Japanese Expansionism Research Articles

“A Great Invention of the East, Unsurpassed in History”: Tŭngsap’an Mimeography in Korea, 1910–1945

Abstract In 1912, Horii Duplication opened a branch office in Keijō, or present-day Seoul, aiming to sell what the company optimistically described as “a great invention of the East,” its patented tōshaban (K. tŭngsap’an) duplicator. The tŭngsap’an was, indeed, a remarkably accessible technology. It was simple and inexpensive to operate; it could reproduce images, roman letters, and East Asian scripts; and it was capable of generating duplicates on any type of paper using readily available ink. Tŭngsap’an technology was deeply implicated in Japanese expansionism from its inception, and in Korea, its role in enabling knowledge production, surveillance, and other forms of political control furthered the reach of the colonial state. Even so, tŭngsap’an duplication was widespread beyond official use, and its unique combination of affordances led colonial authorities to view the tŭngsap’an as both a tool for and a target of state surveillance, especially as independence activists utilized tŭngsap’an duplication in fluid and interactive ways to further resistance efforts. The paradoxes that tŭngsap’an duplication embodied make it a unique site of textual practice, and a rich vantage point from which to study how arrangements of power in colonial Korea were enacted, experienced, navigated, and contested.

The Early Cultural Evolution of Baseball in Korea (1876–1945): Unilateral Product of Cultural Imperialism or Multilateral Process?

The dissemination of sports culture is not a unilinear or unilateral phenomenon. It depends on how the recipients perceive and react to it in the context of their lives. This study aims to shed light on the complex political, social, and cultural processes that led to the acceptance and popularization of baseball in Korea. In the era of imperialism, various modern sports cultures spread in the Korean society, but baseball emerged as the most popular. Baseball was initially introduced to Korea as a by-product of US and Japanese expansionism during the Korean Enlightenment period (1876–1910) and the Japanese colonial period (1910–1945). However, baseball’s germination during the Enlightenment period lay in the self-awareness of Koreans willing to embrace it as a cultural product of Western modernity, realizing its potential to meet the physical and cultural needs of their society. Additionally, during the Japanese colonial period, baseball functioned as a channel for expressing both nationalism and youthful masculinity, being popularized in the Korean society. The international exchange between US and Japanese baseball, which was developed with active recognition of baseball acceptance within the Joseon society during the Japanese colonial period, became the vital momentum driving the popularization of Korean baseball.

The Ideological Background of Japanese Expansionism, C. 1900

Abstract This paper examines the ideologies informing the expansion of Japanese rule at c. 1900. The core feature discussed is the idea of tenka (天下; literally translated: all under heaven), constituting the group of ruled in terms of a universalist indigenat (kokumin 国民), which allowed its expansion beyond the Japanese archipelago at government discretion. The concept of the universalist indigenat, having been tied to the Confucian perception of the world as a well-ordered and change-absorbing entity, conflicted with the European concept of the nation as a particularistically conceived type of group, tied to the perception of the world as a dynamic and largely unruly entity. During the latter third of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth century, some Japanese intellectuals came to appreciate the dynamism enshrined in the European perception of the world and worked it into established universalism. The fusion produced a powerful ideology of colonial expansion targeted primarily at East and Southeast Asia as well as the South Pacific. By contrast, European military strategists and political theorists, unaware of the Japanese strategic conceptions, expected that solely Russia formed the target of Japanese military expansion.

“Just Enough Mystery”: Multivocal Afterlives of a Tokugawa Refugee in Japan and the United States, 1868–2018

Abstract This article examines the life and afterlives of Okei, a political refugee from the Japanese Boshin Civil War (1868–69), who became the first Japanese woman interred in North American soil. Looking at a shared space of commemoration, in this case a grave site in California, this paper tracks how Okei’s memorialization on both sides of the Pacific constructed specific communal identities over a hundred and fifty years. Okei’s legacy has been consciously constructed by different actors to at once prove the resiliency of the Japanese spirit, provide an origin story for Japanese America, glorify Japanese expansionism, promote U.S.–Japanese friendship, establish regional prestige, and embody internationalism. Despite these multivocal trans-Pacific interpretations, all renderings of Okei’s story share one key similarity: the manipulation of history to empty Okei’s life of its divisive political context. A history replaced by multiple myths, the Okei narrative came to express contrasting yet parallel identities grounded in that lonely hill in California.

