not.

Nyozekan did not consider his Critique a work of "abstract theory." Rather it aimed at understanding "concrete political phenomena" in Japan. And although not meant as prophecy, Nyozekan felt that the course taken by Japanese politics—the end of party cabinets and the final turn toward open military aggression—had borne out his analyses.^[156] They are a blend of close reading of political developments in Japan from 1929 to 1932, and comparative "social science"; that is, a class analysis of "Japanese" fascism that, while it employs Marxist formulations, comes to conclusions quite different from the Comintern and contemporary Koza-ha^[*] positions. In fact the term "emperor-system absolutism" (tennosei zettaishugi^[*] ), the linchpin of the prewar Koza-ha characterization of the modern Japanese state, is conspicuous in Nyozekan's Critique by its absence, even in disguised form.

The Critique embraces two theses. First, fascism as a potentially dominant political form emerges preeminently in "late-developing" capitalist states such as Italy and Japan, where bourgeois social power has historically been weak, and where the postwar economic crisis has shaken an already exclusivist, "oligarchic" parliamentary system. (The case of Germany, with its powerful Social Democratic Party, comes immediately to mind as a counterexample to the type of parliamentary system dominant in a potentially fascist regime. At the time Nyozekan wrote, of course, the Nazi takeover was only a speculative possibility.) Ultimately, fascism serves to reinforce capitalism and its "bourgeois dictatorship" by the elimination of all organized legal opposition, especially that of the working class. Thus fascism need not mean the dismantling of parliamentary institutions per se, only the removal from them of working-class representation.^[157]

Here we come to the second and larger thesis, which revolves around the role of social classes and groups in the achievement of fascist ends. We must understand that no concept of an all-pervasive rationality is at work in the idea that one class can achieve its ends through the manipulation of another. The sense is closer to the "playing out" or expression

of a "nature" determined by the total social being of a given class—its relation to other classes and to the national past.^[158] Members of a class cannot but be what they are, and in doing so can serve two masters without being conscious of the fact. Thus, in explaining fascism, Nyozekan joins with Radek and Zetkin, who "recognized as early as 1923" its petty bourgeois roots and appeal, 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 Comintern in the same year, reminded her audience that fascism was a "movement of the hungry, the suffering, the poverty-stricken, the frustrated."^[159] That is, fascism as a movement depended on the mobilization of petty bourgeois fears of displacement, especially by the working class from below. It was a mistake, therefore, to make an enemy of social democracy at a time when, on the contrary, an alliance against capitalism and (though Nyozekan could not have said so) for the overthrow of the capitalist state was necessary.^[160] This was not to deny petty bourgeois hostility to the working class; and that the petty bourgeoisie was (in theory) susceptible to mobilization/manipulation from either side. It played, as Nyozekan put it, a "pendulum" role. Lacking a clear "class attitude" of their own, the groups that make up the "middle stratum" ("small landowners and shopkeepers," etc.) are driven back into reactionary chauvinistic nationalism—the defensiveness of the tribe under attack.^[161] This chauvinism took as its prime target the parliamentary status quo, its attack taking shape as a call for order and justice for the little man, and for an end to the anarchic internationalism and "liberalism" of big capital. It is similarly opposed to the true internationalist socialism of the working class—the internationalism so decisively rejected by the majority of social democratic parties in 1914, which is the only possible defense against fascism.^[162]

Nyozekan's point, however, is not to idealize an existing hero-class but to expose the political tendencies of the middle stratum under certain conditions: the greater the development of bourgeois democracy in a society, and the greater the representation enjoyed by the working class, the smaller the chances of fascism developing when capitalism experiences a serious crisis. However, the obverse is also true; even a democratic society long accustomed to political stability will face, as Britain did after 1929, the internal threat of fascistization in the name of order. This was the lesson Nyozekan drew from Oswald Moseley's breakaway from the Labour Party and his creation of the British Union of Fas-

cists.^[163] Nyozekan does not deal in absolutes, but rather in terms of degree and extent. Fascism was not a ready-made article that could be imposed on a social and political system by a determined enemy, whether internal or external. It was to some degree an "organic" development. Though vitally affected by and transforming that system's relations with the outside, fascism was essentially domestic in its genesis. Its growth (from movement to state?) could be gradual and legal, or violent and illegal. The removal of a fascist regime was of course another matter. Writing in the aftermath of the Manchurian Incident, Nyozekan contemplated the prospect of a second "World War" between fascist and bourgeois democratic (and socialist) regimes. The cure for fascism was sure to be violent.^[164]

