Japanese mass imperialism and the

geometries of total war, 1926–45

December 1926 saw the death of the Taishō emperor, the man who had reigned in name if not
in fact over Japan for fourteen years. With the formal accession of a new emperor, a new era
was proclaimed from Tokyo—the Shōwa era. From the beginning, this was an era of crisis. It
saw the disintegration of Japanese democracy at a vertiginous pace. Just four months after the
death of the Taishō emperor, in April 1927, the incumbent government of Prime Minister
Wakatsuki Reijirō collapsed, and the liberal foreign policy of transparency and friendliness
towards China and America that had been spearheaded by Shidehara Kijūrō as foreign minister
since 1924 was abandoned. In retrospect, this marked a watershed in Japanese politics.1
Military affairs welled to the forefront of politics, as Wakatsuki’s successor Tanaka himself would
lose power thanks to his own estrangement from the military. By 1929 the ‘final breakdown of
the semi-democratic regime’ was already well in train.2 The era of party-based cabinets came to
an end in 1932 with the assumption of the premiership by Admiral Saitō Makoto.

The sequence of political events that marked the era of crisis, catastrophe, and ultimately
collapse within Japan running from the start of the Shōwa era to the Japanese empire’s
annihilation in 1945, has been picked over endlessly by historians from all the nations that
participated in the world-shaking conflicts that followed in their wake. Rather less well-
understood are the trends of intellectual history that contributed to the preparation and conduct
of Japan’s impending wars in the Pacific. As Christopher Goto-Jones has pointed out, currents
of interwar and wartime Japanese political thought like that of the Kyoto School have tended to
be marginalised not just by the ethnocentricity of Western intellectual historians in particular but
because of their assumed ‘association with (or “context” in) the war itself’, taken to discredit
them as localist, ‘anti-Western’ strands of thought with little interest for political philosophers
with universalist concerns.3

While Goto-Jones, however, has argued that the need to return to the Kyoto School stems
precisely from its normative contribution to such a ‘universalist’ project—in his view, the recent
turn to philosophers like Carl Schmitt highlights the desperate need to engage with non-Western
sources who could represent a ‘far less dubious alternative’ and can speak to ‘the needs of a
“worldly world”’4—the significance of intellectual history does not, I believe, simply lie in
recovering the normative ability of historical thinkers to contribute to a universal political
philosophy, but in the ways in which their analysis contribute to describing and shaping their

1
Hosoya Chihiro, ‘Britain and the United States in Japan’s view of the international system, 1919–37’, in
Ian Nish, ed., Anglo-Japanese Alienation 1919–1952: Papers of the Anglo-Japanese Conference on the
History of the Second World War (Cambridge, 1982), 3–26: 12.
2
Harukata Takenaka, Failed Democratization in Prewar Japan: Breakdown of a Hybrid Regime, 12.
3
Christopher Goto-Jones, ‘The Kyoto School and the history of political philosophy: Reconsidering the
methodological dominance of the Cambridge School’, in Goto-Jones, ed., Re-politicising the Kyoto School
as Philosophy (Abingdon, 2008), 3–24: 4.
4
Ibid., 18, 22 n. 11.

1
contexts. In his description of the ‘revolution in the concept of politics’ in Renaissance Italy,
Maurizio Viroli notes that it is misleading to compare the ‘modern’ and ‘ancient’ understandings
of politics simply on the basis of their enduring normative merits: rather, ‘the contrast was
between two ideologies that were meant to uphold certain practices and condemn others’.5
Similarly, then, in Shōwa Japan different currents of political thought set out to negotiate their
context in different ways, accomplishing particular objectives. Departing from Goto-Jones, I do
not believe the moral quality of a political philosophy is of principal interest for the intellectual
historian. The philosophers of Japanese mass imperialism I will discuss are of continuing
interest not because of their normative quality, but because of the power and originality of the
approach they represented.

