Narratives of wartime internationalism

By adding a layer to the historiography of wartime internationalist rhetoric, a consideration of textbooks contributes to a growing body of works that question the standard narrative of Japanese foreign policy in the early 1930s, which traces a path from international cooperation to isolation and war.Footnote ⁶ Even at the peak of aggression and imperialist expansion, internationalist ideas were not expunged from thinking and writing about, or even the implementation of, Japanese foreign policy. To the contrary, through a process of accommodation and evolution, it became more deeply entrenched. In recent years, scholars have challenged the isolation narrative, softening the sense of disjuncture by highlighting continuities in Japanese society, foreign policy, and worldview, and showing a gradual turn from liberal internationalism to pan-Asianism. Two seminal studies by Inoue Toshikazu and Akira Iriye drew attention to the foreign policy leadership's support for policies of cooperation and internationalist rhetoric during the 1930s and 1940s. Building on these early works, Tomoko Akami traced the tandem development of nationalism and internationalism in the 1920s, while Gotō Ken'ichi, Cemil Aydin, and Thomas W. Burkman demonstrated the turn toward regional visions of international organization.Footnote ⁷

Both Burkman and Akami showed that, even in the heady 1920s, internationalism was founded on a basis of nationalism, so that it was not negated, but rather supported in important ways by rising nationalisms. As Burkman demonstrated so effectively through individuals involved in League of Nations activities and the increasing pursuit of Asian cooperative structures after 1933, Japan's withdrawal from the organization represents just one important step in a long process by which the focus of international cooperation narrowed from a global to a regional scope. Gotō traced internationalist themes through the prewar, wartime, and postwar thought and activities of educator and ‘forgotten internationalist’ Ōshima Masanori, who participated in building a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere through cultural exchange with the Philippines, while also calling on his fellow Japanese to develop better understanding of other cultures and peoples in order to be qualified as regional leader. Changes in textbooks show similar trends: the accommodation of Wilsonian ideas and rhetoric (such as an internationalism centred on the League of Nations) to a non-League, often regional, approach to international cooperation. Textbooks thus disseminated evolving notions of internationalism to the broader population through the schools.

But the reality of 1930s Japan is not simply a case of committed internationalists either fighting an opposing tide of imperialism or jumping on a pan-Asianist bandwagon. In fact, educators, opinion leaders, politicians, and diplomats worked along separate but inter-connecting paths to adjust their internationalist principles and practice to new circumstances. Continuities in the theory and implementation of foreign policy from the 1920s through the war mark a gradual evolution of an internationalist framework. In this way, Japan resembled the other imperial powers, all of which found ways to bring the maintenance and expansion of their empires into line with the new internationalist basis of post-Versailles international relations. Peter Duus compared several cases in identifying a new system of ‘imperialism without colonies’ in which imperialist powers in Europe and Asia relied on informal methods of control in order to comply with the letter, if not the spirit, of Wilsonian internationalism.Footnote ⁸ As these comparisons demonstrate, Japan was participating in a nearly universal process of justifying colonialism and war in a new diplomatic context.

More recently, Prasenjit Duara identified in Japanese-controlled Manchukuo a new form of imperialism that he labelled the ‘imperialism of free nations’—a synthesis of modern Western imperialist nationalism and the specific models and ideas of the East Asian region. This new imperialism, which can also be seen in American and Soviet relations with their client states, was characterized by the combination of military control with the legal façade of sovereignty and an emphasis on anti-colonial ideologies and cultural affinity.Footnote ⁹ Mark Mazower focused on the impact of such new forms of imperialism on the postwar global order, locating the origins of the principles of the United Nations in what he calls ‘imperial internationalism’—a hybrid created during the First World War by grafting British imperial self-interest onto Wilsonian rhetoric.Footnote ¹⁰ In 1930s Japan, the same kind of creation emerged from the efforts of internationalists to promote their ideals without contradicting government policies of regional expansion and the increasing anti-Westernism of official rhetoric. Though similar in nature to British imperial internationalism, the Japanese case adds a new dimension by showing how these ideologies came together in a time and place not usually considered as internationalist, but quite to the contrary has often been labelled ‘ultra-nationalist’. The near universality of this trend, and the continuity of Wilsonian internationalism across the wartime and postwar periods, suggests that Japan's imperialist internationalism is not an anomaly, but rather just one particular expression of a potential that is inherent in the vagueness and flexibility of internationalist ideals.

This study develops Iriye's and Duus's arguments about rhetoric, together with Duara's and Mazower's rethinking of imperialism and internationalism, by considering textbooks’ contribution to developing and expanding the reach of new understandings of international relations, encouraging support for war and empire beyond the narrow realm of policy-makers and intellectuals into society as a whole. Akami's recent work on the efforts by Japan's foreign policy elite to harness the soft power of news shows the continued attention to international norms and international public opinion during years that are often seen as a time of isolation.Footnote ¹¹ This article views that dynamic from a primarily domestic point of view; how did intellectuals and government leaders seek to promote a positive public view of Japan's foreign policy among their own people? Considering the treatment of international relations in textbooks for elementary-, middle-, and normal-school ethics courses reveals the use of claims about morality to reconcile internationalism with imperialism and war.

This article will examine the internationalist mindset that developed in both education and diplomacy in Japan, as elsewhere, in the afterglow of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, then explore its transmogrification into imperialist internationalism. Turning to an analysis of ethics textbooks, it will demonstrate three main ways in which these texts modified internationalism in order to accommodate rising nationalism and imperialism: the naturalization of internationalism, the differentiation between its good and harmful forms, and the promotion of ‘people's diplomacy’ as an alternative means of cooperation in the context of state-level tensions. It will conclude with a consideration of the impact of textbook internationalism.

‘International mind’ in diplomacy and education

The promotion of internationalism through education was directed toward two separate audiences in efforts to improve Japan's foreign relations in the short and long term. Internationally, demonstrations of what advocates called an ‘international mind’—such as the translation of a Japanese ethics textbook into English or hosting an international conference on education—were aimed at immediate goals. Educators and diplomats advertised Japan's internationalist education to a Western audience in order to instil confidence in the nation as an active and trustworthy member of the international community. This became increasingly important as tensions between Japan and the Western powers rose during the 1930s. Domestically, textbooks inculcated internationalist ideas to ensure that future leaders would uphold this fundamental principle. In this regard, they formed one small part of a broader trend in Japanese discourse on international relations. The permeation of an internationalist mindset in the 1920s made it the baseline for thinking and talking about foreign policy in subsequent years, even when that discussion centred on policies of imperialism and war. The merging of these seemingly incompatible ideas resulted in the creation of an imperialist internationalism.

The persistence of the emphasis in textbooks on pursuing and promoting cooperative international relations suggests a continued effort to promote among the country's youth an understanding of foreign policy and world affairs that early internationalists in both Japan and Western countries referred to as ‘international mind’.Footnote ¹² This concept tied foreign policy directly to education, as the means to inculcate internationalist attitudes among the general population. The phrase was not on everyone's lips—it was used most frequently in explaining Japanese education to foreign audiences—but it is borrowed here to capture the shared sense among advocates of international cooperation in Japan and other countries in Asia and the West, through times of both war and peace, of close interconnections among education, ethics, and internationalism. Developed in pursuit of peace, the idea of international mind and its corollary, international morality, came to be used in justifications of war in both the United States and Japan.

