Japan's Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shinto Ultranationalism - Rilegato

Skya, Walter A.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0822344254 ISBN 13: 9780822344254

Casa editrice: Duke Univ Pr, 2009

Riassunto

Japan’s Holy War reveals how a radical religious ideology drove the Japanese to imperial expansion and global war. Bringing to light a wealth of new information, Walter A. Skya demonstrates that whatever other motives the Japanese had for waging war in Asia and the Pacific, for many the war was the fulfillment of a religious mandate. In the early twentieth century, a fervent nationalism developed within State Shintō. This ultranationalism gained widespread military and public support and led to rampant terrorism; between 1921 and 1936 three serving and two former prime ministers were assassinated. Shintō ultranationalist societies fomented a discourse calling for the abolition of parliamentary government and unlimited Japanese expansion.

Skya documents a transformation in the ideology of State Shintō in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. He shows that within the religion, support for the German-inspired theory of constitutional monarchy that had underpinned the Meiji Constitution gave way to a theory of absolute monarchy advocated by the constitutional scholar Hozumi Yatsuka in the late 1890s. That, in turn, was superseded by a totalitarian ideology centered on the emperor: an ideology advanced by the political theorists Uesugi Shinkichi and Kakehi Katsuhiko in the 1910s and 1920s. Examining the connections between various forms of Shintō nationalism and the state, Skya demonstrates that where the Meiji oligarchs had constructed a quasi-religious, quasi-secular state, Hozumi Yatsuka desired a traditional theocratic state. Uesugi Shinkichi and Kakehi Katsuhiko went further, encouraging radical, militant forms of extreme religious nationalism. Skya suggests that the creeping democracy and secularization of Japan’s political order in the early twentieth century were the principal causes of the terrorism of the 1930s, which ultimately led to a holy war against Western civilization.

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Recensione:

"Japan's Holy War is an important work. Walter A. Skya shows clearly that religious ideologies play various roles in public life; State Shinto transformed from an ideology deeply supportive of entrenched authority to one profoundly and violently opposed to it."--Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence "Walter A. Skya has something new and important to say about Japanese nationalism, and he says it through compelling, thorough research and documentation. Over and against the excessively abstract analyses that see Japanese nationalism as a monolithic, ahistorical force, he reveals how it changed as it responded to contingent events. Such an exciting, theoretically informed, comparative study of Japanese nationalism is long overdue."--Kevin M. Doak, author of A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan: Placing the People "Japan's Holy War is an absolutely outstanding and necessary work, a major contribution to international scholarly debate. Walter A. Skya gives the most convincing account to date of Shinto's ideological implications. His book will become the standard work on the intellectual and ideological history of modern Shinto." --Klaus Antoni, University of Tubingen

L'autore:

Walter Skya is Director of the Asian Studies Program and Associate Professor of History at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Duke Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0822344254
• ISBN 13: 9780822344254
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 387