下载掌阅APP，畅读海量书库
立即打开
Marx frequented the British Library in London, Li Dazhao himself was a librarian, and Mao once worked in a library. These facts lead some to believe that revolutions begin in libraries.
But the same can be said of fascism.
In 1904, at the height of the Japanese-Russian War, a 21-year-old Japanese man made a daily trip to the Imperial Library in Tokyo where he would pore through volume after volume in the collection. Two years later, at his own expense, he published Theory of Japan's National Polity and Pure Socialism .
That young man was Ikki Kita, the progenitor of Japanese fascism.
To say that fascism is an ideology for the high bourgeoisie is too simplistic; it sidesteps the fact that fascism always arises from the lower levels of a society and can maintain the support of that class until its dying day.
And particularly fascism always proclaims itself as socialism.
Hitler's political party was called the National Socialist German Workers' Party. In his first important treatise “Theory of Japan's National Polity and Pure Socialism,”Ikki Kita argued that Japan must achieve “communism” or “communism for the society”through “public ownership and operation of land and the production sector.” And this was a job for the “lower class,” Kita continued. The plan, according to Kita, was to accomplish “the great socialist revolution” with the help of the “co-governance” of the emperor. But the work into which Kita had poured his heart, soul and money (it was published at his own expense) did not go down well with the Japanese government. The book was banned.
Ikki Kita knew such early socialists as Kotoku and Sakai, translators of The Communist Manifesto, and he introduced Chinese revolutionaries like Zhang Taiyan and Zhang Ji to Kotoku.
Kita was a believer in a civil rights revolution at the time, and not yet a fascist. Coming from a Japan where books were banned, he focused his attention on helping to stoke the revolution in China. He supported Sun Yat-sen and befriended Song Jiaoren and Zhang Ji. As soon as he heard news about the Revolution of 1911 breaking out, he immediately traveled to China. He even wrote a book An Unofficial Account of the Chinese Revolution . He gave himself a Chinese name: Bei Yihui.
Kita had some opinions of his own about the Chinese revolution. In private, he despised Sun Yat-sen, regarding him as completely Westernized Chinese, thinking and working like a Westerner. To Kita, Sun was doing no more than trying to transplant the idea of Western democracy into China by means of revolution. Kita believed the real hopes of the Chinese revolution lay with Huang Xing and Song Jiaoren, not the popular Sun.
But Song was assassinated in Shanghai in 1913.
Huang died of natural causes in Shanghai in 1916.
Ikki Kita's interest in the Chinese revolution was half gone.
And his last shred of enthusiasm for the Chinese revolution vanished in 1919 when the May 4th Movement began.
Kita viewed May 4th as an anti-Japanese movement. “The champions, the agitators and the commanders of this anti-Japanese movement were all our comrades 10 years ago, when we could have died for each other,” he observed. Kita went on hunger strike to protest. When it failed, he decided to leave China. He wrote: “I bade farewell to the Chinese revolution, in which I had been involved for over a decade and returned to Japan. There, I found things had gone so bad so fast during those 10 years that if the fall continued without intervention, then Japan's world policy, its China policy and even its domestic policy were clearly going to fail.”
“Let the soul of Japan rise up from the bottom,” he concluded, “and shoulder the cause of revolution for Japan!”
Kita had completed his study on fascism in Shanghai before returning to Japan.
Fascism had just established a foothold in Japan. The rightist Yozonsha, an organization whose members called themselves “statists,” was formed in August 1919. Its first act was to send Shumei Okawa to China to bring Kita back.
What a cruel irony it is that, while young Chinese traveled to Japan looking for how to save their country, Japanese fascists came to China in search of ideological leadership.
Shumei Okawa was three years younger than Kita and had a doctorate from Tokyo Imperial University. Both men would become the ideological leaders of the fascist movement in Japan. Okawa knew China well enough. He had worked for the South Manchuria Railway Company in China's northeastern region in 1918. But nothing prepared him for his first meeting with Kita in a rundown Shanghai apartment on August 23, 1919, where he found Kita living on a rice and water diet even as he worked on his monumental eight-volume work, An Outline Plan for the Reorganization of Japan .
Entrusting the first seven volumes to Okawa, Kita promised to come back to Japan once he finished the last volume. He planned on completing his fascist chef d'ouevre in Shanghai.
Kita had done grieving over the May 4th Movement and decided to dedicate himself to Japanese statism.
He was by no means opposed to the Japanese emperor. In Outline , he called the emperor “the great emperor of the people.” Using the power of the emperor, he proposed, the government should declare martial law across the country and suspend the constitution for three years. It should also disband the Diet, dismiss the privy council, fire the councilors, abolish the institution of kazoku and get rid of the House of Peers. And it should reorganize the cabinet by selecting capable members from the people rather than letting the warlords, bureaucrats, big business leaders and party oligarchs run the government. Kita also proposed reforming the Diet through popular vote and creating a new constitution.
Kita's revolution did not stop at Japan's borders. He viewed his country as the proletariat of the world, Russia as the land owner and Britain as the business oligarch, and justified declaring wars on these countries. “Japan as the proletariat in the international community” should become a “revolutionary empire,” he argued, and it would “defeat Britain, revive Turkey, make India independent and make China self-reliant, and the Rising Sun flag would bring sunlight to all mankind.” This revolutionary Japanese empire would eventually go on to erase country borders and achieve world peace.