The concept of international mind was adopted from Western scholars seeking a means to eliminate the causes of war in the early twentieth century. In 1912, Nicholas Murray Butler, a prominent American internationalist and educator whose work was widely disseminated in Japan, elucidated the importance of developing ‘among statesmen, journalists, and men of affairs a true international mind’, which would regard other peoples and nations not as rivals, ‘but as friends to work with in the accomplishment of a common purpose’.Footnote ¹³ For Butler, international mind was an extension of individual morality; just as it is considered wrong for a person to steal an individual's possessions, he reasoned, so it should be unacceptable for a nation to take another's territory.Footnote ¹⁴ Through his copious writings and especially his leadership of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Butler sought to promote this kind of attitude toward international relations among not only political leaders, but the general public, as well, and he saw education as playing a key role. The experience of the First World War invigorated a worldwide movement for the promotion of internationalism through education. Japanese educators participated enthusiastically, and the early decades of the twentieth century saw the growth in Japan of a domestic movement for internationalist education, which sought to raise humanism over patriotism and re-imagine Japan's relationship with Asia and the international community as a whole.Footnote ¹⁵

What Butler called ‘international mind’ became a pervasive way of thinking in Japan, eventually colouring the way even staunch nationalists and aggressive imperialists framed and presented their policies: the extension of interpersonal standards of morality to the level of international relations suggested that cooperation with other nations was not only morally correct, but also the path to stability, prosperity, and peace for Japan, the Asian region, and the world. One of the earliest prominent appearances of the phrase in Japan was in a 1918 article by Sakatani Yoshirō entitled ‘The international mind’, originally published in English in The Japan Peace Movement, the organ of the Japan Peace Society and the American Peace Society of Japan. Sakatani was a prominent figure in the government and a leader in non-governmental international activities; having previously served as minister of finance, at the time the article was published, he was a member of the House of Peers and acting head of the Japan Peace Society, and he would later become involved with the Japan League of Nations Association. In his article, Sakatani called for the peace negotiations following the Great War to be based on the spirit of international mind, which he defined as the extension into the realm of international affairs of the principles governing interpersonal relations: righteousness, humanity, the spirit of freedom, independence, and equality. Sakatani characterized this morality as universal. Modifying a well-known Confucian saying, he stated: ‘As there are not two suns in heaven, so there are not two moralities in the world.’ Nations may differ in history and customs, he wrote, but they share a fundamental morality, which could serve as the basis of peace by overcoming the narrow national spirit that fed international strife.Footnote ¹⁶ The emphasis on morality marks a change from earlier conceptions of cooperative foreign policy that were more focused on national advantage in balance-of-power politics. Sakatani's writing shows the influence of Butler's ‘international mind’ in bringing a universal standard of interpersonal morality to bear on nations. His efforts elsewhere aimed to convince the Japanese people to view the world in such moral terms, but the fact that he published this article in English suggests that he wrote for an audience beyond his own countrymen. He hoped, perhaps, not only to urge the peacemakers in Paris to adopt this approach, but also to persuade a Western audience that Japan would be an upstanding member of a moral international society.

In the 1920s, the international education movement was one of many over-lapping efforts by Japanese internationalists to bring their nation into the global trend toward cooperation in all fields. Developments in education became a means to display Japan's internationalist credentials, as diplomats and educators promoted their country's reputation abroad by describing educational trends in their country in the shared vocabulary of international mind. In his preface to the English translation of a Japanese middle-school ethics textbook containing sections on topics such as international cooperation, world peace, people's diplomacy, and international morality, Nitobe Inazō—educator, internationalist, and self-proclaimed ‘bridge across the Pacific’—wrote that the purpose of the translation was to provide ‘to the English-speaking public some idea of how the international mind is nurtured in Japan’ and added that ‘all text-books on morals, history and geography used in primary as well as secondary schools contain something explaining the aims and activities of the League of Nations’.Footnote ¹⁷ That this textbook was translated into English and introduced in this way (and by such a figure as Nitobe, Japan's most prominent internationalist of the time) suggests the manner in which education was being used in Japanese efforts at cultural diplomacy. Persuading the people of the Western powers that the youth of Japan were being trained to have a global outlook based on moral principles would presumably bolster confidence in Japan as a reliable diplomatic partner. The translation seems, at least in one instance, to have hit its mark: its publication was announced under the heading of ‘Events of significance in building international good-will’ (along with news of a League of Nations vote to outlaw war) in the October 1927 issue of the Quaker journal, The Messenger of Peace. The announcement echoed Nitobe's claims about Japanese education and quoted his introduction almost in full.Footnote ¹⁸ Internationalists were confident that education could improve Japan's foreign relations in two ways: first, by promoting greater cooperation and an internationalist mindset through moral education and, second, by highlighting the internationalism of Japanese education in order to improve the image of Japan among the Western powers.

The international education movement, as a political force, did not survive the growing militarism of the 1930s. But the underlying concepts shaping classroom explanations of Japan's position in the world and modes of behaviour in the international arena outlived their early advocates’ political activism. Internationalist approaches to education had become increasingly influential over the early decades of the twentieth century, and their effects were not easily erased. In wartime Japan, where, in contrast to Nazi Germany, propaganda was not led from a central bureaucracy, but rather emerged from a cooperative effort by public and private groups and individuals, a basic social concept such as the ethics of international relations could not be suddenly and single-handedly redefined.Footnote ¹⁹ Instead, the combined efforts of policy-makers seeking to explain and convince on one side, and intellectuals trying to conform to the realities and political exigencies of the times on the other, shaped a generation's understanding of the nature of international community and Japan's role within it.

In addition, these ideas would continue to be useful to wartime goals. It is important to note that, even as he advocated striving for world peace, Butler himself supported the call to arms in both 1917 and 1940.Footnote ²⁰ The concept of international morality can be mobilized as effectively in support of war as in repudiation of aggression, with a call to sanction countries that have contravened a given moral vision of world order. Japan's wartime rhetoric of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere was conducive to this kind of justification for war, and political theorists, policy-makers, and educators all took advantage of that to reconcile imperialism and internationalism, following trends that had been rising in foreign policy discourse since Japan's withdrawal from the League.

For instance, in writing about the 1943 Greater East Asian Conference, a Tokyo meeting of regional leaders aimed at promoting cooperation with Japan's war effort, East Asian politics scholar Kanezaki Ken followed the example of leaders like Foreign Minister Shigemitsu Mamoru in drawing a contrast between Japan's adherence to high-minded principles and Western perfidy and selfishness.Footnote ²¹ Like many wartime writers, he promoted the idea that Japan had a monopoly on ‘real’ internationalism by contrasting the Tokyo summit's supposed achievement of those ideals with international conferences in Europe and the United States, which he depicted as sites of scheming for selfish interests through shrewdness and military power, all imperfectly hidden behind a façade of justice. Kanezaki wrote of the great powers:

The participants in the Tokyo conference, he insisted, thought first not of their own interests, but of the interests of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, the pursuit of which they knew would redound to their mutual benefit.

This judgement about morality became an argument for war when Kanezaki concluded that Japan must win the war in order to eliminate the international system set up by the Western powers for their own interests and resting on the sacrifices of all other peoples, in order to create a world with a ‘fair and honest new order’ based on the sincere cooperation of all countries.Footnote ²³ Or, as the 1943 edition of the sixth-grade ethics textbook explained, the states of Greater East Asia were ‘together building a righteous new world’.Footnote ²⁴ Kanezaki intimated that the moral façade of the great powers hid immoral activities that must be stopped by the possessor of true international morality: Japan. Thus, the concept of international morality, which Butler had posited as the basis of an international mind that would be the key to sustained peace, was twisted into a justification for war. In both ethics education and international relations scholarship, real peace was presented as dependent on the construction of a world order defined in Japanese terms to be more righteous or moral than the existing system established and dominated by the Western powers.

