JAPANESE GEOPOLITICS IN THE 1930s AND 1940s

Abstract

The concept of geopolitics according to Swede Rudolf Kjellén was first introduced to Japan in 1925, when his work of 1916 appeared in a book review in a Japanese journal of international law and diplomacy (Kjellén 1916; Fujisawa 1925). The reviewer, Chikao Fujisawa, rightly pointed out that ‘this new approach opens up new horizons in the real study of the phenomena of the state, casting off the erstwhile prevailing old, abstract, theoretical and conventional approach’. Perhaps Fujisawa was not aware of the geopolitical movement in Germany, already established in Munich due to the initiative of Karl Haushofer. Some months later, Taro Tsujimura, then head of the recently-created Department of Geography at the Imperial University of Tokyo, discussed the term ‘geopolitics’ in his review of Otto Maull’s book (Maull 1925). Tsujimura and other geographers who had occasion to refer to geopolitics in the 1920s considered it to be merely an application of geography to real politics; they were critical of the standpoint that considered it as either a branch or a development of political geography (Tsujimura 1925). Rather, they believed that political geography was firmly based on the recognition of the interdependence or interaction between the state and the physical and cultural landscape. Takuji Ogawa (Ogawa 1930) and Goro Ishibashi (Ishibashi 1927), leading geographers of the Imperial University of Kyoto, criticized geopolitics for its lack of a precisely defined object of study. Their criticism, however, never touched upon the essential character of geopolitics, that is, an organicist (sic) view of the state. Somewhat of an exception was Sasaki, who criticized German geopoliticians for their adherence to environmental determinism and direct causality between politics and land, whilst failing to take into account the intermediate economic mechanism (Sasaki 1927). During that period, therefore, only a few geographers actually applied this new approach to political science in Japanese international politics. Nobuyuki limoto, then a young specialist in political geography at Tokyo, was one of the few who recognized the value of geopolitics in policy-making (limoto 1935:1-13).

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