The language that sells fear has a common grammar—① naming an enemy, ② exaggeration, ③ monopolizing the solution. I crossed this “syntax of fear” laterally through four contemporary variants in the first essay, vertically through late-Edo sonnō jōi in the second, and, via Harris’s negotiations with Japan, followed the border-crossing property of fear in the third. Through the third essay, the lead role always had a “seller”—an agitator who kindled fear, a negotiator who brought in urgency. The syntax had a speaker.
The fourth essay treats a case where that premise collapses. In 1941, the urgency that carried Japan into war with the United States had no seller. No eloquent agitator, no Harris thrusting a clock. And yet the deadline alone existed, as an article in a national-policy document. A clock no one had wound was ticking inside the machinery. Here lies perhaps the most dangerous form of the syntax of fear.
I. Contrast with 1858—The External Clock and the Self-Generated Clock
First, recall the 1858 dissected in the third essay. The unsanctioned signing of the Treaty of Amity and Commerce was not Ii Naosuke’s autocratic act but the decision of the whole machinery, in which the shogunate’s council tipped over into “one-voice” consent to sign under the time pressure Harris brought. But that time, the clock came from outside. It was Harris who spoke the imminence of the British and French fleets in exaggerated terms and stripped away the time for verification. The clock had an owner, and the owner had an incentive structure. That is precisely why judgment—gray though it was—was possible, through the four criteria: falsifiability, proportion to evidence, incentive structure, exclusivity of the solution.
1941 is different. Search for the clock’s owner and none is found.
Recent political-diplomatic history, especially the body of work by Moriyama Atsushi, overturned the popular image of a “runaway military.” Those actively in favor of war with America were confined to a portion of the Army General Staff; the emperor, the government, the navy, and even the Army Ministry were reluctant. Even the appointment of Tōjō Hideki as premier was not to prosecute war with America but as a figure who could restrain the army and might avoid war. That is: search for the central actor who “sold” the war and none emerges.
Why, then, did a war that no one strongly desired begin? Moriyama’s answer is “dual presentation of both arguments” (ryōron heiki) and “non-decision” (hi-kettei). The policy-making system of the time lacked a political subject to decide national policy at all. The premier had no power to appoint and dismiss ministers; the supreme command was independent of the government; and under the principle of unanimity, one person’s opposition could decide nothing—a machinery that could not decide, the opposite of dictatorship. Within it, each organization waged a “war on paper” over face and interest, and only muddy-hued national policies—cohabiting contradictory directions in a single document—were mass-produced.
II. Dissecting the Deadline Clause—A Clock as the Adhesive of Compromise
Within that muddy-hued document, the clock was born.
The “Essentials for Carrying Out the Empire’s Policies,” decided at the Imperial Conference of September 6, 1941, was a document that presented in parallel two directions opposite in vector: the continuation of diplomatic negotiation and the completion of war preparations. What was needed to make two contradictory tracks cohabit a single sheet? A deadline. If, by roughly early October, there is no prospect of achieving our demands, we resolve at once upon war—this deadline clause was not forced through by the war party. It was inserted as the adhesive of compromise so that both the pro-negotiation and the pro-preparation sides could sign the same document. The negotiation side read it as “until then, we can negotiate”; the preparation side read it as “after that, it’s war.” The same sentence guaranteed opposite hopes.
And on November 1, in the “Essentials” re-decided at the Liaison Conference, the clock became the article of the document itself. The time of armed action was set at early December, and—“if negotiations with America succeed by 12:00 a.m. on December 1, armed action shall be suspended.” A timestamp, in the literal sense of midnight, was stamped onto diplomatic negotiation. A national-policy document that guillotines negotiations staking the nation’s fate on a mechanical deadline like a date line is, even in world-historical terms, anomalous.
Here lies the final evolutionary form of the fifth criterion I set in the third essay—the demand of time. The 1858 clock was wound by Harris. The 1941 clock was self-generated by the machinery as the price of “not deciding.” Urgency with no seller. A “right now” that no one desires, yet that stands as the sum of everyone’s compromise. The speaker vanishes from the syntax of fear, and the syntax alone remains in the machinery and operates—call it the driverless operation of the syntax.
III. The “Slow Bleed” Thesis—When Fear Becomes Arithmetic
The driverless syntax has fuel, too. In 1941 it was the “slow bleed” (jiri-hin) thesis.
