Greater East Asia Research Articles

The “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere”: A New Boundary for Taiwanese People and the Taiwanese Capital, 1940–1945 (臺灣人的對外移民與投資, 1940–1945)

This article deals with Taiwanese civilian emigration and overseas investment in the period of 1940–1945 when Japan engaged the Greater East Asian War. Taiwan in general, and some Taiwanese in particular, helped the reconstruction of Japanese occupied areas in this war. Overseas Taiwanese mainly worked as employees for Japanese stores, companies, mines, plantations, and Japanese government offices, but also opened stores, factories, plantations and banks by themselves. As overseas ethnic Chinese, the Taiwanese civilian emigrants examined in this paper moved in the direction opposite that of other overseas Chinese holding Chinese nationality. The Taiwanese populace expanded overseas to Greater East Asia, while Chinese nationals withdrew from this area and returned to China. Thus, this paper will illustrate how the phrase, “people should fight for their country,” bore different meanings for these two different types of overseas Chinese in the Asia-Pacific War theater of wwii. 1930至40年代，中日學者曾就華僑的定義進行討論。吳主惠將華僑定義為定居於海外的中國人及其後裔，不包括駐外政府官員和留學生。吳氏認為華僑的最嚴格定義，是指定居海外但仍保有中國國籍者。1933年日本大藏省為替局統計臺灣地區約有46,000至47,000名華僑，便是依據這樣的定義。吳氏指出，在此嚴格定義下，華人後裔如不具中國國籍者，便非華僑。另有一種較為寬鬆的定義是: 無論是否具中國國籍，凡定居或曾赴海外的中國人及其後裔皆為華僑，井出季和太即持此見。關於日本統治臺灣時期的臺灣人國籍，根據日本大藏省為替局的解釋，由於馬關條約簽訂後的二年內，臺灣人得自由決定離去與否，留下臺灣者為日本國民。這些成為日本國民的臺灣人或其祖先曾具有中國國民的身分，因而1933年的340萬臺灣人也被視為較寬定義下的華僑。在日本建構所謂的「大東亞共榮圈」時期 (1940–1945)，許多不具軍人身分的臺灣人向海外移民或投資，與之相反的是，擁有中國國籍的華僑在此時期則多回歸故里。在大東亞戰爭時期的華人，由於出身不同，「為國而戰」一詞對於他們的意義也因而分歧。 (This article is in English.)

Gagaku, Music of the Empire:Tanabe Hisao and musical heritage as national identity

At the beginning of the 20th century, Tanabe Hisao (1883‑1984), the first Japanese musicologist, elaborated a history of Japanese music in which Gagaku was presented as a original music not only of Japan, but also of all countries in Asia. This concept of Gagaku is consistent with the imperial and colonial ideology before World War II, and still remains up to the present day. It is for example the decision of the Ministry of Education of Japan to designate Gagaku performed by the Court musicians of the Music Department of the Imperial Household as an “Important Intangible Cultural Property” on May 12, 1955, that makes Japan forget the history of musical colonization in aid of more positive re-reading. Gagaku is then described as a cultural relic of the “Asian Continent”, a term substituted for that of the “Greater East Asia Co‑Prosperity Sphere” in the 1940s.

ACHIEVEMENTS OF HIGHER EDUCATION SYSTEM IN GREATER EAST ASIA

The article discusses the importance of higher education institutions in the forming and development of scientific knowledge in the big emerging powers of Asia. It is noted that recently, thepositions of the leading Asian universities have become very much stronger (it is confi rmed by the world rating) due to the radical education reforms (trajectories were very close to each other) that were carried out by the countries of Greater East Asia during the last 25 years. The special programs on the comprehensive development of education were accepted, and its funding was perceived not just as a necessary public expenditure, but as investments to provide the economy with a highly skilled workforce and well-educated professionals. The drastic changes in models of education management are of particular signifi cance. The autonomy of educational institutions can be very high on local level. It is necessary to point out the private sector, which has a crucial signifi cance for Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and China. Exactly universities began playing a major role in scientifi c research in these states. International cooperation in the fi eld of education is also of great importance as it particularly promotes the formation of a cluster of people interested in the development of their own country in an international context.

