Kita Ikki

Kita Ikki was a radical nationalist who lived from 1883 to 1937. Some of his countrymen consider him to be an almost legendary nationalist hero but to the great majority he remains unknown and misunderstood. Early in the twentieth century this man of higher purpose formulated a comparative theory of social evolution which allowed him to examine all countries, East and West, in a new perspective.(Martin 73) Kita Ikki considered revolution to be the inevitable result of earlier evolutionary processes and was a necessary step by which a society enters the modern world. Completing Japans revolution was therefore his ultimate goal and, in his eyes, the duty of all Japanese patriots. His life marks him as an unusual and controversial figure given the radical change in his ideological perspective that occurred in the early nineteenth century. While a young student Kita Ikki was attracted to socialist ideas and met with many influential Japanese socialists. In the July 20 1906 edition of the Japanese socialist journal Hikari, shortly after he published his first work The Theory of Japan 's National Polity and Pure Socialism, Comrade Kita Ikki was praised as a "very young and promising socialist". (Wilson 2) Scarcely more than a decade later, however, the same man would write A Plan for the Reorganization of Japan which historians have generally condemned as blueprint for the introduction of a fascist system with some even going so far as to draw parallels to Adolf Hitler 's Mien Kampf. (Wilson 2) Authors who have written about Kita Ikki assume some dramatic shift in his thinking must have come during the thirteen years that separated his two books. Some consider that Kita Ikki was the Japanese analogue to the group of European intellectuals who saw in Fascism a way of accomplishing both domestic institutional reform and expanding national prestige abroad while others contend he became disillusioned with Socialism after he participated in the failed Chinese Revolution of

Cited: Brown, Myers. Nationalism in Japan: An Introductory Historical Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955. Harris, Martin. The Early Life and Times of Kita Ikki. California: Stanford University Press, 1955. Makiyo, Hori. "Kita Ikki and Japanese Fascism."Rethinking Japan: Social Sciences, Ideology & Thought. Eds. Adriana Boscaro, Franco Gatti and Massimo Raveri. London: Routledge, 1991. 70-86. Narangoa, Li, and Robert Cribb. Imperial Japan and National Identities in Asia 1895-1945. London: Routledge 2003. Wilson, George. Nationalist in Japan: Kita Ikki 1883-1937. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969.