What is Nippon Kokutai? It is the national substance, national principles, the national form. It is a fundamental social idea, a Gemeinschaft, on which the political state and the social system depend for ultimate authority. It is the moral path which enables Japan alone to transmit universal justice to posterity. It is not a form of government. A country without kokutai is an unfinished country; it is founded on no principles, its basis is military or industrial power, and its people live parasitic lives which are totally dependent upon arms and money. But the case of Japan is quite different. Japan is a unique country, for alone among the nations it is based upon kokutai. It exemplifies ideal peace, and its heavenly task is to spread the truth of kokutai.

The substance of kokutai, Tanaka asserted, could be divided into three constituents: 1. Happiness (the sum of national blessing accumulated by ancestors); 2. Wisdom (the sum of national wisdom amassed by ancestors); and 3. Right (the sum of national loyalty cultivated by the imperial descendants). (‘Glory’ is sometimes used in place of ‘wisdom’, ‘righteousness’ in place of ‘right’.) These ideas, amplifications of Tanaka’s interpretation of the Nihongi, suggest that by and large his basic nationalistic inclinations were probably fixed as early as the 1903 speech in which he alluded to the same three principles.

Japan’s “heavenly task” was, Tanaka declared, from the outset not limited to the islands of Japan alone; the departure of Emperor Jimmu for the east marked the beginning of Japan’s movement into the world at large. The country was, indeed, founded for the benefit of the whole world, and it was not too much to say that Perry’s arrival was a call upon Japan to distribute abroad the blessings of its unique moral qualities. The world began and ended with Japan, and if the country were truly understood, mankind would exist in peace and harmony. …

The actual work of bringing the nations of the world to the day of peace involved two stages: the first, “spiritual absorption” (the extension of kokutai in order to enlighten the minds of men) ; and the second, “military pacification” (a sort of negative guarantee of justice through Japan’s control of the “lawless and disobedient” people of the world). The peace which was the final goal called for the submission of the entire planet to the beneficent overlordship of the Emperor of Japan. To this end, every country save Japan should be disarmed, and only the exemplar, the one region already enjoying the sublimity which was the Way of the Emperor, could be allowed to make decisions affecting the rest of mankind.