Tanabe Hajime, and the Kyoto School more widely, hit their apogee at a time when Japan sought to drastically expand its overseas territorial possessions, and in their work we can see an attempt at justifying the existence of imperial governments in a time when Europe’s empires began to wane. In his work, The Logic of Species, Tanabe extrapolates the Linnaean categorisation of species and genus and applies it to the organisation and self-identification of humanity, the bottom line being that, for a nation-state (Genus) to exist, it must be multi-ethnic (multi-specific).[1] This assertion underlines the Japanese idea of an empire encompassing multiple ethnicities gaining their national identity by contributing to the state. Tanabe Hajime joined a long list of intellectuals whose work was used by imperial governments to justify their incursion into foreign, often indigenous land. Where he differs however is in the use of logical thought processes and metaphysical analysis, where similar European examples used religious or legal arguments.
Expansion of Japan’s empire was swift and ruthless. Within the decade preceding the outbreak of the second world war in the pacific, Japan brought Manchuria, areas of Northern China, and numerous islands in the pacific under their control. During the war, European colonies in south-East Asia and American colonies in the Pacific Ocean faced a similar fate. It was then the case that the Japanese empire not only covered vast swathes of mainland and Oceanic Asia, but incorporated countless ethnicities ranging from Han Chinese to indigenous pacific islanders. When Tanabe writes, it is important to note that it is against a backdrop of a growing need to establish an intellectual foundation of Japan’s expanding and increasingly multi-ethnic empire.
Tanabe Hajime’s Logic of Species, as discussed, is a philosophical response to the question of identity in human society. Utilising zoological theory, it unites ideas of species and genus with those of ethnic and national identity. To summarise briefly, as this format lacks neither the time nor space to fully analyse this complex work, Tanabe argues that for an ethnic identity to exist and be recognisable, it must be negated. In that it only exists in contrast to other ethnic identities. The role of the state in this context is to be the forum in which multiple ethnicities exist under the same national identity.[2] Taking the nation-state’s existence as fact, the only way for it to exist is to incorporate multiple ethnic identities. The species, (ethnicity) is a personal trait that connects one to a network of cultural markers of identity. However, the genus (the nation-state) is a necessary construction that plays a direct role in the operation of society.
Understanding how and why this work was vital to the intellectual foundation of Japan’s empire allows us to analyse more widely the justifications for imperialism worldwide. We have already discussed the need for intellectual justification for their imperial ambitions, and this isn’t an issue experienced only by Japan. Early forays into empire by European powers required justification, although what was produced was of a different genre and form. Spanish incursions into South America was justified by a series of papal bulls expounding the belief that it was the role of Christians to spread Christianity. Similar justifications on religious grounds were common between the European powers in the early days of their colonial expansion into the Americas. The British empire, as it began to rapidly expand in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sought legal grounds on which to found their colonial possessions. They settled on the principle of res nullius, a pillar of Roman law in which an ‘unowned’ piece of property can be claimed by those who put it to economic use.[3]
The point of analysing these different approaches to the difficult question of imperial hegemony is not to justify the ends they helped to incur, but to establish a common thread that appears across temporal and geographical contexts. Conquest is rarely given as justification for rule, and it is clear that throughout numerous examples of empire in the modern age, it is rarely enough to cite one’s comparative economic or military power as a reason for their subjugation. Tanabe Hajime, in his work of metaphysical philosophy, contributes to this history of justification, and joins such intellectuals as John Locke and Jules Ferry in their attempts to give reason for the expansion of the English and French empires respectively.
[1] Viren Murthy; Fabian Schafer; Max Ward, Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy, (Leiden, 2017), p.172.
[2] Naoki Sakai, “Subject and Substrata: On Japanese Imperial Nationalism”, in Cultural Studies, 14:3, (09/11/2010), p.462.
[3] Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the world: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c.1500 – c.1800, (Newhaven, 1995), p.45.