Paula S. Harrell's Asia for the Asians is an important and thought-provoking contribution to our understanding of Sino-Japanese relations in the Meiji period, especially Japanese perceptions of and thinking about the relationship. The book consists of biographies of five Japanese “who were engaged professionally and personally with China in important and enduring ways” in order to explore “what China meant to Japanese searching for a path to modernity and a secure place internationally in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (p. 13). Harrell's five subjects are: Konoe Atsumaro, a noted politician, pan-Asianist thinker and founder of the Tō-A Dōbunkai (East Asia Common Culture Association); Hattori Unokichi, a Tokyo University professor, educator and advisor to Peking University who survived the Boxer siege of Beijing; Kawahara Misako, the only female subject, an educator and advocate for women's education who taught in Shanghai, served as advisor to the Mongol Prince and Princess of Karachin and also worked as a Japanese government intelligence agent during the Russo-Japanese War; Kawashima Naniwa, archetype of the modern Japanese continental adventurer (tairiku rōnin); and Ariga Nagao, a legal expert specializing in international law who served as an advisor to Yuan Shikai in the early republic. Of these figures, only Konoe will likely be familiar to students of the history of modern Sino-Japanese relations. Simply introducing us to the others would be a significant contribution to our understanding of this history.
Harrell has much larger aspirations, however. The author seeks to challenge what she sees as prevailing conventional wisdom on the history of Sino-Japanese relations in the Meiji period and the history of Meiji state-building itself. Throughout the book Harrell argues against reading history backward from a predetermined theoretical or moral position that paints the entire history of Meiji state-building and modern Sino-Japanese relations with the brush of Japanese imperialism and militarism. Harrell seeks instead to “read history forward” by recreating “unfettered to the extent possible by official versions and moral frameworks” the context in which her subjects undertook their engagement with China and letting them “speak in their own voices” (p. 13). Reading history forward rather than backward will challenge received wisdom giving us a greater appreciation for the complexity and diversity of Meiji-era Japanese thinking about and attitudes toward China.
In establishing this complexity and diversity in Japanese thinking about relations with China, Harrell's parallel biographies succeed admirably. Harrell's biographies follow her subjects over time, allowing us to appreciate how their thinking changed in response to personal and international circumstances. The biographies also reveal the importance of personal experience, economic circumstance, career goals and personality in shaping attitudes toward China. The princely background of Konoe contrasts with Kawahara's as a local school teacher. The defiant anti-Westernism of Kawashima, who refused to study Western languages, could not be more different from the internationalism and commitment to Western international law of Ariga, who wrote and published his works in French. By following her subjects through their whole lives Harrell also gives us entre into how the subjects themselves assessed their own works and experiences. One interesting example would be Kawahara's attempts to shape her own legacy as an educator in China when in 1942 the press worked instead to present her as a patriotic secret agent and war hero.
Harrell successfully makes the case for a greater appreciation of the diversity and sincerity of Japanese thinking on China, and that this should not be obscured by the history of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Yet, as I read the book I was repeatedly impressed by just how fraught the Japanese engagement with China was. In the end, I felt that I came away from the book much less optimistic than Harrell about the chances for cooperative Sino-Japanese relations based on cultural affinity or a commitment to “Asia for the Asians,” even without reading history backward. This is not necessarily a criticism of the book. It may rather be seen as a testament to Harrell's biographies not shying away from inconvenient facts: that Kawashima tried to foster ethnic separatism in the Northeast, that many of her subjects came away from their China experiences somewhat disappointed in the Chinese, and that in the end their opinions may have contributed to later negative Japanese perceptions of China. Was the Sino-Japanese cataclysm of the 1930s and 1940s inevitable? Certainly not. If, however, the corollary question is: could “Asia for the Asians” have provided the basis for a stable Sino-Japanese accommodation or the establishment of a “genuine East Asian community” (p. 340)? Then I am much less convinced the answer is yes.
The book is engagingly written and does an excellent job of connecting the individual stories. The lives of all five are intertwined, tied together by their concern for and experiences in China. They meet and are in dialogue with one another. And all five, seemingly, are in some way connected to two other figures who appear prominently in the book, Shimoda Utako and Kanō Jigorō. This gives the biographies and the narrative an admirable cohesion and also helps to emphasize the similarities and contrasts among Harrell's subjects. The narrative and the arguments are set in prose which should be accessible to a wide range of readers, including undergraduates. China scholars should be aware that the book is overwhelmingly about the experiences of Japanese in China. Although there is less on the Chinese side of the exchange, Harrell does engage with this issue, showing that Chinese were indeed quite open to working with the Japanese, and that here too complexity and diversity in individual attitudes prevailed.
