by WAIYEE LOH
Observers have long hailed Japan’s aptitude for cultural synthesis. Is this characterization warranted, or does it reflect a collective fantasy about exceptionalism?
This year marks the eightieth anniversary of the end of the Asia-Pacific War. From 1937 to 1945, the militarist state in Japan battled not only for colonies and resources but also to validate certain key ideas that continue to shape how we talk about Japan’s apparent distinctiveness. One of these ideas was Pan-Asianism: a mode of thinking that saw Japan as uniquely adept at synthesizing diverse peoples and cultures such that both the particular and the universal would co-exist within a single whole. While this form of Japanese exceptionalism manifested itself explicitly in wartime propaganda of the 1930s and 1940s, it goes at least as far back as art historian Okakura Kakuz?’s writings on Japanese aesthetics at the turn of the century and extends forward to the Japanese government’s ongoing Cool Japan campaign. Although the war ended in 1945, the ideologies that animated it remain, in mutated form, with us today.
Japanese imperialism in the years leading up to and during the Asia-Pacific War borrowed heavily from contemporaneous Western forms of imperialism, but it wasn’t simply derivative. After overthrowing the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868, the new Meiji government embarked on a program of intensive modernization—which was often synonymous with Westernization—under the slogan of bunmei kaika or “civilization and enlightenment.” Japan’s leaders sought to bring the country in line with the supposedly advanced nation-states of the West, and that meant emulating Western institutions and practices, including extending Japan’s influence over the countries surrounding it.
Japan acquired its first overseas colony, Taiwan, in 1895. It annexed the Korean peninsula in 1910. Like many other industrialized nations, Japan in the 1930s turned to fascism and the construction of autarkic economic empires as a solution to the instabilities engendered by capitalist modernity. Yet there was a major strand in Japanese political thought that set Japanese imperialism in this period apart from earlier European colonialisms and the expansionist activities of Nazi Germany and Italy. Japanese imperialist discourse in the 1930s and early 1940s often portrayed Japanese military aggression as a historic mission to liberate Asia from the European and American imperial powers that had dominated the region for centuries. Japan would then combine all the peoples of Asia into a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, namely, a regional political and economic system where each nation or race would perform a specific role determined by its “natural” cultural attributes.
This pan-Asian ideal was essentially a reaction against the prevailing assumption that being modern required non-Western nations to assimilate into a universal culture based on Western norms and to abandon the cultural traditions that made them unique. Wartime propaganda such as this postcard from Singapore promoted this view by featuring racialized human figures representing different national and ethnic groups gathered around a central Japanese figure (usually in military uniform). Japan, the militarist state insisted, was destined to lead Asia because it could do what no one else could: synthesize discrete elements into a harmonious whole yet maintain the distinctiveness of those elements.
This vision of particularity-in-universality took on its most obvious form during the war, but it had already emerged in earlier forms of pan-Asianism, most notably in Okakura Kakuz?’s English-language writings on Japanese aesthetics. Okakura was born in Yokohama in 1863 to a silk merchant family of samurai origins. He met the Orientalist scholar Ernest Fenollosa when he was a student at the Imperial University of Tokyo and was deeply inspired by the latter’s admiration for Asian art. He later became one of the foremost authorities on Japanese art in the Meiji period. Across his three English-language works—Ideals of the East (1903), The Awakening of Japan (1904), and The Book of Tea (1906)—Okakura developed a set of ideas that laid the foundation for subsequent narratives about Japan’s apparent genius for cultural hybridization.
In Ideals of the East, Okakura argues that Asian civilization is founded on a shared tradition of spirituality and that Japanese art uniquely reflects this tradition because of Japan’s ability to hybridize different cultures without melting them down into an undifferentiated mishmash. Okakura claims that, because the Japanese race is an “Indo-Tartaric” amalgamation, the Japanese people have been especially capable of absorbing Indian and Chinese culture since ancient times. He also asserts that the Japanese race has the special ability to combine the new with the old, the foreign with the indigenous. He uses the metaphor of tidal waves shaping the shore to illustrate his point, writing that “the history of Japanese art becomes thus the history of Asiatic ideals—the beach where each successive wave of Eastern thought has left its sand-ripple as it beat against the national consciousness.”
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