Imperialist internationalism

The wartime reinvention of internationalism centred on Japan's withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933. After the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in September 1931, the Chinese government appealed to the League of Nations, which sent a commission to gather information about the dispute. The League commission reported that, while both nations were to some extent at fault in the dispute, the 1932 creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo was not the result of a spontaneous popular uprising, but rather had been orchestrated by the Japanese military. The Japanese government found this conclusion to be unacceptable and, in February 1933, when the League Assembly voted almost unanimously to accept the report's conclusions, the representative from Japan, Matsuoka Yōsuke, stood and led his delegation out of the hall—a prelude to his government's formal announcement of withdrawal a month later.Footnote ²⁵

The League's decision satisfied neither side. Chinese and Japanese leaders criticized the organization, questioning its commitment to international justice and equality of nations, but, at the same time, both reaffirmed their devotion to internationalist principles.Footnote ²⁶ Japanese government leaders and political theorists responded to this crisis in international relations with a search for alternative ways to envision and exercise engagement with the international community. The Imperial Rescript announcing withdrawal set the tone. Promulgated on 27 March 1933, the document promised that the break with the League did not spell the end of international cooperation, stating that, in spite of specific disagreements with the organization, ‘we have not ceased to long for the establishment of international peace, and therefore, we will continue to cooperate, as before, with all manner of peace activities’.Footnote ²⁷ The rescript laid out the main themes for public discussion of Japan's withdrawal from the League, and many writers cited it in support of their arguments for continuing international cooperation, whether within or outside the organization.Footnote ²⁸

Such arguments contributed to the development of a new attitude toward international relations in general and the League of Nations in particular, the central element of which was a distinction between League membership as one narrow aspect of a total foreign policy and international cooperation as a general principle governing Japan's relations with the rest of the world. This new approach is exemplified by two individuals who symbolize the beginning and end of Japan's membership in the League of Nations: Nitobe Inazō and Matsuoka Yōsuke. Nitobe is the Japanese individual perhaps most deeply associated with both the League of Nations and the principle of internationalism. Long a proponent of peaceful cooperation between Japan and the West, he served the League for six years as under-secretary general before becoming chairman of the Japan Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR)—an international group founded in 1925 for the purpose of studying shared problems and concerns of Pacific Rim countries.Footnote ²⁹ After the Manchurian Incident, he took on the task of defending his country to the international community. Violating his own pledge not to set foot in the United States until the prohibition against Japanese immigrants through the Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act) was repealed, he travelled around the country giving lectures to explain Japan's position.Footnote ³⁰

In defence of Japanese foreign policy, Nitobe employed the ideas of international mind and emphasized non-governmental avenues of cooperation in order to downplay the significance of the League of Nations to an ethical and cooperative foreign policy. He compared a Japan potentially outside of the League to the United States (which had never joined the organization), actively participating in the many organizations that existed to promote international cooperation outside of government-level institutions. He argued that, in fact, cooperation was best begun through private initiatives, which would be more intimate and sincere than official government activities.Footnote ³¹ Like many others working to present Japan as internationalist, he relied on the Imperial Rescript announcing Japan's withdrawal from the League as evidence of the nation's continued commitment to cooperation for peace. The rescript was a focus of his last public speech before his death in October 1933, at the Banff conference of the IPR. A draft of the speech quoted two paragraphs of the rescript in full.Footnote ³² When he actually delivered the speech, in August 1933, Nitobe did not quote from the rescript, but simply cited it as evidence that ‘Japan's withdrawal from the League does not mean her withdrawal from the family of nations’ and would have no impact on ‘Japan's traditional policy to cooperate with the world’. He did not use the phrase ‘international mind’ in this speech, but he relied on the same core principles he had attributed to it in the past, speaking of the IPR's role in ‘combat[ting] the dark forces of intolerance born of ignorance’ and the idea of international morality as an extension of individual social consciousness, obligating nations to ‘think in terms of the whole world’.Footnote ³³ In his earlier work, written at a time when Japan was a prominent member of the League and he himself an important figure in the organization, Nitobe had emphasized the League as a manifestation of international mind.Footnote ³⁴ In the very different context of the months immediately before and after Japan's withdrawal, he downplayed the organization's importance, emphasizing instead the role of non-governmental activities and the sway of universal morality. In defending his country, Nitobe helped to redefine internationalism.

Japan's leaders continued to pursue policies of multilateral cooperation in new and various ways throughout the 1930s, turning from global to regional structures and expanding cultural activities. Even Matsuoka Yōsuke, a firm believer in power politics and staunch Pan-Asianist who led the Japanese delegation out of the League of Nations Assembly, took seriously the organizations and norms of liberal internationalism.Footnote ³⁵ Matsuoka set off for Geneva as Japan's delegate to the League in October 1932 with the dual goal of keeping his nation in the League while holding firm its position in Manchuria, but the exigencies of domestic politics—at a time when politicians and the press called Manchuria a ‘lifeline’ for a Japan in crisis—ultimately led him to privilege the latter.Footnote ³⁶ Though certainly concerned about the potential repercussions of the Manchurian Incident and withdrawal from the League, he was adamant in denying that the split would separate Japan from the international community. He saw his own representation of Japan in the League's deliberations on the dispute over Manchuria as a complete failure, primarily because the outcome severely damaged ‘international faith’ in Japan. But he believed that trust could be restored and, in several speeches and articles written in the months after his walkout, he called upon his countrymen, for the sake of world peace, to nurture close relations with other countries.Footnote ³⁷

At pains to minimize the damage, and perhaps to ease his own remorse for failing to maintain Japan's membership in the League of Nations, Matsuoka insisted that the country was not as isolated as it must seem, describing the sympathy and support for Japan that he found as he travelled home through Europe and the United States over the two months following his dramatic departure from the League, even in countries whose representatives had agreed with the League's decision to accept the Lytton Report on Manchuria. He concluded from this experience that ‘though there are people who say Japan is defying world opinion, they are very ill-informed’.Footnote ³⁸ Matsuoka believed that, in terms of popular sentiment at least, Japan was not alone in the world. David Lu argues that, forced to choose between the incompatible goals of defending Japan's position regarding Manchuria and keeping Japan in the League, Matsuoka bent to the force of Japanese popular opinion to break with the organization, rather than follow his inclination towards international cooperation.Footnote ³⁹ Perhaps the choice between Japan's ‘lifeline in Manchuria’ (a view of Japan's interests in Northeast China that Matsuoka himself had helped to promote) and its membership in the League of Nations was less painful than it seems because he did not see the League as the only means of international cooperation. In February 1934, a year after his departure from Geneva, he gave a speech entitled ‘Japan is not isolated’, in which he stated repeatedly that leaving the League did not mean isolation for Japan, but also warned that Japan must guard against the possibility of falling into isolation.Footnote ⁴⁰ Matsuoka did not discuss Japan's international position in terms of morality but, through such statements, he contributed not only to the reaffirmation of internationalism as the fundamental principle of Japanese foreign policy, but also to its conceptual separation from the League of Nations, both of which informed textbook lessons on the subject.

