by Niels Lee
Pan-Asianism, a modern ideology advocating regional integration in Asia, has a complicated history. It rose to prominence in the 1880s, when Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and Korean Pan-Asianists emphasized Asian unity during a period of international power politics dominated by Western colonialism. It grew to inspire political and social movements into the mid-twentieth century while at the same time revealing deeper complexities and internal flaws of Japanese nationalism, in particular. Ideas and rhetoric regarding what this transnational alliance would look like varied, even within the Japanese Meiji literati who were at the helm of this conversation. Among scholarly attempts to elucidate and categorize fin de siècle Japanese Pan-Asianism, Eri Hotta’s Pan-Asianism and Japan’s War 1931-1945, remains one of the most cited to date. The monograph presents three ideological threads: the Teaists which emphasized Asia’s collective religious and philosophical traditions to provide a corrective to Western materialism; Sinics which promoted a political alliance among “East” Asian nations to combat the threat of Russian aggression (on the cusp of the Russo-Japanese War); Meishurons which believed that Japan was destined to be the Ajia no meishu (“Asian alliance leader”). By focusing on these nuances, Hotta sought to rebut previous scholarship that assumed that early Japanese Pan-Asianism advocated aggressive Japanese hegemony. While acknowledging a certain lineage from the political stakes of nineteenth century colonialism in Japan to the behavior of the state as a propagandistic scheme during the Fifteen Years War (1931–1945), Hotta asserts that this state ideology from above had a more multifaceted, prior history governed by differing commitments and dispositions from below.
And, yet, Hotta and subsequent scholarship by Mohammad Shahabuddin tend to understate early Meiji Pan-Asianism’s colonialist leanings, by limiting their focus on certain “metaphysical, philosophical, and cultural” interests. In doing so, the real complexities of imperialism between Asian actors fades into the background. Hotta and Shahabuddin do not deny the cultural expressions of civilizational superiority at work in Meiji settler colonialism against their neighbors. But limited attention is given to one of the most suggestive examples of the era’s Japanese Pan-Asian discourse around the problem of settler colonialism, namely, the Chosen mondai (“the Korean question”) and how it provides a grid for understanding the territorial ambitions of those associated with the Teaist, Sinic, and Meishuron groups. It is worth noting that many in Japan distanced themselves or at least tried to re-evaluate expansionist rhetoric reminiscent of 1870s seikanron (“Debate on the Invasion of Korea”) and even the state’s propaganda regarding the 1910 annexation. In historical terms, therefore, those competing factions internal to the Meiji Japan give us a window into seeing how Japanese-Korean relations crystallized into imperial practices and rhetorical devices within the Pan-Asian world at the turn of the century.
Even Teaist visionary Okakura Kakuzo (1862–1913), who famously suggested that “Asia is one,” also observed that the peninsula was a realm open to exploitation. Best known in the West for The Book of Tea (1906), he claimed the venerable traditions of China and India were joined by their peace-loving disposition, embodied in the art of making and drinking tea. Yet not only is Korea left unmentioned, in The Ideals of the East (1903) he repeatedly referenced Korea as a tributary state of the Tokugawa Shogunate, the feudal government that preceded the Meiji Restoration of 1868. In The Awakening of Japan (1904), Okakura framed Japan as a “mother-country,” preserving the territorial integrity of a peninsula that had always recognized the shogunate’s hegemony. Thus, for Okakura the empire was entitled to dictate the future of “our ancient domain of Korea.” Reflecting early Meiji anxieties over overpopulation, he envisioned a developmental, economic-political order in Korea to accommodate their “ever increasing population” rather than outright annexation, what scholars today observe as a version of settler colonialism.
Sinic Pan-Asianists, similarly, were also invested in settler colonialism, contrary to Hotta’s insistence that they advocated an East Asian alliance of equals based on a shared cultural bond of what they called oshoku jinshu (“the yellow race”). Hotta rightly argues that figures such as Prince Konoe Atsumaro (1863–1905), head of the House of Peers and founder of the Toa Dobunkai (“the East Asian Society for People of the Same Letters”), once argued in an 1898 Taiyo article “Asia’s future…lies in the ultimate struggle between different races.” The Toa Dobunkai original charter included language that sought to “improve the conditions of China and Korea,” a precursor to what would become decidedly imperialist in the coming decades. As scholar Urs Zachmann has observed, Konoe’s argument quickly faced significant backlash from fellow Sinic-inclined rhetoricians and even a subsequent Taiyo piece advocated a “realist approach” to foreign policy rather than an idealistic racial alliance. The article concluded that the Meiji State had to be open to any polity that shared the same goals; a hypothetical alliance with China would be based on the likelihood of maintaining Asian sovereignty, not on comparative race or culture. Prince Konoe eventually relented, writing in a Toa Dobunkai outlet that one must “consider our own empire’s future fate, decide upon an urgent policy suitable to it.”
Subsequent Sinic Pan-Asian actions were consistent with this approach. According to historian Sangpil Jin, a few years later Korean envoy Cho Pyŏngsik lobbied Prince Konoe for the Korean peninsula to be treated as neutral territory. While the prince initially refused, arguing that Korea lacked self-sufficient armed services, he offered a bilateral military alliance proposal. Given his anti-Russian sentiment, a political anxiety that would foreshadow the Russo-Japanese War a few years later, Konoe assumed that Saint Petersburg was behind Korea’s neutrality efforts in order to consolidate its control over the peninsula. As June Uchida argues, two years later in 1902, Prince Konoe’s aides Ogawa Heikichi, Kunitomo Shigeaki, and Mochizuki Ryutaro, formed the Chosen Kyokai (“Korea Association”) to pursue a more aggressive form of settler colonialism. Konoe’s cohort shared Teaist Okakura’s idea of utilizing Korea to resolve a foreseeable population crisis, but also sought to use settler communities as strategic footholds for Meiji expansion. Their promotion of Japanese commercial activity and advocacy for Korea’s infrastructural and monetary modernization formed a central part of this schema. (The organization was absorbed into what later became the Toa Dobunkai in 1905.) Yet, by then, Japanese settler community success stories in Korea had become stable features of Japanese public and government discourses. That very year, in 1905, Korea officially became a Japanese protectorate.
