War, Wealth, and Ideology- The Corporate Root of Japanese Fascism

by Gabriel Fermin

The First Sino-Japanese War brought significant business opportunities for the Zaibatsu. During this period, Mitsui managed half of Japan’s steel imports, while expanding into new industries such as sugar, cotton, grain, and lumber.[1] Mitsubishi continued to grow by expanding into mineral resource deposits[2] and entered the shipbuilding sector with the construction of the Hitachi Maru cargo and passenger ship[3] along with the building of numerous dry docks and building berths for future shipbuilding.[4] The rapid increase in Japan’s industrial capacity greatly benefited the country, especially in 1904, ten years after finding itself at war with Qing China and against the much more powerful Russian Empire.

Much to the international community's admiration,[5] Japan emerged as the victor. Unlike the war with China, the conflict with Russia showcased Japan’s capacity as a significant player in the global power structure.[6] Armed once again by the Zaibatsu, the Japanese military defeated Russia. It changed international perceptions of Japan from being seen as docile and barbaric ‘Orientals” who succumbed to the gunships of Commodore Perry to a legitimately powerful nation capable of confronting a member of the West. From this new identity of strength, the notion of Japanese nationalism grew from the seed sown ten years earlier with the victory in China. With another decade and the onset of The Great War, this notion began to flourish into the support for ultranationalistic right-wing ideology and, eventually, Japanese fascism. The Zaibatsu predictably found themselves at the center of these developments, playing a crucial role in Japan’s embrace of extremism.
    Japan’s major gain from the Russo-Japanese War was the acquisition of the southern portion of Russia’s Chinese Eastern Railway (CER). The Japanese renamed it the South Manchuria Railway (SMR), reflecting both its location and Japan’s colonial ambitions. The largest private shareholders were Mitsui and Mitsubishi,[7] who began to benefit immensely from a new market for Japanese businesses. The two Zaibatsu held significant influence over the appointment of its president and vice president,[8] and they experienced substantial expansions of their business interests, ranging from Mitsui’s importation of machinery for the SMR’s railway and mining activities[9] to Mitsubishi’s soon-to-be-famous shipbuilding operations.[10] This newfound power also provided the Zaibatsu with greater tools with which to further their goals. To safeguard their interests, the Zaibatsu engaged in business with the Kokuryukai (Black Dragon Society), a Japanese ultranationalist paramilitary and terrorist organization. 
‘Ultranationalism’ differs from regular ‘nationalism’ in its advocacy of supremacy over other nations or nationalities. According to John G. Roberts, author of Mitsui Empire: 
“The society, in addition to maintaining order and discipline among workers, served mining companies by procuring underground mineral rights from reluctant landowners and settling disputes over damage caused by mining operations. Since the establishment of the Yawata Iron Works in Kyushu, Black Dragon Society leaders had been active in getting or maintaining control over Chinese coal and iron deposits for their benefactors, but their deeper purpose was to establish Japanese hegemony over all of China and Manchuria.”[11]
The leaders of the Black Dragon Society, Toyama Mitsuru, and Uchida Ryohei, also supported the pro-Japanese revolutionaries in China, led by Sun Yat-sen and the KMT.[12] The Society acted both as a Mafia-style enforcement arm for the Zaibatsu and as a manifestation of the exploitative and predatory desires that were growing among the leaders of Japanese society. The outbreak of World War I saw Japan’s exports triple[13] and the Zaibatsu’s wealth increase, leading Japanese leaders to adopt socially Darwinistic beliefs that became significantly more pronounced than anything before 1914. These beliefs can be well personified through Mitsui Director-General Dan Takuma, whose:
“....attitudes towards business and labor reflected an idealism based upon his belief in the value of virtuous businessmen to society and, as the necessary corollary, in the divinely ordained destiny of employees to be submissive to them. ‘If you are in an enterprise,’ he once wrote, ‘no matter what it is that you do, that is your Heaven-given function. If you are successful in this and make some contribution to the Nation and your fellow countrymen, the sense of having contributed is your compensation.’”[14]
Takuma did not consider himself a true capitalist, but rather a “managerial employee who was responsible to the workers as well as to the owners and whose duty it was to mediate between them.”[15] He articulated views—whether intentionally or unconsciously—aligned with "corporatist class collaborationism," a doctrine that organizes society into hierarchical groups based on individuals’ social and economic roles. These groups were expected to collaborate within their prescribed societal positions, ostensibly for collective welfare. Though often associated with Japan’s zaibatsu (prewar industrial conglomerates), this ideology also gained traction in interwar Europe, particularly in Italy under Mussolini and Germany during the rise of National Socialism. Across these nations, the framework evolved into a shared authoritarian ideology, adaptable to local cultural and political contexts yet rooted in a common core: the suppression of class conflict through enforced cooperation, subordination of individual interests to state-defined "unity," and the consolidation of power under a centralized authority. Historians have since identified these principles as foundational to fascist governance, despite variations in their implementation.
