VIII. Der Gastaufenthalt Otto Koellreutters in Tokio (1938/39): Eine Facette der Rezeption der nationalsozialistischen Staatslehre in Japan

Abstract

Summary The Schieder-Conze controversy questioned the relationship between the German academic community and the National Socialist government; however, research on how the Japanese academic community dealt with the German-Japanese alliance is still in progress. This study focuses on Toyowo Ōgushi, a Ministry of Education official who invited Professor Otto Koellreutter of the University of Munich to Tokyo as a Japanese-German exchange professor, and his academic friend Teiji Yabe, an assistant professor at the Imperial University of Tokyo. Ōgushi, whose mentor was the conservative constitutional scholar Uesugi Shinkichi, left the graduate school of the Imperial University of Tokyo, which had highly liberal and socialist tendencies. He studied constitutional law at the University of Jena between 1928 and 1933, where he was influenced by Koellreutter and Carl Schmitt. Upon returning to Japan, Ōgushi became a proponent of German National Socialist jurisprudence. Ōgushi and his former schoolmate Teiji Yabe invited Koellreutter to visit Tokyo. As a researcher of democratic theory, Yabe had become an assistant professor at the Imperial University of Tokyo, but he had moved to the University of Munich in 1936 to study under Koellreutter after becoming increasingly critical of parliamentary democracy. The Faculty of Law of the Imperial University of Tokyo, which retained liberal tendencies, was not entirely at ease with Koellreutter. Nonetheless, the Faculty of Law at the Imperial University of Tokyo conducted systematic research on the already established German National Socialist regime; moreover, its tone was not always critical, and it did not prevent the alliance between Japan and Germany as they moved towards war.