Janis Mimura . Planning for Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State . (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.) Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. 2011. Pp. ix, 229. $39.95.

Abstract

Janis Mimura focuses on “reform bureaucrats,” or more precisely Japanese economic reform bureaucrats during the 1930s and early 1940s. She argues that they promoted “techno-fascism,” which “represented a new form of authoritarian rule in which the ‘totalist’ state is fused with military and bureaucratic planning agencies and controlled by technocrats” (p. 4). Unlike some recent works that have examined fascist tendencies in Japanese culture, ideology, and everyday life, Mimura focuses on bureaucrats' visions and policies. This emphasis illuminates the nature of the political regime in this period. Mimura's work is significant as it shifts scholars' attention from more ideologically driven and nativist-oriented bureaucrats and military officers to reform bureaucrats. Although Mimura does not refer explicitly to Itô Takashi's distinction between Kan'nen Uyoku (Ideological Right) and Kakushin Uyoku (Statist Reformist Right), this distinction is useful here. As she indicates, it has been the “Ideological Right” that has dominated the scholarship on fascism in Japan. In contrast, Mimura sees fascism in Japan not only as a part of a global response to industrialization and the developments of technology and mass-based politics, but also as a forward-looking impulse on the part of technocrats. She shows that reform bureaucrats tackled the core issue of fascism: how to overcome the shortcomings of capitalism without making Japan a communist state. She demonstrates that they saw in fascism the solution for this problem (p. 5), and also viewed fascism as the means of overcoming Japan's lack of natural resources through technology, rationalization, spiritual mobilization, and imperial expansion. Mimura stresses that crises and war were opportunities for the major social, economic, and political restructuring that the reform bureaucrats needed to realize their vision.