After finishing this fascinating but frequently frustrating collection of essays on “fascist culture” and “fascist aesthetics” in interwar Japan, I could not helping thinking that the f-word has become an empty signifier—or at least a badly overinflated one. To his credit, Alan Tansman, the editor, manfully acknowledges that there is little agreement among his authors about what just what fascism is or even what interwar Japan was like. In fact, even though some authors decline to define fascism, they seem to know it when they see it. “Did fascism really exist in Japan?” asks Richard Torrance. “Close enough, one is tempted to say” (p. 75).

Tansman himself suggests that the “manipulation of representation and language” lies at the heart of fascism (p. 3). Surely such manipulation lies at the heart of all ideologies. In any case, when Tansman focuses on Japan more specifically, he seems to see fascism simply as nativist or ethnic nationalism: namely, an “ideology for mobilizing and controlling the masses in the name of a ‘natural’ nation with no history” (p. 7). After three pages of discussion, Nina Cornyetz comes to a similar conclusion. While she begins with the observation that fascism is a “signifying system that employs a specific typology of images, sentiments and slogans to enlist the masses in a nationalist, collective, vitalist movement” and a “crisis in representation at perhaps its deepest level—or about the anxiety over the potential slippage between reality and how that ‘real’ is represented in images, slogan or text” (p. 323), she ends with the spare observation that fascism is “a nationalistic reactionary modernism” (p. 335).

There is general agreement among the authors that there were fascists in interwar Japan. As Kevin Doak, Richard Torrance, and Harry Harootunian make clear in their essays, during the late 1920s and early 1930s, Japanese intellectuals often used the term “fascism” to describe what was going on in Japan at the time. But there was no consensus as to what that meant. Some embraced the late Marxist notion that fascism was a consequence of contradictions within monopoly capital. According Doak, Tosaka Jun, for example, “found it all too easy to equate any group, idea or cultural work that was not Marxist with fascism” (p. 41). Others, such as Imanaka Tsugimaro, thought fascism a revolutionary movement that threatened the stability of parliamentary democracy; still others simply used it as an epithet for “despotic rule by a military clique” or “dictatorial government”—a practice continued by many postwar intellectuals.

Certainly there were many parallels between what was happening in Japan during this period and what was happening contemporaneously in Germany and Italy, the two European regimes generally recognized as fascist—increasing censorship, suppression of left-wing radicalism, police brutality, patriotic indoctrination in schools, overseas expansion—but not all the authors feel that labeling interwar Japan as fascist is really necessary. Angus Lockyer notes in his essay, “Japan constantly shared in the general characteristics of the time, but for solutions it was able for the most part to draw on older configurations of ideology, institutions and initiatives. It may be that these were enough, in the end, to achieve similar results to those achieved by fascist regimes” (p. 279). Even those who think it apt to characterize interwar Japan as fascist do so with no great confidence. In her foreword, Marilyn Ivy concludes, “we won't find it illegitimate to think of Japan as permeated with something that we could call fascism in the interwar years.” (p. 7). It is difficult to think of a more tentative assertion.

The most important question raised by this volume is whether it is useful or appropriate to apply a political label such as “fascist” to cultural production at all. “The relationship of style to politics,” Akiko Takenaka sensibly remarks, “is complicated. There is no fixed one-to-one relationship between political regimes and styles of cultural production; nor is there stylistic consistency among cultural products created under one political regime” (p. 234). The essays on architectural or artistic production certainly support that position. Takenaka argues that wartime memorials for the war dead, although sponsored by the military, rejected a nativist neo-Japanist style for a starkly utilitarian modernist style. And as Jonathan Reynolds points out, the Diet building completed in 1936 was designed by a committee that settled on a “modern style” that was vaguely neoclassical in layout but stripped of neoclassical detail. It may invite comparison with Albert Speer's projects, but it does not look very different from numerous post offices and federal buildings constructed in the United States during the interwar years.

It appears equally difficult to find a “fascist aesthetic” in film, a media invariably associated with fascist culture in Nazi Germany. In an especially illuminating essay, Andrew Gerow reviews the material conditions and practices that kept the Japanese from developing a “national style” that was malleable to fascist cultural goals—dependence on narration in local dialect, limited production of film prints, the scarcity of movie theaters or theater chains, the overproduction of feature films, limited viewing audience, and so forth. Equally important, he argues that cultural bureaucrats, though well aware of film's possibilities as a propaganda medium, were also wary of movies' potentially adverse impact on public morals. Michael Basket comes to parallel conclusions in his essay on Japanese collaboration with the Axis powers. The European fascists were not interested in importing Japanese films, and the German filmmaking style met criticism in Japan—all of which suggests that a common aesthetic was not at work.

