George Montandon and the Ainu

Drawing on Arthur de Gobineau's scientific racist theory, George Montandon developed research on race and culture, premised on the existence of superior Aryan men who were born to be leaders. After starting out as an intellectual involved with the Communist Party, Montandon abandoned political activism in 1926 to pursue an academic career in Paris. In 1928 he published his most important work, L'ologenèse humaine, followed a few years later by the complementary volume entitled L'ologenèse culturelle (1934). The concept of hologenesis at the core of his research was inspired by the analogous concept put forth by the Italian zoologist Daniele Rosa, which was little known to the international community of scientists at the time. The adaptation of this concept to the field of physical and cultural anthropology allowed Montandon to develop a neo-Darwinian theory of evolutionary change, which was in contrast to the most common understanding of human evolution at the time. Briefly, the conventional view in the interwar years held that the origin of human races had progressively differentiated in prehistory from an initial single cradle of humanity. According to this view, migration and métissage are the reason why races are diverse and hard to distinguish. By contrast, instead of presenting a model of evolution that proceeded from a pure original race to the formation of mixed races, Montandon believed in the existence of an opposite model that proceeded from a more complex race, until being refined to a ‘purer’ one. The theory of hologenesis, in other words, denied the existence of a pure race at the origin of humanity, by affirming that ‘all species evolved as a result of internal causes, because they were each endowed with an “ideoplasm” or substratum responsible for heredity, in a pattern of constant spontaneous dichotomy’ (Conklin Reference Conklin2013, 174). Over time each race split into two different branches and the resulting new races eventually would divide internally still further, continuing a process that ultimately will make the races more and more distinct and ‘pure’. This view of the subdivision of races throughout history ultimately intended to demonstrate that the latest and most advanced race was the Europeanoid, which was also considered the most advanced civilisation on Earth.

The theory of hologenesis granted Montandon access to the École d'Anthropologie in Paris, where he taught ethnography and bioanthropology and, ultimately, he obtained his naturalisation as a French citizen. When the Germans invaded France in 1940 and created the government of Vichy, Montandon seized the opportunity to collaborate with Nazi scientists in the persecution and murder of Jews. Crucially, his belief that the ‘European race’ was made up of the same physical types that constituted the French ethnicity (Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean), drew him to conclude that France should join the Nazi project of racial hygiene.

While committing himself to serve the interests of Nazi Germany in France, Montandon developed a parallel relationship with Fascist Italy, which is still little known. Indeed, Montandon had a longstanding history of collaboration with Fascism that began in 1928. Initially, he was the author of several contributions to the national encyclopediaFootnote ⁴ (‘Enciclopedia italiana’) and an official member of many Italian scientific societies, including the Italian Geographical Society, the Italian Committee for the Study of Population Problems and the Italian Society of Anthropology and Ethnology in Florence (Knobel and Puccini Reference Knobel and Puccini1991, 116–117).

With the publication of its racial manifesto, ‘Manifesto della Razza’ in 1938, Italy officially endorsed the German Aryan doctrine and its anti-Semitic policy. Montandon saw in this dramatic shift toward an official state racial law an opportunity to play a more influential role. The racist anthropologist Guido Landra, who was the chief editor of the ‘Manifesto’, offered him a position on the editorial board of the journal La difesa della razza, which, for six years, between 1938 and 1943, supported Fascist racist and anti-Semitic policies by focusing entirely on the issue of race. Landra considered the theory of hologenesis an effective way to subsume Italian races within a discourse of European racial superiority, therefore supporting the biological racial thesis. In a 1939 article in La difesa della razza, for instance, Guido Landra used the hologenesis theory as a tool to demonstrate the origin of several Italian racial types from the other European populations.Footnote ⁵