Fascist thought in Italy, Germany, and Japan was the fusion of corporatist class collaborationism with ultranationalist extremism and the use of force, each movement curated by the culture from which it was birthed. Japan’s turn towards fascism, like Italy and Germany, was a process with stages. A simple analysis of the ideological movements and practices of Italian Fascism and National Socialism yields actionable details. Italian Fascism manifested itself through the concept of ‘the Nation.’ According to the Program of the National Fascist Party written in 1921 by Benito Mussolini, “The Nation is not reducible to a sum total of living individuals, nor is it a tool that political parties may use for their own ends. Rather, it is an organism comprising an indefinite series of generations of which single individuals are but transient elements. The Nation is the supreme synthesis of all material and immaterial values of a race.” Italian Fascism believed that the state should aim “at coordinating cooperative development” with the business class (Mussolini calls them guilds/corporazioni) for the sake of furthering the Nation. Mussolini called for several policy positions “in support of the blue-collar and white-collar workers.” However, within the same document, he wrote, “The freedom of individual citizens is subject to a twofold limit: the freedom of other juridical persons and the sovereign right of the Nation to live and develop,”[16] thereby providing Italian Fascism with a structural loophole within which it can circumvent enumerated and unenumerated civil rights and protections. In the later Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals of 1925, written the same year that Mussolini legally changed his title to ‘Head of Government,’ the Fascist leader declared: “[The Fatherland] prompts the subordination of all that is particular and inferior to that which is universal and superior. It is the respect of law and discipline; it is freedom to be conquered through the law by renouncing all that comes from individual choice and irrational, wasteful desires.”[17] Further radicalization is present in the 1932 Doctrine of Fascism, by which during this time, Mussolini eliminated all limits on his power and outlawed the existence of other political parties. He noted “man is man only by virtue of the spiritual process to which he contributes as a member of the family, the social group, the nation, and in function of history to which all nations bring their contribution.”[18] The Duce is opposed to the “individualistic abstractions” of personal liberty that emerged from the French Revolution and proudly exclaimed: “Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual.”[19] Fascism “asserts the irremediable and fertile and beneficent inequality of men who cannot be leveled by any such mechanical and extrinsic device as universal suffrage” and “rejects the absurd conventional lie of political equalitarianism.” All three writings call for Italian military prominence.
