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 1911. (Martin 83) Neither is the case, the reality being that Kita Ikki's goals were no different in his second book then they were in his first, it was simply a change in tactics that necessitated the internal reorganization of Japan laid out in his Reorganization Plan.

For Kita Ikki all nations had their particular levels of attainment and all countries were in a hierarchy, some lower others higher. China long the center of East Asian civilization had recently been in decline and Kita Ikki believed they were on the verge of a great transformation and while ready, they were unable to break through to the next evolutionary stage. (Wilson 26)The reason for this he believed