The ideal of multilateral cooperation took concrete form in terms of education in the August 1937 International Education Conference held in Tokyo with nearly 1,000 participants from 43 countries. The aim of the conference was certainly in line with prewar internationalist education: to eliminate war and promote international understanding through education. Just the fact that a conference with such aims was hosted in a nation engaging in aggressive war in China is suggestive of the flexibility of such rhetoric. Ōshima Masanori, a promoter of internationalist education who helped organize the conference, asserted the need for the Japanese people to develop a greater understanding of other cultures, even as he promoted the establishment of a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.Footnote ⁴¹ In this sense, Ōshima is similar to authors of ethics textbooks, who struggled to reconcile their understanding of international relations with the realities of contemporary world affairs and the political requirements and intellectual trends toward nationalism and emperor-worship that characterized wartime Japan.Footnote ⁴²

The power of textbooks

Ethics textbooks published or revised during the prewar and wartime years continued to trumpet the benefits of international engagement throughout the 1930s and even into the 1940s. The internationalist rhetoric of these textbooks, either authored or at least approved by the Ministry of Education, depending on their grade level, may seem to imply criticism of the foreign policies and military actions by a government engaged in aggression in Asia and contravening decisions of the League of Nations. But, in fact, the flexibility of internationalism as a concept allowed the government to promote international cooperation with one hand while it led a programme of unilateral imperialist expansion with the other. In textbooks, the persistence of internationalist rhetoric, within an on-going trend of increasingly strident patriotism and promotion of Japanese hegemony in Asia, contributed to the development of imperialist internationalism between 1933 and 1945. In this sense, textbook authors and the Ministry of Education embraced the official policy established by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in accordance with the Imperial Rescript announcing Japan's withdrawal from the League of Nations: to maintain the structures and rhetoric of Wilsonian internationalism while adjusting them to accommodate policies of imperialist aggression.

Textbooks help shape the way people think about their nation and the world. As Laura Hein and Mark Selden point out: ‘Because textbooks are carried into neighborhood schools and homes, and because, directly or indirectly, they carry the imprimatur of the state, they have enormous authority.’Footnote ⁴³ Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Japan's national government directly supervised, censored, and later even produced textbooks, which became a means for inculcation of a state-approved patriotism and sense of nation.Footnote ⁴⁴ Textbooks took on a nationalist tone and content after 1886 ordinances on elementary and middle school required that they be authorized by the minister of education.Footnote ⁴⁵ This tendency increased after the Ministry of Education took over the writing of elementary textbooks in 1903.Footnote ⁴⁶ Though higher-level textbooks were still written by individual scholars, they required government approval and thus were similarly affected by the general atmosphere of increasingly strict censorship that prevailed in Japan from the 1920s to the end of the war.Footnote ⁴⁷ This combination demonstrates the public–private interaction that characterized wartime propaganda efforts. Textbooks were far from the only forces shaping popular views of foreign affairs, but their message was amplified and reinforced by its repetition in much of the popular media at the time, including newspapers and journals of opinion.Footnote ⁴⁸

Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that textbooks conformed to trends in Japanese government and society, with a growing focus on national consciousness, patriotism centred on the emperor, and the concept of kokutai, or national polity.Footnote ⁴⁹ Over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, public institutions increasingly emphasized the idea of the kokutai, which referred to Japan's supposedly unique state structure, centred on an emperor who claimed descent through an unbroken line of divine sovereigns directly from the Sun Goddess. In response to public debate over the meaning and specifics of Japan's particular ‘national polity’, the Ministry of Education issued the final word on the topic in a 1937 pamphlet entitled ‘Fundamentals of our National Polity’. This pamphlet defined the ideological basis of education until the end of the war, and ethics textbooks published during that time necessarily incorporated its main ideas.Footnote ⁵⁰ The publication of this work—in the same year as a clash between Japanese and Chinese troops near the Marco Polo Bridge led to full-scale war between the two nations—bolstered the political forces pushing Japanese education in the direction of emperor-centred nationalism by codifying the centrality of the kokutai idea to civic and moral training.

This trend is clear in wartime ethic textbooks. Tsubouchi Hirokiyo argues that the ‘Imperial Rescript on Education’, a heavily Confucian document issued in 1890 as the basis of moral and civic instruction in Japan, had placed the ethics course at the centre of all school curricula, as this course was aimed at inculcating the loyalty and patriotism that were at the rescript's foundation.Footnote ⁵¹ His examination of wartime textbooks shows a heavy emphasis on nationalism and militarism; they cultivated national spirit and raised consciousness of the ‘imperial mission’ in order to justify the war and mobilize the population to participate with enthusiasm.Footnote ⁵² But, throughout the 1930s, and even into the 1940s, the authors of ethics textbooks continued to promote internationalism as the ethical basis of foreign policy. Though the mode, structure, and geographical scope of the cooperative relations presented changed with Japan's escalating aggression, significant continuities meant that students never stopped learning that cooperation was a moral imperative, and that national goals and interests could best be served by acting in concert with other nations.

The topic of international relations is treated at least indirectly in several school subjects, but ethics textbooks are particularly telling because they are the most explicitly hortatory.Footnote ⁵³ While students would certainly draw lessons about their nation's place in the world from history, geography, and even language lessons, it was the ethics textbook that told them in no uncertain terms how they should behave, as good members of their families, communities, and nation, and how Japan should behave, as a good member of the community of nations. Beginning with an education ordinance in 1880, educational authorities had placed primary emphasis on the ethics course, and it became a consistent aspect of students’ educational career, from elementary through secondary school, though only a minimum of one hour of instruction per week was required.Footnote ⁵⁴ The last three pre-1945 editions of the elementary-level ethics textbooks, published in 1922, 1939, and 1943, contain chapters on international relations in the sixth-grade volumes. The first two of these editions include a chapter entitled ‘Diplomacy’. The third edition, rather than being revised from earlier editions, was made up of entirely new ‘wartime materials’.Footnote ⁵⁵ This 1943 volume provided no lesson explicitly labelled ‘Diplomacy’, but it did include a chapter entitled ‘A new world’, which described a different kind of international cooperation as Japan's destiny.

The elementary-school textbooks were standard, used by every school in the nation, and six years of elementary education were compulsory for both boys and girls. Middle schools had more flexibility, but their choices were limited to a selection of books approved by the Ministry of Education.Footnote ⁵⁶ Middle schools also had contact with vastly fewer children, as only a small percentage of elementary-school graduates continued on to the all-male middle schools. (Girls could go to girls’ high school or higher elementary school, then possibly to girls’ normal school, institutions for training teachers.) The top graduates of middle school could enter higher school, then possibly university. Others might begin training for a career in education at a higher normal school. Of those who were not accepted to (or could not afford) middle school, some studied at higher elementary schools—a possible path to normal school.Footnote ⁵⁷ Middle-school textbooks were generally more explicit in their promotion of international cooperation than were the elementary volumes, but they kept pace with the trend toward support for empire-building abroad and emperor-worship at home, harmonizing these goals within the ostensibly conflicting ideological landscape of imperialist internationalism, where international morality was made to promote cooperation and justify aggression. The greater internationalism of middle-school textbooks is significant; because middle school was not compulsory, it was populated primarily by the children of the elite, who would be more likely to occupy positions of leadership in society as adults.Footnote ⁵⁸ This relationship between middle-school education and an individual's future prospects in Japanese society underlines the importance of the persistence of internationalism in those textbooks, as it was Japan's future elite absorbing the most emphatic lessons on the importance of international cooperation.

The elementary- and normal-school textbooks list as author only the Ministry of Education. Middle-school textbooks, on the other hand, were written by private individuals. The authors of the textbooks examined here were scholars of ethics or education. Most had studied in Europe, and all had graduated from the prestigious Tokyo Imperial University, where their professors emphasized the inculcation of moral virtues through education.Footnote ⁵⁹ These textbook authors were all scholars of ethics and education, not international relations. Therefore, the lessons they wrote on Japan's place in the world demonstrate that the international mind was not just a view held by foreign policy specialists, but rather an aspect of the common-sense values of the educated person in 1930s Japan. Though some of these men had connections with the Ministry of Education—and, as teachers, they were all, in a sense, public officials—in writing their textbooks, they were not explicitly tasked with implementing official policy. At the same time, the fact that their textbooks had to be approved by the Ministry of Education meant that they could not stray too far from acceptable norms and ideas. In the wake of Japan's withdrawal from the League of Nations, the authors of ethics textbooks revised their lessons on international relations in accordance with the example set by the Imperial Rescript announcing withdrawal and repeated by both government and intellectual leaders. They drew their arguments from the internationalist ideals of the 1920s, but they also helped to reshape those ideals to fit the constraints of the 1930s and 1940s.