‘What the Boers Did Australia Can Do, and Do Ten Times Better’: The Impact of the Boers on Australian Defence Policy

The Boer Republics of the South African Republic (Transvaal) and Orange Free State influenced Australian defence policy before the First World War. Despite the demise of the Boer Republics at the hands of the British Empire, and the participation of Australia in their defeat, Australian parliamentarians explicitly advocated replicating Boer-style concept of citizen-soldiers to counter an attack on the Commonwealth. The Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) has received limited scholarly attention in Australia and the legislative legacy left by the Boers on early Australian defence policy has been near-entirely unmentioned. Impacted by the romanticised image of Boer society that permeated globally in the nineteenth Century and Australia’s experiences fighting in the Second Anglo-Boer War, Australian legislators used the Boers as inspiration for constructing defence policy. Deeply impressed by the manner in which the Boer Republics resisted British annexation, particularly in the context of Australian fears regarding Japanese expansionism, there was a sustained attempt to legislate a Boer-style military system in Australia.

The Role of the Emperor in Postwar Japan: An Analysis of Emperor Showa’s Addresses at Parliament Openings

Japan has the oldest continuous monarchy in the world. Despite the change of emperors throughout Japanese history, the question remains the same: What precisely is the role of the emperor in a highly developed country with a liberal democracy? This research will attempt to answer this continuously asked question with a discourse analysis of Emperor Showa’s addresses at the opening ceremony of the National Diet (Japanese parliament) between 1947 and 1988. By putting forward the context of the reign of the Showa emperor, one of the most controversial figures in modern times in terms of the role he is believed to have played in the decade of Japanese expansionism during WW II, this research will argue that the emperor is not a mere symbolic figurehead. This research will ultimately prove with its empirical findings that the emperor serves the collective memory of Japan by possessing an integrative power and thus contributes to the stabilization of the country.

Great Britain and the tvolution of the colonial system (end 19th – beginning 20th centuries)

The article investigates the impact of Great Britain on the evolution of colonialism in the late ХІХ and early ХХ centuries. It is analyzed the sources and scientific literature on the policy of the United Kingdom in the colonial question in the late ХІХ – early ХХ century. The reasons, course and consequences of the intensification of British policy in the colonial problem are described. The process of formation and implementation of London’s initiatives in the colonial question during the period under study is studied. It is considered the position of Great Britain on the transformation of the colonial system in the late XIX – early XX centuries. The resettlement activity of the British and the peculiarities of their mentality, based on the idea of racial superiority and the new national messianism, led to the formation of developed resettlement colonies. The war for the independence of the North American colonies led to the formation of a new state on their territory, and the rest of the “white” colonies of Great Britain had at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries had to build a new policy of relations, taking into account the influence of the United States on them, and the general decline of economic and military-strategic influence of Britain in the world, and the militarization of other leading countries. As a result, a commonwealth is formed instead of an empire. With regard to other dependent territories, there is also a change in policy towards the liberalization of colonial rule and concessions to local elites. In the late ХІХ – early ХІХ centuries the newly industrialized powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) sought to seize the colonies to reaffirm their new status in the world, the great colonial powers of the past (Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands) sought to retain what remained to preserve their international prestige, and Russia sought to expand. The largest colonial empires, Great Britain and France, were interested in maintaining the status quo. In the colonial policy of the United Kingdom, it is possible to trace a certain line related to attempts to preserve the situation in their remote possessions and not to get involved in conflicts and costly measures where this can be avoided. In this sense, the British government showed some flexibility and foresight – the relative weakening of the military and economic power of the empire due to the emergence of new states, as well as the achievement of certain self-sufficiency, made it necessary to reconsider traditional foreign policy. Colonies are increasingly no longer seen as personal acquisitions of states, and policy toward these territories is increasingly seen as a common deal of the international community and even its moral duty. The key role here was to be played by Great Britain, which was one of the first to form the foundations of a “neocolonial” system that presupposes a solidarity policy of Western countries towards the rest of the world under the auspices of London. Colonial system in the late ХІХ – early ХІХ century underwent a major transformation, which was associated with a set of factors, the main of which were – the emergence of new industrial powers on the world stage, the internal evolution of the British Empire, changes in world trade, the emergence of new weapons, general growth of national and religious identity and related with this contradiction. The fact that the First World War did not solve many problems, such as Japanese expansionism or British marinism, and caused new ones, primarily such as the Bolshevik coup in Russia and the coming to power of the National Socialists in Germany, the implementation of the above trends stretched to later moments.