Under the oil embargo on Japan, reserves dwindled day by day. We can fight now; in two years we cannot. Therefore, if we are to fight, it must be now—the horror of this logic that the supreme command repeated is that it does not take the form of agitation. The oil reserves were fact. The calculation of depletion was accurate. The second stage of the syntax of fear (the imminence of the threat) was embedded in the machinery not as an agitator’s exaggeration but as the arithmetic of resources. Numbers belong to no one, so no one bears responsibility for refuting them and no one holds the authority to withdraw them.
But inside the arithmetic a leap is concealed. “The oil reserves are dwindling” is fact. “Therefore we must decide on war before they run out” is not fact but choice. The path of accepting the slow bleed and enduring hardship; the path of reconstructing the negotiating framework itself—the alternatives existed in logic. The endurance thesis did in fact come up in the deliberations. But it was dropped, never becoming anyone’s flag, within the machinery of dual presentation. Urgency wearing the face of numbers passes straight through the screening for falsifiability. This is why arithmetic is more dangerous than an eloquent agitator. You can question an agitator’s incentive structure; you cannot question a number. What must be questioned is not the number but who, and when, approved the leap from the number to the conclusion—and in 1941 there was no such approver.
Let me note, for caution, that this is not to say war was inevitable. Having examined the process of national-policy decision leading to war, Moriyama states that the road was by no means necessary, and that had the timing slipped at any single point, the decision for war would have been impossible. The ownerless clock is fearsome not because it is robust. It is fearsome because no one holds the authority to stop it. Had chance sided otherwise, it would have stopped. By no one’s will could it be stopped.
IV. The Other Side of the Pacific—The Nation Where Disproof Became Proof
Shift the vantage point to the American side. In this war, the syntax of fear operated on both shores of the Pacific, in mirror image.
On the prewar economic pressure against Japan, let me impose one discipline. It is fact that the embargo and the Hull note intensified the Japanese side’s urgency. But the so-called back-door-to-war thesis—that America lured Japan into opening hostilities—belongs to the realm of conspiracy theory, lacking documentary support. What can be said here is only this, separating intent from structure: pressure intended as deterrence accelerated the ownerless clock inside the other’s machinery—the syntax of fear, even without the intent to set it, self-ignites on the other side depending on the design of the pressure. Treat the gray as gray. The discipline held since the first essay.
Meanwhile, what happened inside wartime America is not gray. In 1942, roughly 120,000 people of Japanese descent were interned. Naming an enemy (the group “persons of Japanese descent”), an invisible threat (the sabotage of a “fifth column”), monopolizing the solution (internment)—a perfect enactment of the three stages. Above all, note the logic of the official report of the Western Defense Commander, John DeWitt. He recorded in an official document the substance that the very fact that no sabotage by persons of Japanese descent had yet occurred was itself unsettling evidence that it was being carefully planned. Disproof was converted into proof of existence. I know of no other example where the disproof-foreclosure of the syntax of fear—what I described in the first essay as “invisibility becoming proof of existence”—appears so nakedly in an official government document.
And in the war’s final phase, the “liquidation of true believers” I posited in the second essay is re-enacted on the largest scale in history. A populace made to believe in a decisive homeland battle. The kamikaze. Those whom the syntax of fear mobilized paid the highest price at the phase where the syntax’s utility ran out. A repetition, a millionfold in scale, of the Shinpūren Rebellion.
Finally, let me close one circle. America, which appeared in 1858 as “the nation that sells protection,” became, with the 1951 Security Treaty, Japan’s actual protector. The product changed from the shadow of Britain and France to the threat of the communist bloc, and the price from ports to bases, but the form of the transaction is the prototype seen in the third essay. Of Harris’s language, the fear part ran away out of control all the way to the Pacific War, but the transactional form of the sale of protection was completed over ninety-three years.
V. And the Present—How to Watch for the Clock’s Emergence
Up to here it is a story of history. But the conditions for the emergence of the ownerless clock—a machinery that cannot decide, a document of dual presentation, urgency wearing the face of numbers—are not peculiar to 1941. And in present-day Japan there is at least one place where these conditions could align again: the debate over constitutional revision, with Article 9 as the main battlefield.
