| Abstract: | In early 1938, the newly formed Cabinet Information Division (Naikaku jōhōbu) held a closed-door Thought-War Symposium (Shisōsen kōshūkai) in Tokyo with over 100 bureaucrats, military officers, media executives and academics in attendance. While the ostensible purpose of the symposium was to discuss propaganda following Japan's full-scale invasion of China in July of 1937, the presentations had very little to do with the practical coordination of information. Rather, the symposium participants brought their specific areas of expertise to bear on elaborating the curious term ‘thought war’ (shisōsen), a term that had only recently been used with any regularity but which had become invested with critical urgency following the invasion of China. In the conventional literature, the term ‘thought war’ is understood as marking a new modality of state propaganda as Japan moved towards a total war system. However, this reading overlooks the ideological investments in thought war discourse, as well as how ‘thought war’ inherited a multivalent sense of crisis that had crystallized around thought and culture earlier in the 1930s. In this article, I explore how the 1938 symposium reveals a combined sense of historical crisis and an urgent call for the total overhaul of Japanese state and society, a combination which, I argue, underwrote the development of fascism in Japan. I trace how three earlier discourses of crisis – the ‘Manchurian Problem’, the ‘thought problem’ and the ‘movement to clarify the kokutai’ – converged within thought war discourse, thus investing it with fascist urgency. |
