Japan's Pan-Asian Empire

Wartime Intellectuals and the Korea Question, 1931–1945

Seok-Won Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000334692
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du Japon

This book is a study of how the theories and actual practices of a Pan-Asian empire were produced during Japan's war, 1931–1945.

As Japan invaded China and conducted a full-scale war against the United States in the late 1930s and early 1940s, several versions of a Pan-Asian empire were presented by Japanese intellectuals, in order to maximize wartime collaboration and mobilization in China and the colonies. A broad group of social scientists – including R?yama Masamichi, Kada Tetsuji, Ezawa J?ji, Takata Yasuma, and Shinmei Masamichi – presented highly politicized visions of a new Asia characterized by a newly shared Asian identity. Critically examining how Japanese social scientists contrived the logic of a Japan-led East Asian community, Part I of this book demonstrates the violent nature of imperial knowledge production which buttresses colonial developmentalism. In Part II, the book also explores questions around the (re)making of colonial Korea as part of Japan's regional empire, generating theoretical and realistic tensions between resistance and collaboration.

Japan's Pan-Asian Empire provides original theoretical perspectives on the construction of a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural empire. It will appeal to students and scholars of modern Japanese history, colonial and postcolonial studies, as well as Korean studies.

Part I
Theories of a Pan-Asian empire

1
Toward a new imperial order

Pan-Asian regionalism in interwar Japan

The period of anxiety

In June 1933, the renowned Japanese philosopher Miki Kiyoshi published an essay titled, “The Thought of Anxiety and its Overcoming.” In this writing, Miki first introduced the concept of period in history in which he insisted that a new period had begun since the end of the First World War.¹ This period, he stressed, is characterized by anxiety and he diagnosed that the thought of anxiety gave rise to fundamental skepticism toward self-evident modern values that had been sustained by individuals until the outbreak of the First World War.² Not surprisingly, Miki’s speculation was a philosophical approach to what Edward Hallett Carr later termed “Twenty Years’ Crisis.”³ Miki asserted that overcoming anxieties would not be possible by searching for objective truth and instead suggested that constructive and creative subjectivities must be established by individuals.⁴

While Miki centered his analysis on the field of literature and philosophy, the sense of crisis had already been a widespread phenomenon among Japanese and Western intellectuals in the early 1930s. Various theoretical attempts were made by European intellectuals in order to replace the limits of laissez-faire capitalism and democracy. In the field of diplomacy and international politics, a much bolder blueprint was provided to preclude the single-nation-state-oriented world from experiencing another world war. In May 1930, Aristide Briand, a renowned French diplomat, called for the necessity of creating a “United States of Europe” to rescue Europe from being dismantled and to avoid a tacit endorsing of the United States of America as a sole superpower in the international order. To be sure, Briand’s blueprint for a new international order clearly reflects the growing sense of anxiety, as well as France’s strategic decision to appropriate Germany’s situation as a way of promoting her influence in Europe vis-à-vis Great Britain. German politicians and intellectuals also showed sympathy for Briand’s new international order theory, hoping for a restoration of its wounded national pride in the wake of the Great War and the reinstatement of German national leadership in Europe.

For Japanese intellectuals in the 1930s, the sense of crisis took on much more profound colors than any imperial powers in the world. As Koyasu Nobukuni and others have argued, liberal and progressive intellectuals had focused their “constructive” and “creative” powers on the critiques of the preponderance of the Japanese nation-state, since they observed that the total process of modernization since 1868 had resulted in the reduction of individual freedom and democratic values.⁵ Koyasu’s revisit to radical intellectuals and activists such as Kotoku Shusui deserves attention, in that it reveals another aspect of twentieth-century Japanese political thought that was overtly opposed to top-down modernization championed by the Japanese state and the Emperor system. This approach, however, does not fully answer an insightful question Katō Shūichi, one of the most preeminent intellectuals in postwar Japan, raised as early as the 1970s. In 1974, Katō problematized the transition from Taisho Japan to wartime Japan and Japan’s invasion of northern China in 1931 and the establishment of Manchukuo in the following year fundamentally challenged the topography of Japanese political and social thought.⁶ A much bigger task of contriving the logic of rationalizing the position of Japan that was now utterly anti-Western was given to Japanese intellectuals, some of whom had only delved into domestic questions such as state-society relations and class struggle within the Japanese economy.

Under these circumstances, Japanese social scientists, and liberal thinkers in particular, found themselves facing a serious challenge in the new context of Japan’s hostile relations with the West, given that they had played a pivotal role in promoting and spreading the ideas and values of Western civilization and modernity. As the conflict between Japan and the West became worse, various anti-Western and ultranationalistic discourses flooded academia and the media, both of which had previously provided the intellectual backbone supporting Japan’s modernization and the establishment of the Taisho Democracy in the 1920s. Western ideas soon became common targets to be conceptually “overcome,” and as a counter theory, Asianism or the emperor-centered Japanism rapidly gained currency among Japanese intellectuals. Paradoxically, the ideas of both chauvinistic Asianists and Japanists in the mid-1930s demonstrated great affinity with the totalitarian and fascist theories originating in “Europe,” in that they aimed to restructure domestic politics by overthrowing the existing parliamentary democracy and reforming the capitalist economy.

