MARUYAMA MASAO
In the months immediately after the defeat, Maruyama Masao, together with many others, wrote impassioned diagnoses of the structural flaws that had led the imperial state to fascism, imperialism, and war. His influential formulations included the evocation of a "system of irresponsibility," which referred all agency upward to the emperor; the hypothesis of "fascism from above," brought about by premodern survivals in a "sham constitutional system"; and, from his famous 1946 essay excerpted here, the concepts of "transfer of oppression" and "the interfusion of morality and power," referring to the vertical hierarchy of power and the concentration of supreme value in the emperor. Maruyama's structural critique of Japanese history stressed the primacy of society over the independence of the individual, an independence he regarded as the only possible basis for genuine democracy.
THE LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY OF ULTRANATIONALISM
We are faced, then, with a situation that might be described as the rarefaction of value. The entire national order is constructed like a chain, with the emperor as the absolute value entity, and at each link in the chain the intensity of vertical political control varies in proportion to the distance from the emperor. One might expect this to be ideal soil for the concept of dictatorship, but in fact it was hard for this concept to take root in Japan. For the essential premise of a dictatorship is the existence of a free, decision-making agent, and this is precisely what was lacking in our country. From the apex of the hierarchy to the very bottom it was virtually impossible for a truly free, unregulated individual to exist. Society was so organized that each component group was constantly being regulated by a superior authority while it was imposing its own authority on a group below.
Much has been made of the dictatorial or despotic measures exercised by the Japanese military during the war, but we must avoid confusing despotism as a fact or a social result with despotism as a concept. The latter is invariably related to a sense of responsibility, and neither the military nor the civilian officials in Japan possessed any such sense.
This emerges in the question of responsibility for starting the war. Whatever may have been the causes for the outbreak of war in 1939, the leaders of Nazi Germany were certainly conscious of a decision to embark on hostilities. In Japan, however, the situation was quite different: although it was our country that plunged the world into the terrible conflagration in the Pacific, it has been impossible to find any individuals or groups that are conscious of having started the war. What is the meaning of the remarkable state of affairs in which a country slithered into war, pushed into the vortex by men who were themselves driven by some force that they did not really understand?
The answer lies in the nature of the Japanese oligarchy. It was unfortunate enough for the country to be under oligarchic rule, and the misfortune was aggravated by the fact that the rulers were unconscious of actually being oligarchs or despots. The individuals who composed the various branches of the oligarchy did not regard themselves as active regulators but as men who were, on the contrary, being regulated by rules created elsewhere. None of the oligarchic forces in the country could ever become absolute; instead, they all coexisted, all of them equally dependent on the ultimate entity [the emperor] and all of them stressing their comparative proximity to that entity. This state of affairs led one German observer to describe Japan as Das Land der Neben-einander (the land of coexistence), and there is no doubt that it impeded the development of a sense of subjective responsibility. . . .
In the absence of any free, subjective awareness, an individual's actions are not circumscribed by the dictates of conscience; instead, he is regulated by the existence of people in a higher class—of people, that is, who are closer to ultimate value. What takes the place of despotism in such a situation is a phenomenon that may be described as the maintenance of equilibrium by the transfer of oppression. By exercising arbitrary power on those who are below, people manage to transfer in a downward direction the sense of oppression that comes from above, thus preserving the balance of the whole.
This phenomenon is one of the most important heritages that modern Japan received from feudal society. . . .
With the emergence of our country on the world stage, the principle of "transfer of oppression" was extended to the international plane. . Just as Japan was subject to pressure from the Great Powers, so it would apply pressure to still weaker countries, a clear case of transfer psychology.
[Maruyama, "The Logic and Psychology of Ultranationalism," trans. adapted from Maruyama, Thought and Behavior in Modem Japanese Politics, pp. 16-18