Japan's Holy War reveals how a radical religious ideology drove the Japanese to imperial expansion and global war. Bringing to light a wealth of new research, Walter A. Skya demonstrates that whatever other motives the Japanese had for waging war i

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
I. Emperor Ideology and the Debate over State and Sovereignty in the Late Meiji Period
1. From Constitutional Monarchy to Absolutist Theory 33
2. Hozumi Yatsuka: The Religious Volkisch Family-State 53
3. Minobe Tatsukichi: The Secularization of Politics 82
4. Kita Ikki: A Social-Democratic Critique of Absolute Monarchy 112
II. Emperor Ideology and the Debate over State and Sovereignty in the Taisho Period
5. The Rise of Mass Nationalism 131
6. Uesugi Shinkichi: The Emperor and the Masses 153
7. Kakehi Katsuhiko: The Japanese Emperor State at the Center of the Shinto Cosmology 185
III. Radical Shinto Ultranationalism and Its Triumph in the Early Showa Period
8. Terrorism in the Land of the Gods 229
9. Orthodoxation of a Holy War 262
Conclusion 297
Notes 329
Select Bibliography 363
Index 379

Walter Skya is Director of the Asian Studies Program and Associate Professor of History at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.