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Identifying the Site of Creation

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Japanese Geopolitics and the Western Imagination

Part of the book series: Critical Security Studies in the Global South ((CSSGS))

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Abstract

This chapter begins the historical investigation of Japanese geopolitics. Firstly, it engages with contemporary geopolitics literature in relation to current world politics, and then identifies a shortage in the literature for analyzing Japanese geopolitics. Proposing shifting the analytical focus away from the boundary between states to the inside of the state, this chapter trips back to the past to examine the site of creation for the import of geopolitics. Importing the notion of the state originally from China, Japanese people understood their space in relation to the outside with their intellectual tradition. In their imagination, the question asked was “who are we,” rather than “who are they,” having in mind multiple others/selves such as the West, the East, and the South, whose boundaries between the selves were fairly blurry.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a recent discussion on the conception of hegemony in the field of international relations in relation to Asia, see for example Lee (2016).

  2. 2.

    This became a big debate known as the “Nihon Shihonshugi Ronsō” (Debate on Japanese capitalism) in the 1930s (Koyama and Yamazaki 2014 [1947]).

  3. 3.

    Nakano (2011) classifies Uchimura as part of the school of “Japanese Humanism.” I acknowledge this classification, but Uchimura’s humanism is better understood in the wider context of the humanistic tendency seen in modern Japanese thought, which is distinguished from European humanism. Both Takagi (1942) and Yamaguchi (1943) named Uchimura as a forerunning “geopolitician.”

  4. 4.

    The Japanese version was published later in 1939.

  5. 5.

    The title can be translated as “A New Theory of Human Rights.”

  6. 6.

    This statement should not be understood as an idealist statement, since the whole tone throughout the book is rather cynical and sarcastic.

  7. 7.

    The oldest example of Nanshinron can be seen in Bōkaisaku written by Nobuhiro Satō (1769–1850) (Yano 1970: 48; Hirano and Kiyono 1942: 13–19). Satō is also considered to be a pioneer of the idea of Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Hirano and Kiyono 1942; Miwa 1981: 199–200) and Japanese geopolitics (Ishibashi 1943: 15).

  8. 8.

    In 1915, the Nanyō Foundation was established, and recently renamed as the Asia-Nanyō Foundation. The mission of the foundation was to “contribute global interests” (http://newicf.org/history.php: accessed on July 21, 2018).

  9. 9.

    In the first movie of Godzilla (1954), the monster was born in the South. In this movie, the monster was depicted as a tragic product of human progress represented by hydrogen bomb.

  10. 10.

    A large part of the book was drafted in 1928 and 1929, while the whole book was first published in 1935. The quote is from the English translation of the book.

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    Atsuko Watanabe

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Watanabe, A. (2019). Identifying the Site of Creation. In: Japanese Geopolitics and the Western Imagination. Critical Security Studies in the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04399-5_5

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