The Marxist Roots of Japanese Fascism

Disillusionment with the concept of “Taishō democracy,” dramatic changes caused by capitalist industrialization and vulnerability on the international arena compelled a wide array of Japanese theorists to seek radical, state-oriented solutions[1]. Using the example of Takabatake Motoyuki, Uesugi Shinkichi, Kanokogi Kazunobu, as well as the later tenkō (ideological conversion) movement among members of the Japanese Communist Party, we can see that socialist doctrine gave impetus to totalitarian militarism in Japan. The development of national socialist and proto-fascist ideologies in Japan occurred in conjunction with the crises of the Japanese capitalist system. The period following the Meiji Restoration was characterized by rapid state-guided industrialization and the formation of what is known as “dual economy”.

Takabatake Motoyuki and Marxian State Socialism

The link between Marxism and Japanese fascism on a theoretical level has been pioneered by Takabatake Motoyuki (1886-1928). A former political activist in the Meiji socialist movement, Takabatake shifted towards serious study of Marxist theory in the “winter period” that followed the state repression associated with the High Treason Case of 1910-1911. Takabatake published the first full Japanese translation of Karl Marx's Capital in 1919. In the same year, however, inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Takabatake parted company with socialist leaders such as Yamakawa Hitoshi and Sakai Toshihiko to elaborate his doctrine of Marxian national or state socialism (kokka shakai-shugi) [2].
The genius of Takabatake Motoyuki was in accepting Marxist economics while thoroughly rewriting Marx's theory of the state. Takabatake believed that Marx had a split personality: as an economist Marx was a great scientist, yet as a theorist he was wrong and unscientific because he was too much an emotion-driven utopian when he predicted the disappearance of the state through “withering away” after proletarian revolution. Based on his Hobbesian conception of human nature, Takabatake claimed that humans were egoistic and antisocial, thus making public tōsei – domination, authority and control – a supra-class and supra-historical necessity for all stages of human civilization[3].
Domination preceded economic exploitation, according to Takabatake. The state was not only an executive body of the ruling class, but a constant institution needed for cohesion of society. Thus, a “proletarian state” that was supposed to disappear was a logical paradox confirmed in practice by the authoritarian centralization of power in Soviet Russia controlled by the Bolsheviks.
Instead of a stateless utopia, Takabatake supported “functional statism”. Takabatake proposed to utilize Marxian economic planning through elimination of private capitalism, state control of finance and industry, and centralization of production in the context of strong militarized national state. Importantly, Takabatake insisted that this type of state socialism had to be suited for the national character of Japan. He substituted Marxist class struggle with minzokuteki unity of the nation, which he considered more authentic than class consciousness based on historical, cultural and racial sentiment. Moreover, Takabatake added the imperial institution to his formula of state socialism. Takabatake maintained that the monarchy was the most natural and fitting form of state authority for the Japanese kokumin (nation). In international politics, Takabatake demanded universal military conscription and national defense as protection of Japan against encirclement by the West and “workers' imperialism” of the Soviets. This formula of Takabatake's Marxian national socialism created a very influential model, spawning a number of radical rightwing political parties such as Taikakai, Ishikawa Junjūrō's National-Socialist Party of Great Japan, Tsukui Tatsuo's Patriotic Labor Party, and the fascist wing of the Social Mass Party (Shakai Taishū Tō) led by Asō Hisashi and Akamatsu Katsumaro.

Kita Ikki: Japanese Fascism as Pure Socialism

Kita Ikki (1883-1937) was one of the most important and controversial theoreticians of Japanese radical nationalism, whose intellectual evolution clearly reflects the synthesis of the critique of the early socialists and national renovation centered around the state.
Kita Ikki embarked upon his intellectual career within the framework of the early Japanese socialist movement. In 1906, he wrote his first major theoretical work entitled Kokutairon Oyobi Junsei Shakaishugi (“The Question of the Kokutai and Pure Socialism”). In the text, Kita Ikki attempted to synthesize the critique of the society advanced by Marxist theory and the Japanese national polity (or kokutai)[4]. Contemporaries like Katayama Sen reviewed this work in context of the general discussion within the Japanese socialist movement about the legitimacy of the Meiji imperial constitution.
As a reaction to the widespread disappointment in the political inadequacies of the liberal “Taisho democracy”, Kita developed an even more radical program. In 1919, he wrote his classic text titled “An Outline Plan for the Reorganization of Japan (Kokka Kaizōan Genri Taikō)”.
In this work, Kita formulated a program of national socialism aimed at restructuring of the domestic economic system and overturning of the existing international order:

