The Intellectual History of the Imagined Asia

Title

The Intellectual History of the Imagined Asia

Author

OGATA Yasushi

Page

49-76

DOI

10.6163/tjeas.2014.11(1)49

Abstract

　　In the late 19th century, Japan often took Western countries as their models for modernization. Overshadowed by Western civilization, versions of pan- Asianism and East Asian alliance proposed before the end of WWII often constituted nothing more than the "imagination of Asia." However, after the defeat in 1945 and having received the impact of China's Communist revolution, Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910-1977) advocated the notion of "the East" (toyō) as an antithesis of the West. He claimed that modernization have multiple types and suggested a new model entailing Asia's resistance as its content.
　　Reflective of Japan's drastic economic growth in the late 1960s, Umesao Tadao (1920-2010) proposed his famous ecological view of history that contrasts the different paths of development between the center and peripheries of Eurasia. Contrary to Takeuchi's model, Umesao intended to show that Japan's modernization followed a route different from that of Asian societies in general. Nevertheless, quite to the surprise of Umesao, the view that expounds the similarities between Japan and Britain as two cultures peripheral to Eurasia aroused the interest of the Japanese intellectual to regard Japan as a maritime civilization; they started to situate Japan in the Asian oceanic region (with Taiwan at its head) and consider the relationship between geography and Japan's modernization. What Takeuchi and Umesao attempted to do was to bring the prewar Asian imagination into reality to facilitate Japan's transformation. However, after the failure of China's 1989 movement for democratization and the collapse of the socialist polities of Eastern European countries, it seems that, for the Japanese, real Asia has fallen back into imagination again. Arguably, to reexamine Asia's modernity on the realistic ground is a critical issue for Japan and even for whole, particularly East, Asia.

Keyword

Pan-Asianism, Datsu-A, Wang Hui imagination of Asia, Takeuchi Yoshimi, Hu Shi, John Dewey, ecological view of history, Han Yuhai, "The Long Nineteenth Century"

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