During the inaugural speech of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, Chief Prosecutor Joseph B. Keenan pronounced the following:
The evidence will show that [Japan’s] militaristic cliques and ultra-nationalistic secret societies resorted to rule by assassination and thereby exercised great influence in favor of military aggression. Assassinations and threats of revolt enabled the military branch more and more to dominate the civil government and to appoint new persons favorable to them and their policies. (Willensky 58)
This propensity developed into tougher and more engrained strategy until October of 1941, when the military services gained whole and packed regulation over every subdivision of the administration, both noncombatant and combatant.
In 1946, the impression that Imperial Japan, much alike with Germany and Italy, has evolved into an unlawful country that had affianced in a plot to conquest the world seemed, in the light of the releasing of two nuclear missiles on its territory, a supportive argument to the winning Allies.
Nonetheless, sixty years later, the accusations of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East do not direct the negotiations of Imperial Japan. The present availability of data at the National Archives in the United States along with the data in the National Library in Tokyo offer the contemporary researcher a massive collection of material from which to appeal, which is unrestricted from the blemish of winner’s impartiality and the necessity to discover Japan’s war frontrunners remorseful of wrongdoings against humankind.
One precarious feature of the inheritance of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which has never been reasonably dispensed with, is the subject of fascism in prewar Japan. A recent examination of the matters and the establishing of an interchange, by which the subject could be advanced once again and deprived of the prejudices of either the International Military Tribunal for the Far East or the Cold War, is deeply wanted by the fastened and blinkered domain of researchers’ work in English on the subject of Imperial Japan.
From the 1920s until the 1930s, the mass media in Japan was occupied with deliberations of fascism and debated its relation, either for or against, to Imperial Japan. For the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and the winning Allies, there has never been even a small inquiry that Imperial Japan appeared as a country that supported fascism.
Fascism has always been an imperative and contentious issue for Imperial Japan. The supporters of reforms, the right-wing kakushin you, showed too much a transient captivation with the idea of fascism, and a lot of its associates, particularly Nakano Seigo, didn’t hide their respect for Mussolini and the achievements of Fascio di Combattimento (Young 11).
The fundamentalist right-wing, Kannan, you, on the contrary, banned totalitarianism because they disallowed all belongings of noticeable western derivation.
The progression of Japan into a fascist nation began from the “withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933 and the signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact with Nazi Germany in 1936” (Willensky 77).
Moreover, the Imperial Japanese Government applied omnipresent requests for a facility to the nation and commitment to the model of Kodo in order to form the people into the type of interested but a submissive general public, which Mussolini was trying to implement in Fascist Italy.
After the detailed observation of the early Showa period in Japan and the paces on the country during the 1930s lead to the conclusion that indictment about the involvement of Japan in the fascism was accurate.
Irrespectively of the blemish of winner’s impartiality and the superseding sixty years of the Cold War allowance that directed the researchers to misconstrue and reorganize the occasions to suit the geopolitical actualities, Japan has followed the fascist regime.
Works Cited
Willensky, Marcus. Japanese Fascism Revisited, Stanford, California: Stanford University, 2005. Print.
Young, Louise. Twentieth Century Japan: The Emergence of a World Power, Oakland, California: University of California Press, 1998. Print.