February 2012 Reviews 77

projects formed in relation to colonized populations and the peoples of Japan? We see little
evidence of technocrats getting their hands dirty in arriving at or adapting their grand
conceptions – factory managers trying to increase worker productivity, engineers building
advanced infrastructure in unfamiliar environments, propaganda officers spreading messages of
ethnic harmony and development to rural villages. Reform bureaucrats and their allies not
only borrowed from international currents or reacted to political interests, but also developed
their conceptions on the ground.
Second, Mimura briefly notes that reform bureaucrats devised a new technocratic ‘mode of
power’, but she does not fully develop this interesting thought (3). She uses ‘technocracy’
more in the sense of rule by expert planners or technology, rather than as specific techniques or
processes of rule. In the end, their technocratic planning seems to be rather authoritarian, or
the product of political struggles, rather than a new mode of power. But, as suggested by many
of Mimura’s textual details, techno-fascism was more than about exercising despotic power or
incorporating the right and left through appeals to technocratic planning, nationalism and anti-
capitalism. It also constituted a more productive, disciplinary form of power that sought to
mobilize the freedom, creativity and ethics of different peoples toward state goals through
various institutions. In this way, their fascist mode of power resembles techniques employed by
political systems generally seen as non-fascist (such as post-war Japan), demonstrating another
intriguing legacy of techno-fascism.

Aaron Stephen Moore

Arizona State University
ª 2012, Aaron Stephen Moore
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2011.651606

Kenneth Ruoff, Imperial Japan at its Zenith (2010), 288 (Cornell University Press, Ithaca,
$39.95).