The basic text of wartime education, ‘Fundamentals of our National Polity’, explicitly rejected an internationalism that placed the world as a whole before the nation and ‘the mistaken idea that international law constituted a higher norm than national laws’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Its companion text, ‘The Way of the Subject’, issued by the Ministry of Education in July 1941, derided the ‘so-called justice and humanity’ espoused by the Western powers as ‘no more than a means to justify their selfish viewpoint’.Footnote ⁶¹ But this ostensible rejection of internationalism was open to interpretation as a repudiation only of such ‘false’ elements, rather than an abandonment of its core principles. Textbooks were, as a genre, groping toward new definitions of internationalism that seemed to endorse national policies and goals without completely abandoning earlier views of Japan's foreign relations and global role, as well as international society more generally. These efforts included a naturalization of internationalism as a principle held by both the Meiji and Shōwa emperors and characteristic of Japan from long before the creation of the League of Nations; a clarification that internationalism must be firmly rooted in the nation and, at the same time, based on a universal morality that must be defended; and a refraction of international engagement into non-governmental and non-political realms with the promotion of ‘people's diplomacy’. The following three sections will examine these strands of thought in textbooks.

The naturalization of internationalism

In order to support the claim that separation from the League did not signify abandonment of internationalist principles, textbooks had to redefine internationalism, which had previously been explained in terms of cooperation with the League, to something simultaneously universal and more Japanese. It was not much of a stretch for textbook authors to promote the principle of international cooperation because its basic concepts, tinged with the notion of ‘international morality’, extended quite naturally from specific content of earlier years of ethics education. From their first year of formal schooling, students were taught that, in domestic society, a ‘good child’ or ‘good Japanese’ will act according to public morality and with a spirit of cooperation for the general welfare, the happiness of the people, and the betterment of society.Footnote ⁶² Textbooks built on these early lessons, using the analogy of good neighbours to extend to the international level the concept of cooperative social life that had consistently been encouraged on the domestic level. The opening lines of the 1939 sixth-grade chapter on ‘Diplomatic relations’ with which this article begins were unchanged from the 1922 version: ‘It goes without saying that for neighbors and friends to help each other with kindness is necessary in order to increase common welfare. In the same way, for countries to interact and help each other with kindness is necessary in working for world peace and human welfare.’Footnote ⁶³ The principle of pursuing common welfare through cooperation ‘goes without saying’ perhaps primarily because it was repeated ad nauseum in six years’ worth of textbooks. By the time the students came across this statement in their sixth-grade textbook, they were probably very familiar with the sentiment and not likely to have questioned it. It was a small step to apply such a ‘common-sense’ idea to nations. A similar analogy was used in some middle-school textbooks, explaining international morality by comparing the international community to groups of individuals, houses, or villages.Footnote ⁶⁴

The definition of internationalism in terms of morality that was universal, and yet stemmed from the divine emperor, allowed it to be reinterpreted, when times changed, as both imperial and imperialist. Instead of representing the break with the League as a watershed, textbooks told a continuous narrative of international cooperation. In this version of the story, peaceful engagement was in keeping with Japan's modern history, national spirit, and global mission, including expansion of its hegemony in Asia. Textbooks’ rising tone of emperor-centred nationalism was actually quite useful for the promotion of internationalism; by citing past imperial support for international cooperation and amity, they implied that internationalism had the unassailable endorsement of the emperor. A teacher's manual accompanying the 1939 edition of the sixth-grade textbook highlighted the efforts toward international cooperation by the Meiji, Taishō, and Shōwa emperors as specific points of emphasis for the chapter on foreign relations, which had the purpose of conveying ‘the importance of diplomatic relations in extending Imperial influences throughout the world and in promoting the Great Cause’.Footnote ⁶⁵

In this regard, the Boshin Rescript issued by the Meiji Emperor in 1908 was a standard topic for morals textbooks. This imperial edict was essentially a call for return to traditional Japanese values and a rejection of what had been deemed deleterious Western influences.Footnote ⁶⁶ But, in wartime ethics textbooks, it was discussed in terms of its emphasis on international interdependence, the importance of nations working together to improve human welfare, and the benefits of East and West relying on and helping each other. Indeed, the document begins with a meditation on cooperation among nations:

It then goes on to cite ‘the teachings of Our revered Ancestors and the records of Our glorious history’ to support a call for Japanese society to return to the traditional ethics of cooperation, frugality, and hard work.Footnote ⁶⁷

This is not to say that the Boshin Rescript was meant, in 1908, as a statement of ‘internationalism’ in the same sense as either 1920s Wilsonianism or its 1930s reinvention. Rather, textbook authors reinterpreted the rescript as part of their reinvention of internationalism. By focusing exclusively on the document's opening lines, textbook authors transformed the rescript—which was primarily an inward-looking document written in an effort to combat supposed social ills such as individualism, socialism, and a predilection for luxury by reviving traditional Japanese ethics—into something of an internationalist manifesto. One example of this is in a middle-school textbook originally written by Yuhara Motoichi (1863–1931), a scholar of ethics education who headed Tokyo Music School, Tokyo Women's Higher Normal School, then Tokyo Higher School, while serving on various government advisory councils related to education, including the Textbook Study Committee. Yuhara died before Japan's withdrawal from the League of Nations, but his textbook was revised and expanded by ethics scholar Kondō Hyōgo (1887–1976) in September 1933, six months after the withdrawal. This revised textbook used the rescript to lay claim to a native Japanese origin for internationalism, prior to the League's conception. A chapter on the Boshin Rescript stated: ‘It is thought that the idea of international cooperation came after the World War, but Japan's Meiji Emperor had already led the Japanese people with this concept after the Russo-Japanese War.’Footnote ⁶⁸ This assertion of a prior, domestic origin implied that the League was extraneous to Japanese internationalism and therefore unnecessary to the continuation of cooperative activities by the Japanese government, thus downplaying the significance of withdrawal from the League to the basic principles of Japan's foreign policy. Further, the description of the timing of that domestic origin as coming ‘after the Russo-Japanese War’, when the rescript is dated three years after the end of that war, suggests the centrality of war to conceptions of internationalism.

The wartime emperor, too, appeared in textbooks as a supporter of peaceful engagement with the Western powers. The elementary textbooks and one middle-school book hailed the positive impact on Japan's relations with Western countries of Hirohito's travels in Europe in 1921, when he was the crown prince. The account was tempered in the 1939 revision of the government-authored sixth-grade textbook, which removed superlatives, so that, for example, the visit simply ‘advanced friendly relations with those countries’ instead of ‘immeasurably improved friendly relations with each country’, as in the previous edition.Footnote ⁶⁹ In his study of elementary textbooks, Harold Wray has suggested that this difference reflects Japan's strained relationship with the Western powers at the time.Footnote ⁷⁰ But the passage's persistence in the textbook, even with this important revision, shows that, despite changed circumstances, ‘friendly relations’ with other countries were still deemed a necessary part of the ethics curriculum.

