After a three month hiatus, I have returned. I can tell that not much has changed since I was here last. Yet, at the same time, I have uncovered some fascinating things and done some important activities in my absence. The Fourth Estate was never meant to be too popular; if that was my plan, I would spent a fortune advertising the Work-Standard throughout the Internet.
Anyway, a while back, I once written that Kita Ikki’s Kokutairon and Pure Socialism (Kokutairon oyobi Junsei Shakaishugi) is an Imperial Japanese analogue to Rudolf Jung’s Der nationale Sozialismus. Scouring the Internet for an actual English translation of Kokutairon was such a pain these past several years. Today, I am proud to announce that I have found a rough English translation of it on an old .html website (presumably from the early 2010s). The book is exactly as I expected it to be: a lengthy theoretical tome, albeit one wrapped in literary language that almost borderlines on a kind of poetry.
While some of it did in fact influence the course of Imperial Japan in the early 20th century, certain aspects continued to live on post-1945 in one form or another. One of the arguments surrounding Kita Ikki’s legacy is that his ideas cannot be neatly defined in “Communist” or “Fascist” terms insofar as they were part of the National Culture of Imperial Japan in the early 20th century. Another is that a few ideas of his would later be implemented, one of them being land reform and the breakup of the Zaibatsu by the Allied Powers, however piecemeal those endeavors were.
There is a Preface and sixteen Chapters. My plan is to save all of the .PDFs in hopes of preserving them on The Fourth Estate because it is one of those documents that I hate to see disappear after searching for it on the Internet. If I have time, I might even be inclined to write in depth about what I had found while reading, perhaps in hopes of sparing people from having to go through what is otherwise a subpar translation of Japanese into English.
Categories: Philosophy
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