• Domestic restructuring: Kita demanded the state control of private capital, extensive social reforms, restriction of “zaibatsu” wealth as a means of alleviating class struggle;
• International “Have-Not” theory: Kita proposed the division of the world into two types of states - “have nations” (representative Western capitalist powers of Anglo-America) and “have-not” or proletarian nations (like Japan). According to Kita, as the domestic working class had a right to organize strikes against the capitalists, the proletarian nation had the right to go to war and expand into Asia to fight against Western imperialists.

Kita Ikki was among the key members of radical post-WWI renovationist circles, establishing together with Ōkawa Shūmei, Kanokogi Kazunobu and Mitsukawa Kametarō the Rōsōkai (Old and Young Society) and the Yūzonsha (Society of Those Who Yet Remain). The Ministry of Justice considered the latter organization as one of the two principal sources of radical national revolutionary movements in inter-war Japan. However, personal, and ideological conflicts between Kita and Ōkawa Shūmei resulted in the eventual disintegration and dissolution of the Yūzonsha in 1923.
While statists strived to maintain existing conservative institutions, Kita Ikki propagated revolutionary theories. His readiness to accept radical democratic principles (which were criticized by the rightist opponents, such as Kanokogi, as “direct democracy à la Jean-Jacques Rousseau”) was especially despised by the fundamentalist ultranationalists who viewed these theories as subversive and dangerously close to the organ-theory constitutionalism.
Through his supporter Nishida Mitsugi, Kita's ideas greatly influenced the young officers' movement (Kōdōha or Imperial Way Faction) within the Imperial Japanese Army. Kita's “Outline Plan” became an ideological base for the young officers who aimed at the overthrow of the civilian cabinet through direct action. As a result of the military coup of February 26, 1936 (2.26 Incident), Kita Ikki and Nishida Mitsugi were arrested by the state officials and executed in 1937.

The Keirin Gakumei and Early Proto-Fascist Mobilization

In January 1923, Takabatake Motoyuki teamed up with Uesugi Shinkichi – a conservative professor of law at the Tokyo Imperial University who had gained recognition with his advocacy of absolute imperial sovereignty against Minobe Tatsukichi’s theory of emperor as an organ – in order to found the Keirin Gakumei (Statecraft Study Association), which is seen by historians as one of the key progenitors of Japanese ultranationalist and fascist organizations of the interwar period. What made the contemporaneous political observers astounded is the fact that the Keirin Gakumei is the first formally recognized formal union between an outstanding Marxist ideologist and a well-known ultra-conservative scholar.
The manifesto of the Keirin Gakumei and its six-point program included a prototype of the fascist ideology[5]:

• Complete Ideological Mobilization: Implementation of the idea of “the whole nation beating as one heart” to get rid of the liberal and communist subversives;
• National Militarization: Introduction of universal conscription based on the principle that each citizen is a soldier;
• State-Controlled Economy: Creation of the national economy based on state control over private capital and labour;
• Anti-Capitalism and Anti-imperialism: Resistance to the big capitalist monopolies while actively counteracting the influence of the USSR and domestic communism;
• Ethnic Self-Sufficiency and Imperial Devotion: Devotion to the Emperor (tennō) and promotion of the glory of the Japanese ethnic nation (Nihon minzoku) worldwide.