So much will probably seem obvious in the Cambridge School context. The currents that were
of decisive importance to Shōwa Japan have proven elusive, however. Special—even
exclusive—emphasis has tended to be laid on the development of the idea of the kokutai,
variously translated as the national essence or the organic polity, a concept that came to the
fore in the Meiji era and that was deployed ever more strictly in the early Shōwa era by
ethnocentric nationalists who aimed conceptually to marshal the Japanese people as a
homogeneous ethnicity united beneath the distinctively Shintō religious leadership of the
imperial house.6 But despite the Japanese government’s sponsorship of kokutai thought,
including its attempt to legislate the subject in 1937 by issuing a textbook ostensibly on the
correct meaning of kokutai, this doctrine was hard to reconcile with the goal of a multiethnic,
pan-Asian coalition then shared by many in the military and government, including the political
thinkers I will discuss below. The emphasis on kokutai as a figure of interwar and wartime
Japanese political thought has tended to exaggerate the Japanese government’s identification
with this stance, while crowding out other important currents of political thought.7

The theme of this conference points to another, less well-examined yet perhaps equally current
within the development of Japanese political thought in this period. Unlike kokutai, there has
been no systematic attempt to trace the heterogeneous, influential set of Japanese political
theories of space that developed in the early Shōwa period, yet this interest can be found
across the political spectrum, encompassing figures as diverse as the Marxist Tosaka Jun, who
completed his work ‘Space as Characteristic’ (Seikaku to shite no kūkan) in 1927, and the
various philosophers of empire who I will briefly introduce and characterise. Unlike the Shintō
kokutai theorists, these thinkers were exceptionally heterogeneous in their religious,
philosophical, and political beliefs, often inclined, theologically, more to variants of Buddhism
than to Shintō. Their contributions to Japanese political thought in the early Shōwa era offer a

5
Maurizio Viroli, ‘The Revolution in the Concept of Politics’, Political Theory, XX: 3 (1992), 473–95: 490.
6
Western intellectual histories of kokutai have appeared regularly since the prewar era, but for a recent
treatment, see e.g., Walter A. Skya, Japan’s Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shinto Ultranationalism
(Durham, 2009). Skya argues broadly that the official and exclusive ideology of Japan from the 1930s to
1945 must be regarded as a form of ‘radical Shintō’ founded on kokutai theory. Yoshihisa Matsusaka’s
review of Skya offers a useful bibliography of previous English-language contributions to the subject, and
notes that Skya ‘may be overestimating the relative weight’ of this current of thought in Japan at the time.
Matsusaka, in The Journal of Japanese Studies, XXXVI: 2 (2010), 446–51: 449.
7
Matsusaka, review of Skya, Japan’s Holy War; Kevin Doak, A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan:
Placing the People (Leiden, 2007), pp. 102ff.

2
clearer picture of the ideological underpinnings that came to sustain Japanese imperialism.
What I term their ‘weaponisation of space’ constituted a powerful contribution to the Japanese
imperial project that attempted, ideologically, to project it onto a transcendent field that could
subsume the overwhelming development and complexification of contemporary Japanese
society. They are of enduring interest in this sense not because of their universal, normative
merit, but because of their originality and the historical significance of their rearticulation of
Japanese imperialism.

The earliest and most politically important of the Japanese theorists of space I wish to consider
here was Ishiwara Kanji, a military officer and strategist who, thanks to his leading role in
triggering and carrying out the conquest of Manchuria in 1931, would do more than almost any
other single person to set Japan on its particular path to war.8 In this endeavour, Ishiwara was
motivated by a highly distinctive philosophy of history that he elaborated from the middle of the
1920s, based, fundamentally, upon a particular conception of the politicisation of space.
Beginning in his 1927 ‘Lectures on the History of European War’ (Ōshū kosenshi kōgi) and then
in his ‘General Outline of the History of War’ (Sensōshi taikan), first presented as a series of
lectures in 1929 and reworked for publication several times in the subsequent decade, Ishiwara
construed the modern history of warfare as a geometric progression, moving from the one-
dimensional front lines that characterised land warfare at the time of Friedrich the Great through
the two-dimensional territorial combat groups that emerged in the First Wold War, now entering
with the advent of air power upon a three-dimensional phase of annihilation, volumetrically
encompassing space as such.9

