NEW YORK — I was recently amused to read the following observation quoted in an intellectual history of modern Japan: "The system in which people vie to get elected head of state through indulgence in garrulity and by flaunting gestures like those of low-class actors is a singularly bizarre custom that we should do nothing more than watch from the sidelines." The system in question, of course, is the process of electing a president in the United States.
What may be surprising is the man who wrote these words: Ikki Kita (1883-1937). Kita, after all, is best remembered today as a man arrested and executed for allegedly providing the philosophical backbone to the handful of army officers who led the 2.26 Incident in 1936 — a revolt that was prompted by an absolute trust in the Emperor that is incomprehensible today. Such a "radical nationalist," as the American historian George Macklin Wilson called him in his 1969 book on the man from Harvard University Press, could not possibly have passed proper judgment on the cherished American democratic process, you might say, let alone dismiss it.
In truth, Kita was more than that. An aide to Sun Yat-sen during China's 1912 revolution albeit as a member of the Japanese rightwing Kokuryukai (Black Dragon Society), he studied various political systems, in the end advocating "genuine socialism." Also, in the year 1919, when he wrote "An Outline for Remaking Japan," in Shanghai, from which the passage quoted above is taken, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was at the forefront of international affairs. During the protracted Peace Conference in Paris, he was the dominant actor with his Fourteen Points, although, as is well known, the U.S. Senate late that year would refuse to ratify the Versailles Treaty he had worked out, largely because his go-it-alone, self-righteous stance, amply adumbrating that of the current U.S. president, put off the Republican majority in Congress. The ratification failure would put America in an odd position in international dealings for the few decades that followed.