“Though war destroys civilizations it is, at the same time, the mother of new civilizations” [Ishiwara Kanji, Sensoshi taikan, pp.51-2]
By 1933, with Japan in the wake of the Manchuria Crisis, there was no doubt that by this stage the nation was committed to a course of total expansion on the mainland and abroad. In the eyes of Japan’s military and naval commanders, progression in this fashion would see Japan inevitably clash with its surrounding nations, most notably the Soviet Union, as it fought to establish itself. While the Soviet Union seemed to constitute the most immediate barrier to Japan’s aims of territorial expansion in the eyes of the majority of the Japanese General Staff, Ishiwara Kanji begged to differ. Ishiwara believed Japan’s Final War would see the nation lock horns with the united States.
Within Mark Peattie’s Ishiwara Kanji and Japan’s confrontation with the West, Peattie offers a highly detailed biographical insight into the time spent by Ishiwara in the General Staff during the 1930s. With reference to this period, Peattie examines specifically Japan’s plan of implementing a National Defence program that, once implemented, would see Japan emerge as the “leader of East Asia” (p.202). Peattie’s threefold approach to the program is centred around assessing the military influence on the policy, the morality of Japan’s pan-Asian campaigns, and the rationality behind Japan’s foreign and domestic projects.
Ishiwara’s prominence in the Manchuria campaign contributed significantly to the inflation of his prestige in the immediate aftermath. One of the key questions that Peattie therefore looks to offer in his work is whether or not Ishiwara developed such influence in the General Staff due to the power behind his own ideas for the future of Japan, or instead if his success in Manchuria was merely the reason he gained fame? Peattie does consider that by 1933, Ishiwara’s plans for a National Defence State, coupled with the growth of an ideological Russo-phobia and Japanese spiritual faith in its military capabilities, a climate was in place that would form the “basic cleavage in the Imperial Army as to how to prepare the nation for war” (p.188). With regard to this point, Peattie emphasises how the combination of a militant Buddhism with prevailing European, and also Western, fears helped to produce Ishiwara’s concept of an inevitable ‘Final War’.
Most recent historiography from Clinton Godart has sought to refine Japanese motivations for a Final War with the West. Godart’s 2015 article, “Nichirenism, Utopianism, and Modernity: Rethinking Ishiwara Kanji’s East Asia League Movement”, focuses more on the Nichiren Buddhist aspects of Japanese militarisation during the 1930s and how these would ultimately be put into practice to facilitate the realisation a specific Buddhist utopian vision for the future (pp.237-8). These “fascist Nichirenist” tendencies contrast somewhat with the vision previously put forward by Peattie who instead looks to centralise his focus more on Japan’s preparation for the Final War through pan-Asian ideals, specifically the unification of East Asia under Japanese oversight. Ishiwara’s proposition of an East Asian League would see China and Manchukuo come together with Japan, along with its colonies Korea and Taiwan, to form a self-sufficient bloc capable of confronting the “Soviet Union on the Asian continent and the Anglo-American nations at sea” (p.195).
By the mid-to-late 1930s, Japan and the United States were certainly “racing to complete their respective civilizations”, and as Peattie exemplifies, “their progress along rapidly converging paths would inevitably terminate in violent collision” (p.57). What can be taken from Peattie’s argument is that this future conflict of major proportions between these two powerhouses would result in one final synthesis of human culture and ideals. Victory for Japan would leave the nation free to guide and unify the world for generations to come. However, before Japan could count herself fully prepared for this final showdown with the United States, she would need to establish her goal of formulating the East Asian League, and ensuring this was in place and ready before the Final War came.
Of course, what systematically shuts down Ishiwara’s ambitions of this ever coming into fruition was the outbreak of conflict between Japan and China in 1937. What can clearly be established from Peattie’s work is how Ishiwara’s failure to curb enthusiasm for a short, decisive conflict with China in 1937 essentially caused his plans for an East Asian League to disintegrate. Perhaps one of the key takeaways from Japan’s confrontation with the West is the ambivalent nature of pan-Asian ideals in Japan during the 1930s. Ishiwara’s visions of a unified Asia seemed somewhat contradictory given the narrative that surrounded his involvement in Manchuria. The surfacing of conflict and an anti-Japanese front in the 1937 Sino-Japanese War was arguably the result of decades of foreign interference and humiliation for China.