The Strange Career of Gross Indecency: Race, Sex, and Law in Colonial Singapore

In 1938, the British enacted Section 377A of the Straits Settlements Penal Code, criminalizing male same-sex acts in Singapore. Although the law was neither the first nor only attempt to regulate same-sex activity, it represented a stark intensification in sexual policing. Yet, the reasons for the introduction of Section 377A remain elusive. New sources, including recently declassified documents, reveal that Section 377A intersected with the colonial state's wider project of social control. In the early 1930s, intensified policing of female prostitution inadvertently magnified the visibility of male prostitution in Singapore, just as homosexuality was emerging as a distinct conceptual category. Meanwhile, scandals about sexual liaisons between European officials and Asians men threatened British legitimacy. This “discovery” of homosexuality led the British to introduce Section 377A. As British troops arrived in Singapore in the late 1930s in response to Japanese expansionism in the Far East, concerns about blackmail, military discipline, and the colonial color line governed the enforcement of Section 377A. Between 1938 and 1941, the British disproportionately used Section 377A to punish Asian male prostitutes whom they thought had seduced European men. Secondarily, the British used the provision to deter European soldiers, sailors, and non-officials from exposing themselves to extortion. Seen in this light, Section 377A served as a response to changing configurations of race, class, and sexuality in colonial Singapore.

The Wilsonian moment in Yanaihara Tadao's political thought

AbstractAlbeit with little reference to Woodrow Wilson, Yanaihara Tadao, the Chair of Colonial Policy at Tokyo Imperial University in the 1920s and 1930s, and a pious Christian, adapted the core ideas of Wilsonian liberalism such as national self-determination, multilateralism, and democracy to the political and legal framework of imperial Japan. Yanaihara advocated the principle of autonomy for the Japanese empire to transform itself into the core of a liberal international order. He articulated that the combination of colonialism and unfettered capitalism had detrimental effects on the colonized and advocated for a Japanese empire that reflected the voice of its colonized people. However, having seen little improvement in the status of the colonized, Yanaihara increasingly regarded Japanese pan-Asianist ideas in the 1930s as a cover-up of Japanese expansionism. Almost abandoning his earlier ideas about empire as a multiethnic society, he criticized Japan's military venture as economically unprofitable, and policies toward Manchuria as stoking the rise of Chinese nationalism. He advocated for the normative framework advanced by the Mandate System of the League of Nations as a way toward the universalization of sovereignty, and protection of stateless populations. The failure of the Wilsonian moment in Japan forced Yanaihara out of Tokyo Imperial University but also strengthened his inclination towards liberal internationalism.

The Fujitsuru Mystery: Translocal Xiamen, Japanese Expansionism, and the Asian Cocaine Trade, 1900–1937

This article examines the Asian cocaine trade of the early twentieth century. It argues that the distribution of cocaine into Asian colonial ports was controlled by people from southeastern China who took advantage of a convergence of factors: consumer markets in India and Southeast Asia, shifting political winds surrounding drug use, the rise of Japan, and the translocal nature of southern Fujianese society. Xiamen was not only a port but also the hub of a society that was omnipresent in the maritime world of early twentieth-century Asia: natives of southern Fujian resided in Calcutta, Singapore, Rangoon, Manila, and Kobe, constituting a huge percentage of the crew and passengers of the steamships that connected those places. The implications of this story are relevant to two important themes of this special issue: the history of control and evasion in maritime Asia, and, relatedly, the ways in which states sought to extend their jurisdiction over the seas. Fujianese cocaine smugglers saw an opportunity when colonial governments banned cocaine imports, and took advantage of their place within the Japanese imperial sphere to acquire drugs and penetrate colonial markets. The evidence presented here thus highlights the place of opportunism and entrepreneurialism within the wider history of state efforts to control trade.

