Was Imperial Japan fascist?

Story time!

Showa was a kid in an old second-hand Toyota who'd just got his driving License.

So Showa-san would rush around, one eye on the road, the other on the girls rushing past him; he's got a beer in the glove chamber and a half a vodka in his belly; he's already forgotten half the traffic rules his father drilled into him last month and he can't give a damn about the rest.

He'd have returned to normal- like the rest of them.

When his neighbour - a nice Spanish Hippie by the name of Dor- had got his licence twenty years ago, he went over to the neighboring village, ran over the men, raped and enslaved the women, and skinned the children alive to make leather seats for his high-power SEAT.

C A Dor still has those leather seats btw; they're real soft and nice, everyone likes them. Damn shame how they were made though- but one can't expect nice Senor Dor to drag his nose on the ground for every single one of his old sins.

Showa-san- like good old Senor Dor before him- was just being a young hotshot.

So he ran over a few guys, raped and murdered a few girls, and went to town with a knife and fork on a few kids as well. It was practically a rite of passage in the town. You either had a car and murder-raped-ate people, or you didn't and were murdered-raped-eaten yourself.

No one actually minded things much until John knocked over Showa's oil cans and the angry teen went and bashed in one of the headlights on John's friend Sam's prize GM. Sam… was an interesting type. He thought of himself as a gentle giant; his enemies called him a serial killer. At any rate, everyone in town knew that the previous owners of Sam's house were buried in the backyard. However, the more charitable of his friends insisted that he was reforming- and that's how things were.

At any rate, Sam fed Showa two big haymakers, and declared to the onlookers that no one in town could go around messing with others- or he'd teach the bullies the same lesson he'd just taught the now much-subdued teen.

Across the street, Ivan was saying the same thing to another crowd, while squeezing the neck of Fritz of the blood-stained BMW.

When each of the crowds took note of the other, they lined up and called each other names. It was all pretty droll.

As for your question…

Depends on the definitions you use.

Mussolini wouldn't have called them “Fascist”. The average modern Liberal will brand a dog barking at a feminist throwing stones at it “Fascist”.

So I suppose that by the common meaning of the term in the 21st century, the Showa Japanese were fascists.