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This chapter illustrates how in the nineteenth century the category of spirituality received a global modern meaning. It became part of an alternative modernity in different places around the globe. In India and China indigenous forms of spirituality were invoked as alternatives to Western imperialism and materialism. Spiritual superiority became part of Pan-Asianism in the writings of some Indian and Chinese intellectuals. At the same time state-centered religious ideologies as well as nation-centered ideologies focused on spirituality as part of national character. These ideologies are crucial even today in China, India, Taiwan, and Singapore. The chapter then moves to a discussion of spirituality in India, focusing on figures like Gandhi and Tagore, and in China, focusing on figures like Taixu and Chen Yingning.

Keiko Araki’s “Africa for Africans and Asia for Asians.” Japanese Pan Asianism and Its Impact in the Post WWI Era,” explores the history of Japanese nationalists, who, in the process of forging a Pan-Asianist movement, looked at Pan-Africanism as a model in their mutual struggle against Eurocentric racism. Garvey, in turn, observed Japan as a model for Black people. He saw Japan as a non-European power seeking to secure its presence on the world stage. Pan-Asianists appreciated Garvey’s rhetoric as a useful tool in challenging the position of racial inferiority to which European powers had relegated them. But their idea of self-determination had a problematic flip-side, in that it formed the root of Japan’s own imperialist’s designs in the region, at which point Garvey’s Pan-Africanism and Pan-Asianism part ways.

The city of Changchun affords glimpses into two different eras of Japanese empire building. From 1905 to 1931, Changchun served as the northernmost outpost of the South Manchuria Railway, integrating central Manchuria into the Japanese informal empire in northeast China. From 1932 to 1945 Changchun became the capital of the puppet state of Manchukuo, functioning as the central city of a self-styled newly founded empire. In each era, the city's built environment reflected specific yet sometimes divergent Japanese ambitions. The pragmatic structures of the compact railway town gave way to the grand edifices of a sprawling imperial capital. The city reveals the continuity and strength of Japanese influence, it portrays the shifting nature of Japanese means to achieve dominance in Manchuria, and, by extension, in China Proper and other parts of Asia. As such, Changchun's built environment simultaneously portrays the hopes and fears of the evolving Japanese imperial project writ large.

This chapter examines how the early Meiji political activist and writer Miyazaki Tōten engaged with the Chinese nationalist revolution and with Asia more generally. Miyazaki's bringing in remote Kyushu gave him a unique perspective on Japan's relationship with other parts of Asia, one that was diametrically opposed to the expansionist Meiji government. He criticized the boycott of Japanese-made goods following the May Fourth Movement in China, cautioning young students against creating a monster out of Chinese nationalism. This chapter first considers the geopolitical conditions in East Asia at the turn of the century before discussing Miyazaki's oral performance text Meiji Koxinga (1903). It then considers how the construction of a shared genderized East Asian cultural sphere of heroic and popular orality played a role in the Chinese Revolution and influenced modern Sino-Japanese relations. It also explores Pan-Asianism and how it became the blueprint for the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere in the 1940s before reaching its demise in 1945.

After Japan withdrew from the League of Nations in 1933, the Japanese foreign policy establishment sought to reduce the danger of isolation by creating new alternatives to the existing framework that would accord with Japan’s national interests, foreign policy, and sense of its proper international position. Japan’s withdrawal from the world organization revived the fears of international isolation that had motivated the government’s decision to join it. This led to the pluralization of internationalism, as foreign policy experts sought to cope with changed circumstances by reaffirming internationalist principles as the basis of foreign policy and searching for new methods of multilateral cooperation, setting the stage for the varied and sometimes twisted wartime implementation of these ideas.

Notions of Asian regional cooperation had been prominent in Japan since the turn of the century, but gained new significance and evolved into new structures in the context of wartime. Aspects of the early twentieth century focus on racial or cultural affinity persisted, for instance in the rhetoric of “Asian brotherhood,” but wartime iterations of Pan-Asianism stemmed more directly from 1920s liberal internationalism. This was the intellectual background of the most prominent wartime theorists of Pan-Asianism, who focused on the practical, material benefits of close cooperation among neighboring countries. Through concepts such as East Asian Community, intellectuals sought to bring visions of a brighter international future into line with the realities of the government’s war aims.

Government leaders put ideas of Asian regional cooperation into practice, for instance, in the Greater East Asian Conference of 1943, a meeting of seven Asian heads of government held in Tokyo. The countries represented were neither completely independent nor treated by Tokyo as equals, but the organizers of the gathering either understood or presented them in such terms, bringing yet another influence to the multifaceted evolution of internationalism in wartime Japan. Using a combination of Wilsonian and Pan-Asianist rhetoric and structures simultaneously to fortify the commitment of the other countries of Asia to aid Japan in its war effort and to improve Japan’s image in the eyes of its enemies, the conference organizers turned these ideals to violent and imperialistic ends, but also helped solidify them in the Japanese official and popular understanding of international affairs and Japan’s regional and global role.

The Japanese invasion and occupation of Thailand during World War II required the state to invent continuities between its own National Humiliation narrative and Japan’s discourse of Pan-Asianism. Thai leaders insisted that the two countries were natural allies. Both nations had been bullied by western imperialism yet kept their independence. The Thai claimed that Japan’s goal of liberating Asia was merely a continuation of its own efforts to drive the French out of mainland Southeast Asia. Through its support of Japan, Bangkok hoped to regain former territories and secure a privileged place for Thailand within the new order in Asia.

Pan-Asian ideology has become firmly rooted in modern Japanese intellectual history. This chapter will enrich scholarly understanding of Japanese pan-Asianism, especially its relationship to imperialism in connection with Manchukuo, by relying on the specific case study of Japanese translator and Sinologist Yamaguchi Shin’ichi (1907-1980), better known to Manchukuo-based Japanese and Chinese writers by his pseudonym Ōuchi Takao. Initially trained as a China expert in the East Asia Common Culture Academy, Ōuchi then joined the Publicity Department of the South Manchuria Railway Company and later served as a major editor for the Manchuria Review before he worked as Manchukuo's primary translator of Chinese literature after 1937. His vision of Manchukuo appears within his translation and literary output, which in turn, shaped his unique identity as a Pan-Asianist in Manchukuo.