THE IDEOLOGIES BEHIND EXPANSIONISM

1. THE IDEOLOGIES BEHIND EXPANSIONISM

2. KITA IKKI, the radical nationalist, wanted to have a military coup to Japan of its incompetent government leaders so as to restore the governor to a direct relationship to its people. He believed that the emperor should be more independent to the influence of those corrupting politicians and businessmen. Once Japan was restored to health and validity, then it could lead a united and free Asia.

3. It was a document that appealed to the emotions and not the intellect. • Its main thrust was to stress the divine origin of the emperor and the importance of total self sacrificial obedience to his will, to such an extent that loyal service to the emperor and his nation became not so much a duty but the object of life itself.

4. The text defines the Japanese nation as follows: The unbroken line of Emperors, receiving the Oracle of the Founder of the Nation, reign eternally over the Japanese Empire. This is our eternal and immutable national entity. Thus, founded on this great principle, all the people, united as one great family nation in heart and obeying the Imperial Will, enhance the beautiful virtues of loyalty and filial piety. This is the glory of our national entity.

5. The emperor is a ‘deity incarnate', a ‘direct descendant of Amaterasu‘ and serving him is ‘not a duty as such, nor a submission to authority', but a ‘natural manifestation of the heart'. • The relationship between the emperor and his subjects is ‘in its sympathies, that of father and child. • Indeed, Japan follows the way of nature, with ‘nature and man united as one'

6. It is also characterized The Excesses of Ambition 115by harmony, for ‘harmony is a product of the great achievements of the founding of our nation‘. • . In recent times there had been corruption by ‘western individualism and rationalism', and ‘we must sweep aside the corruption of the spirit and the clouding of knowledge that arises from … being taken up with one's “self”, and return to a pure and clear state of mind'.

7. Many westerners who encountered Japanese during the decade or so following Kokutai no Hongi were surprised that not only the masses but also many high-ranking and highly intelligent Japanese appeared to believe this propaganda – even some of those who had helped create it.

8. The important role of the emperor in Japan's prewar ideology hassometimes led to other aspects of the Kokutai no Hongi being overlooked. • One of these was promotion of the idea that the Japanese were ‘united with nature' and enjoyed a purer and more natural existence than western nations corrupted by individualism.

9. . Japanese were able to claim that their expansion on the Asian mainland was intended not just to throw off the shackles of western political and economic systems, but at a deeper level to restore harmony between humans and nature. • This natural harmony was known as musubi, a complex term. It combined meanings of ‘bonding', ‘harmony', and ‘coupling' in the biblical sense.

10. One of the clearest English-language descriptions of musubi is found in Kawai Tatsuo's work The Goal of Japanese Expansion, of 1938: The history of the Japanese nation is nothing but a record of the development of their faith in nature – the harmonization and self-identification of the race with its natural environment. Preserve nature and the rediscover oneself! – so teaches philosophy musubi.

11. Many simply referred Nazi-style to the need for lebensraum, ‘room to live', ignoring the still under-utilized spaces of Hokkaido. The ‘room to live' view was often linked to a clearly selective argument that there were only three ways to ease the pressure of surplus population: emigration, advance into world markets, and territorial expansion

12. Another simpler justification was that of Ishiwara Kanji, of Manchurian Incident fame. He wanted a Japanese military occupation and reorganization of Asia to enable its resources to be used by Japan in preparation for a final war to gain world domination. • Ishiwara himself was not particularly liked as a person and was never greatly trusted by his colleagues.

13. Nevertheless there was growing sympathy for his views on the importance to Japan of acquiring Asian resources for a future showdown with the United States. And as the 1930s progressed, his idea of using military action to take control of Asia came to prevail over less aggressive Pan-Asianist views.

14. One such ‘softer' view was that of the Sinologist Tachibana Shiraki (1881–1945). Tachibana believed that Japan, as the most suitably qualified nation, should establish not military but cultural and political leadership in Asia. • Unfortunately, other than suggesting Confucianism and the Imperial Way as universal guiding principles for this Asian entity, Tachibana did not propose any specific means of organizing this. His silence on these matters made it easier for the militarists to prevail.