Rethinking Japanese Fascism from the Politics of the Household

Abstract

Debates over Japanese fascism have been framed in the past as an issue of the relationship between the Japanese nation-state qua empire, its political structure, and the ideology of the family-nation. This debate has largely echoed the dominant framing of the prewar Japanese capitalism debate between the Rōnō and the Kōza faction of Marxists who debated the nature of Japanese capitalism and the conditions of readiness of Japanese society for revolutionary struggle, which despite its vast differences, operated from an assumption of Japan’s deviation from normal (English) models of development. In order to go beyond this framework, I turn to a theoretically informed historical inquiry into protectionist policies aimed at reforming ‘all aspects’, as Uno Kōzō put it, of agricultural life following World War I. I focus on the complex relationship between the family, gender relations, imperialism and capitalism during this time of massive reorganization of the metropole-colony relation. Approaching capitalism as a social relation enables us to understand the full significance of the state’s prioritization of the small farming household as the primary unit through which private property relations and national belonging were authorized.