Charlie Munger

People as Architects of Fascism

How does fascism take root not just in parliaments or barracks, but in the rhythms of ordinary life? In Grassroots Fascism, Yoshimi Yoshiaki asks you to rethink wartime Japan by looking from below—through the diaries, letters, and local records that reveal how farmers, teachers, shopkeepers, and soldiers became active participants in constructing a fascist social order. He transforms the study of fascism from a story of top-down coercion into one of bottom-up consent and adaptation.

From Imperial Democracy to Imperial War

You see how the ideals of the Taishō-era “imperial democracy,” which combined liberal hope with loyalty to the emperor, mutated into mass support for expansionist war. Many Japanese villagers desired autonomy and material improvement but accepted the imperial system as a vessel for those dreams. Peasant families like Abe Ta’ichi’s viewed war as an opportunity: sons enlisted expecting relocation benefits, farmers anticipated new land in Manchuria, and townspeople sought upward mobility through military institutions.

The Frontline-Homefront Circuit

Yoshimi emphasizes a reciprocal relationship between battlefield brutality and homefront mobilization. Soldiers returning from China brought hardened habits and nationalist zeal that reshaped local values. Rural and urban communities thus internalized wartime logic—discipline, sacrifice, and conquest—integrating it into civic routines like rationing and patriotic drives. This dialectic mirrors European fascisms but without mass parties; Japanese authoritarianism worked through everyday institutions and social obligation.

Why Ordinary People Joined In

In diaries and local surveys, you encounter motives layered across class and region. Teachers, shopkeepers, and technicians sought status; peasants pursued economic security; soldiers found meaning in service and camaraderie. Spiritual rhetoric of a “holy war” and the emperor’s divine mission offered moral coherence amid hardship. Yet you also note ambivalence: many citizens criticized corruption and mismanagement even while endorsing authoritarian strength as antidote to disorder. Fascism from below thrives on this paradox of discontent turned into demands for discipline.

Method: Listening to the People

Yoshimi’s methodological innovation lies in his sources. He privileges contemporaneous diaries, letters, army and police reports, and wartime surveys over elite memoirs. Through them, he reconstructs ordinary consciousness—the conflicting emotions, practical motives, and moral compromises of life during empire. (Note: his approach parallels Orlando Figes’s in A People’s Tragedy or Hannah Arendt’s turn toward the “banality of evil.”) You learn that fascism was not imposed in silence but spoken, organized, and lived through local networks and incentives.

The Central Insight

“Grassroots fascism” means that authoritarian power survives by weaving itself into everyday hopes. Ordinary people offer not just obedience but the moral energy, institutional labor, and cultural legitimacy that sustain dictatorship. Recognizing this pattern is not about blaming the masses—it’s about understanding how social cooperation can produce oppression even without deliberate cruelty.

By reading Yoshimi, you grasp a sobering truth: political responsibility in wartime Japan must be shared. Leaders initiated conquest, but citizens enabled it, motivated by fear, want, and aspiration. That complex underside of participation, rather than passive victimhood, explains how fascism became part of everyday Japanese life—and how its collapse in 1945 left both guilt and possibility for renewal.

Yoshimi immerses you in soldiers’ diaries from China, Burma, and the Philippines, revealing how war transforms ordinary men. Physical exhaustion, hunger, and fear fuse with ideology and necessity to produce an “economy of brutality.” Soldiers like Imai Ryōichi and Yamamoto Takeshi record their passage from horror to habituation—from early revulsion at killing to routine looting and execution.

How Violence Becomes Normal

In field notebooks and letters, you see acts most people would consider unimaginable—bayonet testing, burning villages, using poison gas—described as logistical tasks. Hunger turns requisition into theft; command turns retaliation into massacre. By presenting soldiers who agonize yet continue, Yoshimi refuses both demonization and exoneration: violence became a process rather than an aberration.

Ambivalence and Emotion

Many soldiers confess pity for civilians even while enforcing brutal orders. Takahashi Minejirō and Kimura Genzaemon pity Chinese peasants yet talk of duty to “bring culture.” Exhaustion collapses scruples, producing fatalism and calls for harsher campaigns. Frontline life becomes a crucible that later transfused aggression and fear into Japanese civil society when veterans returned.

Aftermath: Reflection and Reckoning

Postwar testimonies show divergent paths: repentance (Miura, Sakimoto), guilt and confession (Yano), or denial (Fujioka). These men illustrate how battlefield shock creates either moral clarity or moral collapse. Their words remind you that fascism’s endurance depended not only on ideology but on lived habits forged amid survival’s cruelty—the humanization of necessity.

Reading these accounts forces you to see atrocity not as statistics but as social pedagogy. It teaches how aggressive systems recruit the ordinary virtues of endurance and cooperation into violence, and how returning soldiers carried home the psychological residue that made postwar recovery both possible and painful.

In the countryside, fascism developed through daily life rather than slogans. Rural families faced conscription, quotas, and rationing, but these hardships were folded into moral duty and self-interest. Abe Ta’ichi’s village diary shows how a peasant preoccupied with farming becomes an organizer of the war economy, managing ration distribution as both local governance and patriotic service.

Institutions of Mobilization

Reservist associations and patriotic women’s groups transformed abstract national directives into local routines—bond drives, welfare for soldiers’ families, and food control. The Ladies’ Patriotic Association led by Itō Matsuo exemplifies how civic pride merged with conformity. Through these mechanisms, Yoshimi shows you that fascism can thrive not just through fear, but through organization and belonging.

