Japan’s wartime experience, despite its status as a primary belligerent of the Second World War, remains a murky topic for Anglophone scholars. Unlike the post-war historiography that thrust Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini to power, roots of Japanese fascism followed narratives focused primarily on technocrats, elite cliques, and imperial decrees that silenced the voices of the everyday Japanese; those farming the rice, those shouldering the rifle, those who lived and supported the government in times of jubilience and extreme horror. Yoshimi Yoshiaki’s Grassroots Fascism takes aim at bridging this gap, while Ethan Mark’s translation and introduction contextualizes its publication for the Anglophone reader. 

At its core Grassroots Fascism roughly collects various diaries, surveys, letters, and personal documents to build the so-sought after “bottom up” approach that has captivated historians since the post-colonial turn. Yoshimi attempts to return agency into the hands of the normal Japanese; a school teacher who convinces his students to sign up for the war believing all of the state messages, a frontline soldier who transforms from an unwilling bystander to a hardened killer, village elders who work diligently to support the young men they wisp away abroad, and so-on. Upon each, Yoshimi attempts to highlight changing sentiments about the war, personal reflection, individual involvement and interaction with the state, and how individual experience of the war changed their perception of what the war was meant to be. 

Yet in a work titled Grassroots Fascism, Yoshimi rarely makes a cohesive argument for what he labels “imperial fascism.” Ethan Mark’s introduction attempts to rectify this puzzling exclusion by offering Grassroots as “an attempt to illuminate precisely those aspects of the Japanese wartime experience that remain in the dark” through “an eclectic and innovative notion of ‘fascism” (22). In this, Yoshimi often cites support for the war effort on personal levels, writing a home paper for the village boys who were deployed, believing in the cause of the Holy War/Pan-Asianist ideology, and so-on, as evidence of the ever enigmatic Japanese fascism.

However, utilizing such broad definitions and manifestations of fascism at local levels generates an unwieldy phantasm of fascism—would not the imperial wars fought under the Liberal Democracies of the West fall under this umbrella? In a work explicitly about fascism, this lack of interaction, interpretation and definition renders Yoshimi’s work ineffectual in its stated purpose. Rarely does Grassroots engender the reader with a sense of building the actual structure of “bottom up” fascism, just tertiary comments, questionably contextualized state surveys, and the occasional glimpse at patriotic associations which lack overt fascist ideology in the same way as their German or Italian counterparts. 

With this in mind, Grassroots still provides an excellent source for understanding Japanese rather than Japan’s wartime experience from various corners of the frontline and homefront. Grassroots is at its best when presenting the reader with these semi-Heart of Darkness-esque tales utilized to unpack Japan’s war directly from the mouths of those who fought and lived it first hand. As such, Grassroots remains an important piece of literature for students of the Asian Pacific War despite its flaws.