Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History: Colonialism, Regionalism, and Borders

Abstract

Pan-Asianism is complicated stuff. Yet until recently, it has rarely been seen as such, either in or outside of Japan. As Roger H. Brown points out in his contribution to Pan-Asianism in Japanese History, ‘given the often glaring gap’ between Japanese claims of furthering Asian brotherhood and ‘the brutalities of militarist despotism that marked Japan's “Holy War” (seisen) to establish a New Order in East Asia, it is little surprising that historians have tended to conceive of Japan's wartime Pan-Asianism as merely “false consciousness” (giji-shisō) in the service of nationalist aggression’ (p. 133). Yet as the authors of this edited volume consistently argue, Pan-Asianism as an ideology in Japan was more than a simple pretext for military invasion, and requires a more serious examination. For one thing, Pan-Asianism had a much longer history than just the war period alone, dating back to the late 19th century and—as revealed most strikingly in the volume's closing essay by Hatsuse Ryōhei—finding continued appeal right up until today. Second, as revealed in many of the contributions to this volume, its expression has taken the form of a complex, often fascinating range of standpoints and views, addressing modern questions of identity, nation and empire in ways that have ranged, like other complex modern ideologies, from the simplistic to the sophisticated. Grappling with questions of Asian identity in the early 20th century, there were even Asianists who earnestly put forward visions not only of a united front of Asian nations, but also of a regional order that might transcend the bounds of nation and empire itself.

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