Women’s Expanded Roles

Paradoxically, mobilization elevated women’s visibility. Many managed community logistics and relief, gaining confidence and authority even within militarized frameworks. You see how wartime mobilization simultaneously reinforced conservatism and produced proto-social reform—an unintended revolution of roles within patriotic constraint.

Rural Fascism’s Dual Nature

Economic necessity and moral rhetoric collided to make villages the social backbone of the war. Farmers supported war because it promised livelihood, stability, and honor. Their cooperation lent fascism local legitimacy, demonstrating how coercion and consent interlock: survival became political participation. The countryside, far from passive, was the regime’s living infrastructure.

Cities in wartime Japan became laboratories of both unrest and authoritarian hope. Inflation and rice shortages drove shopkeepers, clerks, and factory workers to demand decisive rule. Yoshimi interprets this urban pressure as the social energy that elites converted into the “Imperial Rule Assistance Association” and economic New Order reforms, giving fascism an urban face.

Crisis and Desire for Strength

By 1940, riots and thefts among Tokyo and Osaka crowds expressed frustration with indecision. People wanted control more than freedom. Government surveys reveal that many saw militarized governance as a solution to disorder, not oppression. Fascism capitalized on desire for stability—the politics of strength fueled by economic fear.

Limits of the New Order

Despite new institutions, rationing failed and black markets spread. The state’s inability to meet material needs undermined confidence, contributing later to the collapse of civic faith. By showing how authoritarianism answered popular anxieties but failed materially, Yoshimi explains both the rise and the fragility of wartime consensus.

Urban fascism was therefore transactional: restraint promised stability. When stability evaporated, faith collapsed. This dynamic links Japanese cities to global patterns where economic distress breeds authoritarian longing—a lesson with continuing relevance for crisis politics today.

When you venture with Yoshimi into occupied Southeast Asia, you encounter the empire’s contradictions: economic ambition mixing with coercion, talk of “Asian liberation” masking new subjugation. Through figures like Nitō Seikichi, Ida Masakichi, and Ishii Kenzaburō, you witness how Japanese civilians and soldiers exploited, collaborated, and sometimes redefined themselves after defeat.

Economic Opportunity and Exploitation

Colonial occupation drew ordinary Japanese through commercial dreams—plantations in Medan, clinics in Palembang, trade on Jolo. Yet alongside opportunity came violence: requisition, sexual exploitation, and forced labor of locals (rōmusha). These daily acts reveal how imperialism normalized brutality by blending it with professional routine.

Occupation and Local Nationalism

Japanese training of auxiliary forces like Peta and Heiho in Indonesia and Burma unintentionally incubated postwar independence movements. Military pedagogy thus produced armed resistance after surrender. Yoshimi tracks how former Japanese cooperators and locals transformed imperial structures into anti-colonial instruments—a historical irony in Japan’s claim of “Asia for Asians.”

The colonial front mirrors the homeland’s moral logic: idealism and greed woven together. It exposes how fascism and empire depended on the moral bargaining of civilians abroad, and how their postwar fates—repatriation, citizenship, or exile—embody the lingering ambiguities of imperial identity.

Yoshimi puts Japan’s peripheral populations—Koreans, Taiwanese, Ainu, Okinawans, and Sakhalin’s Uilta—at the center of his moral geography. These communities were coerced into “imperial subjects,” forced to change names, abandon dialects, and serve a war that seldom rewarded them. Their stories reveal the empire’s relentless drive to erase difference under the slogan of unity.

Assimilation as Coercion

In Okinawa, dialect extermination and name campaigns dissolved local culture. In Hokkaido and Sakhalin, Ainu and Uilta were transformed into spies and scouts. Koreans entered the military volunteer system, often under duress, while Taiwanese aborigines became Takasago auxiliary troops. Rather than true inclusion, assimilation produced layered exploitation.

Postwar Marginalization

After 1945, minorities lost recognition and benefits. Former auxiliaries like Dahinieni Gendanu struggled for acknowledgment; Okinawans endured occupation’s double burden. It took decades before public debate addressed minority war participation, marking one of Japan’s lingering responsibilities.

By exposing this suppressed history, Yoshimi expands fascism’s map beyond Japan proper. You see that assimilationist violence—cultural and physical—was an essential technique of empire, and that postwar silence about it perpetuates unequal memory.

The end of war, August 15, 1945, emerges in Yoshimi’s narrative as both trauma and reawakening. Defeat dismantled belief in invincibility yet created a space for moral introspection. Diaries and surveys show that shock, grief, and relief coexisted: some mourned, others rejoiced that the bombing and hunger had ceased. Tanaka, Kogame, and Konagaya’s testimonies capture this emotional fracture.

From Fascism’s Cracks to Reform

Yoshimi interprets defeat as the point where grassroots loyalty flipped. Bombing exposed state failure; shortages destroyed patriotic confidence. People's hope for democracy and reform—land redistribution, corporate dissolution—emerged precisely from exhaustion and betrayal. Yet allegiance to the emperor endured, ensuring transformation without revolution.

Responsibility and Memory

In his final reflections, Yoshimi confronts the ethics of guilt. Drawing on German postwar discourse, he insists that moral learning demands acknowledging popular complicity alongside institutional culpability. Memory must avoid teleology—neither condemning all nor excusing all. It should expose how ordinary choices sustain or break authoritarian systems.

Key Moral Insight

Understanding wartime fascism as grassroots history transforms guilt into civic responsibility. Recognition, not self-exoneration, becomes the foundation of democratic renewal. The memory of participation is Japan’s enduring mirror for how freedom can falter when everyday life aligns with power.

Through this reckoning, Yoshimi closes his account with both lament and hope: fascism was lived through ordinary hands, and its repair must likewise begin from ordinary conscience.