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Grassroots Fascism: The War Experience of the Japanese People
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
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As a young historian researching prewar popular political movements in the early 1970s, Yoshimi Yoshiaki (b. 1946) became increasingly struck—and troubled—by the systematic inattention to popular experiences of the war period, along with the virtually universal silence on questions of popular war responsibility. Imbued with the progressive convictions of a scholarly generation that came of age amid the political struggles of the late 1960s, he was dissatisfied with the near-universal academic focus on elites and abstract social structures that rendered the story of the Japanese experience of the war “a history without people.” After many years of research, stops and starts, the end result was Grassroots Fascism: a radically different vantage on the wartime experience from the “bottom-up” and a bold attempt to break out of the constricted confines of “history in the passive voice.”
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.- Copyright
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References
Notes
1 Personal interview with Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Tokyo, January 19, 2007.
2 Scholars have typically illustrated this “failure” with reference to the experience of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association (IRAA) established around this time, intended by its elite instigators as a vehicle for fascist-style one-party rule under Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro, but frustrated by the bureaucratic establishment. As E.H. Norman observed at the time, “experienced bureaucracy has gradually snuffed out all signs of democratic activity, but on the other hand it has blocked the victory of outright fascist forces.” E.H. Norman, cited in John W. Dower, “E.H. Norman, Japan, and the Uses of History,” in Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E.H. Norman, ed. John W. Dower (New York: Pantheon, 1975), pp. 73.
3 Yoshimi, Grassroots Fascism, p. 96.
4 Personal interview with Yoshimi, Tokyo, January 19, 2007.
5 This and the following comments from Japanese villagers are from Naikaku jōhōbu, ed., “Jihenka ni okeru nōsangyoson no shisō dōkō” (Tendencies of Thinking during the [China] Incident in Farming, Mountain, and Fishing Villages), repr. In Shiryō Nihon gendaishi, ed. Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Ikō Toshiya, and Yoshida Yutaka (Tokyo: Ōtsuki shoten, 1984), 11, pp. 310, 319-322.
6 Iwate ken nōson bunka kondankai, Senbotsu nōmin heishi no tegami (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1961), 226-229
7 Yamamoto Takeshi, Ichiheishi no jūgun kiroku (Fukui: Yasuda shoten, 1985), 192.
8 Senbotsu nōmin heishi no tegami, 74.
9 Ibid.
10 Asahi shimbun Yamagata shikyoku, Kikigaki: aru kenpei no kiroku (Tokyo: Asahi shimbunsha, 1985), 26, 152.
11 Murata Washirō, Nitchū sensō nikki (Tokyo, Hōwa shuppan, 1983), 5:112.
12 This account draws on Kimura Genzaemon's detailed diary from the front, Nitchū sensō shussei nikki (Akita: Mumyōsha shuppan, 1982).
13 Ibid, 19.
14 Ibid, p. 30.
15 Ibid, p. 53. Entry of January 5, 1938.
16 Ibid, pp. 207, 233.
17 Ibid, p. 266.
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