In March 1923, the leftist journal Kaizō published a special edition which criticized the association, with the commentators mentioning that it resembles Italian Fascism and Takabatake dreaming of becoming the “Japanese Mussolini”. Moreover, according to the secret 1923 report of the Criminal Investigation Bureau of the Ministry of Justice, the Keirin Gakumei is the “Japanese Mussolini's Blackshirts” and the main source of the national revolutionary politics along with the pan-Asianist Yūzonsha.
The unity within the Keirin Gakumei was achieved through the conviction in state predominance. Even though Uesugi was the traditionalist, he confessed that he was greatly inspired by the anarchist criticism of Western capitalism of Peter Kropotkin. Yet, both Uesugi and Takabatake did not support anarchist anti-statism and stated that no society can exist without a central authority and the statism is the basic element which is necessary to reach the socialist economic equality. In particular, in accordance with Uesugi, Japan is unique for creation of such total state since its ethnic community (sōkan renzoku) is homogeneous and morally guided by the continuous authority of the Emperor.
Although the Keirin Gakumei soon ceased to exist, its intellectual synthesis was quite significant. First of all, it shows that Japanese fascism was created not only due to the conservative reaction but as the result of adaptation of the European socialist criticism of capitalism and Bolshevik approaches to mass manipulation, centralized state control, and dictatorship. The association predicated the “Total War System” (sōryokusen taisei) of the 1940s through formulation of state-controlled social and economic homogeneity 20 years prior to its implementation during the war period.

Kanokogi Kazunobu: Anti-Imperialist Theory of Japanese Fascism

Alongside Takabatake, Kanokogi Kazunobu (1884–1949) fashioned a native form of proto-fascist ideology that prefigured European totalitarianism by several years. A former naval officer who fought in the Russo-Japanese War, Kanokogi underwent a dramatic intellectual conversion from Christian pacifism to Nietzschean statism and social Darwinism while pursuing a philosophical education in America and Germany. As early as August 1917, two years prior to the establishment of Mussolini's Fasci di Combattimento, Kanokogi invented and defined the term “totalitarianism” (zentaishugi) in his public lectures as the basis for his vision of the total reorganization of the Japanese state.
There were three pillars of Kanokogi's ideology, which complemented one another[6]:

• Totalitarianism (Zentaishugi): The complete obliteration of Western individualism, liberalism, parliamentarian democracy, and laissez-faire capitalism. Kanokogi called for the complete submission of the individual to the state, state control of private enterprise, economic autarchy, and total militarization of all human and material resources.
• Pan-Asianism (Sumera Ajia): The geopolitical concept of the Japanese divinely ordained mission of leading a “racial world revolution” against Anglo-American imperialism and liberating Asia and organizing it into an “Imperial Asia” under the spiritual tutelage of the Japanese Emperor.
• Fundamentalism (Kokutai): The mythical notion of the divinity of the Emperor and uniqueness of the Japanese national polity.

Japan was, in fact, viewed by Kanokogi as a real-life embodiment of Plato's ideal state (Republic). In this Platonic ideal society, an aristocratic group of “philosopher-kings” (disinterested bureaucrats and intellectuals) will govern the society and the Emperor will be the center of devotion for the whole nation, embodying the principle of “leadership”.
Interestingly enough, Kanokogi admired Bolsheviks for their iconoclastic, ruthless character, unyielding commitment to world revolution and total state control during his early radical period. They were seen as Kanokogi's natural partners in the fight against Anglo-American capitalist hegemony. However, in the 1930s he recanted his early sympathy for Bolshevism and began to admire National Socialism of Hitler as a natural political system. Still, Kanokogi's early admiration for Bolshevik dictatorship reflects a common tendency in Japanese radical rightists.
Throughout his life, Kanokogi played a major role in radicalizing various political organizations of the interwar period. He influenced leaders of right-wing movements such as Rōsōkai and Yūzonsha (Ōkawa Shūmei and Kita Ikki, for example), founded radical student organization Kōkoku Dōshikai and advised officers who participated in coup attempts of the interwar period.

