Walter A. Skya . Japan's Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shintō Ultranationalism . (Asia‐Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society.) Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press . 2009 . Pp. xii, 387. Cloth $94.95, paper $25.95.

Abstract

I remember well the graduate school seminar where we debated the question of whether people in prewar and wartime Japan believed the emperor was divine. The class consensus was no, that the Tenno's status was special but somewhere below what people in the West perceive as godlike. I lost the debate. Now comes a new work in Japanese intellectual history by Walter A. Skya which asserts that not only did the Japanese mainstream at the time worship the emperor as the actual blood descendent of the Sun Goddess, but that this belief and its associated “radical Shinto ultranationalism” were substantial components of the ideology that underlay Japanese violent politics, international expansionism, and soldier and civilian behavior in war. This system was militant and totalitarian, and during the Taisho era it displaced the conservative familial statism of the Meiji period. Moreover, Shinto fundamentalism was undergirded by the work of well-placed scholars and promoted by influential activist organizations. Skya's work, while not without its warts, rightly challenges presumptions in modern Japanese history about the role of religion in the Japanese national self-concept, the place of the emperor and notions of national polity (kokutai) in the Japanese body politic, and the nature of Japanese fascism.