The Trans-Afghanistan Gas Pipeline as a Factor of Afghanistan’s Integration into the Greater East Asia: Comparative Analysis of Arguments Pro et Contra

The article focuses on a project of Trans-Afghan gas pipeline and its role in the future development of Afghanistan and the Greater East Asia. The author analyzes the historical stages of the project and challenges to its realization, as well as the current situation in Afghanistan aggravated by the fighting of the Taliban and warlords, drug trafficking, terrorist threat and ethnic conflicts. However, one of the main obstacles to the realization of the infrastructural plan is a competition between projects of neighboring countries.

Into the Tiger's Den: Japan and the Tripartite Pact, 1940

This article reconsiders the birth of the Axis alliance between Japan, Germany, and Italy. Most scholarship correctly suggests that the Tripartite Pact was aimed at the United States of America. But existing scholarship largely neglects what is a surprising undercurrent in the diplomatic history of the Axis pact: the extent to which fears of German designs influenced Japanese leaders to join the Axis powers. As Germany gained ascendancy over much of Europe, many within Japan's foreign policy establishment began to fear that Berlin would seek to control French and Dutch colonies in East Asia. This fear persuaded Japanese leaders to extend their new order to ‘Greater East Asia’ as a precondition to forging an alliance with Germany. In broadening the scope of its sphere of interest to ‘Greater’ East Asia, Japanese leaders sought to deny Germany a hegemonic position in Japan's backyard, and sought to make Japanese preeminence in East and Southeast Asia the precondition for creating any Berlin–Rome–Tokyo axis.

WŎNHYO’S APPROACH TO HARMONIZATION OF THE MAHAYANA DOCTRINES (HWAJAENG)

Wŏnhyo (617–686) is known to the world as Korea’s leading Buddhist thinker and scriptural commentator, mainly due to his numerous exegeses and treatises that attempted to sort out the plethora of new Buddhist ideas generated in the fifth through seventh centuries in East Asia—ideas produced both through the continued influx of newly translated Indian texts, as well as the rapid appearance of fresh East Asian interpretations of the Buddhist doctrine. Wŏnhyo is especially noted for being the only scholar among the great East Asian commentators who had neither sectarian affiliation nor took a sectarian- based approach in the interpretation of Buddhist doctrines. Thus, the privileging of a specific sectarian approach was for Wŏnhyo impossible, since he saw each of the various doctrinal streams of Buddhism as representing a distinct but valid piece of the vast Mahāyāna system—as true as any other piece, but not to be seen as some kind of “ultimate” doctrine. Wonhyo’s method—known as hwajaeng 和諍 (“harmonization”)—is characterized by the juxtaposing of two or more divergent theoretical positions, comparing them, and clarifying their distinctive assumptions and aims. Once these assumptions are properly apprehended, what on the surface appear to be contradictory opinions are shown to be commensurate with each other from a deeper perspective. This article examines in detail the range of motivations, method-ologies, and approaches seen in Wonhyo’s hwajaeng project. Wonhyo’s approach will be examined in terms of three general aspects, which straddle the range of doctrinal/ scholastic, logical/philosophical, and religious, with the religious showing at least three levels of profundity.

A Critical Review on the Thought and Practice of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: Focus on the Criticism of Dakeuchi Yoshimi and Maruyama Masao

A Critical Review on the Thought and Practice of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: Focus on the Criticism of Dakeuchi Yoshimi and Maruyama Masao

Intermarriage and imperial subject formation in colonial Taiwan: Shōji Sōichi's Chin-fujin

In this article, I analyze the political significance of Shōji Sōichi's Chin-fujin (The wife of Mr. Chen), an intricate story of an interracial family in colonial Taiwan struggling to come to terms with their cultural identifications against the backdrop of political upheavals in the late 1910s to the mid-1930s. The novel was well received in wartime Japan and received a 1943 Greater East Asia Literary Prize. Contemporary critics praised it for depicting the perseverance of a Japanese woman married into a Taiwanese family and for representing a Han-Taiwanese intellectual realistically. Yet it was the political effect of the novel that was appreciated by those who selected it for the prize. Shōji demonstrated how the policy and political discourse of the Japanese empire could be acted out in a site of family life, the site that was regarded as critically important for colonial control. He depicted a Taiwanese elite man, his Japanese wife, and their mixed-blood daughter as trying to transcend the old categorical distinction between metropolitan Japanese and natives of Taiwan and seeking a new unified identity position based on colonial Taiwan. I want to show the repressive nature of the national subject formation outlined in this colonial fantasy.