German fascism manifested as the National Socialist Party. It had one official Party Program: the 25-Point Plan written by Adolf Hitler in 1920. In it, Adolf Hitler demanded the “unification of all Germans in the Greater Germany on the basis of the right of self-determination of peoples" as well as “equality of rights for the German people in respect to the other nations,” and he admonished the Treaty of Versailles from World War I that unjustly placed the sole blame for the war on Germany. Hitler further announced that “Only a member of the race can be a citizen. A member of the race can only be one who is of German blood, without consideration of creed. Consequently, no Jew can be a member of the race.” Here Hitler’s brand of nationalism comes from the German “race,” also identified in the Program as the “Germans/German people/German blood,” with “non-Germans” denoting those who are outside of this group. Hitler also “demand[ed] land and territory (colonies) for the sustenance of our people and colonisation for our surplus population,” and proclaimed: “Whoever has no citizenship is to be able to live in Germany only as a guest, and must be under the authority of legislation for foreigners.” The rest of the document, however, calls for various acts of non-Marxist socialism and libertarianism such as “The right to determine matters concerning administration and law belongs only to the citizen,” “We demand that the state be charged first with providing the opportunity for a livelihood and way of life for the citizens,” “All citizens must have equal rights and obligations,” and “Abolition of unearned (work and labour) incomes. Breaking of rent-slavery.” Hitler followed these up with demands for the nationalization of all industries, division of all industrial profits, and various other provisions of egalitarian collectivism.[20] Therefore, despite Hitler’s clear belief in German ultranationalism, National Socialism initially seemed to call for many things that are denounced in the core tenets of Italian Fascism; even its focus on “race” and German-specific nationalism has little common ground with Mussolini’s ideology. The word ‘race’ only appears twice in the entirety of Mussolini’s three writings mentioned earlier, and neither time is used as the basis for his ultranationalism like it is with National Socialism. Change for Hitler could come as a result of Mussolini’s successful March on Rome in 1922, in which he and tens of thousands of paramilitary supporters strong-armed the King of Italy into appointing Mussolini as Prime Minister. Hitler was significantly influenced by Mussolini’s use of force and strong leadership role in the movement,[21] and a year later he attempted his own version of the March with the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. He did not have the same support as Mussolini and was jailed, but in prison, he refined his beliefs, and upon release in 1925, he began to seek political power through legitimate means in the German elections. Aided by a strengthening cult of personality, a belief in a natural racial hierarchy, and a support for corporatism that contrasted with the social democracy of Germany at the time, Hitler grew National Socialism through grassroots methods and political propaganda. After being appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933 and passing legislation that allowed himself to create and enforce laws at will, Hitler passed The Law to Safeguard the Unity of Party and State, the first section of which states: “After the victory of the National Socialist revolution, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party is the bearer of the concept of the German State and is inseparable from the State. It is a corporation under public law. Its organisation will be determined by the Führer.”[22]Like Mussolini, Hitler’s beliefs were also laden with imperial military desire.
In the pattern established above, Japanese fascism established itself as an informal fusion of the Italian and German kinds. Unlike these European fascisms, Japanese fascism did not emerge as an extraneous revolutionary movement that seized the power of the government. It instead surfaced from within the Japanese ruling class itself, manifesting through commonly-held beliefs of the Zaibatsu oligarchs and the Japanese military. In his seminal 1963 work Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics, Japanese scholar Masao Maruyama demonstrated his awareness of the cultural idiosyncrasies of the various fascist movements. He accounted for these distinctions by differentiating between “fascism as a State structure and fascism as a movement.” He wrote that a “complete explanation” for Japanese fascism can be found in the study  “of the military and of the bureaucracy of the State structure, their social foundations, and how these powers were intertwined with Japanese monopoly capital (zaibatsu).”[23] Maruyama identified Japanese fascism as having originated not from a movement of the masses but from a movement of the elite, a dichotomy that he defined as “fascism from below” versus “fascism from above.” He presented a three-stage process of historical change explaining Japan’s turn to fascism. These stages are:

1. Preparatory stage[24]- from the end of World War I to the Manchurian Incident of 1931. This stage was characterized by growing right-wing and ultranationalist sentiment through the creation of groups such as the Taisho Sincerity League and Imperial Way Principles Association in 1918, the Great Japan National Essence Association and the Kanto National Essence Society in 1919, the Anti-Red Corps in 1922, and the Great Japan Political Justice Corps in 1925.[25] Zaibatsu leaders were often direct contributors to these organizations.[26]
2. Period of maturity[27]- from the Manchurian Incident of 1931 until the attempted February coup in 1936. This stage was characterized by the linking of right-wing thought with the Japanese military which then became the driving force for the proliferation of Japanese fascist thought. There were several sequential right-wing attempts at a coup including the March Incident and the Imperial Flag Incident, the Blood Pledge Corps Incident, the May 15 Incident, the Heaven-Sent Soldiers Unit Incident, the Officer’s School Incident, and the Aizawa Incident before finally culminating with the February 26 Incident.