The contribution of Montandon to La difesa della razza not only helped align the Italian racial debate with Nazi-style biological racism, but it also helped to include the Japanese race within the embrace of this irrational theory. His ethnological research in East Asia proved to be useful for Fascist scientists searching to bridge the gap between Japan and the other European allies. Montandon's contribution in this regard advanced the theory of the Japanese people as descending from an Indo-European ethnic group, whose last survivors were the Ainu, an indigenous ethnic minority of Japan living in the islands now known as Hokkaidô. Montandon had begun his research on the Ainu in 1919 when he was still cultivating his passion for descriptive ethnography, while his academic career was yet undetermined. Searching for new travel adventures while living in Switzerland and working as a medical doctor, he managed to become a leading member of the Red Cross mission in Siberia, with a mandate to repatriate war prisoners while offering medical support (Piana Reference Piana2016). Travelling through Siberia by train, Montandon dedicated himself to writing ethnographic reports on several indigenous populations, including the Ainu living on the Sakhalin Island of Japan. The result of his observations became part of a volume published in a first edition in 1927Footnote ⁶ and republished in an extended version in 1937 with the title of La civilisation Aïnou et les cultures arctiques. By conducting a cultural and somatological study of the Ainu (which included taking blood tests and skull measurements), Montandon concluded that the Ainu were the latest remains of an ancient white European bloc that had once spread out across the northern part of the Eurasian territory.

Montandon was not the first Westerner to consider the Ainu as white European ancestors; other early European travellers who visited northern Japan reached similar conclusions.Footnote ⁷ One such early visitor was the Sicilian Jesuit Girolamo de Angelis, who went to Hokkaidō in 1618 and, after noticing their exterior differences from other Asian people, concluded that the Ainu were ‘white’. The wave of European visitors only increased in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Japan was forced to open ports for trade with Western powers, including the port of Hakodate in Hokkaidō. The increased accessibility of northern Japan to external travellers did not change the image of the Ainu from this European myth, and in fact the opposite occurred. Searching for more evidence for the Ainu's Caucasian origin, European visitors emphasised other atypical somatic aspects, such as the hairiness of their bodies, in contrast with Asian bodies. Another ludicrous argument used to support a European origin for the Ainu was their personality, which was described as ‘intelligent’, ‘welcoming’, and ‘unthreatening’. The ‘good’ Ainu, open to receiving strangers in their land, could only be of Western descent. Finally, a linguistic argument for the inclusion of the Ainu language into the family of Indo-European languages was presented by the British missionary John Batchelor, who authored the first Ainu–English–Japanese dictionary, published in 1887. Given the absence of linguistic experts who could object to his thesis, Batchelor conducted a linguistic archeological study in which the Ainu language was forced to fit the grammatical categories of European languages, thus leading the author to demonstrate, artificially, the ‘Aryan’ origin of the Ainu language.

In the end Montandon only reinforced a preexisting idea about the Ainu as white Europeans that was widely circulating at the time.Footnote ⁸ Drawing from the same body of research, he also echoed the theory that the Ainu were the last representatives of a primitive stage of Japanese history; in fact, he concluded, the Ainu provided the first racial stock of the Japanese race. According to this theory, (Montandon Reference Montandon1937, 10) in early times this aboriginal population had been settled all over the Japanese archipelago, until, between the tenth and fifth centuries BC, a wave of Mongoloid migration invaded from the south, forcing the Ainu to retreat north. As a consequence of this migration, a new racial composition that included the Ainu stock was mixed with other racial components. Therefore, the Ainu population currently existing in Hokkaidō was considered the last remnant of the Japanese ancestors who had resisted assimilation to the Mongoloid invasion.

