John Person, "Arbiters of Patriotism: Right-Wing Scholars in Imperial Japan" (U Hawaii Press, 2020)

New Books in Japanese Studies · May 20, 2021 · 1h 25m

John Person’s Arbiters of Patriotism: Right-Wing Scholars in Imperial Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2020) narrates the struggle for ownership of the moral high ground of “patriotism” in the Japanese empire through a political biography of Mitsui Kōshi and Minoda Muneki, two of the most important Japanists of the empire, and the nationalist Genri Nippon Society to which they belonged. Though Person admits that “Mitsui’s reputation as a dangerous thinker is well warranted,” and that of all the nationalist polemicists of the early twentieth century “there is perhaps no single person with as…