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Paper short abstract

In early postwar Japan, Sinophile intellectuals revisited their views on Japan’s imperialism and the war, including wartime conceptions of ‘Asia’. This paper studies Takeuchi Yoshimi's writings to understand their role in the rehabilitation of Asianism and anti-Western discourse in postwar Japan.

Paper long abstract

In the early postwar years, Sinophile Japanese intellectuals revisited their views on Japan’s imperialism and its war against China and the US. This critical engagement also included re-addressing wartime conceptions of ‘Asia’ and their role in history, the present, and the future. A prominent example is Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910-1977), originally a scholar of Chinese literature, who had embraced an anti-imperialist conception of pan-Asianism. In the early postwar years, Takeuchi aimed to encourage the Japanese to rediscover 'Asia' by taking a critical perspective on Japan’s own culture and history. From the 1990s onwards, Takeuchi’s writings were at the core of the renewed interest in concepts of Asian self-affirmation and later strongly influenced the ‘Asia as Method’ boom in the 2000s. This paper studies Takeuchi’s early postwar writings to understand which role they played in the rehabilitation of Asianist conceptions and of anti-Western discourse in postwar Japan. It also addresses his contributions to the critique of hierarchies in knowledge production that has aimed at the emancipation of marginalized voices from the ‘non-West’.