Let us consider how Nyozekan applies his argument to Japan. His first thesis, as we saw, concerned the general function of fascism. The second outlined the petty bourgeois roots of the phenomenon but stressed, on the basis of the Italian example, the cooptation of "primitive" fascism as the regime made its peace with capitalism. In discussing Japan, Nyozekan arrived at a formula that was to see lasting service. This was "cool fascism" (sometimes "cold" or "legal" fascism): the idea that, in Japan at least, with the petty bourgeois "movement" too fragmented to coalesce into a single political force, but too strong to ignore, fascism would come about not only without the destruction of, but indeed through, the existing institutions of government. That is, elements within the state and political parties would gradually make it their purpose to destroy independent working-class organizations and blunt, in the name of national unity and harmony, all opposition from within the bourgeois camp.^[165] Thus: "I believe that in Japan, too, it is not violent, but legal, cool fascism now preeminently taking shape. Before long middleclass fascism will be absorbed [goryu seshimerareru^[*] ] into cool fascism. If we consider Japan an advanced capitalist nation, that, in formal terms, is the course fascism will take."^[166]

In the realization of cool fascism, it is the petty bourgeois movement that provides the necessary destabilization as it seeks by its own violence to counteract the threat to the system from the radicalized working class. That is, it creates the desire for order, and having done so, it is to be "melted into the furnace" of the "cool fascist" dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (an odd mixture of metaphors).^[167] In the economic realm, fascism serves capitalism in analogous fashion: "it erects a bulwark against collapse using the [ideology] of small and middling industry and

commerce."^[168] After 1929, of course, this bulwark, far from having been strengthened, was all the more easily absorbed through the process of the concentration of capital.

Nyozekan does not seem to have regarded Japanese "cool fascism" as a kind of Bonapartism. That is, he did not accept the idea of "class equilibrium" maintained, or a power vacuum filled, by an autonomous fascist state.^[169] Rather, he took the opposite, eclectic tack of trying to subsume the increasingly powerful influence of segments of the military within the category of the middle stratum. Assuming a correspondence between the upper stratum of the bourgeoisie and that of the military, and between the middle stratum (petty bourgeoisie) and middle echelons of the military, Nyozekan argues that in fact the conflict emerging between the "Young Officers" (he does not use this term) and their civilian allies on the one hand and the entrenched bureaucrats of the upper echelon of the army on the other was one of class.^[170] And just as the ideology of the middle differs from that of the upper stratum in society as a whole, so, too, within the military. Just as the petty bourgeoisie's construction of social reality, when threatened, resorted to irrationalist chauvinism—as was proven, to the profound shock and disgust of many progressives at the time of the Great Kanto Earthquake—so, too, the middle ranks of the military were the most determined to impel Japan toward aggressive territorial expansion as a solution to overpopulation and rural poverty. Both, finally, were the first to resort to violent methods in domestic politics.^[171] The question becomes, how is this petty bourgeois front to be absorbed into the ranks of cool fascism? Is this a conditio sine qua non for any development of fascism in Japan? It is difficult, in Nyozekan's Critique , to see what the mechanism of absorption (or de-fanging) is to be. And it is not surprising to find that contemporary Marxist commentators, like Shinomura Satoshi, found the assumption that fascism in Japan would ultimately triumph through existing institutions to reflect an "undialectical grasp" of the problem: "So long as the soil for the cultivation of fascism exists, we must account it a crucial error to recognize in it only the growth of 'cool' or 'legal' fascism while denying that of fascism proper (honrai no )." There is a "practical [jissenteki ] danger" that "by confining the emergence of fascism to one or the other type, our [the party's] praxis will fall completely into the clutches of the bourgeoisie's maneuvers."^[172]

However, Nyozekan does at least try to outline the process of absorption. He hints, first, that in the case of the military (in regard to which censorship must have been extraordinarily rigorous) it will be

violent. Here, of course, Nyozekan was right. He also shows, through an examination of contemporary Japanist groups and their platforms, that "fascist" organizations in Japan's rural districts and towns, while avowedly anticapitalist, were frequently under the control of local bigwigs with connections to the major parties. These organizations in fact gloried in their service to counterrevolution. Anticommunism, rather than anticapitalism, was their great point of pride.^[173] (Thus Nyozekan was probably not surprised that such groups went over to the cause of capital [ = the state] once the final attempt by officers of the Imperial Way faction at a coup d'état failed. They had lost their only focus of activity outside the state itself.) But what of the relation between zaibatsu capital, state bureaucracy, and the parties as a whole? How did Nyozekan envision their eventual role in the development of a fascist regime in Japan?

