If you are an empire, how do you coax a society perceived as inferior into ideological collaboration for the purposes of modern, imperial integration? This book offers a welcome perspective on Japan’s pan-Asianist project of absorbing the Philippines in the Japanese empire before and during the Second World War. Following a long thread of pan-Asianism as political thought and imperial propaganda, Matthiessen lays out when, how and why Japan’s pan-Asianist message failed to convince Filipino ears, against American competition since 1898. As a study of imperial hubris in theory and practice, the book shows the fragility of regional centralization. Chapters 2-4 focus on Japanese perceptions of the Philippines within the pan-Asianist project from its Meiji origins to wartime occupation. Chapter 5 explores Filipino versions of pan-Asianism from the 1890s to resistance in the Independence movement.
The narrative is informed by a Filipino-centred reading of Japanese intellectual proclamations of pan-Asianism and its political expression during the occupation. Pan-Asianism was an ideological vision of the Japanese empire which explained to Japanese and Asian imperial subjects the attractiveness of Asian life under Japan’s benevolent tutelage. If that brainchild had seen the light of the world, it would have been greeted by the bright Japanese sun as the Dai Tōa Kyōeiken, the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’. First proclaimed by Japan’s Foreign Minister Arita Hachirō on 29 June 1940 in a radio address, the Sphere came into print through the August 1940 issue of the Tokyo Gazette. The book misleadingly ascribes the first proclamation to Arita’s successor, Matsuoka Yōsuke, who offered his version a year later, on 1 August 1941.
The book speaks to the strength of Japan’s pan-Asianist message, reflected by official treatises and the Dai Ajiashugi, used by Filipino pan-Asianists like Benigno Ramos in 1935. To Ramos as to his Japanese supporters, liberation from the American yoke was inseparable from liberation by Japan. Both agendas coincided in time and intertwined in sentiment. To Japanese pan-Asianists, Ramos’ attitude fits well into the official ideology of pan-Asianism. Wouldn’t shedding all Western influence in favour of pan-Asianist re-unification end all troubles? Wouldn’t Asian societies quickly find their way to that curious, imagined mix of immaterial happiness and material well-being, once Western imperialism and its capitalist exploitation would be kicked out of the door?
Among the Asian societies envisaged and targeted by Japanese pan-Asianism, the Philippines featured the promise of success. The Davao community on Mindanao in the Southern Philippines (where President Duterte resides today) boasted a hundred years ago ‘the largest Japanese community in Southeast Asia’, according to Matthiessen (1). Why, then, did the Philippines not present ‘an obvious choice for an inclusion’ into Japan’s vision of a regional, Asian bloc (2)? It was perplexing to this reviewer that the book does not explain why Japanese residents of the Philippines did or did not become instrumental to the project of pan-Asianist conversion. Why did not their presence obliterate the need to seek or claim kinship between Japan and the Philippines? Or were Japanese transnationals, in fact, integral to pan-Asianist integration?
Intellectual and military history combined illustrate how ideological planning and occupation policy were correlated and to what effect. Ideology and geopolitics diverged and confused. As in the Philippines, Thailand may offer an example of massive Japanese recalculations. But although ‘going to the Philippines’ was somehow ‘like coming home’ to some, like the historian and anthropologist Nishimura Shinji in 1942, (62) this ‘exoteric’ vocabulary of familial conviviality (the dōbun dōshu mode of imperial endearment) was only one half. The other was critical, Japanese voices of cultural particularism, represented by the ‘esoteric’ Rōyama Masamichi and Yabe Teiji, members of the Shōwa Kenkyūkai. The two strands of policy advice were diametrically opposed: The first made geopolitics into kin, the second kin into geopolitics.
The vision and project of Japanese pan-Asianism in the Philippines extended preceding propaganda in Korea and Taiwan. Within the ‘special training group’, set up in 1938, four teams of 150 men each were tasked with the ‘Southern Area’ of Singapore, Malaya, Burma and the Philippines, to work hand in hand with the First Department Research Section of the Army General Staff (114-115). Not all these distinct strands of pan-Asianism have come under attack by nationalist historians in China, Korea, Taiwan, India, Indonesia and elsewhere.
From the start, imperial timing mattered. Proclamations of the Sphere inaugurated the Japanese assault on the French, Dutch and British colonies of Southeast Asia, now that their European governments had to fend off Nazi Germany at home. To Rōyama, Nazi Germany’s Balkan bloc, in Ernst Wagemann’s Der neue Balkan of 1939, provided not only a model for Japan’s Asian economic bloc (68). It also showed that spheres (kōiki) were a feature of the time, aligning Japan’s pan-Asianism with pan-movements in Europe and America. But ironically, the focus on imperial planning underappreciates the radicalization of the Japanese empire and its cleavages. Support of pan-Asianism did not guarantee political blessings by an empire in flux. Three of Nishimura’s major publications were banned as early as 1941 for expressing Liberal thought.
The trajectory of Japanese expansion, comparatively neglected in North American and Western European research, emerges here as a failed propaganda effort that entailed the political rhetoric and practice of imperial integration, from metropolitan proclamation to aggressive implementation by military means. If geographic proximity and racial kinship were meant to justify imperial aggrandisement, intelligent imperial commentators still saw the limits of determinism. If geographic proximity warranted imperial integration, the dynamics could also play against Japan. Rōyama Masamichi conceded not without a measure of self-critical reflection that the Chinese hinterland (ouchi) was uncomfortably close to the Soviet Union (71). Geographic determinism for hierarchical impositions of imperial affiliation was more easily claimed than proven.
This book encourages more precise conceptualizations of the changing configurations of relations between East and Southeast Asia. Occasional generalizations about ‘Southeast Asia’ could have been avoided, thanks to the volume Locating Southeast Asia: Geographies of Knowledge and Politics of Space, edited by Paul Kratoska, Remco Raben and Henk Schulte Nordholt from 2005, Asia, credited in footnote 17, which explicitly warned against the analytic uniformity of this supposed world region across time. Surprisingly, Japanese scholarship, although worldwide at the top of this game, is given short shrift. The bibliography strongly prefers U.S. publications, as do key points of the argumentation. Where are the Japanese publications of Gotō Ken’ichi. Meanwhile, Anglophone readers can now consult Yoshimi Yoshiaki’s Kusa no ne no fashizumu: Nihon minshū no sensō taiken in Ethan Mark’s translation of March 2015. Also missing is Barak Kushner’s recent The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda on the political spread of imperial ideology.
In sum, the Philippine historical baggage conditioned the prospects for compliance with Japanese imperial purposes, counteracting a very sustained effort of wartime propaganda. A heartening discovery for underdogs, a frustration for those craving more power today than yesterday and more tomorrow than today.
