Japanese Fascism Network
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What it shows
Was interwar and wartime Japan fascist? This map gathers what eleven secondary works on the question say about the people, organisations, events, texts and ideas involved, from Meiji-era nationalism to the reckoning after defeat. It holds 349 people, 150 organisations and groups, 49 events, laws and policies, 27 texts and works and 20 concepts, joined by 878 links.
The historians and theorists who argue over the term form a separate layer: 69 scholars, 110 recorded positions and 117 links showing who discusses whom. Every entry and link carries the author and page it comes from.
Explore it
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How to use it
- Network: scroll or pinch to zoom, drag to pan, and click a node to open its profile on the right. Shape shows the kind of entry, size shows the number of links, and colour shows the theme it belongs to. The profile lists what each work says about the entry, with its page reference. Its Look up links search English Wikipedia and, where kanji are given, Japanese Wikipedia; these are a convenience, not a source for the map.
- Time slider: below the network, drag through the years from 1910 to 1952, or press Play, to watch the network grow. Bands mark six phases, from Taishō beginnings to Defeat and reckoning.
- Filters: search for a name in English or Japanese, limit the map to one theme, kind of entry or source (down to single chapters of Tansman’s edited volume), or turn on Show the historians to add the scholarly layer, drawn dashed.
- Timeline: dated events from the sources, arranged by theme.
- Index: every entry from A to Z, with the works that name it.
- The debate sets out the positions on whether Japan was fascist, grouped by stance; Themes and Sources and method explain how the map was built.
Sources and data
The map draws on eleven works: articles by Edwin B. Lee (1975), Miles Fletcher (1979), Herbert P. Bix (1982), Stanley G. Payne (1984), Christopher W. A. Szpilman (2013), Max Ward (2014) and Louise Young (2017); a chapter by Roy Starrs (2018); two monographs, Janis Mimura’s Planning for Empire (2011) and Reto Hofmann’s The Fascist Effect (2015); and the nineteen essays in Alan Tansman (ed.), The Culture of Japanese Fascism (2009). The main text of each was read in full; endnotes were not systematically read. No entry, link or claim comes from outside the eleven works; life dates and kanji that a source does not give follow standard forms. The Sources and method tab gives the full bibliography and the checks still outstanding.
How to cite
Perkins, Chris. 2026. Japanese Fascism Network, version 0.3. https://whitecresta.github.io/tools/japanese-fascism-network/