When fascism met empire in Japanese-occupied Manchuria

Focusing on the case of Japanese-occupied Manchuria, this article asks what set Japan, Germany, and Italy apart from other empires during the ‘fascist moment’ from the aftermath of the First World War to the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945. While scholars have examined the politics and culture of fascism in metropolitan Japan, there is virtually no literature on fascist imperialism. Indeed, the consensus term is ‘wartime empire’ and the dominant framework is of an empire mobilized for total war. One of the goals is to think through what the concept ‘fascist imperialism’ might mean and what the Japanese case might contribute to its definition. Detailed comparison with Germany and Italy is beyond the scope of this article, which builds a definition of fascism around four core elements drawn from the Japanese case: the ideology of Asianism and its vision for Japanese leadership over a regional movement of anti-colonial nationalisms; hyper-militarism that went well beyond military imperialism pursued since the late nineteenth century and that constituted a new celebration of military action and the aesthetics of violence; red peril thinking that propelled the creation of a police state targeting communist intellectuals, politicians, and labour activists within the archipelago as well as communist nationalists in the empire; and radical statism, which signified the turn to the state as the spear tip and staging ground of action to address the crisis. All four dimensions of fascism in Japan intensified in the process of territorial expansion from 1931 to 1945, and linked transformations across the nation-state-empire.