Promotional Information

A work of history documenting the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century transformation of State Shinto into a radical ideology that ultimately drove Japan into a holy war against Western civilization

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
I. Emperor Ideology and the Debate over State and Sovereignty in the Late Meiji Period
1. From Constitutional Monarchy to Absolutist Theory 33
2. Hozumi Yatsuka: The Religious Volkisch Family-State 53
3. Minobe Tatsukichi: The Secularization of Politics 82
4. Kita Ikki: A Social-Democratic Critique of Absolute Monarchy 112
II. Emperor Ideology and the Debate over State and Sovereignty in the Taisho Period
5. The Rise of Mass Nationalism 131
6. Uesugi Shinkichi: The Emperor and the Masses 153
7. Kakehi Katsuhiko: The Japanese Emperor State at the Center of the Shinto Cosmology 185
III. Radical Shinto Ultranationalism and Its Triumph in the Early Showa Period
8. Terrorism in the Land of the Gods 229
9. Orthodoxation of a Holy War 262
Conclusion 297
Notes 329
Select Bibliography 363
Index 379

About the Author

Walter Skya is Director of the Asian Studies Program and Associate Professor of History at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Reviews

"Japan's Holy War is an important work. Walter A. Skya shows clearly that religious ideologies play various roles in public life; State Shinto transformed from an ideology deeply supportive of entrenched authority to one profoundly and violently opposed to it."--Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence "Walter A. Skya has something new and important to say about Japanese nationalism, and he says it through compelling, thorough research and documentation. Over and against the excessively abstract analyses that see Japanese nationalism as a monolithic, ahistorical force, he reveals how it changed as it responded to contingent events. Such an exciting, theoretically informed, comparative study of Japanese nationalism is long overdue."--Kevin M. Doak, author of A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan: Placing the People "Japan's Holy War is an absolutely outstanding and necessary work, a major contribution to international scholarly debate. Walter A. Skya gives the most convincing account to date of Shinto's ideological implications. His book will become the standard work on the intellectual and ideological history of modern Shinto."--Klaus Antoni, University of Tubingen