Images of the Sporting “Civilizing Mission”: The Far Eastern Championship Games (1913–1934) and Visions of Modernization in English-Language Philippine Newspapers

This article focuses on media coverage of the sporting “civilizing mission” that the American YMCA initiated in the Philippines, Japan, and China through the founding of the Far Eastern Championship Games (1913–1934), the biggest regional sports event held during the interwar period. It analyzes a number of cartoons printed in Philippine English-language newspapers, which communicated visions of a “modern” Asia meeting Western civilization. Cartoons dealing with the Asian capability for self-government in sports show that between the 1910s and 1930s images of Asian bodily and social deficits and of American expertise were substituted with images showing Asian officials appropriating the “civilizing mission.” The analysis of cartoons about internationalism and egalitarianism illustrates that in 1934 all newspapers saw these ideals as part of “civilization” and rejected Japanese expansionism. Cartoons featuring gender roles reflect the fact that female athletes were still a marginal topic for cartoonists. Finally, the depiction of stadiums promoted development successes.

The Institution of Modern Cryptology in the Netherlands and in the Netherlands East Indies, 1914–1935

The need for Communications Intelligence in the Netherlands was first felt by the Dutch military as a consequence of the outbreak of the First World War. The decision to prolong, as in the Netherlands, or establish, as in the case of the East Indies, COMINT facilities belonged to the judicial domain and was primarily related to threats posed by revolutionary movements from within the country. The monitoring of traffic from foreign embassies or consulates happened only when interference from foreign governments was suspected. Japanese expansionism, leading to direct Japanese involvement in the political developments in the East Indies, provided such a case. As a consequence, the fine line between domestic and foreign affairs became thinner still until it entirely vanished during the later part of the 1930s.

San Diego, Guardian of the American Pacific

San Diego did not easily become the home port of America’s Pacific fleet. It was two decades after the US acquisition of the Philippines, Guam, and Hawai‘i before a combination of imperialist naval strategy, Japanese expansionism, the Great White Fleet, unrest in Mexico and Central America, the completion of the Panama Canal, the Panama-California Exposition, a supportive congressman, and energetic civic leadership coalesced on the issue. Together, these factors led to the establishment of major naval facilities in this southern California city.

Solving the “Manchurian Problem”: Uchida Yasuya and Japanese Foreign Affairs before the Second World War

This article examines the enduring significance of the “Manchurian Problem” to pre-Second World War Japanese foreign policy and shows how the 1931 Manchurian incident and the creation of Manchukuo in 1932 came to be regarded by many in the Japanese government as the solution to this three-decade long problem. The focus of the analysis is the career of five-time foreign minister, Uchida Yasuya (1865–1936), who not only influenced policy from his positions as a diplomat in the field but also formulated Japan's Manchuria policy as foreign minister in parts of three successive decades. Uchida and many moderates like him voluntarily supported Army plans on the continent, suggesting that, in contrast to the conventional understanding that the founding of Manchukuo marked the beginning of Japanese expansionism and militarism, the events of the early 1930s represented the culmination of over three decades of Japanese efforts at solving the Manchurian problem.

Crossing Empire's Edge: Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia (review)