This wrong conclusion offered nonetheless a useful perspective to Italian biological racists. In fact, the search for a link between Europeans and the Japanese race is the reason why Italians first learned about the Ainu during the period of the Axis Alliance.Footnote ⁹ The journal La difesa della razza widely diffused Montandon's discoveries in several issues. In 1940, an article by Eugenio De Aldisio introduced the Ainu to the Italian public. In a journal mainly concerned with promoting biological racism, the article's focus on the prehistory of Japan was given as a pretext to argue for the Caucasian origin of the Japanese ally. In fact, De Aldisio presented the Ainu as people of ‘white race’ (‘razza bianca’) of European resemblance, who were originally situated in the main part of the Japanese territory and Siberia. By presenting them as the first inhabitants of the archipelago, De Aldisio could finally demonstrate that the current Japanese race still carried the genetic presence of the white/European Ainu mixed with the Mongoloid component introduced by subsequent waves of migration. In a 1940 article published on La difesa della razza Armando Tosti did not hesitate to dismiss the association of the Japanese with the ‘Yellow Peril’, popular until then, in order to put forth, unabashedly, the idea of Japanese being as white as the Europeans: ‘I giapponesi per il loro aspetto, per la loro mentalità, per le loro istituzioni, per le loro costumanze, non hanno in sé nulla di mongolico, ma sono “bianchi” come gli Europei’ (‘The Japanese, in their appearance, their mentality, their institutions, their customs, do not have anything of the Mongolian; instead they are “white” like the Europeans’. Tosti Reference Tosti1940, 21.)

If De AldisioFootnote ¹⁰ and Tosti gave substantial credibility to the white origin of the Japanese, via the Ainu, other contributions on La difesa della razza tended to undermine this theory. The argument in favour of the ‘whiteness’ of the Ainu presented several shortcomings to those who believed in a correlation between the colour-line and civilisational progress. If the Ainu were ‘white’ European ancestors, how could their ‘uncivilised’ status be explained? Furthermore, if the Ainu were Caucasian, how could their ultimate domination by Mongol populations be justified? These questions were debated internationally and the editorial board of La difesa della razza itself clearly did not reach a shared opinion on this matter. An article by the Albanian geographer Alessandro Kemal Vlora in Reference Vlora1942 substantially minimised the biological impact of the Ainu in the constitution of the Japanese race, by circumscribing it to the population living in northern Japan. However, the most surprising evidence of this division comes from Guido Landra, who wrote a misleading review of Montandon's book on the Ainu – surprising because Landra was the main liaison between Montandon and the Italian group of eugenic scientists, as well as a follower of Montandon's hologenetic theory. Yet, in an article in which he announces that he is simply giving an overview of Montandon's studies on Japanese prehistory, he blatantly intermingles his views with those of the book's author. Rejecting Montandon's understanding of Ainu as white, Landra seamlessly alternated a summary of the book's main discoveries with a personal statement about the exterior aspect of the Ainu: ‘Malgrado questi indubbi tratti europodi, gli Aino [sic] non possono in alcun modo essere confusi con le razze tipicamente europee, come la nordica, la mediterranea, l'alpina e la dinarica. Se ne distaccano difatti per alcuni caratteri particolari, come le arcate sopraccigliari marcate, la forte pelosità e molti altri caratteri di primitività’(‘Despite these obvious Europoid traits, the Aino [sic] can in no way be confused with typically European breeds, such as the Nordic, the Mediterranean, the Alpine and the Dinaric. In fact, they stand out due to some particular characters, such as the marked eyebrow arches, the strong hairiness and many other primitive aspects’ (Landra Reference Landra1940, 13).

Such reactions to the biological thesis of Japanese ‘whiteness’ are a clear demonstration of how longstanding racist views against the ‘yellow’ race could hardly be surmounted (Miyake Reference Miyake, Cestari, Coci, Moro and Specchio2018, 624). Landra's opposition to Montandon's theory was a decisive influence on the entire debate, given his authority as director of the Racial Studies Department in the Ministry for National Culture.

Yet, the ‘rehabilitation’ of the Japanese race, as standing on an equal footing with the Aryan race, became a matter of contention in Italy between two antagonistic racial theories that were confronting each other in La difesa della razza: the biological and the spiritual. The next paragraph focuses on the lesser-known, nevertheless vital, current of spiritual racism, which placed a high price on claiming affinities and commonalities with the Japanese ally.