Through his carefully researched and provocative study of Japan’s 2600th anniversary
celebration, Kenneth Ruoff provides us with new and fascinating insights into wartime Japan.
Ruoff challenges conventional views of what was ostensibly one of the most reactionary public
events of 1940. He argues that this national celebration of Japan’s mythical origins, dating back
to 660 BC, was not simply a bizarre, anachronistic form of emperor worship. Rather, it was an
expression of Japan’s ‘fascist modernity’ in its promotion of the nation-state, middle-class
consumption, mass mobilization and twentieth-century imperialism (24).
Imperial Japan at its Zenith joins a growing body of English language studies of wartime Japan
that takes issue with the traditional depiction of this period as a ‘dark valley’. Ruoff shows how
the wartime years also represented a period of opportunity and personal enrichment. He places
at centre stage not an authoritarian, reactionary state, but a thriving capitalist society in which
both the state and civil society mutually promoted wartime patriotism and consumerism. In
doing so, he shifts our focus from the common themes of military and police control, wartime
rationing and civilian sacrifice to mass consumption and the commodification of Japan’s
imperial heritage through tourism, popular festivals, commercial exhibitions, mass media,
athletic contests and games.
78 Social History vol. 37 : no. 1
An authority on the Japanese monarchy, Ruoff skillfully situates Japan’s wartime emperor
worship within the global trends of nationalism and nation-states. To ‘normalize’ the
monarchy he strips away much of its aura of mystery and oppression by showing how the
imperial line formed an essential component of modern Japanese nationalism and was utilized
for both public and private purposes. Marshalling an impressive array of primary sources,
Ruoff demonstrates that imperial celebrations were not only good for war and empire, but also
for business, especially railway companies, department stores, mass media and tourist-related
enterprises. He argues that ‘[f]ar from being displaced by nationalism and its mystical rhetoric,
Japan’s modern mass consumer sector was enveloped and also spurred on by the patriotic
atmosphere’ (25).
In the first three chapters, Ruoff traces the interpenetrating links between the Japanese
emperor system, nationalism and capitalism. The first chapter explores the ways in which
the Japanese celebrated, codified, manipulated and commercialized Japan’s national history.
We see how the anniversary celebrations provided lucrative opportunities for publishers to
produce special commemorative issues of popular magazines and colourful children’s books,
as well as popular and scholarly works on Japan’s mythical origins. The second chapter
examines the wide variety of mass events, including timed mass rituals, labour service
brigades, fundraising drives, musical and literary contests, and exhibitions sponsored by
newspaper companies and department stores. The imaginative packaging and commodi-
fication of Japan’s national history and its symbols by private industry is striking. In the
third chapter, we learn how the anniversary celebrations set off a tourism boom in 1940 as
Japanese citizens flocked to national heritage sites in such prefectures as Nara, Miyazaki and
Kagoshima. At the same time, Ruoff acknowledges the tensions between state coercion and
popular agency by employing provocative terms such as ‘dutiful consumption’ and ‘rule by
time’.
In the subsequent three chapters, Ruoff casts his net wider to reflect upon the meaning of
empire for the Japanese residing in ‘Japan proper’ (including Korea, Taiwan and Karafuto) and
‘overseas’ (all other areas). The book’s focus shifts somewhat in the fourth and fifth chapters to
examine Japanese tourism in Korea and Manchuria. The sixth chapter considers the status of
overseas Japanese as they participated in the anniversary celebrations via the 1940 ‘Congress of
Overseas Brethren’. In the second half of the book, the anniversary celebrations serve as a
departure point from which to explore the issues of identity, race and citizenship within
Japan’s empire and ‘diaspora’. Generally, these chapters are not as tightly conceived as the first
three chapters.
Although Ruoff is primarily concerned with ‘modernity’ and not ‘fascism’, he makes
important contributions to the debate on Japanese fascism. By illuminating the close
relationship between mass consumption and fascism in wartime Japan, Ruoff effectively
demonstrates that, as in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the Japanese wartime regime enjoyed
mass support. His book provides numerous examples of the ways in which the Japanese
participated in mass events and celebrated, consumed and enriched themselves in the drive
towards war and empire. Less convincing, however, is Ruoff’s attempt to identify charismatic
leadership in Japan. It requires a far stretch of the imagination to consider the mythical
Emperor Jimmu a ‘surrogate’ charismatic leader in the same ranks as real human leaders such as
Hitler and Mussolini. Ruoff also needs to address the problem squarely of why Emperor
Hirohito’s role was downplayed in the anniversary celebrations.
February 2012 Reviews 79
Since the book claims to be ‘a study of the anniversary celebration and, more broadly,
of Japan in 1940’ (4), we must ask what this study really tells us about wartime Japan. I am not
convinced that Japan was really at its ‘zenith’ in 1940. Ruoff describes that year as a ‘heady
time’, when the Japanese contemplated ruling over a vast Asian empire, the publishing
and entertainment industries flourished, and consumerism and tourism were on the rise. But
how do we understand this brief ‘interlude’ of mass celebration and consumerism in the
midst of the costly war in China, combat deaths, material shortages, weak political
leadership, bureaucratic infighting and rising international tensions? From this perspective, the
celebrations appear to signify desperate attempts by the state to divert attention away
from the real issues at hand and rally support for an unpopular war. Which leaders and
factions in the government were for and which ones against these celebrations? We only
obtain occasional glimpses of the conflicts and debates over these celebrations, in quotes
by leaders such as the reformist Cabinet Planning Board member Inaba Hidezō, who later
recalled ‘wondering at the time of the 2600th anniversary celebrations whether there was
really cause for celebration in light of his country’s deteriorating economic position in
strategic areas’ (165). Greater contextualization of the celebrations within wartime politics
would provide a more grounded sense of its political significance and impact in wartime
Japan.
These criticisms and questions should not detract from the valuable contribution of this
work. Ruoff should be commended for making accessible a rich source of wartime materials
on popular culture and for deepening our understanding of popular agency and mass
mobilization in wartime Japan.

Janis Mimura
SUNY Stony Brook
ª 2012, Janis Mimura
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2011.651605

E. Taylor Atkins, Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910–1945
(2010), xv þ 262 (University of California Press, Berkeley, $24.95).

The colonial period in Korea is often and justifiably remembered as a period of

insurmountable suppression and suffering in the political and economic lives of the Korean
people. The tenor of the story is not that different when it comes to the cultural lives of the
population and the policies to which they were subjected. In this familiar narrative of colonial
persecution, even the golden 1920s in Korea under the so-called bunka-seiji (‘cultural rule’) are
seen as a flickering moment during which sinister intentions were concealed under the cloak
of an all-embracing and all too benign definition of culture.
Against this gloomy, one-dimensional depiction of the cultural scenery in colonial Korea, E.
Taylor Atkins provides a revisionist account that complicates the story of colonial rule and its
effects in both metropole and colony from a transnational perspective. Atkins argues that the
cultural rule of the 1920s was not an isolated effort or a fleeting aberration. Rather, he argues,
‘the Japanese interest in documenting, preserving, and consuming Koreana . . . was a constant
feature of colonial rule’ (10).
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