The Atmosphere of Conversion in Interwar Japan

Abstract

Ienaga Saburō, the Japanese historian who spent decades fighting the Japanese government for honest school textbook depictions of Japan’s wartime depredations, is unflinching in his description of Japan’s interwar fascism. Ienaga describes a Japan in which the prewar state held the population in an ever-tightening vise – tightened with every challenge to state repression at home or military venture abroad – made of internal security laws restricting freedom of speech and thought, and conformist education blocking the growth of a freedom of consciousness and political action. Coercion and manipulation ended dissent, and indoctrination was backed by the police, the army, and their swords. Though fascism in Japan may not have resulted from a dramatic, revolutionary break from the past, for Ienaga in 1968 the repression and violence within Japan and without added up to fascism.2