International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS)

The Shinto religion has long been recognized as a defining characteristic of a distinctly Japanese civilization. In this work, Walter Skya examines its role in the creation of a radical ultranationalist ideology that would lead the Japanese into the imperialistic wars of the 1930s and 40s. Skya argues that ultranationalism, which he understands as a form of nationalism that merges fanatical religious faith with nationalistic sentiments, developed in Japan in contestation with liberal democracy and socialism in the 1920s and 30s and fostered a view of major conflicts in the world as conflicts among civilizations, the main conflict being between the Western world and the Japanese Shinto civilization. In JAPAN'S HOLY WAR, Skya analyzes how radical Shinto ultranationalists became convinced of the necessity of waging an ethnic and religious war against the Western world.

JAPAN'S HOLY WAR documents how the ideology of State Shinto was transformed between the late 19th century and the early 20th century from a German-inspired theory of constitutional monarchy that underpinned the Meiji Constitution to a theory of absolute monarchy in the constitutional thought of Hozumi Yatsuka in the late 1890s, and finally to a mass-based totalitarian ideology centered on the emperor in the political thought of Uesugi Shinkichi and Kakehi Katsuhiko by the early Taisho (1912-1926) period. Skya demonstrates that by the end of the 1930s extreme nationalists had taken over the state by employing radical religious fundamentalist ideas to crush the advocates of competing ideologies. He traces this development by first examining how the theory of absolute monarchy became a central state ideology in the late Meiji period, and how a traditional concept of the state as an extended family with the emperor at its head was gradually superseded by a new, more radical strain of Shinto ultranationalism that exerted enormous power in the political consciousness of the Japanese public. He documents the influence of Uesugi who, adapting concepts from G.W.F Hegel, laid intellectual foundations for a form of nationalism that both inspired and justified the acts of political and religious terrorism that swept the country in the 1930s.  Similarly, the thought of Kakehi, widely influential within the military community, was employed as a rationale for the invasion of China in 1937 and for the attack on the West in the 1940s.