For every WW2 history reading and documentary, Japan always group up with Germany and Italy for "The Fascist Club"(Axis). However, I'm quite confuse in term of ideology. Italy with Mussolini introducing idea of Fascism and Hitler rallying the Nazism ideology. Japan is bit different because they don't have ideology or something to against Jew or capitalism. Their conquest for resource much more similar to idea of previous imperial Europe government pre-WW1.
So, is Japan government in WW2 consider as fascist due to relationship with Germany and Italy or there are aspect of ideology running the government that similar to fascism but in different name. Thanks!
Well, the support offered to other fascists is of course something that helps historians deem Japan fascist.
But Japan shows some very clear signs that coincide with what we think of as the fascistic ideals.
Japan was after the economic crisis in the 1920s in a situation where there was a massive problem with unemployment and poverty althewhile having a still powerful military engaged in various colonial possessions. While military service had been highly viewed even before the Showa period (the "Japanese warrior culture" meme is at least somewhat accurate), it made joining the army and thus committing to hierarchy and obedience a valid career choice for many disenfranchised young men that otherwise didn't have anyone to turn to. They clung to their commanding officers and to the emperor that they swore an oath to. In the political leadership meanwhile, Japan's military was viewed as a perfectly valid way to do away with national dissent and with economic dependency on other countries. And thus, in 1931, it began a period of near constant military expansion, primarily aimed against Japanese Korea's neighbor, China. The Japanese took Manchuria in 31, marched further into China in 34, and eventually started the Second Sino-Japanese War in 37.
The anti-Chinese sentiment had to be justified somehow. Japan is culturally very much a child of China, with its buddhism and writing system and so on initially coming from China. So instead of going a route of cultural supremacy, they went a more political/ethnic path by adopting similar racial ideologies like Germany and Italy did. The goal of building hatred of the Japanese population against the Chinese was central to justify the ongoing military action against China.
Japanese society was (and is) rather hierarchical and conservative. During the Showa period, that was at its absolute peak - the emperor was still this nebulous person almost never seen in public that was believed by many to be the descendant of a God. The emperor and his appointed government were thus infallable and from that, Japan had built a sort of cultural collectivism around serving the society and the emperor. Add to that massive restrictions of individual and societal freedoms, including freedom of expression and of the press. Japan had a very authoritarian state built around a culture and society that at least didn't inherently oppose authoritarianism.
Japan had massive companies that cooperated closely with the government. The system of "Zaibatsus", where companies were controlled by certain families, usually led to tight-knit connections between the political elite and these business families. Especially the relationship of the government to the Great Four - Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Sumitomo, Yasuda - was very reminiscent of the close relations of, say, fascist Italy to its own business crown jewel, Fiat.
At last, you mention how Japan was not antisemitic or anticapitalist. That's true, but the Japanese elite was connected with the German and Italian elites through their desperate fear of communism. Especially the rejection of the divine monarchy - and the monarchy as a whole - in communist doctrine scared the political leadership of Japan. Japan's communist party, the JCP, was forced into the underground in 1925, very early in Hirohito's reign. The JCP was notable for opposing the war in China.
The question "was interwar Japan a fascist state?" is one that is highly contentious among scholars of modern Japan and for scholars of fascism in general. Broadly speaking, a good many scholars of European fascism tend to dismiss or downplay the idea that interwar Japan was a fascist state. Robert Paxton, for example, weighs the various pros and cons of Japanese fascism in his The Anatomy of Fascism before coming on the negative side claiming Japan was an expansionist military dictatorship engaged in mass-mobilization. Many of the cardinal elements of fascism such as a hegemonic mass party or the leader cult are notably absent in interwar Japan. But many specialists in fascism are not specialists in Japanese history. This makes it difficult for them to comment on aspects of the Japanese state and society when looking for analogues to European fascism. The debate among historians of Japan as to whether or not it was fascist tends to be more divided than among historians of fascism.
George M. Wilson has largely ruled out Japan as a fascist state for many of the reasons Europeanists tend to exclude Japan from the fascist camp. He notes that the interwar governments did not try to fundamentally recast the structure of the Japanese state as well as the idea that Japanese militarism lacked a "seizure of power" moment. Moreover, unlike Hitler and to a lesser extent Mussolini, militarists worked within the existing Meiji era-designed system in conjunction with the old elites. Likewise, both Peter Duus and Daniel Okamoto have noted in a survey essay Japanese fascist ideas were a "minor side current" in interwar Japan and have faulted scholars who use the fascist label for using imprecise terminology.
But there are also scholars of Japan who do assert Japan was a fascist or fascist-like state. Gavan McCormack's essay "Fascism from Above? Japan’s Kakushin Right in Comparative Perspective" in the anthology Fascism Outside Europe maintained that similarities between European movements and Japan demand a reexamination of the topic. McCormack astutely notes that while studies of European fascism tend to focus on fascism as a movement, ideology, then regime, in Japan, the process was reversed:
European fascism had its greatest impact on Japan’s political regime, a secondary impact on political thought, and its least significant impact on political movements.
So while there might not have been a mass fascist party in interwar Japan, McCormack contends that interwar Japanese elites took their cues from what they saw as a rising political movement that was in resonance with their political ideals. This was the subject of The Search for a New Order: Intellectuals and Fascism in Prewar Japan by William Miles Fletcher. This intellectual history of three prominent Japanese thinkers found many of them drifted from Marxism towards fascist ideals. Pace McCormack, Fletcher notes that these fascist-inspired thinkers largely failed to transform the Japanese state. Kenneth Rouff has argued Japan was a species of fascism in that Japanese imported and tailored fascist ideas into existing Japanese state structures. Japanese political structures may not have been fascist, but the mode of its politics was according to Rouff. Aaron Skabelund makes a related argument in his essay "Fascism’s Furry Friends: Dogs, National Identity, and Racial Purity in 1930s Japan" in that Japan's importation and breeding of German Shepherds also came with discourses of racism and biological essentialism that filtered into other patterns of dog ownership.
All of this is not to say that Japan was a fascist state. Duus and Okamoto's critique on imprecise terminology is applicable to a number of the scholars answering this question in the affirmative. But this critique also misses the point about fascism in general. One of the problems with defining fascism is that it was a highly nebulous political movement and it is hard to pin down what exactly was fascism even in states that declared themselves fascist like Italy. Applying the existing fascist paradigms to Japan is doubly difficult given Japan's own unique history and institutions. But this has not stopped some Japan scholars from trying to do so.
In many aspects early Shōwa Japan was much closer to reactionary regimes like Franco's Spain or Salazar's Portugal: authoritarian systems relying on traditional elites such as the monarchy, the military and the clergy with no intention of allowing a mass popular movement to take over and radically reshape the state to its leader's bidding.
That however doesn't mean fascist elements didn't exist in Japanese society at the time, similarly to how Vichy France not being strictly speaking fascist didn't stop clearly fascist-inspired organizations like the SOL or PPF from emerging. The Kōdōha faction of the military, ideologues associated with the so-called Shōwa Restoration and the conspirators behind several coup attempts in the '30s that were crushed by the government held views very close to fascism's palingenetic, revolutionary, populist nationalism. See Sadao Araki, Ikki Kita, Kingoro Hashimoto, Shūmei Ōkawa, etc.
Antisemitism was not an integral part of fascism. Until Hitler made Mussolini impose racial laws in 1938, Italian Jews were huge supporters of the fascists and held many important government and military positions.