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How's that "the closest thing"?
A militaristic, nationalistic dictatorship in the 1930s that rejected liberalism in favour of extreme statism and corporatism, suppressed alternative ideologies, promoted traditional values, conquered and brutalised its neighbours and allied with explicitly fascist regimes in Europe.
Japan's racial ideology was slightly different, in that it didn't want to exterminate the Chinese (like Germany wanted to exterminate the Jews and Slavs), just rule over them. And it didn't have a single leader like Mussolini/Hitler and instead had the Emporer as a figurehead with power being held by competing military factions. But based on the many similarities I think it's reasonable to call Imperial Japan the closest thing to East-Asian supremacist fascism. Can you think of another regime that would be closer?
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How is it not? Ultra-nationalist racial supremacists turns out they don't like other races I'm shocked. The Japanese treated the white people under their rule pretty terribly and they had a significantly white city in Harbin at the time. If you mean some sort of East Asian non-democratic technocracy well that's hardly what people mean by facism.
I feel like you and Opt-out are treating Fascism the way campus leftists treat socialism. Actual existing Fascism was not about raising prosperity for everyone with competent government, it was about raising prosperity for the chosen group.
How does that make them "the closest thing" though? Does China or Singapore not apply?
You might be on to something, but that's not exactly it. Maybe we can define our terms first? I'm getting whiplash from getting called a fascist for ten years for wanting fairly minor reforms, to now hearing Franco was not a fascist.
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