Where Japanese and Roman traditions meet

The 1938 publication of Italy's Racial Manifesto did not preclude the continuation of alternative racial theories, whose origins preceded the advent of Fascism. Among those, the ‘spiritual’ racism, inspired by the writings of Julius Evola, proposed a notion of race that enabled a discourse of rapprochement between the ‘yellow’ and the ‘white’ races. Evola's spiritual brand of racism was by no means the only one existing in Italy, nor the first to be formulated. In the first half of the twentieth century the influence of prominent philosophers such as Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile led a significant part of the Italian intellectual community to embrace the tradition of humanism and neo-idealism against positivism and Marxist materialism. During the liberal period, the racial debate around the issue of defining the Italian national identity found in the anthropologist Giuseppe Sergi (1841–1936) a leading representative of this anti-scientific cultural front. Sergi became the major proponent of a Mediterranean racial identity for Italy, in opposition to the German Aryan thesis, which adopted a more ‘scientific’ method of racial classification. A cornerstone of this Italian theory was the belief in the spiritual unity of all Italians as a result of sharing the same cultural environment, despite the phenotypical differences, especially between North and South Italians. Mussolini embraced this thesis until 1938, because of the appealing notion, which described the ancient Romans as the spiritual ancestors of modern Italians (Gillette Reference Gillette2002, 24–34). However, after 1938, Evola's strain of spiritual racism became handier than the Mediterranean thesis to Mussolini, as it predicated the idea of a confluence of Italians and Germans under the Aryan race while distancing itself from German biological racism. Considering Italians as a Roman-Aryan race fulfilled Mussolini's ambitions of appeasing the German ally without renouncing the notion of a distinguished Italian racial theory (Gregor Reference Gregor2005, 218).

Evola considered the biological notion of race, and racial purity, as a vulgar reduction of the single human being to a materialistic interpretation. For him, beyond the superficial layer of the body aspect, two deeper elements completed the racial outlook: one, the ‘race of the soul’ (the human psychological and emotional structure) and the other, the ‘race of the spirit’ (a human predisposition to embody ‘traditional’ values that best express the ideal human person, such as courage, virtue, character, integrity, etc.) By embodying the traditional values of the Roman empire, such as virtue, spirit of sacrifice, courage, and obedience to the superior authority, Italians were considered descendants of the Aryan-Roman race, a concept that reconciled the Risorgimento's myth of Romanità, of pure Roman-ness, with the German glorification of the Aryan race.

However, the priority of the ‘spiritual’ element over the ‘biological’ also allowed Evola to include in the so-called superior race individuals of different racial profile, or geographical origin, including, occasionally, some Jews whom Evola regarded as ‘Aryans’ in spirit. In this regard, according to Evola, individuals who embodied in the present day the traditional values inscribed in ancient forms of spirituality (Buddhism, esoteric and ascetic cults, Taoism, the Jewish Kabbalah, Hinduism, and Greek philosophy) were legitimate members of this ‘super-race’. In this sense Evola regarded the Japanese nationalism of the 1930s as an ideal addition to this family, for its blending of old and new traditions, of ancient philosophies integrated with a modern army. Of course, Evola was not claiming this fascination with Japan in a vacuum. Indeed, there was a long history of Italian nationalistic admiration for modern Japan that Evola himself must have experienced in his early career, when he was part of the Futurist movement together with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. In this arena of right-wing writers, Japan was already considered a great example of a nation that created a strong sense of spiritual unity, militarism and national identity based on the ancient doctrines of Shinto, Buddhism, or Confucianism.Footnote ¹¹ It mattered little to these admirers of the Japanese that emperor worship was not an ancient cult in Japan, but rather a modern invention of tradition, introduced during the Meiji Restoration and quite dependent on Western influence. Indeed, Shinto had become a state religion only in 1867 when the shogunate was replaced by the central role of the emperor, who became the father of the family-state (Kazoku-kokka). This modern creation of an imperial nationalism linked to a traditional samurai ethic (bushidō), was reactionary and conservative, rather than democratic. Indeed, at the outset of the Second World War, many nationalists in Italy saluted the alliance with Japan as the spiritual union of two rising empires, modelled after the virtues of ancient Rome on the one hand and the Shinto virtues of war and loyalty to the central figure of the emperor on the other.