The Tenkō Movement and the Conversion of the Left

The ideological convergence between socialism and fascism culminated in the 1930s in the form of tenkō or mass ideological conversion. On June 8, 1933, imprisoned heads of the underground Japanese Communist Party (JCP), Sano Manabu and Nabeyama Sadachika, made a shocking announcement from the Tokyo District Court denouncing the Comintern, rejecting the doctrine of orthodox Marxism-Leninism, and swearing loyalty to the Japanese imperial nation. This declaration led to an unprecedented mass defection of communists: in a month's time 548 imprisoned JCP members made official statements renouncing their membership, and by 1935, the communist movement in Japan was totally liquidated[7].
Far from being a mere instance of cowardly capitulation to police pressure, tenkō meant an intellectual and psychological solution of the “national question” (minzoku mondai). Japanese Marxists imported European socialism in order to help Japan become modern and resist Western domination. Yet, in doing so, Comintern dictates compelled them to accept proletarian internationalism, attack their own state, and demand the total abolition of the Emperor system—a system closely bound to the culture and personality of Japanese people. Cut off from Comintern in jail, facing the growing military confrontation with China, the bonds of tradition and personality became paramount for the members of kokutai.
To overcome the conflict, Sano and Nabeyama combined Marxism with imperial nationalism in the concept of “one-country socialism” (ikkoku shakai-shugi). They believed that:

• The Comintern Was Irrelevant and Imperialist: The Comintern was an agency of the interests of Russia as a national entity which imposed doctrinaire views without taking into account the realities of Japan.
• The Monarchy Was Compatible with Socialism: Japanese Emperor system was not a feudal anachronism, but a living symbol of ethnic unity protecting the people historically; true Japanese socialism could only be built around the Imperial Household.
• Class Struggle Should Be Subordinated to the National Unity: Class struggle divided the minzoku (ethnic nation) and weakened Japan in front of Western encirclement; hence, the struggle of classes ought to be substituted by the unity of the nation.
• Asian Expansion Was Progressive: Military expansion of Japan into Manchuria and China was interpreted not as capitalist expansion, but as progressive, anti-imperialist mission aimed at liberation of Asian peoples from the oppression of Western colonization.

This ideological transformation was echoed throughout the leftist camp in Japan. Many Japanese leftist intellectuals and politicians—Akamatsu Katsumaro, who worked out the theory of “scientific Japanism,” Takahashi Kamekichi, who developed Marxian justification of Japanese continental expansion called “petty imperialism,” and Asano Akira of the “dissolutionist faction” (kaitō-ha)—shifted from Marxist internationalism to imperial national socialism. And in 1940–1942 the ideological tenkō was translated into organizational tenkō as ex-leftist political parties and trade unions merged voluntarily into totalitarian mobilization organization of the state, the Imperial Rule Assistance Association (Taisei Yokusankai).
As Germaine Hoston and others have argued, national socialism in Japan was invariably constructed on the basis of the Left as opposed to that of the Right. Here, Japan paralleled the development of Italian Fascism led by Benito Mussolini, himself a former radical Marxist whose class struggle ideology was reformed into a doctrine of national-socialist expansion, and German National Bolshevism. In the context of such late developing countries as Japan, Germany, and Italy, the rapid process of state-controlled industrialization and the pressure exercised by the established Anglo-American capitalist world order made national existence especially vulnerable.
For late-developers, Marxism was an efficient ideological apparatus for criticizing the West. However, since stateless internationalism undermined the existence of the nation-state in a dangerous world situation, radical ideologists in such societies were constantly revising the Marxist doctrine with the inclusion of national elements.

