Description
Book SynopsisThe origins and evolution of technocratic fascism in wartime Japan.
Trade ReviewDrawing on a wealth of largely untapped primary materials and journals, the work focuses specifically on a group of elite bureaucrats, predominantly graduates of Tokyo Imperial University, and army staff officers who were the driving force behind the reorganization of the Japanese economy in the late 1930s and 1940s... Mimura's is the first English-language synthesis that traces the history of central planning in Japan from its inception in the corridors of power in Tokyo, through the experimentation period in Manchuria, to its final implementation in Japan. Mimura’s contribution is particularly valuable precisely because it deals with men who were in a position to put their ideas into practice.
-- Christopher W.A. Szpilman * Monumenta Nipponica *
Mimura writes, moreover, with great economy, pinpoint clarity, and without embellishment or hint of hyperbole. If Planning for Empire does not, thus, aspire to 'best in show' honors for recent analyses of the Japanese empire, it deserves accolades as likely the most influential of the lot for its measured yet powerful confirmation of several critical trends in the study of early twentieth-century Japanese empire and war... it is a must read for all serious students of modern Japanese history.
-- Frederick Dickinson * Journal of Japanese Studies *
Mimura's detailed examination of the administration of Manchuria/Manchukuo offers a useful counterweight to Driscoll's portrayal of Kishi and Ayukawa as little more than misogynisticexploitative brutes... Mimura’s dissection of Japanese techno-fascism—of its appeal across traditional political dividesof its incremental ideological genesis and of its ultimate failure—makes Planning for Empire a welcome addition to a new body of scholarship that has sought to resurrect fascism as an analytical tool for our understanding of mid-twentieth-century Japan.
-- Martin Dusinberre * Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History *
Roles played by the Japanese civilian bureaucracy in the course of Japan's militarization before WW II have attracted little attention in academia, in contrast with scholars' heavy focus on the Japanese military. Mimura fills this void with this first in-depth English-language analysis of the Japanese "reform bureaucrats" who, as prominent advocates of "techno-fascism," endeavored to realize their vision of a "managerial state" and "controlled economy" in prewar Japan.... Highly recommended.
* CHOICE *
'Fascism' is a term of abuse today, but once it was an idea with a future, as Mimura shows in Planning for Empire.
* The Japan Times *
Anyone interested in the role of reform bureaucrats in Japan and the perpetual debate over fascism will want to read this well-researched, informative, and stimulating monograph.
* Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute *
Table of ContentsIntroduction1. Japan's Wartime Technocrats
2. Military Fascism and Manchukuo, 1930–36
3. Bureaucratic Visions of Manchukuo, 1933–39
4. Ideologues of Fascism: Okumura Kiwao and Mori Hideoto
5. The New Order and the Politics of Reform, 1940–41
6. Japan's Opportunity: Technocratic Strategies for War and Empire, 1941–45Epilogue: From Wartime Techno-Fascism to Postwar ManagerialismBibliography
Index