The Development of Socio-Cultural Society in Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty Four

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four reflects the paranoia that prevailed in Europe during the interregnum of the two World Wars of the twentieth century society. The two World Wars and the Great Depression cast a sense of shock, horror and disillusionment. The rise of Fascism and Nazism left the people terrified and confused. The existing political institutions could not cope with this situation. The novel also reveals the political views of the novelist. He was of the opinion that justice and freedom are the two important aspects of every issue, raised by the problems of society. He divided the world into three great powers-Oceania, Eurasia and East Asia. According to him, these powers are always at war with one another.

“As The Days Go By: Throbs of Grateful Hearts”: Reeducation Under the Japanese of Filipino POWs at Camp Del Pilar, Dau, Pampanga, 1942

This research note presents samples of previously unpublished testimonial letters written by Filipino officer prisoners of war (POW) to their Japanese POW camp commander in 1942. A preface to these letters, 184 in all and kept in the US National Archives, provides a glimpse of the day-to-day activities of the reeducation propaganda conducted by the Japanese Propaganda Corps in Camp Del Pilar, Dau, Pampanga. The Filipino officers’ expressions of gratitude showered upon the Japanese show another dimension of the otherwise tumultuous occupation period. Keywords: Second World War • Japanese occupation • wartime propaganda • documentary sources • Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere

Origin of Old World pottery as viewed from the early 2010s: when, where and why?

A critical evaluation of the existing data corpus on the earliest pottery in East Asia and its chronology as of early 2013 is presented here. Pottery in the Old World emerged in three regions within greater East Asia, namely South China, the Japanese Islands and the Russian Far East, at c. 14,800–13,300 bp (or c. 18,500–15,500 cal. bp). Most probably, pottery-making appeared in these places independently; no solid evidence exists about migrations and/or diffusion of this technology from a supposed single centre in South China. Because the Upper Palaeolithic humans in Eurasia were familiar with clay (as a raw material for making figurines), the most probable driving force for the origin of pottery was the necessity to produce in large amounts durable, light containers for the processing (including boiling) and storing of food.

Marketing ‘Brand China’: Maintaining the Momentum – ‘The Middle Kingdom’ Resurgent and Resplendent

The multiplicity of manoeuvres that characterise modern China's geopolitical ascendancy and ambition illustrate political ingenuity used calculatedly with the clear intention of becoming invulnerable. Past recent humiliations are not to reoccur. In addition, ‘The Middle Kingdom’ is to be reincarnated: invincible imperialism pursued. The strategic plurality employed in complex compositional patterns is both imperial and historic in nature: the past is to be projected into the present and the future. The once ‘Great Game’ is now ‘The Great East Asia Game’! In the light of the Guangzhou Asian Games Triumphalism, there could be a ‘double entendre’ employed here of sizable significance. This essay considers the possibility.

