Janis Mimura's Planning for Empire focuses on Japan's technocratic, reform bureaucrats to show how Japanese policymaking in the 1930s and 1940s became centered on competition between an existing political and economic order and a bureaucratic class of young, middle-class professionals seeking a new order based on technical and scientific expertise, national independence, and imperial expansion.
Mimura's approach offers significant insights, for both Japan and transnationally, into institutional development in the interwar years, the economic importance and meaning of the international warfare of the 1930s and '40s, and the importance of accompanying changes in institutions and ideas for the postwar years.
There is, however, one notable defect in Mimura having chosen to frame Japan's wartime economic planning in terms of fascism. This is a problem, argumentatively, historiographically, and in terms of the primary material Mimura presents.
In her introduction Mimura describes “Japanese fascism” as “techno-fascist” – a term she leaves undeveloped beyond one unexpanded reference to Georges Gurvitch's category of “techno-bureaucratic fascism.” From then on, Mimura simply states repeatedly that Japan was “fascist” and “techno-fascist” with no further explanation beyond conflating technology and economic planning with fascism. At various points she cites institutional or ideological elements or influences as being “techno-fascist” without explaining why there is anything fascist about them. This is especially problematic because, as she occasionally acknowledges, many of the elements she classifies as “techno-fascist” are and were as common in Britain, France, the U.S., Scandinavia and other countries generally considered as non-fascist as they were in 1930s/40s Italy or Germany. Advocating German technology or science, as many of Mimura's bureaucrats do, is not the same thing as being fascist.
Similarly, Italian Fascism and German National Socialism themselves were not monolithic, particularly in economic matters. The anti-capitalist thrust that Mimura emphasizes among Japan's reform bureaucrats resembles similar views among early fascists in Italy and Nazi party members such as Goebbels, but conflicts with more pro-capitalist and accomodationist views dominant in Italian governments from the mid-1920s, and among Nazis in power.
In large measure what Mimura describes as “fascist political-economy” (p. 113) is a standard part of nineteenth-century, post-World War II, and present-day economic thought: Listian national economics, the nineteenth-century German Historical School of inductive economic history, international trade theory, and economic regionalism along the lines of the EU, Mercosur, NAFTA, and TPP. An informed reader will find the parallels and interconnections across time and regions fascinating. A reader relying solely on Mimura's guidance, however, will either mistakenly view this all as uniquely fascist or will be confused by the dissonance between what Mimura's sources say and the fascist label the text forces upon them.
Rather than recognizing the parallels her sources display with a variety of economic principles and traditions, Mimura presents a set choice of “liberal” versus “fascist.” The fact that her bureaucrats find ideas in1930s Germany is repeatedly presented as evidence of fascism without considering the nature of those ideas or their acceptance outside of Germany. Nor does Mimura deal with the fact that “liberal capitalism” was not the only economic idea or model that states referenced in the nineteenth century or the interwar period. The Listian and German Historical School ideas that Mimura links to fascism were, to various extents, common to economic thought and practice among all leading capitalist states in the nineteenth century, including Meiji Japan.
In her eagerness to find fascism, Mimura also tends to reduce thinkers such as Werner Sombart and Friedrich von Gottl-Ottlilienfeld to examples of fascism even where much of their work and influences either preceded fascism, or reflected other historical or intellectual movements – including List, Fordism, and Taylorism.
This tendency to make individuals and ideas fascist by association – and “German” a synonym for “Nazi” – occurs again when Mimura mentions the German Reichsbank President and economics minister Hjalmar Schacht in a paragraph that begins by emphasizing, “Reform bureaucrats vehemently denied charges that they were promoting socialism and emphasized their close links to the idealist right and Nazism” (p. 167). Nowhere does she mention that Schacht was a liberal politician, President of the Reichsbank during the Weimar Republic, or that the Nazis fired him from his government position in 1937.
Mimura also neglects the special character of wartime governments and wartime economies. Rationing, planning, and control were the hallmarks of all World War II economies. That the planned economies of World War II represented the only way to avoid a new postwar Great Depression was a commonplace of the 1940s. Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942) touches on many of the same examples of the technocratic, managerial, planned state for Britain that Mimura covers for Japan. This does not, however, mean that either Britain or Japan was fascist. At the very least, Mimura needs to understand the commonalities, as well as the differences, between her “liberal” and her “fascist” states.
What is most striking about Mimura's book and the sources contained therein is not their evidence of fascism, however one may decide to define that. What is striking is how many of the ideas and institutional developments resemble those within countries that were neutral or fought against Italy and Germany in World War II. Also striking are the influences these ideas and developments share with the nineteenth century and the 1920s. Although Mimura occasionally starts to acknowledge this, she inevitably turns back to her dichotomy of liberal versus fascist, with Japan and her techno-fascists rhetorically placed in the latter camp from the start.
Mimura makes her clearest statement of at least some of these parallels in the Epilogue. She immediately, though, insists that they are not what interests her, and closes with a critique of Kishi Nobusuke and her other techno-fascists for insufficient war guilt and for trying “to secure Japan's ruling position in the future world order by using Asia as a pawn and ultimately a victim in the game of great power politics” (p. 200). Well, yes. Like every other great power in history. However one feels about great power politics and imperialism they were and are hardly exclusive to the 1930s/40s, fascism, Japan, or Kishi Nobusuke and his fellow bureaucrats. It is certainly no more evidence of fascism than the Opium War is of British fascism or Commodore Perry is of American fascism.
But, ultimately, rhetorical repetition aside, Mimura's book is not really about fascism. It is about planning, bureaucrats, empire, and the wartime state in the interwar years, World War II, and after. Although Mimura displays less interest in non-fascist international and historical parallels, it is here where her insights about Japan point to valuable future work in transnational history and political economy.