Scholars have already traced the explicit influence of German strategic thought and Nichiren
Buddhism on Ishiwara,10 but I suggest there is another aspect to this story. In 1923, Japanese
society had been forced abruptly into a radical engagement with the space in which it was
situated by the immensely destructive Great Kantō earthquake. Minami Orihara and Gregory
Clancey have recently located the origins of the Japanese discourse of national emergency or
hijōji in this event, pushing it back from the traditionally accepted pivot of the Great
Depression.11 Though little remarked upon in the interpretive literature on Ishiwara, it appears
that in the earthquake’s aftermath he, too, came to a profound sense of the engulfment of
human society by the space in which it is situated. Ishiwara read of the earthquake the day after
it took place while studying in Germany in 1923, and was deeply affected by the news.12 He
would later recall that while crossing Siberia on his return from Germany two years after the
earthquake in 1925, he was asked to give a speech to members of the Nichiren Buddhist

8
One recent biography of Ishiwara titles him ‘the man who unleashed the war’: Bruno Birolli, Ishiwara:
L’homme qui déclencha la guerre (Paris, 2012). The standard biography in English remains Mark Peattie,
Ishiwara Kanji and Japan’s Confrontation with the West (Princeton, 1975).
9
A detailed exegesis of Ishiwara’s arguments on the history of war and the impending final war is given,
with diagrams, in Peattie, Ishiwara Kanji, chapter 3: ‘“The Final War”’.
10
On the German influence, Peattie, Ishiwara Kanji; on Nichiren Buddhism, Gerald Iguchi, ‘Nichirenism
as modernism: Imperialism, fascism, and Buddhism in modern Japan’ (unpublished PhD dissertation,
University of California San Diego, 2006), chapter 4: ‘Ishiwara Kanji, History as Contrapuntal Harmony,
and Modernity as “the Dawn that Never Comes”’.
11
Minami Orihara and Gregory Clancey, ‘The Nature of Emergency: The Great Kanto Earthquake and the
Crisis of Reason in Late Imperial Japan’, Science in Context, XXV: 1 (2012), 103–126.
12
Tatsuo Irie, Nichiren-shōnin no tairei to Ishihara Kanji no shōgai (Tokyo, 1996), 76.

3
association the Kokuchūkai at Harbin. Here, he amazed his audience by claiming that it would
be frivolous for the Japanese government to lavish money on earthquake-devastated Tokyo
because the ‘final war for the unification of the world is near’, and the ‘capital of the world’ could
only be rebuilt by the people of the whole world.13

This provocative comment, mentioned almost parenthetically in his ‘General Outline’, might
appear simply as an apocalyptic pronouncement tailored for Ishiwara’s mystical sensibilities and
his religious audience. Jacqueline Stone, indeed, has described Ishiwara’s thought in general as
serving merely as the articulation of a ‘violent millenarian vision’ that was ‘instrumental in setting
Japan on a tragic course’.14 But Ishiwara’s thought was predicated not just on mystical
expectation—though Nichiren Buddhist predictions of the looming millennium had a clear role in
his theory of the impending ‘final war’—but on a series of more concrete observations on the
trajectory of mass society and its interactions with the environment in which it lay. If Tokyo had
been destroyed by the earth in 1923, Ishiwara went on to argue that in any case it would soon
be destroyed again from the air in the apocalyptic wars that lay head; for Ishiwara this mirror
eventuality was a ‘heaven-sent condition’ resulting from the inexorable development of the
history of military tactics. The destruction of the mass society of the city by the immeasurably
more immense three-dimensional space in which it lay loomed large in his historical schema: for
Ishiwara, ‘the earlier history of mankind was the era of urban culture, and its later history is the
culture of urban demolition’.15

On precisely the same day that he presented his ‘General Outline’, Ishiwara produced another
document titled, verbosely, the ‘Plan for the Solution of the Manchuria and Mongolia Problem as
a Basic National Policy to Revolutionize Our Country’s Destiny’ (Kokuun tenkai no konpon
kokusakutaru Man-Mō mondai kaiketsuan).16 Ishiwara believed that the conquest of the
resources of continental Asia was necessary not simply to extend the power of the Japanese
state, and still less to reduce China to colonial status, but, firstly, as part of a broader plan to
consolidate a tenable military position in preparation for a future ‘final war’ against the West, and
more fundamentally because the inexorable permeation of space by war evidenced in history
caught the entirety of Japanese politics in a ‘heaven-sent obligation’ to construct a state capable
of waging it. ‘War maintains war,’ Ishiwara argued here—and it was on the basis of his
arguments in this document, two years later, that he would, as an officer in Manchuria,
strategise and carry out the Kwantung Army’s spectacular occupation of this region, which fixed
Japan on its course towards a Second Sino-Japanese War. Just as the Kantō earthquake had
done, the reality of total three-dimensional warfare imposed an obligation to imperialism that
engulfed mass society with the suffocating inevitability of fate. ‘In [such] war, young and old,
man and woman, will participate. [But] not just the young and old, man and woman. Mountains,