Reviewed by: Crossing Empire's Edge: Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia Emer O'Dwyer Crossing Empire's Edge: Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia. By Erik Esselstrom. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008. 248 pp. $59.00 (cloth). Esselstrom's monograph on the Japanese consular police in Asia is a testament to how the study of Japan's prewar empire is undergoing a renaissance led by younger scholars animated by new approaches and concerns. The importance of transnational history in capturing the flow of ideas and institutions, the interconnectivity of metropole and colony, and the imperative of decentering September 1931 as Stunde null in the transition to "wartime imperialism" are among the most pressing of these new approaches and concerns. [End Page 185] The protagonists of Esselstrom's study are the Japanese consular police whose presence in Asia dates to the early 1880s, just over a decade after the Meiji Restoration and Japan's transition to modern nationhood. These police emerged first in the treaty ports of late Chosŏn Korea. Maintenance of public order and protection of local Japanese residents who had flocked to the peninsula eager to partake of newfound economic opportunities (following establishment of modern trade relations with the 1876 Treaty of Kanghwa) were, ostensibly, the main concerns of the early police corps. It is Esselstrom's contention, however, that the consular police presence was instrumental in the process by which Korean sovereignty was eroded over the course of the 1880s and 1890s and that eventually led to the establishment of a Japanese protectorate in 1905. The size of the force expanded from 11 personnel in Pusan in 1880 to some 270 twenty-five years later, when the establishment of a new protectorate administration in late 1905 absorbed many of their number into new police units. With annexation in 1910, veteran consular police were among those entrusted with training the new colonial police force. These transfers of personnel and know-how remind us of the continuities behind Japan's Korea policy over the 1910 divide, as well as of the centrality of armed force to Japan's presence on the peninsula throughout. Simply put, the consular police were the vanguard of invasion and colonial control—a process repeated in China and Manchuria in subsequent decades. Esselstrom's focus in chapter 2 on China's treaty ports at the turn of the century reveals two important truths: first that consular police provide an excellent case study for demonstrating the value of transnational history in discovering new dimensions to familiar stories, and second, that Japan's protection of its interests by force in the treaty ports was unexceptional when compared with similar actions taken by France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and other Western powers of the time in Shanghai, Tianjin, Xiamen (Amoy), and elsewhere in China. Though Esselstrom does not explore Chinese reactions to perceived infractions by Western powers of treaty port rules and regulations, such infractions by the Japanese consular police throughout the second decade of the twentieth century reveal an early start to Chinese complaints about the violation of sovereignty that would become endemic in the 1920s and lead to a total breakdown of diplomatic relations by the early 1930s. Esselstrom's switching of his sights to southern Manchuria (halfway through chapter 2) provides the setting for a range of new interpretative strategies for understanding the connections (and frictions) between metropole and empire, as well as between individual authorities [End Page 186] and actors in Japan's sphere of influence in northeast China: semi-colonial, colonial, and what we might call collaborationist. Japanese consular police stationed in the Kwantung Leasehold and Rail Zone butted heads time and again with their compatriots in the office of the Kwantung Resident-General (renamed the Kwantung Administration in 1919—more on name changes below), which was responsible for administering Japan's "special rights" in South Manchuria and which maintained its own separate police force. Jurisdictional ambiguity also characterized the relationship between Manchuria's consular police and Korea Government-General police in Jiandao, a border region along the northeastern stretch of the Yalu River that separated China's Jilin Province from colonial...

A Concept of “Overseas Shinto Shrines”: A Pantheistic Attempt by Ogasawara Shōzō and Its Limitations

"Overseas Shinto shrines" (kaigai jinja) is a generic term that refers not only to colonial shrines within the former Japanese empire, but also to shrines built in countries other than Japan by Japanese emigrants. This article examines the thought and activities of Ogasawara Shōzō (1892―1970), who coined this term and devoted himself to the establishment of institutions for Shinto shrines overseas before Japan's defeat in World War II. Beginning with an overview of the conventional State Shinto concept, including the historical facts concerning colonial shrines, it traces Ogasawara's Shinto education, his encounter with ethnic Korean issues in the Japanese empire, and his enthusiasm to make shrine Shinto a universal (world) religion. Through analyses of the successes and failures of his attempts, this article reveals the potential of Shinto as a polytheistic religion and also its limitations with regard to modern Japanese expansionism.

Crossing Empire's Edge: Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia. By Erik Esselstrom. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009. xii, 233 pp. $59.00 (cloth).

Crossing Empire's Edge: Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia. By Erik Esselstrom. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009. xii, 233 pp. $59.00 (cloth).

Crossing Empire's Edge: Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia (review)