As Japanese claims over Korean settlement increased, so too did ideological networks around other, newly unfolding movements of regionalistic nationalism. Uchida Ryohei (1874–1937), one of the founding members of Toa Dobunkai, founded another organization, Kokuryukai (“Amur River Society”) in 1901. Kokuryukai quickly promoted a “Meishuron,” a form of Pan-Asianism that believed in an alliance helmed specifically by the Meiji Empire, supporting causes in Korea, Bengal, and China that also sought to resist international, Western advancement. Yet, as scholar Sven Saaler notes, when Korea officially became a Japanese protectorate, Kokuryukai critics of the Japanese seizure of Korea were in the minority. Many Japanese elites acknowledged that the annexation fulfilled their Pan-Asian aims, an ironic façade that only covered up norms of a more equal gappo (“union”). Uchida himself was a leading proponent of the occupation. Peter Duus’s 1995 work details Uchida’s personal motivations for annexation as an adviser to the then resident-general of Korea, Ito Hirobumi. Critical of Ito’s policies that sought to gradually integrate Korean society into the Meiji fold, Uchida successfully orchestrated a secret campaign to oust the resident-general. Post-annexation Uchida and his associates were critical of the government, but only due to its protracted failure to achieve social cohesion between the nationalities. By 1932 Uchida admitted that annexation provided regional stability as “disorder in East Asia could always trace its roots back to Korea.”
Some within the Kokuryukai consortium sympathized with the Korean plight yet still acknowledged the necessity of annexation. One example of this came from the Russian-born Tatar globetrotter Abdürreşid İbrahim (1857–1944), whose Pan-Islamic ideals intersected with Japanese Pan-Asianism. Best known for his travelogue Alem-i İslam ve Japonya’da İslamiyet’in Yayılması (“The Islamic World and the Spread of Islam in Japan”) and the first Imam of the Tokyo Mosque, he sought to fold Ottoman and Japanese leadership into a united front, traveling to the Meiji Empire under the auspices of the Kokuryukai in 1908. During his six-month stay, he admired as much as evangelized, often congratulating his hosts for their modernization success and emphasizing the geopolitical significance of the larger Muslim World. Before leaving for Korea, a Kokuryukai sister organization Asya Gi Kai (“Asia Defense Force”) was established to advocate for an Islamic-Asian alliance, which at one time numbered a local membership of over one hundred forty people.
However, İbrahim’s enthusiasm for Japanese leadership was immediately challenged when he witnessed the realities of the “the Korean question.” While İbrahim partly blamed Christian missionaries, his critique was mainly reserved for specific Japanese colonial practices that seemed to undermine freedom. Local government, urban military, train conductors, station managers, and foreign trade were regulated if not governed by Japanese authorities. İbrahim was well aware of Japan’s perceived population crisis, but the policy was all too reminiscent of Russian appropriation of Tatar territory through Slavic immigration. Claims that resident-general Ito’s modernization efforts had won popular support—echoed by Korean Interior Minister Park Che-soon—were unconvincing. Even Japanese-helmed modern railroad system in Korea only seemed to be a means to “invade the entire country.”
To be sure, İbrahim considered talk of full Korean independence as reckless, instead supporting full annexation in congruence with Uchida’s program. Part of the answer lies in his embrace of political realism. The historical situation’s realpolitik seemed to dictate that Korea had ultimately failed in global power politics (albeit, ironically, never actually being recognized as a state actor themselves). Thus, for İbrahim, it was preferable to submit Korean sovereignty under a prejudicial protective Japanese system, one that seemed to share the same “philosophical and cultural background” rather than face a culturally-different Russian colonialism. Already in his travelogue, we find an early intuition that intense Meiji encroachment into major Korean institutions, as necessary as it seemed to him in the moment, would inevitably lead to future resistance efforts of self-governance.
Over the course of two decades, Japanese settler colonialism intertwined with various forms of pan-Asianist discourses of the “Korean question.” By describing the occupation as gappo (“union”) rather than the official heigo (“annexation”), Japanese rhetoricians deliberately tried to keep the government at arm’s length from criticism while simultaneously implementing colonial policies. As such, the romanticism of a united Asian front was outpaced by shifting practical considerations of imperialism, for example, from Okakura’s perceived population crisis to İbrahim’s idea of temporary custodianship. In this way, Meiji Japan gives an historical window into what constitutes a public discourse of settler colonialism, how it is talked about by state actors, and how elites creatively navigate and manipulate certain cultural and political devices within a colonial apparatus.
Niels Lee received a master’s degree from Yale University, with a focus on modern Ottoman and Islamic intellectual history. He currently works as an editor and has published articles in The Birch, Maydan, and MERIP. His recent publications include an article for Maydan titled “‘Something to see rather than use’: The Hagia Sophia District’s Musealisation.”
Edited by Jacob Saliba
Featured image: 1895 Meiji 28 Japanese Map of Imperial Japan with Taiwan, via Wikimedia Commons.
