Document analyzation - Essay Example

The Kita Ikki document: Intense and restless as Japan Here is Japan, time and again, the popular focus of discussions in international history and breaking news from long years of unmitigated industrial success to so much grief in times of great upheaval. This is Asia’s consummate giant of an economy just as restless, ambitious and intense in times of war and peace. The country that is only as big but more topographically compact than the Philippines, one of the most prized targets of their external expansionist minds which had some of its most reflective expressions in such influential figure of Japanese history as Kita Ikki.

His life, thoughts and action can be seen, heard and read in his own works called the “General Outline of Measures for the Reconstruction of Japan.” The document that strongly advocated national distribution of wealth had given much hope followed by an intense longing for reforms by the poverty-stricken citizens of the pre-industrial era. It had its own dire effect and far-reaching consequences. The string of events prior to and on the day of the February 26, 1936 incident several years after his first mimeographed publication of the banned document had cost him his life when he was executed together with the conspirators of the military uprising.

Kita’s daring attempts to overhaul the feudal system and disturb the status quo of the Japanese aristocracy is rarely mentioned in many historical accounts. Nonetheless, his death and the subsequent recognition of his ideas stirred the Japanese consciousness into treading the path of ultra-nationalism. The imminent build-up of a national frame of mind that has dealt Japan so much progress as it has given them grief and humiliation as an offshoot to its military adventurism and expansionist policy, most of which was believed to have taken roots from the minds of Kita.

2 In life and in death, Kita Ikki and the likes of him are just blatantly daring. Kita, his cohorts and the army of followers attracted to his detailed plan of action and reforms are just uniquely bold and overbearing. Adherents that may even extend to those who executed him and whose kinship with his thoughts and idealism had given rise to widespread ultra-nationalists deportment in all of Japan. In life, his burning desire to materialize his ideas without further delay has finally caught up with him when the people loyal to the emperor and their constitution which he had sought to revolutionize had found strong evidence to implicate him and the conspirators to the February 26, 1936 coup de’etat.

His execution does not mean people do not like his works at all. He died not because of advancing the cause of giving the emperor full powers to impose massive reforms through the declaration of martial law as the document had advocated. What cost him his life is his growing impatience in seeing through with his document’s warlike posturing. Kita would not have last that long from the first publication of the document in 1923 to his eventual execution in 1936 if his ideas did not sit well with the mindset of the majority of the people of his time.

He even lasted thirteen long years of continued indoctrination of some select group of believers, who might have grown to be top brasses of the Japanese Imperial Army themselves. Men, who had seen the fruition of Kita’s principles through to Pearl Harbor, Philippines and the Pacific with its gruesome and devastating effect and finally meeting its end with the return of the United States liberation forces. The doctrine’s consuming desire for military preparedness is depicted in such repeated expressions of words as “Future colonies” and “newly-acquired colonies”.

Militarism and fascism has been the single most incisive feeling and directions of the Kita document depicted in one of the most disturbing assertions of his ideas as Japan’s right to start a war to find new raw materials for massive industrialization, naval and commercial shipbuilding and agricultural production in and out of Japan. Japanese women not having the right to vote is simply Japanese. Abolition of the English language is utterly Nippongo. But imposing Japanese to the other world by means of war is plain and simple domination.

“Reconstruction” has become a byword specially to those who embrace its deep and sublime intentions. For many of Japan’s rising sons of the Shogun and Samurai tradition, the idea is appealing to their warlike senses and industrialists psyche. Flourishing as the Cherry Blossoms but unlike its national flower, Kita’s influence and ideas know no season and boundary. Reconstruction is one prophetic, visionary purpose they had invoked --- reconstruction they will have.