Perhaps most telling of all is the relative lack of fascist spectacle in interwar Japan. Walter Benjamin argued that fascism in Europe was a kind of antidemocratic populism that gave the masses “not their rights” but “a chance to express themselves.” It was this “chance” that prompted rallies, parades, exhibitions, stadia, and monuments to instill popular identification with a charismatic national leader, his party, and the state. But as Lockyer shows in his essay on aborted plans for an international exhibition celebrating the 2,600th anniversary of the founding of the Japanese nation, surely a splendid occasion to buttress the fascist llusion of timeless community, the project was the work not of the fascist regime but of local government, private capital, and the exhibition production business, with little interest in celebrating fascist virtues. And the layout, posters, and other material artifacts produced in the planning process relied on borderless architectural and design templates that reflected a worldwide taste for the modern.

The essays that argue most strongly for the permeation of Japan by “something we might call fascism” focus on individual cultural producers or particular cultural products. One of the more successful is Aaron Skabelund's delightful essay on Hachikō, the loyal dog whose heart-warming story made its way into the 1934 shūshin textbooks for second graders. Although Skabelund argues that the cultures (note the plural) of fascism are characterized by “idealization and glorification of nation, race, loyalty, and violence” and concludes judiciously that Hachikō's story contributed “perhaps unintentionally” to the construction of an “imperial fascist culture” (p. 156), his essay indicates that the Hachikō story was initially promoted by Japanese dog enthusiasts obsessed with purity and breeding, who had more in common with the Westminster Kennel Club than with SA storm troopers. (He also reminds us that a dog is sometimes just a dog: the real Hachikō was said to be shy of gunfire.)

James Dorsey's essay on the popular story of the “nine war gods”—the midget submariners who died in the Pearl Harbor attack—analyzes a popular narrative that promoted the ideals of personal selflessness and communal sacrifice by linking pure-hearted heroism to family and community. Although he suggests that this tale of bravery resurrects the tropes of the traditional bidan, he concludes that it “addressed a large swath of the population assuaging the anxieties of modernity through participation in a totalizing myth that envelopes the individual in an eternal essence that is the state” (p. 410). The glorification of heroes and the beautification of death, however, are common tropes in war stories, and one wonders what made them more fascist in Japan than in other wartime countries. Perhaps cross-national comparisons would have clarified his conclusion.

In her essay on the efforts of “fascist planners” to introduce Nazi techniques of managing factory workers by manipulating their living quarters and leisure time with the help of the mingei movement, Kim Brandt suggests that there may be fascist styles of interior design as well as fascist forms of recreation. Perhaps so, but much of her narrative indicates that Japanese attempts to emulate the Nazi Beauty of Joy models gained as little traction as efforts to promote collaboration in film production. Noriko Aso's interesting essay on Yanagi Sōetsu, founder of the mingei movement, argues that although he often criticized the state, his cosmopolitan, humanist, and nonideological viewpoint was tempered by a strong nativist streak that made it possible to read some of his work as congruent with “fascist currents of the day.” By elevating community over the individual, trumpeting a revalorization of the traditional, calling for “normative standards” of health and wholesomeness, and rejecting frailty and intellectual indulgence, he offered a platform that “European fascists would have found little to quarrel with” (p. 144). Neither would New Age yoga instructors—or, come to think of it, the Boy Scouts.

The essays by Jim Reichert and Keith Vincent strain the hardest to identify a “fascist aesthetic” or tie a cultural product to fascism. Both offer fascinating discussions of mystery stories with homoerotic themes. Reichert suggests that while Edogawa Rampō's Demon of the Lonely Isle titillates the reader with a tale of an unrequited sexual relationship between two male protagonists, it ultimately warns against deviant, transgressive, and abnormal sexuality that threatens the purity and vigor of the Japanese bloodline. As such, it is a precursor of the fascist zeitgeist and covert propaganda for social and cultural conformity. Vincent, on the other hand, argues that the main narrator in Hamao Shirō's The Devil's Disciple, a man falsely accused of murdering a wife he wanted to kill and also the jilted lover of the prosecutor of the case, whom he attacks as a “demonic” force, is essentially a recovering homosexual—in short, a “homofascist.” Vincent concludes with a definition of “fascist culture” that makes it sound like a twelve-step program gone haywire—“[a culture] in which narratives of recovery become compulsory and addictive” (p. 391).

Clearly in this volume, the f-word has come a long way from its association with putsches and street fighting, the “Sieg Heil” salute, book burning, the Nuremberg Rally, Kristallnacht, and death factories. Perhaps too far. While the essays offer many original and interesting perspectives on the “wartime culture” of Japan, they establish only the thinnest of parallels to “fascist culture” in Europe—and those parallels have more to do with the creation of “imagined” or “artificial” communities in all modern nation-states, fascist or not.