13
Ishiwara Kanji, Saishū sensōron, sensōshi taikan (Tokyo, 1993), reproduced online at http://tatsu-
zine.com/samples/aozora/saishusenso_sensoshi.pdf, 198. My translation.
14
Stone, 273.
15
Shirato Midori, Ishihara Kanji no sensō hōkiron: sensō to shūkyō, kagaku to shūkyō hen (Tokyo, 1981),
360. My translation.
16
This plan and the circumstances surrounding its authorship are discussed in Peattie, Ishiwara Kanji,
Chapter 3.

4
rivers, grass, trees; all of it enters the vortex of war.’17

Following his return to Japan from the continent and subsequent dissociation from active
policymaking in 1941, Ishiwara remained in Kyoto until September 1942, lecturing at
Ritsumeikan University. His presence in this city was timely. Over the previous few years, Kyoto
had become an important site in a significant controversy that had erupted over the elaboration
of geopolitics in the Japanese context. Ishiwara’s disillusionment and withdrawal from
policymaking was precisely contemporary with the meteoric rise of Komaki Saneshige, a priest
and geographer at Kyoto University—now rather more obscure than Ishiwara, despite his long
subsequent postwar career—who soon took the lead in demanding the formulation of a new
school of geopolitics fit for Japan’s particular context. ‘Geopolitics’ was a relatively recent arrival
in Japan from Germany: its ideas had spread from the mid-1920s onwards primarily through the
translation and adaptation of the work of the German geopolitical theorist Karl Haushofer and
his ‘Munich school’.18 This was the current with which Komaki would break.

Having received his doctorate in 1937 and become head of Kyoto University’s geography
department the following year, in December 1939 Komaki established a secret research group
named the Yoshida no Kai or Yoshida Association to promote a distinctively Japanese school of
geopolitics.19 The next year, in 1940, he issued a ‘Manifesto for Japanese Geopolitics’ (Nihon
chiseigaku sengen) that soon attained wide circulation. In this text, he insisted on the distinctive
character of ‘Japanese geopolitics [as] different from the many world geopolitical currents
imitating German geopolitics’. Like Ishiwara, he was dissatisfied with the methods and
objectives that had been adopted in the Japanese government’s drive to establish Japan as a
hegemon in Asia, and this would again take the form of an attempt to reach beyond the ordinary
limits of international relations, and beyond Haushofer’s conception of regional spheres, to
some more abstract form of geopolitical space as such.

Against the proponents of the co-prosperity sphere as a matter of Japanese Lebensraum or the
consolidation of a distinctive East Asian space in the sense articulated by Haushofer’s disciples,
Komaki insisted that this conception did not do nearly enough either to encompass the
distinctive character of East Asia or to resist the West. For Komaki, the concept of a distinct,
hegemonic space reflected a Western understanding of the world incompatible with Japan’s
‘imperial way’ or kōdō. To divide the world into regional blocs was to strike disorder into the
transcendent unity of space.20 On his account, like that of Ishiwara, what was necessary was a
far more thoroughgoing weaponisation of geopolitical space.21 Komaki insisted that the world’s