In 1940 Julius Evola published in the journal Asiatica, directed by the orientalist Giuseppe Tucci, a celebratory article of the Tripartite Pact of September 27, 1940. He welcomed this alliance as the pact with a ‘“traditional” civilisation’ that would help Italy in the struggle against the forces of Western (especially Anglo-American) materialism. He portrayed Japanese values as similar to ancient Roman values: for instance, the Shinto sense of loyalty to the emperor was compared to the concept of fides in the Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages and in ancient Rome itself. When Japanese soldiers in the Pacific theatre became famous for their suicide attacks, in which their bodies were used as human bullets (nikudan), Evola compared their ethic of self-sacrifice with the ‘ancient Roman ritual of Devotio’ (Evola Reference Evola and Morgan2011, 122).Footnote ¹²

Evola's historic shortsightedness can only be explained by his desire to fit Japan into the grand scheme of the history of civilisation that thinkers such as Oswald Spengler and René Guénon had laid out (both were in fact translated into Italian by Evola).Footnote ¹³ Indeed, following the ideas that Guénon expressed in 1927 in La crise du monde moderne (Italian version Guénon 1937) Evola pursued an interpretation of his present time in which the decline of Western societies was interpreted as a progressive abandonment of traditional and spiritual values, which existed only in fragmented form. According to this view, Eastern countries were the only remaining guardians of such esoteric cults and metaphysical traditions as connected the individual with a transcendental authority. Thus, Evola concluded his article explaining that the most beneficial aspect of the Japanese-Italian alliance was the merger of two ancient traditions. In his words:

This interpretation of the nature of the alliance between Italy and Japan would reverberate with many political commentators, to the extent of becoming the driving racial discourse to help promote the Italo/Japanese coalition. In a 1941 issue of La difesa della razza the esoteric philosopher Massimo Scaligero would echo Evola's article by stating that even though the Japanese could not be considered ‘white’, nonetheless they still belonged to the ‘Aryan’ group by virtue of expressing ‘traditional principles’, such as the Zen doctrine and the mystical/heroic spirit of the Samurai. (Scaligero Reference Scaligero1941, 21–24). A year later, La difesa della razza would publish a series of three articles on La razza giapponese by Alessandro Kemal Vlora. If in the first article of the triptych, above mentioned, Kemal Vlora undermined the biological solution to the problem of how to include the Japanese in the Aryan race, in the second article, he underscored a ‘spiritual commonality’ between ‘the Italian and Japanese people’ (Vlora Reference Vlora1942, 11).

It is not by chance that these articles were published in this period. In fact, this idea of ‘spiritual racism’ reached its greatest popularity in Italy between summer 1941 and mid-1942. In this period, Mussolini read with enthusiasm Evola's essay Sintesi della dottrina della razza (‘Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race’, 1941) and authorised Evola to pursue the project of a bilingual German-Italian journal on race to be titled Blood and Spirit. With an editorial board composed of German and Italian esoteric philosophers, this journal aimed at counteracting the 1938 Racial Manifesto, by offering insights into Aryan myth, the ‘racial soul’, and the ‘spirit of the race’. The project, however, could not survive the criticism of biological racists both in Italy and in Germany. Guido Landra vehemently accused Evola of compromising basic racist principles by suggesting that non-Aryan individuals could still carry Aryan characteristics as part of their soul or spirit. Eventually, Mussolini chose to maintain the status quo and decided to terminate the journal project in March 1942.

