The KGZ issues between 1940 and 1944 exemplify a body of unexplored wartime literature, particularly academic journals. While there is much English and Japanese literature on tenkō, propaganda, and censorship of the period, no one has paid serious attention to wartime academic journals themselves. The reason behind this gap in the historiography is perhaps a tendency to treat the journals as products of state suppression and unwilling recantation. The value of these journals was even underplayed by the authors themselves and their postwar successors. The former believed that what they published did not express their true thoughts and only reflected their cowardice; the latter found it unnecessary to reveal this "shameful" content in order to challenge the giants of the postwar intellectual world. This essay, however, argues that in the early 1940s, KGZ became a platform where serious scholarly discussions on kokutai and criticisms of Nazism and fascism could be conducted and spoken out without interference. Moreover, this essay will examine the KGZ's structure of administration, economic base, advertisements, size of membership, and other para-textual materials, which provide valuable information to reconstruct the conditions in which anti-Nazi articles were reviewed, published, and consumed.
X Li (Thu,) studied this question.