The early discussions on the subject of regional empire by Japanese intellectuals were led by a newly emerging group of social scientists such as Rōyama Masamichi (1895–1980) and Shinmei Masamichi (1898–1984). Along with other social scientists such as Kada Tetsuji (1895–1964) and Takata Yasuma (1883–1972), they are known as the leading figures who theorized the famous but unexplored and conceptually unpacked notion of the East Asian Cooperative Community (tōa kyōdōtai) during the wartime period. In challenging both ultranational fascism and spiritual Pan-Asianism, they represented a “rationalist” intellectual stream, one that sought to construct an idea of East Asian empire in which Japan’s regional hegemony could be endorsed by the rest of Asia, and Chinese and other colonial subjects could voluntarily commit to the new empire.

Most of the intellectuals whose work embraced the theory of kyōdōtai were trained in the social sciences under the liberal atmosphere of Taisho democracy during the 1920s. Therefore, it is misleading to simply assert that these intellectuals’ involvement in supporting imperialist discourse was forced by the fascist government during the wartime period. These Japanese social scientists, including some Marxist intellectuals, subjectively encountered the era of “Europe in crisis” in the post-World War I international order. In doing so, they presented a variety of critiques of liberal democracy and laissez-faire capitalism, and Pan-Asianist thinking emerged as an intellectual platform for them to restructure the Japanese empire in the 1930s. At stake is the question of how these kyōdōtai social scientists differentiated their ideas from spiritual and Japanist Pan-Asianist discourses and resorted to what they believed to be “rationalist” Pan-Asianism.

The tumultuous 1920s: domestic reforms vs. early Pan-Asian empire

The 1921 work Critiques of The Modern Nation State (gendai kokka hihan) by Hasegawa Nyozekan (1875–1969), one of the leading intellectuals during the Taisho Period, was a symbolic piece of writing that foregrounded the mentality of Japanese social scientists, liberal intellectuals in particular, in the 1920s. In this book, Hasegawa first observed that the ideal of modern nation-state was to mutually aid and foster each individual in his or her pursuit of real life.⁷ However, modern nation-states, he stressed, revealed their limits as they failed to cope with the diversity and complexity required in each sector of their expertise – society, economy, politics and culture. Nyozekan asserted that to get closer to an ideal state, a modern nation-state needed to be organic so that the gap between individuals’ real life and the state’s execution of political power is reduced. He lamented that the modern nation-state had lost its organic aspect – the spiritual, religious and moral idealism that constituted its internal and external logic.⁸

Hasegawa’s critiques of the modern state resonated with a number of Japanese social scientists who shared the observation that the excessive state control of all social sectors and the linear top-down modernization path since 1868 had reached a critical point. It was at this point that the notion of “discovering society (shakai no hakken)” captured the attention of Japanese intellectuals. As Hasegawa pointed out in discussing the limits of the modern state, these social scientists tended to first differentiate state from society and conceptualize the latter as a space where cooperation, mutual aid and reforms might occur to protect individuals from incessant conflict and enable them to develop their lives. For this reason, advocates of “discovering society” naturally associated their line of thinking with radical prescriptions that prioritized reducing the state’s control over society and individuals, and constructing a new space called society where existing problems such as economic inequality, labor abuse and marginalization of peasants would be solved.⁹

It is misleading to argue that the intellectual trend of discovering society was premised on a naïve theoretical attempt to completely differentiate society from state or that it ended up addressing an unrealistic utopia based on an idealized version of society. To be sure, the concept of society played a crucial role in revealing the shadows of rapid modernization in early twentieth-century Japan and at the same time brought forth the advancement of Japanese social sciences. The emergence of Japanese sociology was concurrent with the notion of “discovering society.” However, what mattered more was how, and in what context, they would deal with the intellectual challenges caused by the state being omnipotent. As historian Arima Manabu has argued, the rise of liberal and progressive intellectuals in Taisho Japan ought to be much more broadly considered together with what he termed the internationalization of Japan in the 1920s.¹⁰

Since these Japanese intellectuals considered themselves as theoretically addressing liberal and progressive reforms within domestic matters, they had to answer growing critiques of Japanese imperialism from the outside, and from European powers in particular. In other words, they also needed to measure to what degree the widely shared perceptions of society and social progress would affect their “locally” focused thinking. Here it is important to note that the “crisis mentality” shared by European intellectuals in the aftermath of the First World War not only pertained to their observation of domestic order in crisis but more importantly, to the limits of a single nation-state framework in the international order which, they believed, would result in another world war. Growing tensions among major powers in post-World War I Europe intensified demands for a new collective security system to operate at an international level, fundamentally questioning the existing League of Nations, a precarious system of di...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Theories of a Pan-Asian empire
• Part II The Korea question
• Index