Exhibiting the Contradictions of Japanese Fascism: The Tokyo Thought War Exhibit of 1938

In February 1938 the Japanese imperial state organized the first in a series of Thought War Exhibitions (Shisōsen tenranakai) in Takashimaya Department Store in downtown Tokyo, displaying materials of Japan’s ostensible campaign to eradicate “dangerous foreign thought” from East Asia. Equating Japan’s recent invasion of China in 1937 with de-liberating East Asia from western thought, the exhibit mapped the world into conflicting ideological blocs, converting geo-politics into reflections of cultural-ideological essences at war. In order to win this ideological battle, the exhibit exhorted all imperial subjects throughout the empire to purify their thought of foreign influences, fortify the Japanese imperial spirit and to prepare for “national thought defense.”

By choosing Takashimaya Department Store, the imperial state intentionally wove its message of thought war into the culture and spectacles of urban consumption. Moreover, the state utilized the newest display technologies in order to draw shoppers into the exhibition – including neon signs, illuminated installations, dioramas, display cases and simulated street corners. However, this strategy required that the state display the supposed urgency of thought war through the medium of entertaining urban spectacles, and reduced the purported radiance of the imperial Japanese spirit to a few objects arranged in a display case. This paper explores these types of tensions at work in the Exhibition and how they revealed aspects of the constitutive contradictions that underwrote the formation and development of Japanese fascism in the late 1930s.