Kita Ikki Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Kita Ikki (1883–1937), born Kita Tirujiro, was the principal theoretician and strategist of the National Socialist movement in the early Showa period in Japan before World War II (1939– 1945). In 1906, the first book that he published, The Theory of Japan’s National Polity and Pure Socialism, was banned. Thereafter he became associated with Okamai Shumai, Kotoku Shusui, Sakai Toshihiko, and other revolutionary socialists in Yuzonsha, an ultranationalist organization. Kita’s revolutionary fervor led him to go to China as a member of the Tongmenghui, an underground resistance movement organized by political leader Sun Yat-sen. Here he sought to help in the Chinese Revolution (1911–1912) and to overthrow the Qing dynasty. However, after the assassination of Liberal Party leader Song Jiaoren, Kita was ordered to leave China.

After returning to Japan in 1913, Kita published an account of his Chinese interlude under the title of The Chinese Revolutionary Party and the Chinese Revolution. He went to China again in 1916 but returned to Japan in 1919 as a disillusioned socialist. He became an ardent chauvinist and nationalist and sought to promote Japan’s imperial ambitions. These attitudes were at odds with Marxism, which tended to de-emphasize national identities, so he abandoned his Marxism and became thereafter the spokesman for the far right. His new fascist sympathies appeared in his next book, An Outline for the Reorganization of Japan (1923). His goal was Kokutai (the national polity), through which Japan would unify and lead a free Asia.

Under Kita’s plan, a military coup would usher in a totalitarian regime under the emperor, who would then suspend the constitution, reorganize the Diet, nationalize industries, impose limits on private property, and, above all, liberate the rest of Asia and bring it under Japanese rule. Kita’s ideas were a mixture of Marxism, fascism, agrarianism, religion, and militarism. He soon attracted support from young army officers, and on February 26, 1936, approximately fourteen hundred soldiers, from three regiments belonging to Kita’s Yuzonsha, launched a coup and took over key buildings and assassinated top public officials. The emperor denounced the coup and it slowly failed. Kita was arrested, convicted of treason, and executed.

Although Kita’s ideas were aborted, they lingered in the imperial court and were instrumental in the vision of the Co-prosperity Sphere that Japan tried to create during World War II. This concept focused on the idea of Western powers being expelled from Asia and replaced by Japan. In this sense, Kita was one of the instigators of World War II in Asia. Kita was a nationalist in the sense that he bitterly hated all Western powers, but in the end he advocated a form of Japanese imperialism that was worse than the one it would supplant. Kita also retained strong socialist ideals although he claimed that he had abandoned socialism. He advocated the confiscation of large corporations and the imposition of limits on the amount of wealth or land that a person could possess. He also called for workers to receive one-half of the profits of their employers. In the 1963 book Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics, leading Japanese political theorist Maruyama Masao called Kita the “ideological father of Japanese fascism.” He referred to Kita’s book, An Outline for the Reorganization of Japan, as “the Mein Kampf of Japanese militarism.”

Bibliography:

Brij,Tankha. Kita Ikki and the Making of Modern Japan: A Vision of Empire. Delhi: University of Delhi Press, 2006.
Masao, Maruyama. Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics. London: Oxford University Press, 1963.
Morris, Ivan. Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963.
Wilson, George. Radical Nationalist in Japan: Kita Ikki, 1883–1937. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969.

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