After Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1933 and withdrawing from the League of Nations in 1933, the world believed Japan to be rejecting internationalism.¹ The believed rejection of internationalism by Japan was proven to be false as Japan developed the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a pan-Asian conglomerate with the aim to promote an anti-colonialism from the West.² From the interwar years through the postwar decades, Japan’s engagement with the world was full of contradictions torn between universal ideals and imperial ambitions. As historians Jessamyn Abel, Tomoko Akami, and Mark Lincicome each show, Japan’s global identity was never simply nationalist or internationalist. It was a constant negotiation between empire and moral legitimacy.
The three historians all attempt to understand how Japan builds its identity within the global sphere. Abel focuses on the “international minimum” which was Japan’s way of maintaining a baseline of global participation even during times of war.³ The main example of this baseline was the bid from Japan to host the 1940 Tokyo Olympics. Abel frames the Tokyo Olympics as a gesture of goodwill to the international community even though at the time Japan’s imperialism was spreading over Asia. Japan projected an image of peace and enlightenment while simultaneously expanding its empire. The display of Japanese culture on a global scale such as the Kokusai Bunka Shinkoukai sponsoring art and education abroad helped to show that Japan is a key component to bridge the East and the West. Abel concludes that Japan rebranded itself throughout time by using culture as a front to project the image of peace while still expanding the nation’s imperialism throughout Asia.⁴ This use of culture illustrates how Japan reshaped its identity to fit any ideology that the moment required in order to build an identity with the West.
While Abel traces cultural diplomacy, Tomoko Akami examines international engagement that was meant to foster peace but emphasized global tension. In 1925, The Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) was created to foster a dialogue between nations around the Pacific Rim.⁵ Japan joined early and eagerly sent scholars and diplomats to discuss trade, diplomacy, and governance. As Japan’s imperialism grew throughout the 1930s, tension grew between the countries and came to a head at the 1926 Yosemite Conference. Japanese representatives defended the nation’s expansions in China stating the expansion as a need for modernization yet this argument illustrates how Japan combined imperialism and internationalism. Akami states, Japan’s participation was a performance of legitimacy as it sought to appear as a civilized and cooperative power, even while defying Western norms.⁶ The IPR revealed how internationalism could reinforce imperial hierarchies rather than dissolve them which illustrates that Japan’s identity in the international stage was centered around imperialism and fake facades of modernization according to Akami.
Similarly to Abel and Akami, Mark Lincicome uncovers how Japan’s schools and universities became ideal for shaping “international” citizens and uses education as a global identity. After World War I, international education was promoted and students were taught to value peace, cultural understanding, and global citizenship.⁷ But by the 1930s, these ideals were absorbed into the state’s nationalist mission. Under imperial rule, the “global citizen” became an imperial subject who represented Japan’s cultural superiority abroad and brought “civilization” to colonized Asia.⁵ Lincicome’s insight illustrates how Japan used education as another front to cover imperialistic colonization of Asia similar to Akami’s view on Japan’s modernization. The very language of peace and world citizenship that Japan used after 1945 had imperial roots and ideals didn’t vanish; they simply rebranded just as seen in Abel’s view on Japan using culture to project ideals of peace.
Throughout the three works, all of the historians portray an image of Japan that ties its identity to facades of peace and global cooperation. Abel’s Japan uses culture to maintain international visibility and a connection with the West even after Japan left the League of Nations. Akami illustrates how Japan uses opportunities of international cooperation and discussion to put on a false image of peace and cooperation between countries. Lincicome combines the two views into one by illustrating how Japan uses education as a part of culture to enforce global ideals that serve the nation. Abel, Akami, and Lincicome remind us that nations rarely reinvent themselves from scratch. They evolve through the reinterpretation of old ideals. Japan’s imperial past was not erased by defeat: it was rewritten through the language of internationalism.
- The Japanese Embassy to the State. September 24, 1931.
- Beasley, W. G. “The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” In Japanese Imperialism 1894–1945, 233-50. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
- Abel, Jessamyn R. The International Minimum: Creativity and Contradiction in Japan’s Global Engagement, 1933–1964. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2015. Introduction.
- Abel, Jessamyn R. Chapter 3, “Cultural Diplomacy for Peace and War,” pp. 81–107.
- Akami, Tomoko. Internationalizing the Pacific: The United States, Japan and the Institute of Pacific Relations in War and Peace, 1919–1945. London: Routledge, 2002. Introduction, pp. 1–16.
- Akami, Tomoko. Chapter 8, “The IPR and the Sino-Japanese War, 1936–9,” pp. 200–239.
- Lincicome, Mark Elwood. Imperial Subjects as Global Citizens: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Education in Japan. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. Chapters 3–4.