Beyond the Mushroom Cloud: Commemoration, Religion, and Responsibility after Hiroshima by Yuki Miyamoto (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond the Mushroom Cloud: Commemoration, Religion, and Responsibility after Hiroshima by Yuki Miyamoto Joseph S. O’Leary Beyond the Mushroom Cloud: Commemoration, Religion, and Responsibility after Hiroshima. By Yuki Miyamoto. Fordham University Press, 2012. 252 pages. Hardcover $75.00; softcover $26.00. Coming to terms with a traumatic past has become a major preoccupation of thinkers and artists over the past century, and of public figures, too, as seen in the papal call for a “purification of memory” in 2000 or Queen Elizabeth’s poignant litotes in Dublin in 2011: “With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.” The First World War, the Holocaust, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the most prominent sites of this collective travail of mourning, repentance, and healing. In Beyond the Mushroom Cloud, Yuki Miyamoto undertakes a close critical study of how the Hiroshima bombing is recalled in Japan, whether as a uniquely Japanese fate or in the more universal terms expressed in the refrain of the hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors), “I do not want anyone to go through this again” (p. 4), and in the motto, “not retaliation, but reconciliation” (p. 112). For many, the author reminds us, Hiroshima is more than a memory, because of “the long-term effects on hibakushas’ health as well as the genetic influence on their children and grandchildren” (p. 14). Her book is more than a contribution to Asian cultural studies: in five essays on the themes of public commemoration, religious interpretations, and fictional representations, it keeps coming back to the moral imperative of remembering and learning from the traumatic past. An afterword added as the book went to press refers to the catastrophes of March 2011, giving a sharp edge to Miyamoto’s call for the abolition of nuclear weapons and power plants, “these causes of shame and affliction” (p. 184). Public commemoration often fails to create “an inclusive community of memory” (p. 25). The victims’ perspective was excluded from the 1995 exhibition commemorating the half-centenary of the bombing of Hiroshima at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The organizer, Martin Harwit, came to realize that “the balance he sought, and the message that he believed this balance conveyed, would not be tolerated by the American public” (p. 17). The Enola Gay had become sacrosanct as an icon of victory and technological prowess, and Harwit was accused by veterans of ignoring “the record of Japan’s aggression, the brutality of its war policy, and the fanaticism of its soldiers,” while newspapers denounced intellectuals who sought “to redefine American history in a way that assaulted traditional values” (p. 18). Harwit resigned, and the exhibition enshrined the view that “the atomic bombing was part of a sacred mission to save American soldiers and American values, even though it resulted in an unfortunate loss of non-American lives” (p. 21). Both in segments of U.S. society and in Japan the commemorative work is fraught with tensions between what Avishai Margalit calls the “thick” relations of particular [End Page 147] communities and their values and the “thin” relations constructed, in the spirit of the parable of the Good Samaritan, “upon the mere fact that we are all humans—the community of humankind” (p. 23). The hibakusha and the mayors of Hiroshima have championed a universal morality that “urges one to extend thick relations to all humankind” (p. 24). Unfortunately, “by the mid-1980s, the Japanese national narrative had begun to appropriate the accounts emerging from Hiroshima and Nagasaki as part of a narrative of victimhood” (p. 47). Addressing the controversial visits to Yasukuni Shrine by Yasuhiro Nakasone and Jun’ichirō Koizumi during their respective tenures as prime minister, the author refers to scholar of Buddhism Sueki Fumihiko, who sees certain events as “too grave and too far beyond comprehension to be dealt with adequately by the human-made regulations of ethics” (p. 62) and who advocates a religious “dialogue with the dead” (p. 59) that goes beyond ethics. She rejects Sueki’s claim that Yasukuni Shrine facilitates this dialogue and deplores the shrine museum’s glorification of the “Great East Asian...

An Alternative View of tenkō: Hayashi Fusao's Popular Writings for Shinseinen

In discussions on tenkō (political re-orientation) the case of Hayashi Fusao is invariably referred to as representative of the type of writer who never recanted his political conversion, not even after Japan's war defeat and return to democracy in 1945. Hayashi officially disavowed his Marxist convictions in 1936 and would for the rest of his life reiterate his rightist political leanings, culminating in his infamous In Affirmation of the Greater East Asia War. When considering Hayashi's tenkō, critics usually rely on his various statements referring specifically to his re-orientation, coupled with an examination of his shift away from proletarian literature in serious works of fiction such as Youth (1934). In contrast, this article is an attempt to comment on Hayashi's purported conversion by focusing on samples of his rarely discussed popular writings that were published in the lowbrow youth literature magazine Shinseinen. This focus on Hayashi's predilection for adventurous storytelling aims to moderate the conventional image of him as a political thinker.

