This is a revised, updated and abbreviated version of the introduction to the two volume collection by the authors of Pan-Asianism. A Documentary History Vol. 1 covers the years 1850-1920; Vol. 2 covers the years 1850-present, link. The economic and political power of Asia, the world's largest continent, is increasing rapidly. According to the latest projections, the gross domestic products of China and India, the world's most populous nations, will each surpass that of the United States in the not-too-distant future. China's economy, like Japan's, is already larger than that of any single European country. With this new economic might comes growing diplomatic influence. The twenty-first century, many pundits agree, will be an Asian century. This undisputed Asian success story, together with its accompanying tensions and discontents, has attracted much media and scholarly attention. Yet for all this talk of Asia, there is no consensus on what Asia actually stands for as a whole. Is the vast Asian landmass a single entity? There has never been—and perhaps never will be—universal agreement on this question.

One of the most striking aspects of the international history of the 1930s is the revival and official endorsement of a pan-Asian vision of regional world order in Japan. The pan-Asian discourse of East-West civilizational difference and comparison was influential in various intellectual circles in Asia. But during the 1920s, as a political project of Asian solidarity, it was irrelevant for Japan's foreign policy, and it did not have any international momentum or movement. The period after the Manchurian Incident in 1931, however, witnessed a process by which pan-Asianist ideas and projects became part of Japan's official foreign policy rhetoric. After 1933 Japan's pan-Asian internationalism began to overshadow liberal internationalism, gradually becoming the mainstream vision of an alternative world order. This process culminated in the declaration of the Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere in 1940, a project that relied heavily on the rhetoric of panAsian internationalism. In 1943, seventeen years after the ineffectual 1926 Nagasaki pan-Asiatic conference that was ridiculed by official and liberal circles in Japan, the Japanese government itself hosted a Greater East Asia Conference to which it invited the leaders of the Philippines, Burma, the provincial government of India, the Nanking government of China, Manchukuo, and Thailand.

The January 1922 issue of Shonen kurabu (Boy's Club) carried the first episode of an exciting new “hot-blooded novel” (nekketsu shosetsu) drawn from the fertile imagination of noted children's writer Miyazaki Ichiu. For fourteen consecutive issues Miyazaki enthralled Japanese children with depictions of Japanese valour and the Yamato spirit (Yamato damashii) locked in a titanic struggle against a duplicitous and rapacious foreign enemy. The fate of the navy and of the nation itself hung in the balance. The Imperial navy fought valiantly against a technologically superior foe but was ultimately destroyed. Then, in Japan's darkest hour, the nation was saved by a group of true patriots, led by a child warrior commanding a powerful new technology. All Japan wept. This was the Future War Between Japan and America, “the greatest naval battle in history.”

He stood among the Japanese soldiers wearing a weather-beaten visored cap over his short, dark hair and a rough hewn jacket covering his broad soldiers, a cigarette angling away from his square jaw and a camera dangling from his gloved hand. As they studied documents, the Japanese troops contrasted with Jack London in their box hats and high collared uniforms. A photographer present immortalized London looking like the adventurer and writer that he was, one drawn to the battle like a missionary to his calling, who skillfully recorded the machinations of great powers while sympathizing with the underdogs who struggled to survive.

During the 1930s, a dramatic increase in Japanese exports to Africa and Japan's growing influence in Ethiopia led many Europeans and South African whites to evoke the specter of the ‘Yellow Peril’ and to call for measures to halt Japan's ‘penetration’ of Africa. Japan's close ties with Ethiopia and her growing exports to South Africa were of particular concern. Japan and Italy were able to reach an agreement with regard to their conflict of interest in Ethiopia, but Japan's relations with the British Empire suffered as a result of anti-Japanese sentiment in South Africa.

Former Prime Minister Mori Yoshiro seems an unlikely champion of a multicultural Japan. His brief term of office is, after all, perhaps best remembered for the furore he evoked by a speech in which he described Japan as a “Divine Nation headed by the Emperor”. This echo of prewar nationalism stirred fears at home and abroad that senior Japanese politicians still subscribed to Shinto myths of a unique and racially superior Japan. Yet Mori today is an active participant in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's “Diet Members’ League for Promoting Exchanges of Foreign Human Resources” (Gaikoku Jinzai Koryu Suishin Giin Renmei), an awkwardly-named body whose mission is to promote mass immigration by making Japan a magnet for skilled workers from around the world. (Akashi and Ogawa 2008, 69)

At the Chicago Liberty Meeting in April 1899, organized to protest U.S. imperialist advances in the Philippines, Jane Addams was the only woman of eight plenary speakers. There she stated, “To ‘protect the weak’ has always been the excuse of the ruler and tax-gatherer, the chief, the king, the baron; and now, at last, of ‘the white man’” (Addams 1899). A few months earlier, in late 1898, the United States purchased the Philippines from Spain in the Treaty of Paris despite a preexisting revolutionary movement for independence. Subsequently, the Philippine-American War broke out, with Filipinos continuing to seek an end to colonial rule, be it the rule of Spain or the United States. President Roosevelt officially announced the war to be over on July 4, 1902, although fighting continued in some provinces through 1913.

Speaking on May 4, 1902 at the newly-opened Arlington Cemetery, in the first Memorial Day address there by a U.S. President, Theodore Roosevelt placed colonial violence at the heart of American nation-building. In a speech before an estimated thirty thousand people, brimming with “indignation in every word and every gesture,” Roosevelt inaugurated the Cemetery as a landscape of national sacrifice by justifying an ongoing colonial war in the Philippines, where brutalities by U.S. troops had led to widespread debate in the United States. He did so by casting the conflict as a race war. Upon this “small but peculiarly trying and difficult war” turned “not only the honor of the flag” but “the triumph of civilization over forces which stand for the black chaos of savagery and barbarism.” Roosevelt acknowledged and expressed regret for U.S. abuses but claimed that for every American atrocity, “a very cruel and very treacherous enemy” had committed “a hundred acts of far greater atrocity.” Furthermore, while such means had been the Filipinos’ “only method of carrying on the war,” they had been “wholly exceptional on our part.” The noble, universal ends of a war for civilization justified its often unsavory means. “The warfare that has extended the boundaries of civilization at the expense of barbarism and savagery has been for centuries one of the most potent factors in the progress of humanity,” he asserted, but “from its very nature it has always and everywhere been liable to dark abuses.