I have recently been reading about the Mitogaku, a school of thought first formed in the 17th century and had a great deal of influence in the way the Japanese "mindset" developed. I would say the banzai charges of WW2 can be traced directly to Mito thinking.
I do not want this thread to become a nationalist chest beating exercise. It is intended to look at the development of national thinking, if you have an agenda to push, kindly do it elsewhere.
The Mitogaku was so-named because it developed out of the Mito domain, which was rather ironically held by one of the three Tokugawa branch families. The Mito Tokugawa, due to their proximity to Edo (Tokyo), were the most influential, despite having the smallest landholdings.
The second Mito daimyo, Tokugawa Mitsukuni, founded an institution called the Shoukoukan, whose task it was to compile a history of Japan centred around the Imperial line. Out of this work, the scholars of the instituution began to develop ideas that placed the Emperor at the centre of Japanese society.
Prior to and during the Edo period, the Emperor had, for many centuries, held a rather symbolic position - although theoretically at the peak of Japanese society, Emperors could, and often were deposed at the will of powerful lords, and in some cases lived in poverty (that is, for an Emperor) as the real powers of the land refused to finance them. Mito scholars, drawing on Confucian ideas, held that the Emperor delegated power to the Shogun, who was responsible for looking after the country's prosperity.
Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, most domains suffered from serious economic decline. This was primarily due to natural disasters which affected crops. Since samurai income was denominated in rice, the shortfalls left many domains in debt and discontent grew. Mito scholars put these economic scholars down to moral decay and misguided policies and mismanagement by the Shogunate. They also surmised that the country's weakness would leave it vulnerable to invasion by foreign powers. These ideas became popular amongst the common folk, and would eventually develop into sonnou joui ("revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians") of the bakumatsu period.
In the early 1800s, Tokugawa Nariaki became daimyo of the Mito clan, and one of the fiercest critics of the Shogunate. He predicted famines, popular discontent and Western dominance of Japanese affairs, which proved to be true over the next few years. After the death of Shogun Tokugawa Iesada, Nariaki's son was a candidate to become Shogun, but the great councillor, Ii Naosuke purged Nariaki's supporters in what would become known as the Ansei purge. Naosuke was murdered by Mito radicals, an event that would be the catalyst for the downfall of the Tokugawa shogunate and lead to the Meiji restorations.
Mito thought heavily influenced the Choshu and Satsuma domains, and that, combined with the ideas of Bushido as perpetuated by the Tokugawa shogunate themselves led directly to the unquestioning reverence of the Emperor and tens of thousands of young men charging to their deaths in the face of withering machine-gun fire on godforsaken Pacific beaches in 1944-45.
Mito Domain - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mito_Domain
I must admit, I haven't yet been able to find a great deal of material on Mitogaku - it isn't covered in any of the textbooks I have to hand, so any thoughts, corrections, questions etc. are very welcome. I know I skipped over that last part, from the Meiji restoration to WW2, as I don't yet have enough in-depth material to support it.