Other textbooks were able to maintain the importance of this event as a lesson for Japan's future role in the global community of nations by explaining its significance in ethical terms of international obligation. For example, in the opening section of a chapter on ‘International friendship’, a 1935 middle-school textbook by Konishi Shigenao (1875–1948) went into some detail, describing how the crown prince saw the ruins of war, was warmly welcomed wherever he went, and observed the culture of each country.Footnote ⁷¹ This book even quoted the crown prince himself expressing his wish that Japan would continue ‘to contribute to the development of world culture’.Footnote ⁷² Representing international engagement as a function of Japan's obligation to the world, rather than just a matter of politics, allowed it to transcend the particular context of Japan's tense relations with the Western powers. Konishi was by no means presenting a pro-Western view in his textbook lesson on the crown prince's European tour; in fact, he warned against excessive adulation of the West and called for the elimination of imported Euro-American ideas that might be harmful to Japan's ‘national polity’. But the ethics of social obligation to the community of nations required activities like the emperor's youthful travels through Europe as part of Japan's contribution to world culture—a concept that was strongly advocated by Japanese internationalists before and after Japan's withdrawal from the League of Nations.

Several years after his European tour, in 1926, the crown prince ascended the throne as the Shōwa emperor. In this capacity, too, he appeared in textbooks as an advocate of internationalism, most notably (and perhaps surprisingly) in the Imperial Rescript announcing Japan's withdrawal from the League of Nations. Textbook authors, like many Japanese internationalists, found in the announcement a glimmer of hope that the break with the League did not imply the end of an era. For the most part, textbook explanations of the rescript highlighted its call to continue cooperation in other venues.Footnote ⁷³ The 1939 edition of the sixth-grade volume was the least enthusiastic, simply mentioning that the rescript called for Japan to help establish international peace, while the accompanying teacher's manual emphasized that the rescript showed the Japanese people the path to be followed without elucidating the direction of that path.Footnote ⁷⁴ A normal-school textbook produced by the Ministry of Education in the same year was more emphatic, stating that the emperor was very concerned that there be no change in Japan's foreign policy and, therefore, clarified through the rescript that Japan would ‘still cooperate with other countries in all manner of peace activities’.Footnote ⁷⁵ This was, of course, written in the context of full-scale war stemming from Japan's invasion of China and rising tensions with the Western powers, which had led Japan to break off the limited participation in ‘non-political activities’ of the League of Nations that had continued for five years after withdrawal.Footnote ⁷⁶

The privately written middle-school textbooks either quoted or reprinted the rescript in full in order to emphasize continuity in Japanese foreign policy. Here, too, the idea of standing for what is right served to bring Japan's break with the League in line with the principle of internationalism. One example is in the 1936 edition of a textbook by Ōse Jintarō (1866–1944). Ōse had previously been a professor and later president of the Tokyo University of Humanities and Science, the precursor to Tokyo University of Education, then served as principal of Tokyo Higher Normal School, retiring in 1934, two years before this edition was published. In a chapter entitled ‘International justice’, this textbook followed the full text of the rescript with an assertion that it clarified the ‘true meaning’ of withdrawal as an essential step toward ‘an era of true international peace and cooperation’.Footnote ⁷⁷ This, of course, implies a criticism of the League and the Western powers as the violators of international justice, leaving Japan as the one real internationalist, which had to break with the Western-dominated League in order to achieve ‘true’ international cooperation. Raising international justice (however defined) above international law (embodied in the League of Nations) was the key to justifying Japanese withdrawal from the League and, by extension, its invasion of Northeast China.

In addition to borrowing imperial prestige and authority, textbook authors sought to rescue the concept of internationalism from the reality of Japan's break with the League of Nations by explaining the situation in terms that emphasized the government's long and continued cooperation with the organization and the continuation of such principles as the basis of foreign policy. Textbooks celebrated Japan's participation in and support for the League as ‘energetic’, ‘devoted’, even ‘joyous’.Footnote ⁷⁸ The split with the organization was then marked down to no more than a ‘difference of opinion’ over Manchuria and the act of withdrawal described in passive phrases of inescapable circumstances: ‘it was decided [for Japan] to leave’; ‘[things] came to the point of splitting’; and ‘it came to be unavoidable that [Japan] withdraw from the League’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Typically, these explanations were followed by a comment that Japan would continue to cooperate internationally. While there was a grain of truth in this claim, it seems more like wishful thinking than a real explanation of Japan's international activities, especially in textbooks written after 1938, when the Japanese government cut the last remaining ties of ‘non-political’ cooperation.

Such enthusiastic discussion of the League of Nations did not necessarily imply any criticism of Japan's foreign policy, as such comments were invariably paired with either ebullient praise of Japanese devotion to internationalist principles or implied criticism of the League's failings. For instance, Ōse's 1936 middle-school textbook, which had explained withdrawal from the League as a step toward ‘true’ internationalism, also called Japan the ‘world's most devoted supporter’ of the League of Nations and blamed the split on Europe's ‘misunderstanding’ of Japan's relations with Manchuria. This book insisted that the ‘true meaning’ and significance of withdrawal would be understood when ‘the great powers realize their mistake and acknowledge Japan's righteousness by recognizing Manchukuo’, which would bring about ‘true international peace and cooperation’ in East Asia and the world.Footnote ⁸⁰ Clearly, such an endorsement of internationalism included support for Japanese government policies and laid all blame for Japan's split with the League at the feet of the Western powers, none of which had at that point extended diplomatic recognition to the puppet state of Manchukuo. Even as this textbook promoted the idea of international cooperation, it defined what was ‘righteous’ or ‘just’ to accord with the state's militarist and expansionist policies and rhetoric.

By generalizing the idea of internationalism—removing it from the specific context of the League of Nations, assigning it the weight of universal morality, and attaching it to Japanese foreign policy both before and after Japan's tenure as a member—textbooks taught that cooperation was an essential and continuing tenet of foreign relations. The potential contradictions brought up by rising nationalism and emperor-worship were smoothed over by the attention to the internationalist principles and activities of the modern emperors themselves. In pursuit of two pedagogical goals—instilling both an internationalist outlook and devotion to the emperor—textbook authors contributed to the formation of an international mind that could embrace war and empire.

The good internationalisms and the bad

The analogy between interpersonal and international relations used in textbooks to explain the ethics of international cooperation could also work in favour of nationalism. Even as the textbooks insisted that neighbours and villages must cooperate for the common benefit of the entire community and nation, at the same time, they held that it is also quite normal for every household to put its own interests first, and for every village to focus on its own special role within the nation. This explanation of human society made room alongside advocacy of cooperation for the promotion of patriotism and support for Japan's supposedly unique ‘national polity’. The analogy also facilitated a second means by which textbook authors promoted internationalism and, significantly, helped accommodate it to heightened nationalism: the differentiation between what they defined as its desirable and destructive forms. This involved two main elements: the rejection of international communism or any conception of internationalism, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, or globalism that ignored or minimized the role of the individual nation; and the comparison of Japan's ‘real’ international morality with the false claims used by Western powers to hide their selfish motives.

The argument against communism helped to create a strong link between nationalism and internationalism by contrasting an ideology perceived as a threat to the Japanese state with the ‘good’ internationalism that rested on a foundation of patriotism. For students who were being relentlessly reminded to sacrifice themselves for sovereign and country—as in the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education's admonition, ‘should emergency arise, offer yourselves courageously to the State; and thus guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial Throne coeval with heaven and earth’—this served as reassurance that being a good patriot was not incompatible with being a good internationalist.Footnote ⁸¹ Some middle-school textbooks used the analogy between house or village and nation to argue for the harmony, and even mutual dependence, between nationalism and internationalism. Konishi's 1935 textbook suggested that ‘Patriotism and international amity at first glance seem to be contradictory, but just like we, for instance, love our own house and also are friendly with our neighbors, so patriotism and international amity can and must coexist’.Footnote ⁸² This was followed by a warning that wars begin from a lack of sympathy and understanding between nations, echoing a frequently made accusation against the League of Nations that the lack of understanding of Asia on the part of its European members had caused Japan's withdrawal. While this pairing of patriotism and international amity appears to promote mutual understanding, forbearance, and peace, the differentiation between beneficial patriotic internationalisms and more dangerous varieties was also used as ammunition in the foremost ideological battle of the 1930s: the fight against communism. In order to clarify the difference between the internationalism advocated to Japanese schoolchildren and the ‘dangerous thought’ of communist internationalism, textbooks reiterated the importance of the nation as the primary unit of action on the world stage and ultimate object of the individual's loyalty.

