The Quest for Japanese Fascism: A Historiographical Overview

‘Japanese fascism’ is a historiographical construct rather than a historical reality. Whether Japan’s sociopolitical developments in the 1930s and early 1940s can be legitimately and authoritatively defined as ‘fascist’ depends on the triangulation of three axes of analysis: historical reconstructions of institutional, political, social, and ideological processes; historiographical surveys of the palimpsest of interpretations historians have given to this period of Japanese history; and metahistorical analyses of the cognitive legitimacy of the category of ‘fascism’. This essay focuses on the second axis, offering a historical survey of the historiographical debate on ‘Japanese fascism’ worldwide.