Introduction

Abstract

Abstract This book explores the ideological links that tied Japan to Italy during the period 1915–1952. More specifically, it considers why Japanese intellectuals, writers, activists, and politicians, although conscious of the many points of intersection between their politics and those of Benito Mussolini, were so ambivalent about the comparability of Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy. To elucidate the scope of the Japanese encounter with fascism, the book relies on individuals, theater plays, official documents, popular literature, newspapers, and philosophical treatises. In discussing how contemporary Japanese understood fascism, the book rethinks the history of Japan as part of a wider, interconnected, history of fascism. It argues that Japanese politics and ideology in the first half of the twentieth century were intertwined with European fascism.