Kita's revolution theory, hammered out in a tiny Shanghai apartment, also proposed restraint on private capital and large business interests and advocated the sharing of profits between employers and employees. But his revolution would depend on the military, not the workers. “It is a historically-tested, universal rule that all revolutions depend on military forces,” he argued, going as far as to describe Japanese military men as “workers with the quality of soldiers.” He proposed forming a worker-soldier organization, modeled on the Russian Soviet, so that the most organized and most combat-ready Japanese people could become the driving force of national reorganization.
Kita thus built a bridge between statism and militarism.
Later commentators have described Kita's revolutionary formula as putting new Marxist wine into an old bottle. But the reverse is true. He was putting old Japanese sake into a Marxist bottle. “Although Marx was born in Germany, he was in fact a stateless Jew. He had no state to call his own but only a society to call his own. So his ideology was first and foremost founded on society and not on state. But when Japan as a society aspires to something great, we can only do so as a state,” Kita wrote. Therefore, “socialism in Japan means statism.”
Kita was serving no particular class but the state as an abstract concept. It did not take long before statism as he formulated it became out-and-out militarism and fascism, just like the Western edition that he had not come to experience with.
The year 1919, after the end of World War I, was a bumper year for fascism.
In May, Benito Mussolini formed “the Blackshirts.”
In September, Adolf Hitler joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party.
Also in September, Kita completed An Outline Plan for the Reorganization of Japan in Shanghai.
As Russian revolutionaries were establishing their Red state power, the German revolution was ongoing and the Chinese revolution was brewing, fascism was being born at the same time in both the West and in the East.
For fascism to take root there must be crisis.
And Japan was facing an unprecedented crisis following the Rice Riots of 1918 and its intervention in Siberia.
Poverty makes Japanese great. It makes them resilient.
Let prices rise. They can survive on water and porridge.
Oh, look how happy they are!
They eat Nanjing rice and the bed bugs eat them, in their pigsty-like houses.
They have not right to vote but they are proud to be Japanese.
Oh, look how happy they are!
Growing and growing is the power of state.
Growing and growing is the wealth of the capitalists.
Growing and growing is my wife's belly.
Growing and growing the size of poverty.
Oh, look how happy they are!
In 1918, this folk song took Japan by storm.
In the song, Nanjing rice refers to the rice shipped to Japan from Nanjing, China. The song spread to most of Japan and perfectly mirrored the reality of a broken and corrupt Japan.
As World War I drew to a close, the Japanese government dispatched an army to Siberia on the pretext of rescuing people of various nationalities being held as prisoners of war and to retrieve wartime assets of its allies. The expedition fueled Japanese ambitions as Emperor Taisho and the cabinet were already deliberating on the possibility of annexing eastern Siberia.
But the Siberian Intervention backfired on them. The Rice Riots that took place right after spread to 32 counties in the home country, and involved 700,000 people. The riot shocked the government, which feared the prospect of a revolution similar to the one that had befallen the Romanov dynasty of Russia. The emperor and senior officials who had hitherto opposed party cabinets now had to lift the ban on political parties forming a cabinet.
And thus was born Japan's first party cabinet, under the premiership of Prime Minister Takashi Hara.
Early political party cabinets were nothing but a pressure valve to maintain peace and order. As a result, political parties were not allowed to fill the three most important posts, the minister of army, the minister of navy and the minister of foreign affairs. Parties were also sidelined on matters of national security.
Right from the start party politics in Japan were a facade.
And a fragile facade at that. The first cabinet prime minister was assassinated.
By the end of World War I, China had become a tempting target for world powers, coveted to such an extent that another world war was feared, provoked by competition over China. That fear motivated the US to invite Britain, France, Japan, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal and China to meet in Washington to discuss disarmament and the matter of China. The meeting resulted in the Nine-Power Treaty , in which the signatories pledged to respect China's sovereignty and China agreed to open its market equally to every nation. The treaty was a product of compromise and meant China had to open itself up to the world, but it did at least help keep in check the colonialist powers and maintain China's territorial integrity at a time of great political turmoil.
At the Washington conference, delegates from the Hara administration promised to drop some of the provisions of the 21-point treaty Japan had signed with China and to return Qingdao and other cities previously under German control. Back in Japan, this arrangement was viewed as a compromise and betrayal by Hara, who came under blistering attack.
A commoner by birth, Hara wanted to overturn plutocratic politics in favor of Western democracy. But his country denied him the opportunity.
On November 4, 1921, Hara was assassinated at the Tokyo Railroad Station. The murderer, Konichi Nakaoka, was a 19-year-old railway employee and a devoted reader of Otakebi , official journal of Yozonsha, the organization of which both Kita and Okawa were members.
Just over a month earlier, Heigo Asahi had killed Zenjiro Yasuda, one of the four business oligarchs of Japan. That assassination was also inspired by Kita. Asahi worshipped the emperor and revered Kita. He believed the zaibatsu plutocracy, political parties and the cabinet had gotten in between the emperor and his people. “Killing a couple of those rich crooks will get them all to reflect and repent.”
The twisted political ideas started off in Japan with a violent streak.
Nakaoka was inspired to emulate Asahi, proclaiming his act to be a protest against what he saw as worsening decadence and hedonism in Japan and against the swelling incoming tide of Western culture.
The murder weapon was a dagger purchased from a hardware store near the railway station. A humble dagger from a nearby hardware store finished off Japan's infant democratic politics.
Henceforth Japanese politics had the unenviable reputation of “assassination politics.” Kita's statism came in handy: Every assassination was presented as an act of patriotism. In their rush to join Europe and learn the Western way, Japanese forgot these words of Samuel Johnson:
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.