17
Ishiwara Kanji, Saishū sensōron, sensōshi taikan, 45. My translation.
18
Haushofer himself was intensely interested in Japan, having lived there on secondment as a
researcher while serving in the German military from 1908 to 1910. He played an important role in
encouraging closer ties between Japan and Germany before and during World War II.
19
On the Yoshida Association see Mizuuchi Toshio, ‘Tsusho “Yoshida no kai” ni yoru chiseigaku kanren
shiryō’, in Kūkan, shakai, chirishisō, VI (2001), 59–112.
20
See Komaki, Chiseigakujōyori mitaru daitōa (Tokyo, 1939), 51.
21
On Komaki, see Russell Nozomi Horiuchi, ‘Chiseigaku: Japanese Geopolitics’ (unpublished PhD
dissertation, University of Washington, 1975); Shibata Yoichi, ‘Ideas and Practices of the Kyoto School of
Geopolitics’, in Shimazu Toshiyuki, ed., Languages, Materiality, and the Construction of Geographical
Modernities (Wakayama, 2014), 55–69; Shibata Yoichi, ‘Komaki Saneshige no “Nihon chiseigaku” to
sono shisōteki kakuritsu’, in Jinbunchiri, LVIII: 1 (2006), 1–19.

5
different geographical spaces were not equal; nor were they simply matters of culture or race. In
fact, Komaki’s work on ‘Japanese geopolitics’ aimed not simply to resituate geopolitics in the
context of Japanese political culture, but to project that culture onto the pure content of
geopolitical space itself. Komaki argued in his work from 1939 onwards that Japan’s claim to
leadership of the resistance to Western incursion in Asia, and ultimately to a leadership role in
the world, was based on its unique ability to confront Western imperialism on this higher level,
thanks to the peculiar relationship to space embodied in the Japanese imperial cult, and to East
Asia’s distinctive character as a geographical region, both of which formed continual topics of
interest for him.

Though Komaki’s role in the war was rather more obscure than that of Ishiwara Kanji—and like
Ishiwara he remained a dissident in certain important respects—he also played an important
role in formulating the concepts that would motivate the Japanese government. Komaki
conceived his role to be that of a participant in a ‘thought war’, mobilising the Japanese
population by discerning transcendental geopolitical imperatives.22 In September 1940, an
Institute for Total War was established at Kyoto, managed jointly by the army and navy with the
goal of training officers and bureaucrats for the impending conduct of total war, which soon
began collaborating with the Yoshida no Kai.23 Komaki’s thought developed in increasingly
extreme directions, building on his resolution to identify the Japanese imperial project with a
mobilisation of space as such: most notoriously, in 1943, he proposed a reconfiguration of the
world’s continents such that North America would be renamed ‘Northeast Asia’, Europe as
‘West Asia’, and so on. This represented not just a flight of fancy, however, but—in his view—a
necessary consequence of the attempt to fight Western colonialism on the most expansive and
geopolitically important terrain possible, that of abstract space itself.

As with Ishiwara, Komaki was also motivated by a partly mystical conception of politics: for him,
this lay in the peculiar role of the Japanese imperial house, whose presence in Japan from time
immemorial represented an interface between temporality and eternity that granted Japan a
type of connection with space and time that was denied to other nations of the world. Writing
three decades after the end of the war, Komaki would evocatively describe Japan’s imposition
of an internal spatial order from the late Meiji era through to the 1930s through its appeal to the
imperial cult: ‘Shintō ideology’, he wrote, ‘was mobilised in order to identify the people’s
geopietal sentiments with tennō [emperor] worship’24 The regimentation of space meant the
collapse of Japanese religion’s heterotopic diversity into the mandate of a single genius loci for
each village, which could then hierarchically be related to the tennō cult.25 In Komaki’s view after
the war, the eventual association of this movement of spatial regulation with fascism was simply
a ‘tragical paradox’. Inasmuch as they represented the apex of this engagement with space,
however, his wartime geopolitics may suggest another story.

22
See Lee Seokwon, ‘Rationalizing empire: Nation, space, and community in Japanese social sciences,
1931–1945’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 2010), 184.
23
Christian Spang, Karl Haushofer und Japan, 698.
24
Keiichi Takeuchi, ‘Geopolitics and Geography in Japan Reexamined’, Hitotsubashi Journal of Social
Studies, XII: 1, 14–24: 20.
25
Komaki Saneshige, ‘Some remarks on the history of regional description and the tradition of
regionalism in modern Japan’, Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies, X: 1 (1978), 36–44: 40.

