Once upon a time I got into an argument with one of my professors on how exactly Imperial Japan (and it certainly was an Imperialist monarchy) should be parsed in the age of fascism. Being focused more towards the Italian brand I hesitated to classify Japan as such. I came to the realiazation that 'fascism' (small f, not big F) is a hard concept to quantify as the meaning is largely fluid. George Orwell himself sums it up best by saying, "The word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless…I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek…and I do not know what else.”

It is thus, perhaps, best to think of fascism as any number of different systems that are authoritarian and heavily nationalistic, both in governmental and economical systems. In fact, one of the common threads of all fascist states was an ultranationalist totalitarian model that bore out striking similarities.

##The Fuzzy Meaning of Fascism

The man that coined the term fascism, Benito Mussolini, had a lifelong evolving view on what exactly his party, and fascism in general represented. At varying points Mussolini asked for the Pope to excommunicate Hitler and all members of the Nazi Party, before appearing in rallies in complete support of Hitler personally and the Nazi Party (Kertzer, pg. 280). Various leaders within the Fascist party also held differing views on the so-called ‘jewish question,’ with Mussolini himself stating that, “antisemitism is foreign to the Italian people,” months after trying to stir a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy. This was prior to the racial laws of 1938 that were put into effect to match the German Nuremberg Laws.

However, writers at the beginning of the fascist movement such as Alfredo Rocco show that this was the very nature of fascism: it was end goals, and not a means:

“Fascism never raises the question of methods..this indifference to method often exposes Fascism to the charge of incoherence on the part of superficial observers, who do not see that what counts is the end and that therefore even when we employ the same means we act with a radically difference spirit and strive for entirely different results.”

One of the famous chants of the Fascists was, “No dogma! Discipline suffices!” allowing one to see why a movement that was stringently anti-communist can have its name applied to Stalinist Russia if one looks at these as means to an end state of totalitarian control. This is what has lead to fascism as an idea that can be copied and applied is that it was an ultranationalist idea fueled by intense racism, militarism, and imperialism under a totalitarian government in a single party state.

Looking at ultranationalism presents an interesting dichotomy between Japan and Italy. With Italy experiencing unrest following the end of the first World War, Mussolini was able to direct armed squadrons of Blackshirts in an effort to bring communists, socialists, and anarchists to heel. Under the assumption that it was Mussolini himself that controlled the Blackshirts, and also due to Fascist popularity in the military, King Victor Emmanuelle III appointed Mussolini as Prime Minister. Believing that the Italian race was culturally, and spiritually superior the Fascists were quick to reduce or rename anything in Italy which previously had foreign names while also using sports to highlight the superiority of Italians over others. In addition to this, the Fascists (in a view similar to that of the Nazi lebensraum) viewed the world under spazio vitale - that is, vital space. It was the duty of the superior civilization of the Italian race to bring the conquered lands of the former Roman Empire under the rule of an Italian empire.

Similarly the Japanese course that brought them to hegemony over South East Asia can be viewed as, “the need for the Yamato race to take control, to lead it’s fellow Asians.” For the Japanese, the view carried by ardent nationalists such as Tokutomi Sohō was that Japan had a mission to rid their sphere of influence in Asia from Western influence. Where the Italian imperial expansion was a force from the inside, the Japanese brand was by the outside exertions of its military. In an almost Prussian manner, the Japanese military pushed the borders of Japan into Korea, then Manchuria, then into the entirety of the South Pacific in order to create the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Regardless of the names (Lebensraum, or spazio vitale, or Co-Prosperity) a striking similarity existed between Japan, Italy, and Germany. Not only did they all desire to expand their empires, but it was in the name of their own race which was naturally better than the ones they were conquering.

##The Fuzzy Militarism of Fascism

The manner in which the Italians, Germans, and Japanese conquered and treated those that they conquered in the chosen term of their dogma bear similarities as well. The Fascist campaign into Ethiopia during late 1935 was accomplished with multiple atrocities and war crimes. Poison gas attacks (authorized by Mussolini) numbered casualties in the hundreds of thousands, while the Italian Air Force gas bombed a Swedish Red Cross field hospital. The Nazi incursion into Poland is a well documented event that saw the total subjugation of the Polish people in an effort to exterminate not just the Jewish people among the population but also to ethnically cleanse the Polish race and culture in order to resettle Germany citizens in the area. The application of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere saw behavior from the occupying Japanese bordering, “on genocide against ethnic Chinese.” Brutality was so rife in occupied Burma that the Burmese Army turned against the Japanese, while Malaysia saw continued ethnic cleansing against Chinese. The Japanese were met with collaborators at first in the great majority of the areas. By the end of Japanese occupation, the treatment of the citizenry was so brutal that it was common for former collaborators to become resistance fighters.

Despite differences in outlook (Hitler viewed the Japanese as "lacquered half-monkeys" and imported copies of Mein Kampf to Japan had to be edited to disguise his words), the countries of Japan and Nazi Germany followed a similar path of aggression in their rise during the 1930s. Both countries immediately defied treaties and conventions at the end of the first World War that were meant to inhibit their power. The Nazi’s operated in secret while the Japanese conducted their force expansion openly. Both expansions lead to further treaties designed to curb further rearmaments but had unintended second and third orders of effects: the Washington Naval Conference in 1922 secured Japan’s security in their home isles (Cohen, pg. 325) but ensured that Japan could continue their encroachments into Manchuria without repudiation, while the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935 allowed Nazi Germany to officially exceed the terms set by the Treaty of Versailles in regards to the size of the German Kriegsmarine. The failure of the agreement to reach better relations between Germany and Britain (as Hitler had hoped) eventually led to further rearmament in anticipation of a war against Britain. Prior to the outbreak of war with China in 1937, Japanese Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro touched upon the need for aggressive foreign policy as being part of Japan’s “vital right to survival” in the face of “international justice.” That both Japan and Nazi Germany saw in their “right” to defend their homelands in violations of treaties signed would be touched upon un-ironically by Hitler in his declaration of war against the United States.