One of the most vivid examples of this foregrounding of the nation appears in Yuhara Motoichi's middle-school textbook, revised in September 1933 by Kondō Hyōgo. The book criticized the Russian Revolution for having spilled a great deal of blood and generated more international tension than peace. It then presented as an analogy to the nation the image of a household that becomes impoverished by ignoring its own needs in order to work for the good of the village, thus becoming a burden to others, damaging its relations with other households, and ultimately causing the decline of the village as a whole. The point of this analogy is to suggest that internationalisms that ignore the individual nation are utopian and unrealistic—and in fact damaging to the international community—while an ideology focused on the national interest more effectively promotes world peace. The lesson taught here was that weak and poor states could not contribute to international peace activities and claimed, therefore, that true internationalism would emerge from the strengthening and development of ‘moral’ states such as Japan. Such states, it followed, recognized that nations have common interests and, therefore, did not recklessly invade other countries, but rather used their own national wealth and power to advance world peace and human welfare. This chapter went so far as to assert a mutual dependence between nationalism and internationalism, calling nationalism ‘the foundation of internationalism’ and concluding that ‘to love one's nation and make it rich and strong makes it possible to contribute surplus energy to international peace activities’. In contrast, poor, weak nations were likely to become a burden on international society.Footnote ⁸³

This link between nationalism and internationalism formed the first step of a more extreme move—one that would later become a mainstay of wartime rhetoric: using claims about ‘moral’ behaviour to connect the principle of international cooperation with policies of imperialism and aggression. In a section entitled ‘Japan's responsibility for international morality’, Yuhara's textbook discussed above asserted that, when countries ignore morality among nations, it is the great powers’ responsibility to correct that ‘immoral’ behaviour. The example presented was China's boycotting of Japanese goods, anti-Japanese education, and disregard of treaties, which (the textbook claims) resulted in the Manchurian Incident and, therefore, just ended up hurting China. What, of course, went unstated in the textbook was the Japanese aggression that had prompted such responses from China. Instead, viewing Chinese actions without context, the lesson concluded that ‘it is Japan's responsibility to establish Eastern peace . . . not just for our own benefit, but for the well-being of the East and the world’.Footnote ⁸⁴ According to this view, by engaging in activities deemed immoral, China was violating international morality, so that internationalist principles required Japanese action on the continent. Like Kanezaki Ken's analysis of the Greater East Asian Conference a decade later, this lesson used the cover of morality to turn the principle of internationalism into a justification of aggression.

The word ‘cooperation’ was also deployed as a euphemism for coercion. Textbooks used such rhetoric to explain Japanese aggression and imperialist expansion in a positive light, thus attempting to reinforce popular support for empire at the grassroots level. It is perhaps to be expected that the most egregious examples of this euphemistic pedagogy appeared in texts produced by the government bureaucracy. Textbooks of the late 1930s to early 1940s were shaped by two publications from the Ministry of Education, the aforementioned ‘Fundamentals of our National Polity’ (1937) and ‘The Way of the Subject’ (1941). The former provided a general critique of Western internationalism, while the latter echoed earlier criticisms of the League of Nations in its differentiation between the Western powers’ use of high-minded phrases like ‘justice and humanity’ to mask their selfish world domination and, in contrast, Japan's ‘profound and lofty’ mission of constructing a new world order based on moral principles.

‘The Way of the Subject’ emphasized that this mission could not be achieved without international cooperation, specifically with Manchukuo and China. Sounding appropriately Orwellian, it explained that the ultimate purpose of the war in China was peace: ‘Truly, the objective of the China Affair is to enlighten China, to strengthen Sino-Japanese cooperation, and to achieve coexistence and co-prosperity, thereby building up a new order in East Asia and contributing to the establishment of world peace.’Footnote ⁸⁵ Here, the rhetoric of international cooperation for peace and prosperity is central to the justification of war. The text went on to discuss the principle of hakkō ichiu, or ‘the eight corners of the world under one roof’. This concept, based on a phrase from an eighth-century account of the pacification of Japan by its mythical first emperor, was reinterpreted in the 1930s to imply imperial rule extending over the entire world, then deployed as one of the main ideological supports for wartime imperialism. ‘The Way of the Subject’ explained that this supposedly ancient principle was the ‘fundamental ideology of the construction of a new world order’.Footnote ⁸⁶ The rhetoric of morality and the sense of national mission combined to form a potent justification for aggressive war and expansion without abandoning the idea that Japan was acting not out of selfishness, but rather in the best interests of the world as a whole.

This theme was already present in ethics textbooks. The Education Ministry's 1939 normal-school textbook stated that Japan's diplomatic relations were based on the principle of hakkō ichiu. Referring to Jimmu, the mythical founding emperor of Japan, this textbook stated: ‘Our ideal is to spread the influence of imperial rule across the four seas and to cooperate with other countries for development based on Jimmu's founding spirit.’Footnote ⁸⁷ This statement of Japan's expansionist goals was followed by calls for cooperation and people's diplomacy. The juxtaposition of a proclamation of an imperialist ideal with cooperative internationalist principles made for a confusing sense of what was meant by cooperation. The 1943 sixth-grade textbook echoed these ideas, presenting the construction of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere as a project of international cooperation. Manchukuo, China, Thailand, and eastern Indochina were all identified as building close relations with Japan ‘and hand in hand, cooperating in the construction of Greater East Asia’.Footnote ⁸⁸ This ‘cooperation’, the text continued, was of course being led by Japan. This kind of propaganda seems transparent and certainly would not have been convincing to either Japan's wartime enemies or, by the time this textbook was published in 1943, the victims of imperialism. But, for Japanese schoolchildren (and even some conquered people), who, for the most part, had no access to opposing viewpoints or contradictory information, it potentially created a skewed understanding of the world, in which war was simply the means by which Japan ‘convinced’ other countries to cooperate for the mutual benefit of all, thereby fulfilling its international responsibilities as a great power and the leader of Asia.Footnote ⁸⁹

Textbook authors used the rhetoric of internationalism in the promotion of imperialism because, in the twentieth century, real isolation was not an option. Cooperation among nations toward a common goal was, therefore, presented to schoolchildren as the correct mode of action in the international arena. And, though this might be dismissed as ‘just rhetoric’, the fact that the government put such ideas into practice with events like the 1943 Greater East Asian Conference suggests the importance of rhetorical forms and discursive trends in policy formation.Footnote ⁹⁰ In presenting Japanese domination of Asia as ‘cooperation’, textbooks thus contributed to a new kind of imperialism that Prasenjit Duara calls the imperialism of ‘free nations’, in which imperialists espouse anti-colonial ideologies and emphasize cultural and ideological similarities, even as they control their dependencies through military subordination. Through the rhetoric of morality, Japanese leaders were able to reconcile the contradiction that Duara identifies between the two primary models for Japanese imperialism: modern Western nationalism and ideas current in East Asia, including anti-Westernism and anti-colonialism.Footnote ⁹¹

People's diplomacy

While taking care to warn students away from ‘dangerous’ strains of internationalism, textbooks encouraged alternative forms of cooperation, especially interactions occurring outside of governmental venues. This paralleled a growing commitment to ‘people's diplomacy’ by the Foreign Ministry, which supported various efforts to improve Japanese foreign relations through grassroots contacts in the 1930s.Footnote ⁹² At a time of tense government-level relations, foreign policy experts increasingly sought opportunities to establish and strengthen connections between Japanese subjects and the peoples of other nations, with the idea that personal contacts and first-hand experiences would promote understanding and sympathy for Japan and thus reduce criticism of its actions in Asia. Most of the schoolchildren reading these books would not grow up to join the Foreign Ministry, and textbook authors emphasized the roles that individuals could potentially play outside the sphere of government-level relations. This approach helped to ingrain ideas of internationalism even more deeply on young Japanese minds by making the maintenance of international morality the personal responsibility of every individual.