3. Consummation period[28]- from the February 26 Incident of 1936 to the Japanese surrender in 1945. This stage was characterized by overt fascism exercised in the name of the Emperor through the military, the latter of whom “fashioned an unstable ruling structure in coalition with the semi-feudal power of the bureaucracy and the Senior Retainers on the one hand and with monopoly capital and the political parties on the other.”

During the second decade of the twentieth century, Japan was an environment more favorable for fascism than Italy and Germany since there was already a corporatist class collaboration structure within the society with no existing socialist government that the fascist movement in Japan had to wrest power from. As exhibited by Mitsui leaders like Dan Takuma and Masuda Tanaka, there was already contempt for concepts such as workers’ rights, individualism, and equality of opportunity[29] that are beholden to liberal socialist governments as seen in Europe at the time. Right-wing thought also saw direct support from academics like scholar and lawyer Kinzo Gorai, who actively studied fascism and was responsible for Mein Kampf’s translation into Japanese. Gorai was a member of the openly fascist organization Kouka Renmei (Imperial League for the Promotion of Imperial Liberation),[30] and after traveling through Europe between 1931 and 1932, he delivered a lecture in 1933 titled “Fascism or Communism?” in which he called Mussolini and Hitler patriots and declared that Japan itself was open to fascism.[31] Gorai saw fascism as a kind of spiritual enlightenment based on unity and harmony amongst the social classes,[32] an echo of both Mussolini’s and Hitler’s proclaimed spiritual and philosophical dimensions of their fascism.
Like Italy and Germany, Japan acquired an increasingly militant mindset between WW1 and WW2. In the 1920s, Japan suffered both from an earthquake[33] and a financial crisis,[34] and this only served to increase the contempt for capitalism among the non-elite due to the multiple Zaibatsu bank bailouts that occurred during these times with taxpayer money.[35] Many young men, specifically those who joined the army, rejected the “solutions offered by spokesmen for the socialistic left” and became “increasingly attracted to the doctrines of revolutionary rightists, who rallied under the banners of authoritarian nationalism and imperialism.[36] The military grew significantly in influence after the Manchurian Incident of 1931, in which Japanese soldiers staged a false flag to provide Japan with a pretense for the full-scale military occupation of Manchuria. The Zaibatsu had previously supported the right-wing terrorists when it benefitted their businesses, despite growing “concerned” about extremist activities the oligarchs continued to fund military expansion. According to Mitsui spokesperson Fujihara Ginjuro, “Money spent on armaments is capital which promotes the advancement of us businessmen… We have a splendid opportunity to expand abroad; it is the manifest destiny of the Japanese nation.”[37] The military began to take control of the SMR,[38] and the Zaibatsu were well aware of the changing situation. According to John G. Roberts, the Zaibatsu’s many financial contributions were “to learn what the right-wing radicals were doing, so that the concern could adapt to the impending transition from party governments, which were controlled by the Zaibatsu, to regimes that would be headed by militarists then hostile to the zaibatsu.”[39]
The right-wing element within the military, composed mainly of the younger population, became personified with the Imperial Way faction.[40] In the early twilight of February 26, 1936, Imperial Way Faction (Kōdōha), a radical militarist group within the Japanese army, in Tokyo began distributing a manifesto to local newspaper offices “blaming Japan’s economic difficulties on the zaibatsu and attacking the elder statesmen, bureaucrats, and other party politicians.”[41] They concluded that Japan “confronts a crisis. Therefore it is our duty to take proper steps to safeguard our fatherland by killing those responsible… We think it our duty as subjects of His Majesty the Emperor. May heaven bless us and help us in our endeavor to save our fatherland from the worst.”[42] The Imperial Way conspired to assassinate high-ranking government officials and install leaders sympathetic to their ultra-nationalist agenda. In the early hours of February 26, 1936, approximately 1,500 infantrymen from the 1st and 3rd Imperial Guard Regiments launched a coordinated uprising, attacking key political figures and symbolic sites in Tokyo. While they succeeded in assassinating targets such as Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo and General Watanabe Jōtarō, the coup leaders failed to secure the full support of the military high command or occupy the Imperial Palace itself. By the following day, the rebellion was decisively crushed by loyalist forces under Emperor Hirohito’s orders. In the aftermath, Kita Ikki, a controversial intellectual whose writings had inspired the rebels, was arrested and interrogated. Investigators uncovered his clandestine financial ties to Ikeda Shigeaki, a director of Mitsui Bank, raising questions about corporate complicity in the faction’s radical agenda. Ikeda supplied Kita “thousands of yen every month for living expenses. In exchange, Kita supplied Ikeda with information about the military and the right-wing.”[43] The events of February 26 convinced the Emperor of the need for more centralization. On February 27, Emperor Hirohito declared administrative martial law under Article 8 of the Meiji Constitution one day after the February Incident which “[freed] himself from any obligation to obtain the consent of any cabinet ministers for his actions.”[44] Conveniently, the attempted coup had eliminated many of the military’s government opponents. At this point, Japanese fascism had officially become the ruling ideology of the country.
