ABSTRACT
The translation of a physical direction into a political stance was one of the great terminological victories of the French Revolution.1 However, searching for the ‘political Left’ in a non-European context is complicated by the profusion of other directions that are granted political significance. In the case of interwar Japan, intellectuals and political leaders were striving to make sense of a new universe of political ideas and organizational models, largely imported from Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. For many such thinkers, the most salient and useful directions in political thought were ‘East’ and ‘West,’ no matter how vulgar these terms might have been. ‘Left and Right’ appeared to be internal concerns or subdivisions of the ‘West,’ and it took a number of years for the Japanese academe to really appreciate the substantive ideological and philosophical distinctions between these two stances. Even then, there remained little consensus about how the Right-Left spectrum might be mapped onto the political formations of the ‘East.’ In particular, looking back through the rich philosophical traditions of Japan, it was not immediately obvious where to locate the various schools of Buddhist, Confucian, or Shintō-derived political ideas. Were these on the ‘Left’ or the ‘Right,’ or did they somehow transcend this schema altogether?2
