Thought as War: Japan’s “Thought War” Discourse in the Second Sino-Japanese War, 1937–45

While political thought often borrows the terms and motifs of war, military engagements are very rarely represented as political affairs. Rather, war is more often than not represented as an existential fight to defend culture, civilization and/or national honor, thereby eliding its essentially political nature. One historical exception to this elision was the Japanese imperial state’s discourse of “thought war” (shisōsen) following its invasion of China in 1937. On the surface, thought war was defined as a conflict in which the Japanese spirit was defending East Asia against the threat of dangerous foreign ideologies such as communism and liberal individualism. However, by characterizing the conflict as primarily one of thought, the imperial state inadvertently indicated that the conflict was an ideological, and therefore political, struggle, inviting reflection on the political nature of the Japanese spirit and national essence.

In this paper I will consider the continuum of politics and war through two state-sponsored events held in Tokyo in early 1938. The first event was a closed-door Thought War Symposium (Shisōsen kōshūkai) in which military officers, bureaucrats and academics drew upon their respective areas of expertise to formulate a “thought war” strategy from the standpoint of the Japanese spirit. The other event was a public Thought War Exhibition (Shisōsen tenrankai) held in a department store in downtown Tokyo, in which neon signs, dioramas, illuminated maps and other displays urged the urban shopper to expunge dangerous intellectual influences from their daily lives and to mobilize for what the state called “national thought defense” (shisō kokubō). I will consider the tensions within Japan’s thought war discourse and what such tensions reveal about the intersections of political thought and war in East Asia.