ExcerptIn 1930, the right-wing Japanese scholar Ōgushi Toyoo published an article on “Carl Schmitt’s Theory of Sovereignty” in a memorial volume for his teacher, the reactionary political theorist Uesugi Shinkichi.1 We now live in a world where there is widespread, international interest in Schmitt’s work, ranging from the decades-long surge in interest in the United States that accelerated in the 1980s to the more recent “Schmitt Fever” that has been reported in China.2 This state of affairs often features scholars (...) looking back at Schmitt’s trenchant critiques to examine how they might illuminate modern political and institutional crises, but there has not always been this temporal distance to Schmitt’s work. During the early years of Schmitt’s activity, he had contemporary, international readers, although they seem to have largely been limited to two spheres: Germanophone scholars and Catholic readers abroad, primarily in France and Spain. The appearance of an article in Japan concerning Schmitt’s work as early as 1930—half a decade before the formation of the Axis—is thus an invitation not only to examine how this article came into being but also to consider the scope of Schmitt’s international impact even as he was conspicuously engaged in the political transformation of Germany. Rather than trying to map across time, the beginning of Japanese reception offers a chance to look at how Schmitt’s theory traveled abroad as well as how it was evaluated against a background facing similar circumstances. Moreover, Ōgushi’s piece points to a fact that has been relatively underappreciated in Western Schmitt scholarship: the Japanese reception of Schmitt produced one of the earliest extended corpuses on Schmitt’s ideas outside of Germany when measured in terms of the availability of Schmitt’s texts in translation and the uptake of his ideas by responding publications. This article takes Ōgushi’s text as an opportunity to lay some of the groundwork for expanding our understanding of how Schmitt’s ideas spread internationally both by examining the contextual factors that likely helped drive that spread and by digging into the content of this earliest published Japanese text on Schmitt. (shrink)