Walter Skya has written an excellent overview of changing formulations of imperial ideology from the Meiji period until 1945, especially as they were articulated by Hozumi Yatsuka, Minobe Tatsukichi, Kita Ikki, Uesugi Shinkichi, and Kakehi Katsuhiko. Skya details how ultranationalist Shintō thought shifted in response to changing sociopolitical conditions and how it employed or rejected facets of Western and Confucian conceptualizations of the individual, the ruler, the state, and sovereignty.

Skya begins his exposition by sketching how Itō Hirobumi's constitution left ambiguous the exact nature of the Japanese state—especially in terms of the respective powers of the sacred emperor and secular representative bodies—and for this reason led to political gridlock. In response to this crisis, Hozumi Yatsuka (1860–1912) advanced a theory of absolute monarchy, with the emperor ruling directly as a national patriarch in a völkisch family-state. Minobe Tatsukichi (1873–1948) located sovereignty not in the emperor but, like Hegel, in the state, of which the emperor was one of several organs. In opposition to Hozumi and Minobe's approaches to securing a strong state and effective government, Kita Ikki (1883–1937) took a more social democratic approach in his formulation of the national polity along socialist lines.

These approaches to the tensions in the Meiji constitutional system proved inadequate in the early twentieth century, when education, media, and other factors lead to a politicization of the urban masses. The question then became how to integrate the masses into the state, and Skya outlines several responses. Uesugi Shinkichi (1878–1929) diverged from his teacher Hozumi's hierarchical, patriarchal theory and advanced a holistic metaphysics of the totalitarian state, with the masses interacting in a horizontal social structure and the divine emperor standing as a moral exemplar and the source of the “organizational will” (taisei ishi). Kakehi Katsuhiko (1872–1961) took a theocratic approach, seeing the emperor as a manifest kami (arahitogami), descended from if not incarnating Amaterasu, and as the “universal self” and “great life” with which Japanese could achieve a mystical unity, especially when they participated in Japan's unique mission to create a new world order.

In his final chapters, Skya focuses on the various “incidents” in the 1930s and the “orthodoxation” of the imperial holy war ideology through the publication of Kokutai no hongi (Fundamentals of Our National Polity) in 1937. And in his conclusion, he offers rich comparisons with al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

Throughout Japan's Holy War, Skya provides important angles on Japan's imperial ideology. For example, highlighting that they were professors at leading universities, Skya rejects Maruyama Masao's claim that ultranationalist ideologues were “pseudo-intellectuals” (p. 136). Skya also parts from those who would see emperor ideology as monolithic and continually centered on claims that the state is a family headed by the emperor as the great patriarch. Skya also positions himself in opposition to the thesis that Japanese militarism was an aberration in an otherwise consistent process of modernization and democratization, and he makes the case that Uesugi, more than Kita, should be seen as the theorist with the most influence on ultranationalist activists in the 1930s (p. 184).

I have only a few quibbles with this rich and important book, and they concern somewhat tangential facets of Skya's exposition. At one point, Skya writes that in the late 1930s and early 1940s, “[c]onstantly bombarded with radical Shintō ultranationalist thought, the common Japanese was no doubt coming to feel invincible” (p. 292), and he states that Shintōist thought was “the ideology that made the emperor the divine man that he was in the hearts and minds of millions of Japanese, the ideology that made for the fanatical loyalty of the Japanese people to their emperor, unshaken even after the dropping of two atomic bombs and the destruction of the Meiji state” (pp. 9–10). I wonder, however, whether the “common Japanese” felt invincible and, in their hearts and minds, truly regarded the emperor as a divinity and felt “fanatical loyalty” to him. If the ideology had penetrated Japanese psyches to the extent that Skya claims, then why the Special Higher Police, the Military Police, the widespread censorship and self-censorship, and other forms of repression at that time?

I also am not fully persuaded by Skya's framing of the incidents in the 1930s as “terrorism” or “terrorist activities.” Skya uses Bruce Hoffman's definition of terrorism as “violence—or, equally important, the threat of violence—used and directed in pursuit of, or in service of, a political aim” (p. 232), but this broad definition fails to specify what “terrorism” implies—not only using violence but also trying to instill fear in the populace—and it encompasses war in general and other forms of violence that we might not be inclined to term “terrorism.” And while high-profile politicians, bureaucrats, and industrialists presumably felt fear in the face of the incidents in the 1930s, it is not at all clear that instilling terror in the populace was an objective in those acts or that the net effect of the acts was widespread fear and intimidation. Though Skya claims that the “wave of political and religious assassinations … terrorized the nation” (p. 263), he subverts that claim when he also writes that those and other acts made the perpetrators “immensely popular in the minds of the Japanese masses” (p. 251) and that “the Japanese state was gripped by a religious fundamentalism so powerful and pervasive that even the radical Shintō ultranationalist terrorists were praised by the masses for their purity and devotion and purely innocent victims were thought to have deserved death at the hands of the true believers” (p. 311).

Again, these issues are somewhat peripheral to Skya's main focus and arguments, and I have no doubts that Japan scholars in a range of disciplines will benefit greatly from Skya's analysis of emperor ideology, as will graduate and advanced undergraduate students.