Planning for Empire by Janis Mimura

Author:Janis Mimura [Janis Mimura]
Language: eng
Format: epub

Kamei was interested not so much in Germany’s specific technological inventions, but in the mindset and spirit that informed its inventions. He believed that ultimately the source of technological innovation was of a spiritual and political nature, not material and technical nature. The fount of scientific and technological innovation was the spirit of the ethnic folk (Volk) and its organic, national community (Volksgemeinschaft). Under Konoe’s New Order, Kamei helped design a mass party to unite the Japanese people and mobilize the national spirit.

Japanese technocrats were convinced that Western-style empires, which had benefitted from their international comparative advantage in natural resources, were outdated. The new world trend was toward regional blocs dominated by countries that had achieved self-sufficiency in raw materials and commercial products through superior technology and organization. Technocrats argued that the new order would be based on different principles and practices. In contrast to western imperialism, which was based on the capitalist exploitation of colonies and semicolonies through monopolies, leaseholds, concessions, and “third party rights,” the new ethnic-based regional orders would draw on managerial and spatial principles and strategies that aimed at the rational distribution, development, and overall profitability of the regional bloc. Among the organizational principles informing the new world order was the idea of spatially planning industry based on an assessment of the optimal location for production. In Manchuria, Japanese planners applied this concept in their policy of “suitable site for suitable industries,” which aimed at the most rational division of industries within the Japan-Manchuria bloc. According to Kamei, Nazi regional planning was based on the multilateral organizational form (takakuteki naru soshiki keitai), in which industries within the bloc are managed in the same way as a technology-driven concern organizes its various subsidiaries based on a consideration of technology, management strategy, and factor costs.¹² Technocrats took up these concepts in the context of national land planning and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

With regard to mobilizing the national spirit, Japanese technocrats saw in European fascism a model of political organization that incorporated the latest managerial principles and mobilized the people. They contrasted the “organic” “leadership” organizations of German and Italian totalism with the “mechanical,” “dictatorship” organization of communist (Soviet) totalism. According to one theorist the communist state was a “supra-racial, supra-national mechanical organization that took the individual as the core unit.” In such a system, control was mechanical and impersonal because individual character was not recognized. The state resembled a feudal dictatorship in which a small elite and an unpopular leader oppressed the masses like slaves. In contrast, the fascist state was an organic racial state (jinshu kokka) based on ethnic self-determination. Control took the form of “living” control in which the part was not oppressed by the whole but rather its individual character was recognized as a vital, organic component of the whole. Whereas the unpopular leader Stalin relied on systems and institutions to “oppress” the masses, Hitler used his popularity and charisma to “lead” the masses. For this reason he described the Soviet Union as a “dictatorship state” or an “oppressed state.

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