With the end of Fascism's collaboration with spiritual racism, the journal La difesa della razza gradually abandoned the ‘spiritual’ argument to justify the Italo-Japanese alliance altogether. In the last issue of the magazine, Felice Graziani published an article lamenting the lack of unity and collaboration between Aryan groups scattered around the world (Graziani Reference Graziani1943, 12–13). In contrast to this phenomenon, Graziani mentioned both the spiritual unity of the Jewish diaspora and the example of Japan's racial consciousness and spiritual cohesion. Graziani considered Japan's spiritual unity as independent from the Aryan race. After having dismissed the idea of ‘whitening’ the Japanese by focusing on a supposedly Caucasian genealogy, La difesa della razza ended its publication cycle with an article that ignored even the spiritual argument in support of the ‘Aryanization’ of Italy's Asian partner. By representing the Japanese as non-white and non-Aryan, this infamous Fascist magazine finally came full circle to its initial position: the Far East ally could now once again be ‘othered’ and kept at a safe distance.

A legacy slow to die

In the end, this analysis of the racial theories that aimed at including Japan in the group of Aryan races has brought attention to two antagonistic approaches: biological and spiritual racism. The parallel developments of similar arguments in Germany suggest a transnational approach that would include Italian Fascism in relation to the Third Reich and, possibly, other twentieth-century fascisms as well. Within this broader context, the case of Italy stands out for its continuity between the pre and postwar period. In fact, while the biological thesis about the Italian/Japanese affinity was dropped with the demise of Fascism, the spiritual thesis would survive the end of Axis Alliance, resurfacing in different forms in the postwar years. By contrast, in Germany, ‘few spoke of the alleged German-Japanese similarities after the final defeat, and those who had propagated such images most actively either lost their jobs and influence or turned to other subjects on which to write’ (Bieber Reference Bieber, Saaler, Akira and Nobuo2017, 324). Some of them committed suicide, including Goebbels and Himmler in 1945, and Haushofer a year later. Eugen Herrigel (1884–1955), however, washed away his past Nazi affiliation by becoming a best-seller author with his book Zen oder die Kunst des Bogenschießens (Zen or the Art of Archery, 1948), which appealed to young Western readers looking for Oriental teachings of wisdom and peace. Regardless of the commercial success, ‘one should perhaps note that Zen or the Art of Archery does not contain a single reference to similarities between German and Japanese culture’ (Bieber Reference Bieber, Saaler, Akira and Nobuo2017, 324).

Julius Evola's fate in Italy was different. After his failed collaborations with both Italian Fascism and Nazi-Germany, Evola abandoned the political arena, while becoming a maître à penser for a generation of right-wing activists. In this new role, Evola became a point of reference for a postwar regrouping of neofascist militants seeking to continue the struggle against the forces of Western materialism and modernity. With both Europe and Japan experiencing an economic boom and embracing the American way of life, Evola's search for exceptional individuals who embodied ‘traditional values’ became increasingly hopeless and defeatist. Nonetheless, a book like Cavalcare la tigre (Ride the Tiger), with its message directed to those men of tradition who refused to concede to the values of modernity, appealed to far-right groups, searching for ideological guidance during the season of political terrorism in the 1960s and 1970s. The image of the ‘spiritual warrior’, upholding traditional values in an age of decadence, was largely inspired by references to Japanese Zen. In an article published in the journal East and West, directed by Giuseppe Tucci, Evola challenged the notion of Buddhism as a non-violent form of spirituality, as it appeared to 1960s Western pacifist (and left-wing) groups: ‘Zen Buddhism could be called the doctrine of the Samurai, i.e., of the Japanese nobility, who are certainly not noted for their abhorrence of arms and bloodshed’ (Evola Reference Evola, Johnson and Cleary2018, 476). The spectacular suicide of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima in 1970 appealed to him as the perfect example of this nobility protesting against the triumph of modernity: ‘If modern developments continue their course, Mishima's death will only be a distant memory of the past and never be seen in a proper light, namely as an example of high paradigmatic value’ (Evola Reference Evola and Stucco1994, 15).

With this warrior-like interpretation of the Zen, Evola created access to Zen teachings (as well as Taoism and Tantric doctrines) for young far-right militants, in competition with the Beat generation's enthusiasm for Zen forms of spirituality and self-enlightenment. By continuing to stress a spiritual unity between Eastern and Western men who followed the path of traditional wisdom, Evola was able to maintain the same message that had appealed to Mussolini during the Fascist years and to perpetuate his influential role in the political activism of the far right.

