YTOPIA · Yamatology of the Axis. Japan as a Nazi-Fascist Utopia of Political Renewal

Yamatology of the Axis. Japan as a Nazi-Fascist Utopia of Political Renewal

Japan still occupies a special place in the European far-right imagination, often being described as an ethnically and culturally homogenous land that has successfully harmonized tradition and modernity, representing a possible alternative to the liberal development pattern of Euro-American societies. The myth of Japan in the far-right milieu is usually focused on the alleged existence of an unchanged and authentic “Japanese spirit” (Yamato-damashii), supposedly distinct from the materialist and individualist mindset of the European paradigm of modernity, and it is populated by masculine models of soldierly virtues and strong nationalist commitment that range from the samurais of the past to the suicide pilots of the Second World War and prominent right-wing intellectuals of the postwar period. The far-right fascination with Japan is not a by-product of the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis. On the contrary, it began to emerge at the very beginning of the 20th century as an intellectual means to criticize the liberal view of society and was cultivated by many early supporters of the Fascist and National Socialist movements, setting the cultural ground for the political rapprochement during the 1930s. From this perspective, the far-right representation of Japan – something that can be called “yamatology,” i.e., the “discourse on the alleged authentic spirit of Japan” – is a peculiar political phenomenon that covers more than a century and deserves closer attention, in order to better understand both the ideological underpinning of the military alliance that unleashed the Second World War and the contemporary imagination of several extreme right-wing movements. The research project YTOPIA explores the origin and the transformations of the right-wing image of Japan with a focus on the historical moment at which it reached its wider dissemination and became an integral part of far-right ideologies, namely the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis. By adopting a global and long-term perspective that includes the emergence of right-wing sympathies for Japan in the early 20th century, the relations with the representation of Japan in other European countries, and their reciprocal interactions with the Japanese self-representation, YTOPIA analyzes the construction of the image of Japan in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy as it was expressed in books, newspapers, illustrated press, and other mass media. Through a comparative approach, YTOPIA identifies similarities and differences in the ways Japan has been imagined by Italian and German intellectuals and political actors in order to determine whether a specific Nazi-Fascist image of Japan ever existed and, if so, how it was dialectically related to common ideological features shared by both ideologies, such as the cult of violence and masculinity, the sacralization of power, the hero worship, and the view of the three countries as “latecomer powers” that were committed to the creation of a new world order. In doing so, the project highlights the utopian dimension of yamatological narratives, as well as the tensions emerging between the admiration for a non-European country and the ultra-nationalist and racist character of Nazi-Fascist ideologies – two elements that continue to shape the far-right representation of Japan even today.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union