Pan Asianism And Japan S War 1931 1945

The book explores the critical importance of Pan-Asianism in Japanese imperialism. Pan-Asianism was a cultural as well as political ideology that promoted Asian unity and recognition. The focus is on Pan-Asianism as a propeller behind Japan's expansionist policies from the Manchurian Incident until the end of the Pacific War.

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 Rōyama Masamichi, Kada Tetsuji, Ezawa Jōji, 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.

A portrayal of how and why Japan waged war from 1931-1945 and what life was like for the Japanese people in a society engaged in total war.

Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- The universal West: Europe beyond its Christian and white race identity (1840-1882) -- The great rupture: Ottoman imagination of a European model -- Ottoman westernism and the European international society -- A non-Christian Europe? -- The West in early Japanese reformist thought -- The modern genesis of pan-Islamic and pan-Asian ideas -- Conclusion -- The two faces of the West: imperialism versus enlightenment (1882-1905) -- The Muslim world as an inferior Semitic race: Ernest Renan and his Muslim critics -- Yellow versus white peril? pan-Asian critiques and conceptions of world order -- Crescent versus cross? pan-Islamic reflections on the "clash of civilizations" thesis -- Conclusion -- The global moment of the Russo-Japanese war: the awakening of the East/equality with the West (1905-1912) -- An alternative to the West? Asian observations on the Japanese model -- Defining an anti-Western internationalism: pan-Islamic and pan-Asian visions of solidarity -- Japanese pan-Asianism after the Russo-Japanese war -- Conclusion -- The impact of WWI on pan-Islamic and pan-Asianist visions of world order -- Pan-Islamism and the Ottoman state -- The realist pan-Islamism of Celal Nuri and İsmail Naci Pelister -- Pan-Islamic mobilization during WWI -- The transformation of pan-Asianism during WWI: Ôkawa Shûmei, Indian nationalists, and Asiaphile European romantics -- Asia as a site of national liberation -- Asia as the hope of humanity -- Conclusion -- The triumph of nationalism? the ebbing of pan-Islamic and pan-Asian visions of world order during the 1920s -- The Wilsonian moment and pan-Islamism -- The Wilsonian moment and pan-Asianism -- Pan-Islamic and pan-Asianist perceptions of socialist internationalism -- "Clash of civilizations" in the age of nationalism -- The weakness of pan-Islamic and pan-Asianist political projects during the 1920s -- Conclusion -- The revival of a pan-Asianist vision of world order in Japan (1931-1945) -- Explaining Japan's official "return to Asia"--Withdrawal from the League of Nations as a turning point -- Asianist journals and organizations -- Asianist ideology of the 1930s -- Wartime Asian internationalism and its postwar legacy -- Conclusion -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

Gruhl's narrative makes clear why Japan's World War II aggression still touches deep emotions with East Asians and Western ex-prisoners of war, and why there is justifiable sensitivity to the way modern Japan has dealt with this legacy. Knowledge of the enormity of Japan's total war is also necessary to assess the United States' and her allies' policies toward Japan, and their reactions to its actions, extending from Manchuria in 1931 to Hiroshima in 1945. Gruhl takes the view that World War II started in 1931 when Japan, crowded and poor in raw materials but with a sense of military invincibility, saw empire as her salvation and invaded China. Japan's imperial regime had volatile ambitions but limited resources, thus encouraging them to unleash a particularly brutal offensive against the peoples of Asia and surrounding ocean islands. Their 1931 to 1945 invasions and policies further added to Asia's pre-war woes, particularly in China, by badly disrupting marginal economies, leading to famines and epidemics. Altogether, the victims of Japan's World War Two aggression took many forms and were massive in number. Gruhl offers a survey and synthesis of the historical literature and documentation, statistical data, as well as personal interviews and first-hand accounts to provide a comprehensive overview analysis. The sequence of diplomatic and military events leading to Pearl Harbor, as well as those leading to the U.S. decision to drop the atom bomb, are explored here as well as Japan's war crimes and postwar revisionist/apologist views regarding them. This book will be of intense interest to Asian specialists, and those concerned with human rights issues in a historical context.

With this book the editors complete the three-volume series on modern Japanese colonialism and imperialism that began with The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945 (Princeton, 1983) and The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895-1937 (Princeton, 1989). The Japanese military takeover in Manchuria between 1931 and 1932 was a critical turning point in East Asian history. It marked the first surge of Japanese aggression beyond the boundaries of its older colonial empire and set Japan on a collision course with China and Western colonial powers from 1937 through 1945. These essays seek to illuminate some of the more significant processes and institutions during the period when the empire was at war: the creation of a Japanese-dominated East Asian economic bloc centered in northeast Asia, the mobilization of human and physical resources in the older established areas of Japanese colonial rule, and the penetration and occupation of Southeast Asia. Introduced by Peter Duus, the volume contains four sections: Japan's Wartime Empire and the Formal Colonies (Carter J. Eckert and Wan-yao Chou), Japan's Wartime Empire and Northeast Asia (Louise Young, Y. Tak Matsusaka, Ramon H. Myers, and Takafusa Nakamura), Japan's Wartime Empire and Southeast Asia (Mark R. Peattie, E. Bruce Reynolds, and Ken'ichi Goto), and Japan's Wartime Empire in Other Perspectives (George Hicks, Hideo Kobayashi, and L. H. Gann).

Kenkoku University and the Experience of Pan-Asianism makes a fresh contribution to the recent effort to re-examine the Japanese wartime ideology of Pan-Asianism by focusing on the experiences of students at Kenkoku University or “Nation-Building University,” abbreviated as Kendai (1938-1945). Located in the northeastern provinces of China commonly designated Manchuria, the university proclaimed to realize the goal of minzoku kyowa (“ethnic harmony”). It recruited students of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, Mongolian and Russian backgrounds and aimed to foster a generation of leaders for the state of Manchukuo. Distinguishing itself from other colonial schools within the Japanese Empire, Kendai promised ethnic equality to its diverse student body, while at the same time imposing Japanese customs and beliefs on all students. In this book, Yuka Hiruma Kishida examines not only the theory and rhetoric of Pan-Asianism as an ideal in the service of the Japanese Empire, but more importantly its implementation in the curriculum and the daily lives of students and faculty whose socioeconomic backgrounds were broadly representative of their respective societies. She draws on archival material which reveals dynamic exchanges of ideas about the meaning of Asian unity among the campus community, and documents convergences as well as clashes of competing articulations of Pan-Asianism. Kishida argues that an idealistic and egalitarian conception of Pan-Asianism exercised considerable appeal late into the Second World War, even as mobilization for total war intensified contradictions between ideal and practice. More than an institutional history, this book makes an important intervention into the historiography on pan-Asianism and Japanese imperialism.