Let me state my position clearly first. This essay does not argue the merits of revision. In both the pro- and anti-revision camps there exist variants of the syntax of fear dissected in the first essay—the rhetoric of “the government wants a country that can wage war,” and the rhetoric that leverages the imminence of crisis to compress debate, are both products of the same grammar. One who is wary of only one of them becomes the carrier of the other’s syntax. What this essay argues is not the merits but the sovereignty of time—how to discern, and how to prevent, the situation in which a deadline outruns the debate—that one point.
What must first be acknowledged is that the very configuration around the current Article 9 is already a vast dual presentation. The cohabitation of the article “land, sea, and air forces will never be maintained” with the actual organization of self-defense under a doctrine of exclusive defense. Postwar Japan has maintained this muddy hue for decades with the adhesive of interpretation. It can be called deception, or it can be called the wisdom of avoiding a decisive split. But the lesson of 1941 teaches that the danger arises less from dual presentation itself than at the moment dual presentation combines with a deadline. A document holding a contradiction, once given a deadline, “settles” not by the ripening of debate but by the arrival of the deadline. It was no one who decided. It was the clock.
So where might the ownerless clock emerge this time? Just as the 1941 clock was born from back-calculating oil reserves, it will invariably appear wearing the face of a technical, external number. A year cited as a neighboring country’s military milestone gets transcribed, before anyone notices, into an implicit deadline for Japan’s own political decision. The target year of a defense-buildup plan is promoted without authorization into the “deadline” for a constitutional positioning. The schedule of equipment procurement drives, from behind, the timing of a national referendum. Each number is a fact, and the plan is rational. But the leap to “we must decide by that year” is, as with the oil reserves, choice and not fact. When urgency wearing the face of numbers appears, there is one thing to ask. Who set this deadline, and by what authority? Under what conditions is it extended or withdrawn? If the answer is “no one,” the ownerless clock is already ticking.
Let me raise one more, paradoxical, ignition point: irritation at “a politics that cannot decide,” in itself. To point out the pathology of non-decision is correct. This essay itself has done so. But when its prescription short-circuits into a craving for “a strong leader who can decide,” history has another rut prepared. It is the rut of Ii Naosuke, whose response to the dysfunction of the council was autocracy. The ownerless clock has two modes of activation. The 1941 type—the deadline arrives while no one can stop it. The 1858 type—procedure is skipped on the pretext of the deadline. When the phrasing “we’ve debated for decades, that’s enough” begins to drive the scheduling of a vote, that is a symptom of the latter. The quantity of debate and the sharing of the question are two different things.
VI. Conclusion—Before the Deadline, the Question
To the one line that has run through the tetralogy, let me splice this essay’s finding and close.
Fear steals the question. And in the vacant seat of the stolen question, a deadline sits down.
“What does this country want to protect, from what, and how?”—every position around Article 9 is only one of several possible answers to this originating question. It is precisely the structure of skipping the sharing of the originating question and hurrying only the vote on answers that hands the initiative to the clock. In 1941 Japan agreed only on “by when to decide,” with no agreement on “why we fight.” A deadline without a question manufactures decisions for the deadline’s sake.
So the order of priority for what to watch is clear. Over the eloquence of the agitator, the silence of the machinery. Over the exaggerated threat, the number no one owns. And before every “right now,” ask once—who wound this clock?
If no one wound it, then the authority to stop it, too, must be newly made by someone. That is the work of institutions and, at the same time, the work of language. Language that reseats the question ahead of the deadline. The public role of the work I call narrative strategy is, I suspect, precisely there.
Principal sources: Moriyama Atsushi, Nihon wa naze kaisen ni fumikitta ka: “ryōron heiki” to “hi-kettei” (Shinchō Sensho, 2012); idem, Nichi-Bei kaisen no seiji katei (Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1998). Primary sources: Sugiyama memo: Daihon’ei–seifu renraku kaigi-tō hikki (Hara Shobō); “Essentials for Carrying Out the Empire’s Policies,” Imperial Conference minutes (National Institute for Defense Studies, Ministry of Defense; Japan Center for Asian Historical Records, Ref. C12120186200 et al.). On the 1858 deliberations, Kikuchi Hisashi, “Bakumatsu no bakufu seiji to Ii Naosuke,” Bulletin of the Historiographical Institute, University of Tokyo, no. 34 (2024).