There exists a consensus in mainstream history that hesitates to apply the term ‘fascism’ to the development of Imperial Japan. According to Benson Cheung, of the Journal of Contemporary Asian Studies, historian Robert Paxton believes that Imperial Japan does not qualify as fascist due to the absence of a revolutionary political party, and was instead “an expansionist military dictatorship with a high degree of state-sponsored mobilization [rather] than as a fascist regime.”[45] Historian Roger Griffin said Imperial Japan was “not fascist” and its leaders merely “weaponized” Japan’s feudal traditions.[46] The clear similarities between European fascism and its Japanese counterpart, like a belief in corporatist class collaborationism mediated by a supreme executive and ultranationalist military expansionism, are ignored because of a difference in political manifestation. Both Paxton’s and Griffin’s take on the subject significantly downplay the underlying cultural aspects of fascism, and they choose to only focus on the political aspects. The “conscious membership of a spiritual society”[47] denoting Mussolini’s Fascism in tandem with Hitler’s institutional fusion of National Socialism with “the concept of the German state”[48] are both examples of the philosophical root of fascism, an attempt to provide a rational view of the world through the wholehearted rejection of rationalist individualism and the embrace of irrationalist collectivism. We see this demonstrated in the fascist embrace of the ‘nation/race’ as the lynchpin of society and the duty of the people within that society to reject individualism in favor of collectivist improvement. 
A defining feature of fascism is its insistence on subordinating individual interests to a perceived collective unity, typically mediated by a central authoritarian leader who claims to embody the nation’s will. Historically, such leaders amass near-absolute power, positioning themselves as both the interpreter of the "people’s will" and the arbiter of national destiny. Crucially, fascist ideologies are not monolithic; their expression is deeply shaped by the cultural and historical contexts in which they emerge. Italian Fascism called back to the hegemonic glory of the Roman Empire and the cultural variety of the Renaissance, especially the writings of political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli. National Socialism invoked the lengthy reign of the Holy Roman Empire and the military dominance of the Prussian-led German Empire to fashion itself as the Third in a series of Reichs. Japan constructed a military autocracy based on its former feudal aristocracy and its 2000-year-old divinely ordained monarchy. These are all cultural situations whose differences yield natural deviations in the progression of fascism in those countries. Unlike within Italy and Germany, our modern concepts of ‘liberal democracy’ and ‘free elections’ birthed from the Enlightenment and French Revolution never acquired a strong foothold in Japan. Therefore, it is academically shortsighted to withhold the label of ‘fascist’ from Imperial Japan on the grounds of its different political manifestation because

