Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the spiritual geopolitics of Fujisawa Chikao from the 1920s until the end of World War II. Fujisawa’s vision was an attempt to turn Shinto into a truly universal project that could provide the ideological underpinnings not just of the Japanese Empire, but of a new global order.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will focus on the political thought of Fujisawa Chikao (1893-1962). Known for his shift from liberal internationalism to an extreme form of imperialist Japanism during the 1920s, Fujisawa serves as an excellent conduit to explore attempts at imagining Shinto empire in interwar Asia. As a figure deeply involved with propaganda work and the propaganda war during the late 1930s and 1940s, Fujisawa deserves more attention than he has received so far. After serving in an official post at the League of Nations in the early 1920s, Fujisawa returned to Japan to take up a teaching position at Kyushu Imperial University. The 1920s saw him increasingly repudiate his original internationalist leanings. He began to search for alternatives that would allow the international community to overcome the structural pitfalls of the nation state system. As part of these attempts his attention turned increasingly to Shinto, and during the 1930s, Fujisawa began to read political events through the lens of Shinto mythology. Pivotal in this intellectual shift were the ideas of the legal scholar Kakei Katsuhiko (1872-1961), in whose thought Fujisawa rooted his vision of a new international order. To lay the intellectual foundations for this new Japan-centered order, Fujisawa transformed Shinto from a national tradition into a universal truth. To do so, however, he needed to expand the scope of Shinto mythology and integrate global history into this new framework. The paper will examine the intellectual resources Fujisawa mobilized to construct his vision and how Fujisawa located other religious and civilizational traditions within it.