As of mid 1932, portents of the development of cool fascism were coming, in Nyozekan's view, from the parties. These signs, of course, came after the government's apparent acquiescence in the army's moves in Manchuria, after the March coup d'état attempt, and after the open repression of the left, beginning in 1928. Nyozekan had in mind particularly the activities of Home Minister Adachi Kenzo^[*] (1864–1948), whose "boycott" of cabinet business and call for a government of "national unity" had brought down the Minseito^[*] cabinet of Wakatsuki Reijiro^[*] at the end of 1931. Having caused the collapse of the government (and of a cabinet led by his own party), Adachi bolted from the Minseito and, with the famous "Showa^[*] Restorationist" Nakano Seigo^[*] , formed the Kokumin Domei^[*] . How did Nyozekan interpret these moves? To better understand his position, we must take a small detour and fill in the background, with which Nyozekan must have felt his readers already quite familiar.

It is interesting to note that Adachi had long been known as a maker and breaker of party fortunes. From his beginnings as an organizer of right-wing terror gangs under the direction of Toyama Mitsuru^[*] and Uchida Ryohei^[*] (leaders of the "classic" radical-right Genyosha^[*] ), Adachi had gone on to become the "giant killer" in the smashing election victories of the Rikken Doshikai^[*] in 1915. (Formed in 1913, the Doshikai combined with two other groups in 1916 to form the Kenseikai, and then in 1927 with the Seiyu Honto^[*] to create the Minseito.) A consistent advocate of a "hard"—pro-military—line in China, Adachi was joined in his efforts to forge a "national unity" coalition by other friends of the army, notably the "new zaibatsu " magnate and Seiyukai^[*] chairman

Kuhara Fusanosuke. Indeed, elements of the Seiyukai^[*] had on their own sought "army cooperation to bring down the Wakatsuki cabinet."^[174] To be sure, the ultimate aim of all these efforts, a one-party government that enjoyed the blessing of the military, was not shared by all the elders of the Seiyukai or the Minseito^[*] . This much is clear from the defense of the principle of parliamentary government mounted by Inukai Tsuyoshi and Wakatsuki Reijiro^[*] in the wake of the assassination in February 1932 of Inoue Junnosuke, the Minseito leader and a former finance minister. Inukai had reaffirmed his belief in the "beneficial effects" of parliamentary government, while Wakatsuki denounced the trend toward fascism in Japanese politics and the rule of terror certain to result if Japan were to follow the lead of "Russia, China, and Italy" in establishing a one-party state. With Inukai's own assassination in May, however, "the era of party cabinets came to an end."^[175]

There is little question, then, as to Adachi's antipluralist proclivities. At the same time, it would be wrong, as we have seen, to imagine that he or Kuhara desired the establishment of an outright military dictatorship; certainly they did not relish the prospect of rule by those who had assassinated Inukai. Nevertheless, it is equally obvious that Adachi—and not only for Nyozekan—was a symbol of the powerful trend toward accommodation with the military that was permeating the parties. But what sort of accommodation was this to be? What could a man such as Adachi have hoped to achieve through a "national unity" cabinet—the type of cabinet that did, of course, predominate in the years after 1932, and under whose aegis actual party influence within the cabinet drained steadily away?

