Translators have made books from around the world available through the centuries to those unable to read the language in which a work first appears. Translation allows us to gain insights and grapple with the arguments of authors from around the globe. A world without translation would be, for most readers in the Anglosphere, a world without such works as Sun Tzu’s classic Art of War or Mao Zedong’s modern On Protracted War. While Asian literature is relatively well represented in English translation, from Murasaki Shikibu’s ancient Tale of Genji to Murakami Haruki’s latest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, translations of their non-fiction equivalents are comparatively rare.
Robert Stolz, associate professor of history at the University of Virginia, has translated in its entirety the expanded 1937 version of The Japanese Ideology, Tosaka Jun’s critique from a Marxist perspective of Japan’s descent between the two world wars from a form of liberal politics into nativism (also known as Japanism) and fascism. Stolz’s translation follows his earlier work as an editor of Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader (East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2013), which includes a chapter from The Japanese Ideology. Stolz has also written an environmental history of Japan, Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, & Politics in Japan, 1870-1950 (Duke University Press, 2014).
Tosaka Jun, born in Tokyo in 1900, embarked on his journey as a materialist and Marxist critic after graduating in 1924 from the philosophy department of Kyoto Imperial University. In 1932, one year after joining Hosei University in Tokyo as an instructor, he founded, with other intellectuals, the Materialist Research Association and edited the group’s journal. Arrested several times for his political views, Tosaka died in prison on 9 August 1945, the day that the Soviet Union invaded the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo and the US dropped an atom bomb on Nagasaki, and less than one week before Tokyo announced its surrender.
Tosaka’s book, first published in 1935, consisted originally of two parts of ten chapters each. The first part is an attack from a materialist standpoint on Japanese nativist political thought, known as Japanism.
Though some may dispute it, Japanism is the Japanese form of fascism. If Japanism is not seen as fascist it is impossible to get a full understanding of this ideology as a link in a global chain.
The book’s second part is a critique of Japanese liberalism. Tosaka saw the rise of merchants and a market economy after the feudal period—the advent of economic liberalism—leading to a political liberalism of liberty, equality, political parties, and elections to serve bourgeois interests. However, he argued, in an age of monopoly capitalism and state control of the economy, indicating the fall of liberalism’s political and economic bases, there remained only a cultural form of liberalism in the form of a “cultural consciousness”:
As a historical category, liberalism was an economic, political, and cultural ideology of the rising bourgeoisie of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The final three chapters, less philosophical and more immediate, added in the expanded edition of 1937, focus on the Japanese political scene. Tosaka ended his book’s expanded edition by arguing that Japan had, in the latter half of the 1930s, descended into a “fascism of the bourgeois and landlord political parties”, the Minseito and Seiyukai, without abandoning its liberal constitution or turning to dictatorship.
Tosaka was indeed on to something. General Tojo Hideki, whom Allied propagandists had attempted to paint as a fascist dictator on a par with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. His European allies essentially ruled until the final moment of defeat in war. Tojo, Japan’s prime minister, however, resigned with his cabinet in 1944 to take responsibility for Japanese reversals in the Pacific. Several prime ministers followed him before the surrender and Japan’s parliament remained in session under the nation’s original Meiji Constitution throughout the war.
Readers who have studied Western philosophy or have an interest in Japanese thought will find much to ponder in The Japanese Ideology. Tosaka makes many a reference to Aristotle, Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, and other touchstones of Western philosophy in making his materialist points. On the Japanese side, Tosaka offers cutting comments on the perceived failings in the political systems of the philosopher Nishidao, the intellectual activist Kita Ikki, and other thinkers of various stripes. The problem, in short, was that none of them were Marxists. For the average reader lacking a background in philosophy and Japanese political history, however, The Japanese Ideology will likely prove tough going.
One point to note about The Japanese Ideology is that, contrary to the book’s cover and its publishing information, it is more than a translation. Stolz adds to the translation his own analytical introduction to Tosaka’s book and, in his afterword, an essay applying such Marxist analysis to the recent political scene in the United States. The bibliography, for its part, has less to do with Tosaka’s text than with Stolz’s analytical additions. Even the book’s subtitle, “A Marxist Critique of Liberalism and Fascism”, is an appraisal of the book rather than a translation. The translated subtitle of Tosaka’s work would be “A Criticism of Japanism, Fascism, and Liberalism in Contemporary Japan”.
As someone who believes that translated books are key building blocks to understanding the world around us, I applaud Stolz for translating Tosaka’s book, Columbia University Press for publishing it, and the late Professor Tetsuo Najita for making years ago the “offhand comment” to Stolz and his classmates in a lecture at the University of Chicago that “someone should translate” The Japanese Ideology “one day”. Imperial Japan occupied a key place in the turbulent history of the interwar years, yet relatively few works of Japanese intellectuals, military officers or political leaders from that period are available in English for an international audience. The translation of The Japanese Ideology, a work by a major figure in modern Japan’s intellectual history, adds to the world’s understanding of Japan in that era. I hope to see other works from those years translated into English in the years ahead.