1. fascism is not merely a political phenomenon, 
2. Imperial Japan did not have the same intellectual and social background as Italy and Germany.

Such a perspective also misleads the public about one of the most important eras in human history. It provides an excuse for those holding left-wing nationalist views to avoid comparison to fascism. In the essay “Fascism Seen and Unseen” written by Kevin M. Doak: 
“ethnic nationalism has largely escaped critical attention in debates on Japanese fascism because many on the left have yet to extract themselves from the seductions of ethnic national culture and remain deeply enmeshed in the appeal of ethnic nationalism as the best hope of an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist social revolution. For them, continuing the focus on fascism within its received modes of production (“the capitalist state”) is a useful means of preventing their own ethnic nationalism from being rendered visible and thus from being held accountable for various acts of oppression, both during the war and after.”[49]
Japan’s dance with fascism warrants renewed critical evaluation through a careful analysis of the country’s cultural interaction with the phenomenon in the context of Japan’s cultural history. As an appropriate closing to both Doak’s essay and my own, “By exploring the relationship of culture and fascism, it should become apparent that this underlying cultural theory of minzoku (ethnic nationality) has largely escaped critical attention under the cover of an obsessive focus on the evils of the state. It should not be allowed to do so any longer.”[50]


    “It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.” - David Hume
1. ROBERTS 135
2. MORIKAWA 67
3. Ibid 66
4. https://web.archive.org/web/20110807050917/http://www.mhi.co.jp/en/nsmw/introduction/history/index.html
5. Jansen, Location 6646
6. MATSUSAKA 54
7. ROBERTS 166-167
8. Ibid 167
9. Ibid 168
10. Ibid 170
11. Ibid 176
12. Ibid176-177
13. Ibid 201
14. Ibid 207
15. Ibid 207
16. Program of the National Fascist Party
17. Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals
18. The Doctrine of Fascism
19. Ibid
20. The National Socialist Program
21. Kershaw 182-185
22. The Law to Safeguard the Unity of Party and State (1993)
23. Maruyama 25
24. Ibid 26
25. Ibid 27
26. Roberts 210-212
27. Maruyama 26
28. Ibid 26-27
29. Roberts 208
30. The source has been deleted off of the Sumitomo-owned archive website. However, the Cooperation Association published a yearbook of its members in 1938, in which Gorai is listed.
31. Gorai 26
32. Ibid 26
33. Roberts 240
34. Ibid 241-244
35. Ibid 273 
36. Ibid 264
37. Ibid 264
38. Ibid 257-258
39. Ibid 293
40. Ibid 296
41. Ibid 297-298
42. Ibid 298
43. Ibid 299
44. Bix
45. Cheung, Paxton
46. Coalson, Griffin
47. The Doctrine of Fascism
48. The Law to Safeguard the Unity Party and State (1933)
49. Doak 49, The Culture of Japanese Fascism
50. Ibid 49 

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Morikawa, H. (1970). The organizational structure of Mitsubishi and Mitsui Zaibatsu, 1868–1922: A comparative study. Business History Review, 44(1), 62–83. https://doi.org/10.2307/3112590 
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. (n.d.). History. History | Nagasaki Shipyard & Machinery Works | Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. https://web.archive.org/web/20110807050917/http://www.mhi.co.jp/en/nsmw/introduction/history/index.html 
Jansen, M. B. (2000). The Making of Modern Japan. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 
Matsusaka, Y. T. (2003). The Making of Japanese Manchuria, 1904-1932. Harvard University Asia Center. 
Mussolini, B. (1921) “Program of the National Fascist Party”
Mussolini, B. (1925) “Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals”
Mussolini, B. (1932) “Doctrine of Fascism”
Hitler, A. (1920) “National Socialist Program”
Kershaw, I. (1999). Hitler. 01, 1889-1936: Hubris. Flammarion. 
Nazi Germany (1933), The Law to Safeguard the Unity of Party and State
Maruyama, M. (1963). Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics. Oxford University Press
Gorai, K. (1933) “Fascism or Communism”
Bix, H. P. (2000). Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. HarperCollinsPublishers. 
Cheung, B., & Kinmonth, E. H. (2017, February 14). Heil Hirohito: Was Imperial Japan a fascist totalitarian state?. Synergy. https://utsynergyjournal.org/2017/01/23/heil-hirohito-was-imperial-japan-a-fascist-totalitarian-state/ 
Coalson, R. (2022, April 9). Nasty, repressive, aggressive -- yes. but is Russia fascist? experts say “no.” RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty. https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-repressive-aggressive-not-fascist/31794918.html 
Doak, K. M. (2009). Fascism seen and unseen: Fascism as a problem in cultural representation. The Culture of Japanese Fascism, 31–55. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478090885-003