Weatherhead Books on Asia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. vi, 347 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-231-16568-6.
In Yoshimi Yoshiaki’s Grassroots Fascism: The War Experience of the Japanese People, Japanese soldiers on the battlefields of the Second World War are soaked, stinking, and covered in rashes. Draped in necklaces made of the shriveled pinky fingers of their fallen comrades, they are witnesses to—and participants in—looting, rape, and mass killings of civilians. Their compatriots on the Japanese mainland and dispersed throughout the peripheries of the Japanese empire are absorbed as much in matters of inflation and taxes, rice prices, rations, and draft notices as they are in the rhetoric of patriotism. The strength of Grassroots Fascism is that through Yoshimi’s assiduous collection and transcription of letters, diary entries, memoirs, and opinion polls, we readers are privy to these everyday experiences of Japan at war—the ambivalence, resentment, regret, horror, and apathy—related directly by the common people themselves.
Despite the presence of the word “fascism” in the work’s title, Yoshimi’s study does not attempt to join the scholarly debate about whether or not Japan’s political extremism qualifies as fascism. Neither does Yoshimi seek the roots of Japan’s fanatic popular nationalism in administrative policies, propaganda campaigns, and social structures. Rather, in the vein of the 1960s “people’s history” movement in which Yoshimi himself came of age as a scholar, Grassroots Fascism attempts to provide a history of the Second World War that recognizes the individual subjectivity of ordinary people, to investigate how the Japanese people were simultaneously the victims of radical imperial consciousness and the aggressors perpetuating it. Whereas other histories of militarist Japan may oversimplify the complacency of the Japanese public in swallowing the myths of a holy war waged for the autonomy of the Japanese empire, Yoshimi presents a history that recognizes “the people” as engaged both in the demands of their immediate environment and in the transcendental discourse of honour and sacrifice.
The work’s four chapters sketch the chronological rise and fall of “grassroots fascism” by tracing the tendency of men and women across the Japanese empire to filter their daily work and struggles through the narrative of a righteous war. Chapter 1 presents the voices of soldiers and townspeople during the early stages of the Asia-Pacific War: individuals who increasingly support Japan’s mission in Asia with the hope that the fighting will end quickly. Chapter 2 demonstrates that with Japan’s victories across the Pacific and, eventually, at Pearl Harbor, rising popular support of the war was beginning to take root not only on the Japanese home front but also throughout its growing empire. This chapter in particular shines in its discussion of the spiritual incorporation of members of the Japanese imperial populace often glossed over in scholarship of World War II Japan, such as the Uilta of Karafuto, the Chamorro of Guam, and Korean volunteer soldiers. In chapter 3, the reader is confronted by the horrors and confusion of the battlefield as the imperial military’s withdrawals begin to outnumber its successes, and chapter 4 concludes that despite a trend toward self-preservation and apathy as the promise of a Japanese victory fades, the “fighting spirit” of the populace does not founder until the emperor’s radio announcement of surrender; indeed, the “imperial consciousness” that drove popular support for the war lives on even after defeat.
By introducing the circumstances and musings of soldiers, farmers, teachers, fujinkai volunteers, merchants, and mothers, Grassroots Fascism gives credit to individual feelings and to how these feelings are sorted out on paper. Although translator Ethan Mark generously describes Yoshimi’s presentation of these various personal accounts as “a remarkable array of popular voices deftly assembled” (7), the experience of reading Grassroots Fascism feels more like a visit to a labyrinthine museum exhibition, where we readers press “play” at random in an oral history archive listening booth. Yoshimi provides no methodological explanation for his selection of the entries included, and he makes little effort to connect them thematically. Also almost entirely absent is any critical questioning of the sources in terms of the speakers’ intent, choice of medium for expression, or the individuals’ motivation for putting pen to paper in what was undoubtedly a climate of hyper-surveillance. And yet, even if the voices in Grassroots Fascism are too often disembodied, the effect does surround the reader with the murmurs of an empire at war, reiterating that the individual experience of war is disjointed and disorienting. Readers accustomed to the typical format of contemporary English-language scholarship may also be frustrated by the absence of an overall theoretical argument and of explicit definitions by the author of the key terms he employs (such as what he means by “fascism” and “the people”). Helpfully, the translator’s introduction and extensive notes situate the work by providing details of Yoshimi’s academic influences and methodological foundations.
Originally published in Japanese in 1987, Grassroots Fascism spoke to a readership confronting the failure of the Japanese state to acknowledge war responsibility at the fortieth anniversary of defeat (as West Germany’s president and former chancellor had famously done). The release of its English translation, which coincides with the seventieth anniversary of surrender, will reach a wider audience yet engaged in matters of the legacy of the war. Yoshimi’s study demonstrates that despite what Japanese government officials may have said (or left unsaid) over the past seven decades regarding responsibility for wartime atrocities, the experience of the war on the individual level was a complex jumble of anxiety, grief, and acknowledgement of brutality. In the musings and representations preserved in Grassroots Fascism, we see that non-elite individuals who supported and participated in the war were not simply succumbing blindly to propaganda. Rather, they were motivated by economic realities and the desire for personal advancement, negotiated amid rhetoric of the holy mission of the divinely favoured Japanese race.
A. Carly Buxton
University of Chicago, Chicago, USA
pp. 658-660