There was a reason why this strand displaced the other two
as the dominant strand. India, incorporated by the Teaists as a partner in the
enterprise was unclear in their position vis-à-vis anti-imperialism. There were
surely those who fought for independence from Great Britain (e.g., Subhas
Chandra Bose) but many more Indians appeared to be fine with the status quo.
China, an obvious partner in the enterprise and even treated as equals by the
Teaists and the Sinics, was suffering greatly under the Western powers,
especially after the Boxer Rebellion. But she was a torn and fragmented country
with no unifying government. One can hardly expect China to play a significant
role in the rise of Asia. It is therefore left to the most developed and stable
country then, Japan, to take the lead.
An obvious question that one would ask would be whether
Pan-Asianism, especially the Meishuron strand, caused Japan’s war. The author
made no such claims but demonstrated how the adoption of Meishuron affected how
the war and post-battle treatment of the conquered were carried out, both at
the macro and the micro levels. At the macro level, in the early stages it led
Japan to feel that they could not count on China to act as an effective
partner, if not to check the Soviet Union’s likely southern expansion then at
least as a buffer for a while. Japan therefore had to do it herself, and
coupled with the need for room to house its expanding population and need for
resources, found the occupation of Manchuria to be a perfect solution.
At the micro level, it explained the behaviours of the
Japanese soldiers and commanders towards the peoples under their occupation.
Firstly there must be a pent-up frustration amongst the Japanese soldiers
towards the people they conquered because Japan was trying to bring respect to
Asia, liberating these countries from the Western Imperialists, paying the
price with blood, and yet facing a perplexingly hostile reception from fellow
Asians. Secondly in the view of this strand, Japan and Japanese are superior,
as seen by their ability to ‘liberate’ the other Asians, and these ‘sub-humans’
can be treated as such.
However in assigning herself this responsibility, the author
demonstrated clearly the paradoxical Japanese psyche that was prevalent at that
time where on one hand Japan felt a sense of superiority and mission in
relation to her other Asian neighbours, but on the other felt inferior and
victimised by the West, described by the author as a “curious blend of
arrogance and self-consciousness” (pg. 207). The perceived sense of
victimisation can be traced to their humiliation by the West in the wake of the
Treaty of Portsmouth and the Washington Conference when they realised the
‘Hobbesian nature’ (pg. 53) of world affairs. The sense of superiority on the
other hand was a result of their realisation of their advancement in comparison
to their neighbours as mentioned above. This psyche became a justification in
many Japanese’ minds resulting in a sense of righteousness in their subsequent
behaviours in the occupied territories.
While this book is centred around the theme of Pan-Asianism,
the author also touched on the other factors that played equally important
roles in the war including the role that the Soviet Union played (albeit
briefly), the losing of control of the military, the internal fighting within
the factions of the military, and most important of all, the dead ends that
Japan eventually found herself in after attacking Pearl Harbor. Despite these,
the author never let Pan-Asianism out of sight and in the end led one to ask
whether it also had a role in Japan’s defeat. To this the author showed that
there were perhaps two pitfalls that eventually led to Japan’s failure.
The first was their surprise that China would actually
resist. Japan might have expected China not to either because the Chinese were
thought to be too impotent to do so or because they might really buy into the
ideology of Pan-Asianism. The reality was although China could not mount a successful
defence against Japan, the vast expanse of China meant the tying down of a big
number of Japanese troops.
The second was while the decision makers in the military
might be under no delusions of eventual defeat and were only carrying on
because they had promised an East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and were therefore
unable to dismount, there were actually others who “saw reforming implications
in what they were doing” (pg. 136). The machine therefore grinded on until it
was utterly destroyed by the US.
This book must be read carefully because readers from
countries that suffered under Japanese occupation might be quick to dismiss it
as a revisionist effort to re-present history. The reader may accuse the writer
of trying to justify Japanese soldiers’ brutality by pleading that the
intention was good, and the brutal ways that were used on the occupied peoples
were exactly the same ones used on Japanese themselves. The author did not have
the intention of excusing Japan for her treatment of the people in the occupied
territories, rather, she wanted to take an open-minded look at the Pan-Asianism
ideology and how it influenced Japanese attitudes and decisions during the war.
That the outcome of the ideology was bad for Asia in general and Japan in particular
serves as a lesson for us in not examining our own reactions to the ideology,
it does not imply that any attempt to understand it is an attempt to excuse the
perpetrators of a brutal and ultimately tragic war.
This book is not an easy read; the fact that I am the first
reviewer since the book was published in 2007 attests to it. It was not written
in a “popular history” style where the author tried to inject life into
characters by describing for example “he was tossing and turning in his bed”. What
this author did instead was to adopt the academic writing style, citing
references where they were due, describing events as they were, and making no
effort to add colour to the characters. However for those who would make the
effort, they can be sure of being richly rewarded with not just knowledge of
events and people, but an expanded vocabulary (of which Hotta’s range was huge)
and an insight into how an expert does critical analysis. It is well worth the
effort.
(Find this book at Goodreads)