Boundary Fluidity and Ideology: A Comparison of Japan's pre-World War II and Present Regionalisms

AbstractThere is a question that has not been raised in the literature on Japan's regionalism: Why does it have a strong tendency toward making the boundary of the proposed East Asian community fluid? By looking back beyond the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of the 1940s, a method hitherto untried, the paper shows that this Japanese propensity was also present in the first half of the twentieth century, especially in the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, both then and now, Japan did not and does not have a firm adherence to an ideology. These are two similarities between the pre-World War II period and the present (from the 1960s). On the other hand, Japan's present international situation is very different from its pre-World War II position. The paper uses the logic of the ‘most different cases’ comparative method, which states that in two cases that are different in most aspects but the same in some, one or some of the similarities may explain the other similarity or similarities. It concludes that in both periods, the lack of a firm commitment to an ideology explains Japan's prejudice toward boundary fluidity. This explanation has the potential to contribute to a more comprehensive, if not yet a general theory of Japan's approach to regionalism because it applies not only to the present, but to the past as well. And it has to be stressed, the past refersnot onlyto the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of the 1940s but also to the decades before.

A Dragon’s Head and a Serpent’s Tail: Ming China and the First Great East Asian War, 1592–1598 by Kenneth M. Swope (review)

A Dragon’s Head and a Serpent’s Tail: Ming China and the First Great East Asian War, 1592–1598 by Kenneth M. Swope (review)

The Neolithic of the Russian Far East and Neighboring East Asia: Definition, Chronology, and Origins

The exact definition of the term “Neolithic” is discussed and the spatio-temporal coordinates of the two main Neolithic-related phenomena in greater East Asia, pottery and cultivation of plants and animals, are presented. In this part of Eurasia, pottery-making preceded agriculture by several millennia. Pottery may be accepted as the major criterion of the Neolithic epoch in the hunter-fisher-gatherer continuum of East Asian prehistory. This situation differs from that in the Near East, where plant and animal husbandry developed before the emergence of pottery, and Europe, where pottery and agriculture appeared almost simultaneously. Thus today, three main ‘trajectories’ for Neolithisation may be defined in Eurasia. The ultimate reason for the origin of pottery in East Asia remains unclear.

Transformations and Residues in Greater East Asian Co-Property Sphere

Transformations and Residues in Greater East Asian Co-Property Sphere

Asian’s Thoroughfare for Corporate Governance

This study examines the state of corporate governance in some countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Since the early 1990s, corporate governance has been receiving increasing attention from regulatory bodies and practitioners worldwide but the rhythm was very soft. But in Asia region the economic crisis realize the need of corporate governance with depth. That is also a key aspect of improving corporate governance in the region is that improved investor protection and more transparent disclosure will enhance the development of local capital markets and promote foreign investment to provide funds for long-term economic development. As a reaction of great slump East Asian countries develop reforms which defiantly create a good essence of corporate governance.

Nativist legacies of desinicization and nationalist sentiment in poetry during the Second Sino–Japanese War

This article explores roles poetry played in creating a discourse of Japanese imperialism through both its inherited formal poetics of allusion and its highlighting of Nativist concerns in aestheticizing and naturalizing Japanese colonial and imperial interests in the 1930s and early 1940s and in framing military aggression against China. It explores how the extreme intertextuality in classical poetic modes, revived during the period leading up to the war, helped to blind Japanese to the contradictions within their imperialist and colonialist ideology. Following examples of poetry and song reflecting the ideology of the Japanese Empire and creating a Great East Asian Sphere of Co‐prosperity, this article explores in particular the articulation of a national cultural identity crisis in the writings of Yamakawa Hiroshi (1916–1945), whose work foregrounds antiquated Nativist issues of national cultural autonomy and desinicization. These issues were originally expressed by the Nativists as issues related to ancient language and poetry, and with Yamakawa, who studied Nativism, they are again used as such to provide intellectual support for his Japanist and imperialist positions. Thus the desinicization Nativist fantasy of the 18th century comes full circle in the Sino–Japanese War itself, adding to our understanding of the contradictions in Japan’s Great East Asian Sphere of Co‐prosperity and furthering our understanding of the historical antagonisms within Japan that led to the period of expansionism and fascism. Nativist elements of Japanese nationalism and imperialism are shown to be analogous to the Lacanian traumatic, unknowable Real (little object a) as it is predicated on the impossible recovery of a lost ancient Japanese culture and way of life which has been transformed through the embrace of Chinese language and culture. Thus the symbolic‐ideological writing of poetry becomes a screen of symptoms preserving the Nativist fantasy and carrying Japan into disaster.