Short Abstract

This panel explores how wartime Japanese intellectuals defined “Asia.” It highlights the administrative and legislative contexts of their work, their networks, and knowledge circulation, with particular attention to border-crossing intellectuals between metropole and colony.

Long Abstract

Eighty years after the end of WWII, Japan continues to grapple with the political divisions and divergent historical perceptions that its wartime and colonial past left between itself and its Asian neighbors. Throughout the long postwar era, a substantial body of scholarship has sought to reconsider Japan’s historical engagement with Asia—whether in pursuit of regional reconciliation or as part of a broader effort to critically confront the legacies of war. Yet much of this discourse, shaped by strong political overtones, has tended to overlook the diverse circumstances in which knowledge about “Asia” was produced, including the institutional infrastructures, actors, and networks that positioned intellectuals within the imperial sphere.

In this panel, we clarify how wartime Japanese intellectuals framed “Asia” by foregrounding the administrative and legislative contexts of their work, the networks through which they communicated, and the circulation of knowledge within these structures. We pay particular attention to their positionality—especially those who crossed borders and lived between Japan and the Gaichi, in order to reconsider wartime discourse on “Asia” as multilayered and interconnected rather than a single, uniform narrative.

The first presentation provides an overall background to wartime Japanese intellectual discourses. It highlights two crucial conditions: the effort to formulate a uniquely Japanese philosophy of life through the Kokutai Meichō (Clarification of the National Polity) movement and the construction of a distinct Japanese worldview in the ideology of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The second presentation examines Japanese social scientists in the Gaichi. Focusing on the economics professors at Keijō Imperial University, it sheds light on how the specific conditions of colonial Korea shaped their paradigms of conducting social science. The third presentation examines the Tōa Kenkyujo’s (Japanese East Asia Research Institute) surveys of rural China in the early 1940s. It analyzes wartime discourses on the “Asiatic” village community and elucidates the power structures underlying their production of knowledge. The last presentation uses early postwar writings to reassess Japan’s “progressive intellectuals” and their views of China, focusing on Takeuchi Yoshimi’s contributions to Japanese debates on “Asia” that shaped postwar perspectives and continue to influence contemporary intellectual discourse.