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Paper short abstract

Takushoku University was a center of higher learning that trained privileged colonial officials in Japan’s colonies. By looking at this institution, this paper examines the institutional foundations of Pan-Asianism and its complex relationship with Japanese settler colonialism.

Paper long abstract

Takushoku University was established in 1900 to train personnel for colonial rule in Taiwan and, after 1907, in Korea. Students at this higher education institution studied law, commerce, and languages, and until the mid-1910s, typically secured privileged positions within the colonial governments and financial institutions of Korea and Taiwan after graduation. In other words, this school provided well-educated professional colonizers to the Japanese settler communities.

However, as Japanese settlers pressured colonial authorities to establish local higher education institutions—and as their own sons gained access to these privileged positions through racially biased quotas in colonial schools—most Takushoku graduates gradually lost their professional foothold in the colonies. In response, Takushoku’s leadership abolished Korean and Taiwanese language training in 1920, shifting focus to Chinese, Russian, Dutch, and Malay. Around the same time, the university began recruiting anti-Western thinkers such as Ōkawa Shūmei and Mitsukawa Kametarō, who helped reframe the identity of graduates from colonial administrators to anti-Western expansionists. Students at Takushoku embraced this new identity, even erecting a statue on campus of Waki Kōzō, a fellow student who died while serving as an army interpreter during the Russo-Japanese War.

By looking at this process, this paper examines the institutional foundations of Pan-Asianism and its complex relationship with Japanese settler colonialism. It pays particular attention to the Korean case, highlighting the intense competition between colonized subjects and aspiring settlers, as well as between settlers and metropolitan elites—tensions that underpinned this paradoxical transformation.