In Nyozekan's view—to return now to the Critique —Adachi was concerned to guarantee that the interests of industrial and finance capital represented by the parties would still be served despite the "new situation" in Manchuria. This meant winning control for big capital over the South Manchurian Railroad and its allied enterprises. These had become a zone of special privilege for bureaucrats and military figures, and as such were insufficiently flexible as tools in the expansion of private Japanese capital.^[176] Although the two-party system had seemed to promise a stable domestic political arrangement for this expansion, too many destabilizing elements were surfacing: abroad, the Western and Soviet threats, intensified now since the overrunning of Manchuria, and Chinese nationalism and capital in North China; at home military insubordination and working class and peasant agitation, not to mention (for Adachi) the immediate problems of strategy vis-à-vis the Seiyu^[*]

kai.^[177] Adachi thus felt it expedient to "unify" the parties under retired military figures beyond accusation of partisanship, and to accommodate rather than antagonize the military. (Inukai Tsuyoshi had of course taken the opposite tack.) In short, cabinet power had to be single, not in order to prevent further military outrages in Manchuria or North China, but so that the parties' constituencies could begin to reap the benefits of "acquiescence."

The real issue, as Nyozekan saw it, was not civilians versus the military, but upper versus middle/petty bourgeoisie. (The fact that in their efforts to secure military favor for coalition, Seiyukai^[*] officials had approached the army general staff and ministry officials, would seem to bear this out.) Adachi was this upper stratum personified, looking ahead to the time when it would be necessary to bring its minions—the line officers of the Kwantung Army and their domestic allies—to heel. Whether this would be possible was, as Nyozekan points out, quite another question. There was always the danger that the petty bourgeois "horse," while still "bridled" by the institutions of the bourgeois state, would grow too strong and throw its rider.^[178] Thus Adachi's moves, as Wakatsuki himself had hinted, could be seen as the "fascistization" of the parties themselves, through fear not so much of direct revolution as of loss of their dominant position in the state as then constituted.

Nyozekan thus locates the engine of cool fascism, as of 1932, in the parties, and ties it directly to the interests of Japanese capitalism in Manchuria. At this point, bureaucracy in Nyozekan's view remained, like the military, divided in itself, at "heart" a semifeudal and guildlike province, and allied in its rank and file with the petty bourgeoisie. (This is not to imply that there was any sort of "Luddite" mentality involved. Bureaucracy was never antimodern in the sense that it resisted technological innovation. Quite the contrary. The question was rather one of control.) The parties had clearly established their dominance over the political system, but only on the condition that bureaucratic influence remain as a structural and ideological brake on big capital. Abroad, the anti-zaibatsu policy of the government in Manchukuo seemed to bear this out; similarly bureaucratic sponsorship of "social policy" as a means of class conciliation was evidence of this same influence. For while it might seem to reflect the rising influence of the proletariat, it sprang in fact from the "petty bourgeois" origins and consciousness of bureaucracy itself. Nyozekan traces this lineage back to the "middle stratum force of the feudal warrior class," which was itself responsible for the Meiji Restoration. Bureaucracy had served as the technician of the hur-

ried transition from feudal to (industrial) capitalist production and still harbored the territorializing impulse characteristic of the former condition of society. This was evident in the frequent attacks on giant industrialists and financial combines as "antinational." The parties in turn were compelled to go after petty bourgeois support and to acquiesce in continuing bureaucratic influence. In this sense—in its partial orientation to petty bourgeois interests and consciousness as Nyozekan very broadly construes them—Japan was ab origine "fascist."^[179] Within five years, of course, the center of gravity was to shift, as Nyozekan had predicted, from this "aboriginal" to a "legal" fascism. One may perhaps infer that the technical side of bureaucratic personality, following the collapse of the radical petty bourgeois front in 1936, finally came into its own, overcoming its "guild" consciousness sufficiently to supplant the parties as the dominant institution, along with the army, in political society.

Nyozekan's account of Japanese fascism is necessarily truncated. Its categories seem eclectic and arbitrary at times. The membership of the middle stratum is only vaguely indicated; there is not a single economic statistic in the entire work. Nyozekan obviously had heavy censorship to contend with. And while he did believe that fascism could be understood through class analysis, one could not pin down the author of the Critique as an adherent of any organized ideological movement or party. These factors may account for some of the vagueness and imprecision. Despite these limitations, Nihon fuashizumu hihan can claim to be the first attempt to clarify the interclass dynamics of fascism in Japan. It has the immediacy of a work wrestling with an immense and present danger.

