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9 - The Japanese Empire

from Part I - Imperial and Postcolonial Settings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2023

By
Sherzod Muminov
Edited by
Cathie Carmichael ,
Matthew D'Auria  and
Aviel Roshwald
Cathie Carmichael
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Matthew D'Auria
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Aviel Roshwald
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington DC
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Summary

Fundamentals of our National Polity (Kokutai no hongi), where these quotations are from, was published by Japan’s education ministry in March 1937, months before the nation plunged into war against China and, subsequently, the Second World War.1 A portable canon of imperial ideology, the Fundamentals attacked the alien ideas that had become too prominent in Japanese society, particularly “individualism, which is the root of modern Occidental ideologies.”2 Yet the booklet contained more than simple propaganda; by instructing the imperial subjects to reaffirm their loyalty to the emperor and the nation, it reflected the Japanese state’s attempt to enlist citizens in its revolt against the West. As such, the pamphlet provides a useful historic vantage point. It illuminates, retrospectively, what had gone wrong in Japan’s quest for modernity over the preceding eight decades, which ended in an all-out confrontation with the Allied powers.

Keywords

JapanJapanese EmpireSecond World WarPacific Warwar crimesEast AsiaJapanese EmperormodernizationcolonialismPan-Asianism
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism , pp. 179 - 209
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

Further Reading

Barclay, Paul D., Outcasts of Empire: Japan’s Rule on Taiwan’s Savage Border, 1874–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dickinson, Frederick R., War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914–1919 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999).Google Scholar
Gluck, Carol, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jansen, Marius B., The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Shimazu, Naoko, Japanese Society at War: Death, Memory and the Russo-Japanese War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).Google Scholar
Ravina, Mark, To Stand with the Nations of the World: Japan’s Meiji Restoration in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).Google Scholar
Takashi, Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).Google Scholar
Uchida, Jun, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011).Google Scholar

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