Once upon a time men were proud to call themselves fascist. "I am convinced," wrote a leading Japanese reformist bureaucrat in the early 1930s, "that from now on the spirit of the civilization and politics of mankind is fascist ideology ... Before the iron laws of historical development, the downfall of the liberalistic, individualistic, capitalistic world is unavoidable."

PLANNING FOR EMPIRE: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State, by Janis Mimura. Cornell University Press, 2011, 229 pp., £24.95 (hardcover)

So it seemed to many enlightened spirits, and we reading these lines 80 years later can perhaps congratulate ourselves on a narrow escape. To the democratic mind, "fascist" is the most damning political epithet in the lexicon — just as, to the fascist mind, "democrat" was, unless "liberal" or "capitalist" trumped it.

Japanese fascism — not to be confused with the emperor-worshiping militarism with which it was fitfully, uneasily allied — has a decidedly more intellectual, less charismatic, less hideously vicious and sadistic cast than its German and Italian equivalents. It was "techno-fascism," "managerialism." Its proponents, writes American historian Janis Mimura in this provocative re-examination of recent history we thought we knew, "were neither fanatic militarists nor manipulated leaders. They were highly rational and conscientious public servants who promoted a vision of an ultramodern Japan."