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After finishing this fascinating but frequently frustrating collection of essays on "fascist culture" and "fascist aesthetics" in interwar Japan, I could not helping thinking that the f-word has become an empty signifier--or at least a badly overinflated one. To his credit, Alan Tansman, the editor, manfully acknowledges that there is little agreement among his authors about what just what fascism is or even what interwar Japan was like. In fact, even though some authors decline to define fascism, they seem to know it when they see it. "Did fascism really exist in Japan?" asks Richard Torrance. "Close enough, one is tempted to say" (p. 75).
Tansman himself suggests that the "manipulation of representation and language" lies at the heart of fascism (p. 3). Surely such manipulation lies at the heart of all ideologies. In any case, when Tansman focuses on Japan more specifically, he seems to see fascism simply as nativist or ethnic nationalism: namely, an "ideology for mobilizing and controlling the masses in the name of a 'natural' nation with no history" (p. 7). After three pages of discussion, Nina Cornyetz comes to a similar conclusion. While she begins with the observation that fascism is a "signifying system that employs a specific typology of images, sentiments and slogans to enlist the masses in a nationalist, collective, vitalist movement" and a "crisis in representation at perhaps its deepest level--or about the anxiety over the potential slippage between reality and how that 'real' is represented in images, slogan or text" (p. 323), she ends with the spare observation that fascism is "a nationalistic reactionary modernism" (p. 335).
There is general agreement among the authors that there were fascists in interwar Japan. As Kevin Doak, Richard Torrance, and Harry Harootunian make clear in their essays, during the late 1920s and early 1930s, Japanese intellectuals often used the term "fascism" to describe what was going on in Japan at the time. But there was no consensus as to what that meant. Some embraced the late Marxist notion that fascism was a consequence of contradictions within monopoly capital. According Doak, Tosaka Jun, for example, "found it all too easy to equate any group, idea or cultural work that was not Marxist with fascism"...