Reviewed by: Crossing Empire's Edge: Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia Selcuk Esenbel Crossing Empire's Edge: Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia. By Erik Esselstrom. University of Hawai'i Press, 2008. 248 pages. Hardcover $59.00. Crossing Empire's Edge, by Erik Esselstrom, is part of the new field of transnational history, which looks at border-crossing issues and experiences that researchers working within the boundaries of the nation-state have frequently neglected. The work sheds critical light on the participation of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Gaimushō) in prewar imperialism and militarism in the context of the political intelligence role the ministry's police force played during the twentieth century. Making rigorous use of both published and unpublished ministry records and the available research on this aspect of Japanese imperialism—little known, especially in English-language scholarship—the book convincingly argues against remnants of the official view that, emerging from the Tokyo War Crimes Trial following World War II, has relegated responsibility for Japanese militarism solely to the army and a few radical Asianist extremists. As he states early in the book, Esselstrom takes issue with the [End Page 408] standard view of postwar scholarship, which has often characterized the Foreign Ministry as a liberal and progressive element that clashed with the Imperial Army, whose unilateral security prerogatives and reckless ideological ambition led to the Manchurian Incident of 1931 and its aftermath. The author challenges the so-called villains-and-victims view of prewar Japanese imperialism and militarism and its vindication of the American destruction of that polity and exoneration of "ordinary" Japanese from responsibility. By showing the involvement of the Foreign Ministry, the book provides insight into that institution's participation at each stage of Japan's colonial and imperialist project. In five concise chapters rich with solid evidence, Esselstrom discusses the activities, spanning roughly sixty-five years, of the consular police force organized under the Japanese Foreign Ministry and deployed, through a controversial interpretation of extraterritorial privilege, on the Asian continent as part of Japan's informal empire. Originally a small security force, the consular police evolved to become a "full-fledged political intelligence apparatus devoted to apprehending Korean, Chinese, and Japanese purveyors of dangerous thought" (p. 2). Active in China's treaty ports, North China, and Manchuria along the Korean border, at its peak in 1936 the consular police force numbered 1,794, or just over 70 percent, of the Foreign Ministry's 2,557 total personnel overseas. Beginning with a discussion of patterns of Japanese police work in late Chosŏn Korea, the first chapter recounts the origins of Japan's earliest quasi-colonial organization in northeast Asia as Japanese consular police institutions in Korea. The force stationed in Korea illustrates the part played by the Foreign Ministry in facilitating that country's annexation, a development in which Japanese residents were deeply involved. The second chapter looks at Japanese consular police in late Qing and early Republican China, and in Manchuria. Responsible for the protection of local Japanese civilians and Koreans, who were considered to be Japanese subjects, the consular police stationed in the Jiandao region (on the Manchurian/Korean border) became a source of jurisdictional ambiguity and led to clashes with Chinese police forces throughout this period. Chapter 3 sheds light on the history of Japanese intelligence, tracing the development of Japanese consular activities in this area as a means of guarding against ideological threats to the imperial state, whether posed by nationalists or Communists, by Koreans or Japanese. Here we see the background to Imperial Japan's prewar anti-Communism, which would form the basis for collaboration between the United States and former members of Japanese army intelligence during the Cold War years.1 The discussion of Japan's anti-Communist ideology during the 1920s and 1930s rightfully places Japanese history in the context of twentieth-century imperialism and patterns of global power relations. One interesting example, reminiscent of patterns in modern global power behavior up to the present, is the prewar collaboration between the French and Japanese Foreign Ministry offices, which exchanged information about political opposition groups, including Vietnamese nationalists, in the case...

Nation-Building in the Philippines: Rooseveltian Statecraft for Imperial Modernization in an Emergent Transatlantic World Order

The acquisition of the Philippines in the wake of the Spanish–American War gave Theodore Roosevelt's presidency an unprecedented mandate for conflict resolution, post-war reconstruction and development through modernization and democratization. A network of bilateral inter-colonial relations contributed to the extension of triangular transatlantic reciprocal influence. The lessons of America's continental empire-building, assessment of competing colonial experiments, and modern attempts at public diplomacy fed into a strategy of preventive containment of Japanese expansionism through popular consent. The intention was to institute an enduring “special relationship” to build up America's power in the Pacific, and to transform the Philippines into a model that would then “naturally” expand into a transcontinental informal empire by proxy.

`Pre-History' of International Relations in Japan: Yanaihara Tadao's Dual Perspective of Empire

This article seeks to locate the work and contribution of Yanaihara Tadao (1893-1961) within a distinct tradition of International Relations in Japan. It challenges the conventional view that Japanese International Relations originates in the US academic discipline. Yanaihara's view of empire was influenced by two academic traditions in Japan: the Staatslehre and Marxism, and by his humanist, moral view derived from a Christian faith. According to Yanaihara, any empire should be built upon an organic, moral society, which provides an overarching framework for peaceful coexistence between nations and ethnic nations within the empire. Yet, he also made it clear that the existing empires were essentially an outflow of economic and/or ideological imperialism. Such a perspective allowed him to avoid justifying the disastrous Japanese expansionism of the 1930s. The article highlights implications for the debate on the role of US Empire in today's International Relations.