6
Ishiwara and Komaki have, I believe, received less attention than they merit as political thinkers.
I will mention, briefly, a third thinker who may be positioned in the same current, a member of
the Kyoto School of philosophy, Nishida Kitarō, who has recently received rather more notice.
Komaki himself had been influenced by the philosophy of another thinker of the Kyoto School,
Nishitani Keiji, but it was to Nishida, as well as to the other Kyoto philosopher Tanabe Hajime,
both among Japan’s most respected philosophers at the time, that the Japanese government
would turn to help articulate the concept of the co-prosperity sphere that would form a central
plank of Japanese imperial policy at the height of the Pacific War. In the runup to the first and—
as it happened—only summit of leaders of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere in
1943, the Greater East Asia Ministry sought out Nishida to prepare a summary document of
principles for the Joint Declaration to be issued by the conference. The paper Nishida returned
to the ministry was titled ‘Principles for a New World Order’ (Sekai no shinchitsujo no genri).
With its endorsement of Japanese supremacy in Asia, this document, perhaps more than any
other of Nishida’s works, has provoked a good deal of controversy among recent interpreters of
the Kyoto School.26

What is relevant for our purposes is the specifically spatial argument that Nishida articulated
here. Nishida suggested that ‘as a result of the development of science, technology and
economy, each ethnic nation-state has come to enter an intimately linked single international
space’. This unitary space called teleologically upon nation-states ‘to construct a universal
world’: ‘this is the ultimate Reason of the historical development of mankind, and is
simultaneously the principle of the new world order demanded in today’s world war.’27
Importantly for Nishida, however, nations were characterised not just by their ‘tradition’ but by
their ‘relation to the earth’.28 The geopolitical conflicts he saw taking place were subsumed
within—and motivated by—the imperatives imposed by this unitary space, and through it they
transcended not just the specific divisions within Japanese society, but also those between the
nations of East Asia.

Despite their obvious differences, through their shared conceptual ground and their
interactions—as well as the interesting fact of their physical coincidence in Kyoto in 1941–42—
these cases form a relatively continuous strand of intellectual history, characterised by its

26
Satofumi Kawamura calls ‘Principles’ Nishida’s ‘most notorious paper’ and a pivot of the contemporary
controversy over his thought: Satofumi Kawamura, ‘Introduction to the “Nishida Problem”: Nishida Kitarō’s
Political Philosophy and Governmentality’, Working Paper Series, Afrasian Research Centre, Ryukoku
University, 1. For more on this controversy see Elena L. Lange, ‘Die Überwindung des Subjekts. Nishida
Kitarôs (1870–1945) Weg zur Ideologie’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Zurich, 2011).
Drawing on ‘Principles’ and other aspects of Nishida’s political work, Lange powerfully criticises a number
of ‘apologists’ for Nishida who seek to minimise the connection between his thought and the Japanese
war effort, including Goto-Jones, Ueda Shizuteru, Michiko Yusa, and James Heisig. Lange argues that
Goto-Jones’ argument that Nishida’s arguments constituted an occulted critique of power that was only
incidentally ‘perverted’ thanks to the irreducible pollution of linguistic concepts themselves opens the door
to an unacceptable form of relativism: ‘There is a good reason,’ she states, ‘we do not call cities
“concentration camps.”’ Ibid., 264, n. 975, my translation.
27
Nishida, Sekai no shinchitsujo no genri, translated in Yumiko Ida, Rethinking Identity in Modern Japan:
Nationalism as Aesthetics (London & New York, 2002), 41–2.
28
See Jo Yung-Hwan, ‘Japanese Geopolitics and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’
(unpublished PhD dissertation, American University, 1964), 214.

7
distinctive appeal to space as a means of overcoming the contradictions of Japanese society
and uniting the nation under the banner of one imperial project. For both Ishiwara and Komaki in
particular, the root of their concern was to negotiate the problems of mass capitalism and mass
politics: the figure of the city for Ishiwara, though also the disaffection with capitalism he
expressed in other works; for Komaki, the way in which the consolidation of Japan as a mass
nation-state demanded an appeal to transcendent spatial order. In each case, they set the
objective of recovering Japanese imperialism by identifying it in one way or another with space
itself, projecting it on a scale so vast that it could lie beyond the control even of the promethean
forces of mass politics, acting on it from above and serving to construct a genuinely mass
imperialism. By recovering this current of thought, we way shed light not just on one specific
chapter on Japanese intellectual history, but on the powerful role that space can assume in
political thought.