One point of particular interest in the Critique is its powerful treatment of fascist ideology and art. For Nyozekan art becomes fascist when its producers make use of obscurantist traditionalism not out of principle, but for purely commercial motives. Such, Nyozekan contends, is the nature of much of the contemporary "mass art." Fascist because it plays on the emotions of the masses while mobilizing them against (unexamined) "forces" that threaten the national essence, such work is also pure nihilism. Its producers are, of course, pawns in the bourgeoisie's campaign of cultural imperialism. What is important is that "art" hide reality from its consumers. To the extent that the producers of such work are unaware of their political role, they are to be pitied and awakened. To the extent that they are aware, they are vultures to be unmasked. Yet this is in fact the dilemma of the whole petty

bourgeoisie. Inescapably bound to a capitalist system of production (including artistic production), its particularism cannot but be compromised by the "universal" quest for profit. Unable to see its own liberation in the struggle of the proletariat, the middle stratum turns against it. But in whose cause? The petty bourgeoisie have none of their own. They condemn the corruption of bourgeois politics not (despite the rhetoric) because it is corrupt, but because it is not theirs . The middle stratum is the big loser.^[180]

The Critique , finally, seems to have been the first work to expose the "timelessness," social ubiquity, conceptual emptiness—and supreme usefulness—of contemporary Japanism.^[181] It was this ideological feature of Japanese society that implicitly linked mass and elite: though the elite version of Japanism was more refined, it helped in its own way to integrate the intelligentsia into the ideological superstructure of the state. Indeed, it was debate over how to counteract this kind of integrating force that divided the Japanese left. And for the JCP in particular, it was a major stumbling block, not least because the Comintern could not grasp such a situation.

However, between the intelligentsia and mass there was, according to Nyozekan, a major difference in degree of consciousness. Like big capital, Nyozekan argues, the interi knew what they were about. They were conscious of their social role,^[182] whether in support of or opposition to the system. Scholar-functionaries (who, according to Maruyama, must be considered members par excellence of the interi )^[183] had explicit knowledge of their purpose: to legitimate capitalism under the Meiji constitutional system. One dimension of this task was the attempt to link the "timeless" idea of the kokutai with the current system that professed to protect it. This was the purpose, for example, of works such as the Kokutai ron shi (History of theories of the national polity), compiled by the Shrine Bureau of the Home Ministry in 1919. The volume contained articles by such established academics as Kakehi Katsuhiko, a constitutional law scholar, and the historian of religions Anesaki Masaharu—both of Tokyo Imperial. (Admittedly, Nyozekan remarks, Kakehi is a "crank [kijin ] who claps his hands in supplication when he mounts the rostrum and dances strange dances." But Anesaki is a "sound scholar.")^[184] Whatever the differences in tone, they are in agreement on the unchanging nature of the kokutai .

In this respect, the work of figures such as Yoshino and Minobe can be understood as attempts from within to reformulate the argument for the system's legitimacy under changing conditions. But what happens

when the impingement of society on politics forces the interi to seek not a new formula but a new system? Here Nyozekan's argument on the dynamics of seido comes to mind: the existing institution reacts to protect itself; the means it chose in the early 1930s were fascist. For the interi as for the mass, the line between tolerable dissent and heresy had been drawn in 1925. Now, in the early 1930s, the space given over to legitimate dissent was narrowing drastically. Nyozekan, it will be recalled, regarded a self-conscious proletariat as the only real answer to fascism. It did not materialize, and we may assume that he took for granted the absorption of the masses into a "fascist" system. But what of the interi themselves? Until the advent of the "national emergency" (hijoji^[*] ) around 1933, there had been no obvious connection between the interi and fascism. Indeed, their sentiments, if Nyozekan is any indication, seemed genuinely hostile to it. But by the last years of the decade, after the mass tenko^[*] of the JCP leadership and rank and file, the campaign against Minobe Tatsukichi and the university purge of 1938–39, the hostility seems to have softened considerably. With the triumph of "cool fascism," many among the interi were hewing to the state. Some, like Royama Masamichi^[*] , Kaji Ryuichi^[*] , and the journalist Matsumoto Shigeharu, were followers of Nyozekan who had come to see such service as the cutting edge of social renovation. Royama^[*] , indeed, spoke the language of a refined fascism. Nyozekan could not have forecast this development, and both he and others were hesitant (after 1945) to examine it. Nonetheless, the involvement of Japanese intellectuals in the country's mobilization for struggle against the West can be seen as the extension of a problem implicit in Nyozekan's Critique . More to the point, it is implicit in his life . To this problem, that of tenko broadly conceived, we now turn our attention.