Conclusion

The history of interwar Japan has shown that Japanese fascism was not a stupid and reactionary deviation from the path of civilization, but a well-thought-out modernization ideology with a pronounced socialist and Marxist pedigree. Japanese radicals managed to combine the Marxian criticism of capitalism, syndicalist techniques of direct action, and Bolshevik practices of totalitariansim with the indigenous kokutai political mythology.
From the early work of Takabatake Motoyuki on Marxian state socialism and proto-fascist agenda of the Keirin Gakumei up to the Platonic totalitarianism of Kanokogi Kazunobu and tenkō movement of the 1930s, the socialism has played the primary role in intellectual justification of Japan's refusal from Western liberal ideology. In the end, this combination of Left-radicalism and imperial statism led to the disappearance of dividing line between anti-capitalist social revolution and military totalitariansim, creating ideological basis for the Total War System and Japanese aggression in Asia.
This synthesis in Japan is consistent with the proto-fascist and revisionist Marxist doctrine of “national syndicalism” prevalent in France by Georges Sorel along with Cercle Proudhon[8], classical fascism prevalent in Italy under Mussolini, and the National Bolshevism, prevalent in Ernst Niekisch and Karl Otto Paetel of Germany. From national syndicalism in France, classical fascism in Italy, National Bolshevism in Germany, to “pure socialism” in Japan, behind each fascist doctrine there lies a former Marxist or a group of former Marxists who invented or co-invented fascism through the replacement of the internationalism of Marxism with that of proletarian nation concept of anti-imperialism. This, therefore, replaces class conflict with class collaboration and stateless society with socialism in one country. This is all that the socialists need to turn Marxism into fascism.

Bibliography

• Crump, John Derek.A Critical History of Socialist Thought in Japan to 1918. Vol. 2. PhD diss., Centre of Japanese Studies, University of Sheffield, 1980.
• Hoston, Germaine A. “Between Theory and Practice: Marxist Thought and the Politics of the Japanese Socialist Party.” Studies in Comparative Communism 20, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 175–207.
• Hoston, Germaine A. “Marxism and National Socialism in Taishō Japan: The Thought of Takabatake Motoyuki.” The Journal of Asian Studies 44, no. 1 (November 1984): 43–64.
• Kyaw, H. H. The Marxist Roots of Classical Fascism: Genuine Anti-Fascism Begins with Understanding Fascism. Zenodo, 2025. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22202541.
• Hoston, Germaine A. “Tenko: Marxism & the National Question in Prewar Japan.” Polity 16, no. 1 (Fall 1983): 96–118, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3234524.
• Szpilman, Christopher W. A. “Kanokogi Kazunobu: Pioneer of Platonic Fascism in Japan.” Monumenta Nipponica 68, no. 2 (2013): 233–280.
• Szpilman, Christopher W. A. '“Japanese-style” Fascism in the Early 1920s'.
• Linkhoeva, Tatiana. "Debates on 'Japanese-style Fascism' in the 1920s." Paper presented at the Axis Empires: Toward a Global History of Fascist Imperialism Workshop, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, November 23–24, 2015.

Footnotes
[1] Germaine A. Hoston, “Marxism and National Socialism in Taishō Japan: The Thought of Takabatake Motoyuki,” The Journal of Asian Studies 44, no. 1 (November 1984): 43–64.
[2] Tatiana Linkhoeva, “Debates on 'Japanese-style Fascism' in the 1920s” (paper presented at the Axis Empires: Toward a Global History of Fascist Imperialism Workshop, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, November 23–24, 2015).
[3] Germaine A. Hoston, “Marxism and National Socialism in Taishō Japan: The Thought of Takabatake Motoyuki,” The Journal of Asian Studies 44, no. 1 (November 1984): 43–64.
[4] John Derek Crump, “A Critical History of Socialist Thought in Japan to 1918” (PhD diss., Centre of Japanese Studies, University of Sheffield, 1980), vol. 2.
[5] Tatiana Linkhoeva, “Debates on 'Japanese-style Fascism' in the 1920s” (paper presented at the Axis Empires: Toward a Global History of Fascist Imperialism Workshop, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, November 23–24, 2015).
[6] Christopher W. A. Szpilman, “Kanokogi Kazunobu: Pioneer of Platonic Fascism in Japan,” Monumenta Nipponica 68, no. 2 (2013): 233–280.
[7] Germaine A. Hoston, “Tenko: Marxism & the National Question in Prewar Japan,” Polity 16, no. 1 (Fall 1983): 96–118.
[8] H. H. Kyaw, "The Marxist Roots of Classical Fascism: Genuine Anti-Fascism Begins with Understanding Fascism," Zenodo, 2025, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22202541.