he taught military science at the Military Academy of Japan. He thereby gained a growing reputation for his view of war and Japan’s future strategies, becoming a key figure in the Control faction. As seen in his book, On the FinalWorld War (1940), his thought was not very complicated. In his view, first, the world after the end of the First World War was divided into four regions, i.e., Western Europe, a Soviet bloc, the US and Japan. Second, Western Europe and a Soviet bloc would be eliminated from the competition for global hegemony. Third, a final war between the US and Japan leading Asia would occur in the mid-1960s.28
Influenced by Nichirenism, Ishiwara aimed to build the Buddhist paradise in the world. Yet, from his perspective, Japan was entirely unprepared for the total war. To prepare for this, Japan had to achieve the highest level of industrialisation. In particular, neutrals could hardly exist in the total war. Thus, Japan should not depend on importing natural resources and other materials from countries that might participate in the war as Japan’s enemy. For this reason, Ishiwara thought that Japan required to build an autarkical economy. This was impossible solely within the Japanese archipelago and the Korean peninsular. In addition, the Japanese Diet and civil society in the 1920s were eroding the military’s social power. Moreover, to win the imperialist competition, Japan needed to draw enthusiastic supports from Asian people. Yet, in the 1920s, resistance against Japan in its colonies was strengthened. To solve these problems simultaneously, Ishiwara planned to build a puppet state, that is, Manchukuo. The multi-staged coup of the Control faction thus started by expanding Japan’s territory itself.
5.7 The Building of Manchukuo (1931-1945)
28 Ishiwara was thus critical of the Pacific War on the ground that Japan was still unprepared for it. This created conflict with his higher officer Tojo Hideki, leading to his retirement immediately before the war. Then Tojo became Prime Minister of Japan and waged the war.
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The Manchurian Incident broke out in this context. Dispatched into the Kwangtung Army in Manchuria, Ishiwara and his colleagues blew up the Manchurian railway that they should protect. Then, blaming Chinese warlords for the explosion, they attacked them without permission from the Japanese Diet, the Japanese government, the headquarters of the Japanese Army and, indeed, even commanding officers in the Kwangtung Army. Their troops continuously won the battles with Chinese warlords, thereby occupying Manchuria, the size of which was far greater than the Japanese Archipelago. Then, on 1 March 1932, the Kwangtung Army established the puppet state of Manchukuo. This had such profound consequences that this state has been represented as the ‘black box' of the modern history of East Asia. The Kwangtung Army used Manchukuo as follows.
1. Manchukuo was a key factor in the political-military strategy of the far-right factions in the Japanese Army. First, as regards Japan’s politics, Manchukuo was a key element in the territorially complicated, multi-stage fascist coup. That is, the strategy of the Control faction can be divided into the following stages: (1) expanding Japanese territory into Manchuria, thereby stimulating external enemies at the same time as oppressing internal conflict in Japan; (2) building a fascist fortress in the region, thereby obtaining a laboratory for economic, industrial, political and military experiments, and (3) re-articulating that fortress with Japan and its colonies. In this way, the Kwantung Army transformed Imperial Japan itself into a fascist empire. In this respect, while Shōwa Ishin was a fascist coup from above, Manchukuo was a fascist coup that occurred from the outside inwards. It was the outward expansion of a fascist force and, simultaneously, its ‘countercurrent’ into Japan (Yim S-.M 2000). Second, as regards macroregional international politics, Manchukuo served both as a bulwark
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against the Soviet Union and as a battlefield for the Kwangtung Army to directly purge anti-Japanese Chinese and Korean guerrillas. Third, globally, it was an indispensable foundation in preparation for the final world war.
2. As mentioned, the Kwangtung Army conducted many political, economic, military and social experiments in the puppet state. In other words, Manchukuo was the Army’s laboratory. First, it experimented with building a state (or empire) that was managed in conformity with its ‘internal guidance’. In particular, it had complete authority to appoint bureaucrats, including those dispatched from Japan, and to attend any and all governmental meetings without prior notice. Second, it experimented with nation building as it attempted to forcibly merge Manchurians, Chinese, Koreans, Mongolians and Japanese into a nation under the guise of the harmony of five ethnic groups. Third, it undertook military experiments. Notably, it massacred many people to test biochemical weapons. Fourth, it tried to achieve rapid heavy and chemical industrialisation. In the process, Ishiwara appointed Miyazaki Masayoshi, who after studying political economy in Russia, worked as an expert in the Russian (or Soviet) planned economy. Thus Manchukuo’s “Five Years Plan of Industrial Development” (1937) was inspired by the first “Five-year plans for the national economy of the Soviet Union” (1928-32).
In brief, although a few developmental statists have glamorised Manchukuo as the prototype of an East Asian development state, that is, the state of plan-rational, development- oriented economic bureaucrats (Johnson 1982; 1999; Sasada 2014), it was, instead, the fascist puppet state of the Kwangtung Army, based on the articulation of (1) European fascism, (2) the planned industrialisation of the Soviet Union and (3) the Japanese far-right, militaristic interpretation of Buddhism, Confucianism and, further, its indigenous religion. Also, the
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construction of Manchukuo was prepared in anticipation of the second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War. In the process, Imperial Japan eventually mutated into a ‘national defence state’, based on Nazi’s war state. Overall, then, Japanese fascism since the 1930s can be regarded as the Japanese far-right syncretism of national socialism and state socialism.