The subject of this lecture is fascism in Japan. Now it is our view that there's absolutely no question that the government that emerged in the 1930s in Japan was a fascist government. What is less well known or deliberately misconstrued by Western historians is that the evolution of the Japanese government towards an authoritarian model which was very much in keeping with Japanese history. It was also very much in keeping with Japanese religion in terms of both Buddhism and Shintoism. Indeed, Ishihara, the military mastermind of the Japanese seizure of Manchukuo, was a fanatical follower of Nichiren.
Now part of the problem in understanding Japan in the 1930s and the whole ideology is the mixed up view that the West has of Buddhism, and the attempt to portray Buddhism as some sort of pacifist religion which is just a bunch of nonsense, but that's a key part of the Western view. This is simply not true going back to the warrior monks of China and a whole series of other things that we could discuss at length.
In particular the modern idea of Tibetan Buddhism as a pacifist religion is the creation of the current Dalai Lama, not of Tibetan Buddhism.. Tibet has a long history as warrior state and so the evolution of Japan in the 1930s towards an authoritarian state was very much grounded in the origins of Japanese ideology.