Unlike the Fascist doctrine, this new form of political radicalisation was dismissive of concepts of nation and people. In Cavalcare la tigre, Evola calls for the formation of ‘transnational regroupings’ and even foreshadowed a ‘world without frontiers’ (Evola Reference Evola, Godwin and Fontana2003 [1961], 183) where an elite cadre of individuals from every nation could coalesce around prominent leaders. Ordine Nuovo was the radical right Italian movement, which, more than any other, was receptive to Evola's ideas. The followers of this neofascist group especially embraced the Evolian idea of a transnational elite group fashioned after the example of ‘the warrior castes and the soldiers/heroes of a familiar list: the Samurai, the Kshatriya, the medieval knightly Orders’ (Ferraresi Reference Ferraresi1996: 55). Ordine Nuovo was in fact a key protagonist of the period so-called strategia della tensione (‘strategy of tension’), between roughly the end of the 1960s and the mid-1970s, during which time several terrorist attacks, including bombs planted in key targets, were aimed at preventing a feared Communist takeover of Italy, as well as promoting a coup d’état.

The intersection of neofascist ideology and Evola's fascination with Japanese traditionalism is well represented by Delfo Zorzi (1947–), who was one of the leaders of Ordine Nuovo, a young Japanese scholar at the Istituto Universitario Orientale in Naples and founder of the first karate school in the Veneto. His name is associated with numerous massacres (especially the 1974 bomb attack in Brescia) committed by Italian extremists in this period. In 1974 Zorzi moved to Japan, where he married a local woman, which helped him achieve citizenship status in 1989. He promptly used his new Japanese affiliation, under the name of Roi Hagen, to seek government protection against repeated requests of extradition by the Italian government, which tried in vain to overcome the Japanese reluctance to hand him over for trial in Italy. Since the 1980s, Zorzi has apparently become a successful and wealthy entrepreneur through an import/export fashion business between Europe and East Asia. In 1995, using the nom de plume of Dario Zanchi, he published Ten-chû!, a history of Japanese far-right groups and their adoption of the bushidō ethic between the Meiji period and the rise of nationalism in the 1930s.

Evola's blend of neofascism and Japanese warrior spirituality even continues its legacy today in the context of the Italian far-right movement. The notorious Italian neo-Nazi activist Franco Freda carried on his subversive activity by directing ’Edizioni di AR’: a far-right publishing house, which is still a point of reference for Italian neofascist militants. The title of the book series Sannô-kai, devoted to Japanese nationalist writers, is a reference to the name of the Tokyo hotel (Sannô), where on 26 February 1936 a group of Young Officers gathered to commit the assassination of two prime ministers, together with other cabinet ministers and business leaders. The authors of this failed coup d’état were part of an army faction called the kōdō (Imperial Way), which upheld the traditional imperial values that members of Ordine Nuovo so admired. Perhaps echoing the failed takeover of Italy by members of the Italian army during the ‘Strategy of tension’, this book series demonstrates that the Fascist spiritual affinity with Japanese nationalism survived the death of Evola in 1974, and it is still maliciously present in today's far-right propaganda.

The surprising longevity of these ideas after the end of Fascism finds its raison d’être in the historical context of the postwar years of reconstruction. The fact is that when the Italian constitution came into force in 1948, the formal decision to outlaw Fascist racism from the Italian legislation was a symbolic gesture of rupture with the past, rather than an opportunity to reflect on the racial imaginary that underpinned the drafting of Fascist racist laws (Giuliani, Reference Giuliani2019, 86). This lack of public debate in the aftermath of the Second World War allowed racist ideas (like the one posing the existence of a set of superior Aryan-Japanese virtues) to survive the end of Fascism and then circulate, undeterred, in the political underbelly of Italian society.Footnote ¹⁴