4 - Sun Yat-sen and Japanese Pan-Asianists

Summary

In his pioneering post-war work on Pan-Asianism, Takeuchi Yoshimi, an expert on modern Chinese literature, noted in the 1960s that what was known in Japan as ajiashugi or Pan-Asianism was too variegated a concept to have any clear definition (2006, p. 255). “There are as many interpretations as there are books written about it”, as he put it. Indeed there are many different types of Pan-Asianists, but as Eri Hotta has recently observed, Pan-Asianists “were of one mind on the question of why they were Pan-Asianists, which was that ‘Asia was one’ and ‘Asia was weak’, and utterly and unconditionally at that” (2007, p. 49). Pan-Asianism, briefly defined, is an idea that called for the unity of Asian people in order to resist the plundering of Asia by western imperialists, an idea widely shared among nationalists and revolutionaries throughout Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Pan-Asian sentiments emerged in Japan in the nineteenth century, but it was in Sun Yat-sen that the Japanese Pan-Asianists found inspiration for and a means with which to pursue their idea of Pan-Asian solidarity, or more specifically, close cooperation between Japan and China for the sake of Asian liberation. This chapter examines the Pan-Asianism of Sun Yat-sen by analysing his last major speech in Japan, and the Pan-Asianism of his Japanese supporters. It also discusses the success and failure of their Pan- Asian ideals.

Japan's Pan-Asianists in Meiji Japan

Japan's Pan-Asianism is often equated with imperialism and colonialism. However, in the late nineteenth century, Japanese Pan-Asianists regarded themselves as playing the role of promoting Asian solidarity for the sake of reviving Asia, and not for the sake of expanding Japan's own interests in Asia. “Asia is One”, the famous opening line of Okakura Tenshin's book, The Ideals of the East (1904), was an expression of this ideal that Asia is one and that Asia must be one in order to liberate itself from the subjugation by the West (Matsumoto 2000, pp. 54–57).