Textbook chapters on people's diplomacy, like those on international cooperation more generally, based the concept on principles that had already been instilled, by drawing connections between domestic community life and participation in a global community. Students were told that the lessons they had previously been taught regarding public welfare and civic virtues were not limited just to domestic activities, but also applied to contact with foreigners, whether in Japan or abroad. They learned that their individual interactions with foreigners could either smooth foreign relations or, if they acted immorally, conversely damage Japan's image abroad. Even in 1922, before the Foreign Ministry began its heavy promotion of people's diplomacy, the sixth-grade ethics text told students that they should always be aware of circumstances in other countries and, ‘when interacting with foreign people, always focus on increasing friendly relations between ourselves and others’.Footnote ⁹³ This lesson took on a greater urgency after Japan split with the primary organization of government-level multilateral engagement. The dire tone of the lesson on people's diplomacy in Kondō’s 1933 revision of Yuhara's middle-school textbook suggests the impact of Japan's withdrawal from the League of Nations on internationalist educators. Reminding students that different countries always have some interests in common, this textbook noted that the increasing interaction among different peoples had smoothed diplomatic relations. But it then proceeded to issue a warning: ‘If the people do not perceive this kind of relations between nations and act selfishly, that will not only violate international morality and cause trouble for other nations, but also damage trust in our own country and bring its downfall.’Footnote ⁹⁴ Since students were increasingly being taught that all is for the emperor and nation, it would have been a logical conclusion that interactions with foreigners could impact the nation's foreign relations. But putting diplomacy in the hands of non-professionals presented a new set of challenges, and the potential pitfalls of the popular approach were all too clear.

The connection between a rising interest in non-governmental diplomacy and Japan's break with the League of Nations is highlighted by the fact that discussions of people's diplomacy in textbooks were almost invariably positioned immediately following explanations of the withdrawal. For example, in education scholar Ōse Jintarō’s 1936 middle-school book, a chapter entitled ‘The people's global activities’ followed directly after one on ‘The true meaning of withdrawal’. That lesson on people's diplomacy stated: ‘We will not participate in League of Nations activities, but Japan must make even greater efforts in other spheres in order to realize this great national (kokuminteki) ideal.’Footnote ⁹⁵ It is significant that the word choice for ‘national’ is kokuminteki, explicitly including the kokumin, or national people, rather than, for example, kokkateki, which would suggest that agency was limited to the state (kokka). The book identified academia, economic relations, transportation, communication, and sports as areas in which Japanese people should engage in cooperative relations that transcended national borders.

The question of behaviour at international sports meets was especially significant around this time because, in the summer of 1936, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) selected Tokyo to host the 12th Summer Olympic Games. Though the 1940 Tokyo Olympiad would ultimately be cancelled, during two years of planning and preparation, the event was heavily promoted in Japan as an ideal opportunity for people's diplomacy.Footnote ⁹⁶ Ōse's textbook, which came out in September of 1936, just months after the IOC's decision, reminded students to cheer for their own countrymen, rather than jeering athletes from other countries, especially when those athletes are guests in Japan.Footnote ⁹⁷ This admonition was similar to the general discourse leading up to the Olympics, which was full of concern that the Japanese people must be taught how to behave in an ‘international’ manner.Footnote ⁹⁸

At least one middle-school textbook, published in 1938 by ethics education scholar Sasaki Hideichi, explicitly mentioned the Tokyo Olympics as a diplomatic opportunity for Japan. Sasaki considered education to be a fundamental aspect of broader social reform, and he sought to draw society into diplomacy by teaching children about the potential of such events to contribute to Japan's foreign policy goals. A chapter on ‘Diplomatic friendship’ asserted that, as the result of hosting this international event, ‘Japan's position in the world will be raised even higher, and at the same time, we will certainly achieve the fruits of international cooperation along with amicable diplomatic relations’. Part of this diplomatic effort would be to introduce Japan to the world, and Olympic advocates in many fields looked forward with either eager anticipation or anxious foreboding to having the eyes of the world fixed on their capital city. Sasaki may be included among the former group, insisting that ‘on this occasion, the great leap in the Japanese people's lifestyle will be seen. We must always take an attitude of not being ashamed of our great people, based on a true and complete Japanese spirit’.Footnote ⁹⁹ In this way, the globally popular event of the Olympic Games provided a space for nationalistic preening. In their discussions of the Olympics, textbooks, too, were prone to this kind of nationalist approach to internationalism, reinforcing such ideas among the nation's youth.

The post-1933 emphasis on people's diplomacy also reflected a turn toward Asia in international perspectives that took place at the same time among intellectuals and government leaders. One of the most typical reactions to news of Japan's withdrawal from the League of Nations was the claim that such a Euro-centric institution was not an appropriate venue for discussion of Asian matters.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In a resurgence of pan-Asianism, calls for the establishment of some kind of regional organization to replace the League came from many quarters.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Textbooks, too, urged a re-evaluation of Japan's relationships with Western and Asian countries. A chapter entitled ‘International friendship’ in education scholar Konishi Shigenao's 1935 middle-school textbook included a section on ‘People's diplomacy’, immediately following the full text of the Imperial Rescript announcing Japan's withdrawal from the League. Konishi asserted that ‘Diplomatic relations are not the duty of government officials only. This is the age of people's diplomacy’. But relying on the people meant the potential incursion of popular views into diplomatic relations, so Konishi also warned students against both baseless idolization of Westerners and contempt for Asians.Footnote ¹⁰² In this way, the lesson was aimed at preventing a kind of ‘reverse’ people's diplomacy that would result from negative interactions with Asian countries at the grassroots level.

Internationalist rhetoric was stretched and twisted by educators seeking to reconcile their understanding of the world with the realities of Japan's foreign relations, official slogans of Asian co-prosperity, and the exigencies of writing within the shrinking range allowed by government censors. After Japan's split with the League of Nations, the emperor, the Foreign Ministry, and theorists of international relations all worked to perpetuate both the ideal and practice of positive international engagement. Wartime ethics textbooks reveal the participation by the Ministry of Education, through its production and approval of the books, in the efforts by Japan's political and intellectual leadership to maintain the forms and rhetoric of internationalism while policies of aggression and territorial expansion seemed to indicate a contrary direction. Ethics textbooks echoed the specifics of these broader efforts—the affirmation of the principle of internationalism and the promotion of alternative means of engagement, including the shift of some responsibility to grassroots level people's diplomacy—and added the element of morality that was particular to a course in this subject. Internationalism is not a firm doctrine explicated by an identifiable set of texts, but rather an amorphous and mutable concept—a subjective worldview existing primarily in people's heads and expressed with words wielded politically. The versions of Wilsonian internationalism found in wartime Japanese textbooks are not necessarily examples of misunderstanding or misrepresenting internationalism. Rather, the flexibility of internationalism allowed its accommodation to new historical contexts and its mobilization toward disparate political goals.