"A Living Past as the Nation's Personality": Jinnõ shõtõki, Early Shöwa Nationalism, and Das Dritte Reich

Abstract

1In the 1930s, contemporary relevance was attributed to Kitabatake Chikafusa’s Jinnō shōtōki (1339) as a “standard work of national education” and an expression of “folk-national weltanschauung” for encapsulating the concept of kokutai, Japan’s national essence. It was praised too for claiming that Japan is a shinkoku or “divine country” wherein the sun goddess bequeaths her line of rule to all eternity; a concept of perpetual divine presence that has been described as the epitome of Shinto itself. In order to make the “Shinto” concepts of kokutai and shinkoku accessible to the uninitiated reader in Germany, Hermann Bohner, the first translator of Jinnō shōtōki into a Western language, in 1935 deployed Arthur Moeller van den Bruck’s Das dritte Reich (1923) as comparison. An examination of Moeller van den Bruck’s ideas, the socio-political milieu in Germany at the time, and Bohner’s political and theological stance reveals Jinnō shōtōki’s contemporary significance as being imbued with an almost metaphysical essentialism of the nation’s character. This article traces a shift in Jinnō shōtōki ’s evaluation from the early Meiji period, examines the role Shinto actually plays in Kitabatake’s work, and elucidates, via Bohner’s comparative approach, its importance for early Shōwa period nationalism.