Saaler Sven

<p>The Japanese colonial empire was composed of territories adjacent to the Japanese archipelago, ranging from Southern Sakhalin in the north to Taiwan in the south. Unlike most European powers, Japan did not acquire colonial territories that were far away from the metropolis; rather, it did so within the region in which it was located—East Asia. The geographical proximity between the metropolis and its colonial territories influenced not only the structure of the colonial administration, racial hierarchies in the empire, and colonial and metropolitan identities but also the rhetorical strategies that were used to legitimize colonial rule.</p> <p>Although the government generally envisioned a European-style empire, the creation of which would earn Japan the respect of the Great Powers and eventually lead to the recognition of Japanese equality, a significant number of politicians, writers, and activists argued that it was Japan’s mission to unite the Asian people and protect or liberate them from Western colonial rule. These discourses have been summarized under the term “Pan-Asianism,” a movement and an ideology that emerged in the late 19th century and became mainstream by the time World War I began. However, although some advocates of Pan-Asianism were motivated by sincere feelings of solidarity, the expansion of Japanese colonial rule and the escalation of war in China and throughout Asia in the 1930s brought to the fore an increasing number of contradictions and ambiguities. By the time World War II started, Pan-Asianism had become a cloak of Japanese expansionism and an instrument to legitimize the empire, a process that culminated in the Greater East Asia Conference of 1943.</p> <p>The contradictions between Japan’s brutal wars in Asia and the ideology of Asian solidarity continue to haunt that country’s relations with its neighbors, by way of ambiguous historical memories of the empire and war in contemporary Japanese politics and society.</p>

In the conduct of prewar Japanese foreign relations, political associations (seiji kessha) - we might also call them pressure groups - exerted considerable political influence, particularly on Japan's relations with China and other Asian nations. One of the best known of these political associations is the Kokuryukai (the "Amur Society," also known as the " Black Dragon Society"), which was founded in 1901 and, in 1946, was banned as an ultranationalist association by the American occupation authorities. The Kokuryukai was also identified as the center of an expansionist conspiracy to steer Japan towards war with the Western powers. In the absence of detailed studies of the Kokuryukai, this article aims to clarify the organization's political views and activities and to demonstrate its influence on Japanese foreign relations and involvement in East Asia in the early twentieth century. Drawing on primary sources such as the association's publications and its leaders' memoranda and letters, I show that the Kokuryukai engaged in intensive networking activities and the accumulation of social capital involving not only Japanese but also Chinese and Korean politicians and diplomats. Nevertheless, I conclude that the association's influence on the origins of the Asia-Pacific War should not be overstated, since its activities reached a climax in the late 1910s and effectively ended with the death of founder Uchida Ryohei in 1937.

Around a century ago, in his "The Ideals of the East", Okakura Tenshin (Kakuzo) proclaimed that "Asia is one". This phrase, quoted repeatedly ever since, has been interpreted as representative of the ideology of Pan-Asianism (Han-Ajiashugi) or Asianism (Ajiashugi) in japan. However, Okakura&apos;s writings were not widely read in japan during the Meiji era and his originally English writings were translated into Japanese only in the 1930s. It must have been other authors that defined Pan-Asianism as a comprehensive ideology and brought this ideology closer to politics, a sphere where pan-Asian approaches were mostly rejected until the 1910s. This paper introduces the writings of Kodera Kenkichi (1877-1949), a politician and long-time member of the Lower House of the Imperial Japanese Diet, and identifies his "Treatise on Greater Asianism" (1916) as a central work in the history of the ideology of Asianism in modern Japan.

This article explores the political and social backgrounds of the ongoing history textbook controversy in Japan. It demonstrates that, as a consequence of a strong connection between conservative historical revisionism and politics, the views of Japan’s recent history presented in the realms of memory, i.e. in in memorials, museums and ceremonies, are increasingly similar to those advocated by historical revisionism. Here, the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945) is frequently depicted as a defensive war or as a war waged for the “liberation” of Asia, following the affirmative view of the war urged by revisionists. However, these views fall short of reflecting a consensus on history in Japanese society at large. The analysis of opinion survey results covering historical questions indicates that revisionist views face an uphill battle in Japanese society and rather have to be considered a minority view at the present stage.

The term "race" originally developed within the field of the natural sciences. However, since the late j9th century, an increasing relevance can be observed within the discourse on identity, national character, nation-building, and also regionalism. Introduced by Fukuzawa Yukichi, in Japan the category of race was first instrumentalized by the early Pan-Asian movement, which aimed at an alliance of the Asian yellow peoples' against the colonialist West. With the emergence of "Yellow Peril-propaganda after 1895, the term race also became of increasing importance in Japanese foreign policy decision-making. Especially in the Imperial Army, influential figures such as Yamagata Aritomo or Utsunomiya Taro belonged to early voices that predicted a "clash of races" (jinshu toso-ron). During and shortly after World War I, these fears seemed to materialize. Germany was said to spearhead a return of "white powers" to East Asia by planning an "advance to the East" (Doitsu tozen-ron), building on the stock of Prisoners-of-War that were interned by Russia in Siberia and the Far East. The dealings with these German (actually mostly Austro-Hungarian) POWs on the side of Japanese politicians, military, academics and media showed an increase of irrational behavior in discourse on foreign policy and a lack of flexibility to adjust to new developments in international politics. This lead to an increasing antagonism with the Western powers becoming obvious during the Siberian Intervention. The scenario of a "clash of civilizations" obviously was more attractive to contemporaries than Okuma Shigenobu's and Yoshino Sakuzo's scenarios aiming at "harmony of civilizations" (bunmei no chowa).