Internationalizing the Pacific: The United States, Japan and the Institute of Pacific Relations in War and Peace, 1919-45 (review)

With this extensively researched, well documented, and exquisitely presented volume, Tomoko Akami—a historian at the Australian National University—has produced a vital resource for students of international affairs. Those with an interest in nongovernmental organizations and Asia-Pacific regionalism will want to pay particular attention, with Akira Iriye's useful foreword being of special additional interest in this regard. Akami's impressive use of wide-ranging archival materials dealing with American and Japanese participation in the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) makes her analysis of even greater importance, as do her constant efforts to examine the class and gender biases caused by the elite maleness of the IPR, the concept of "non-state agency" in international affairs, the interaction between national delegations and state governments, the role of nationalism, the way regional initiatives can take on international aims, and the Institute's own brand of Orientalism.

Readers of this journal will want to review Akami's comments on the relationship between Japan and China in the early twentieth century (with the issue of Manchuria prominent at the IPR's 1929 conference and having an impact on the organization through 1933) and her assessment of colonialist perspectives apparent in debates over the participation of Korea and the Philippines. She also offers several interesting and extended insights into the involvement in the IPR of persons such as Fumimaro Konoe, Masamichi Royama, Inazo Nitobe, Edward Carter, Jerome Greene, Merle Davis, Lionel Curtis, and Herbert Norman.

The author's main mission throughout is to examine the nature of the IPR's challenge to the dominant institutions and ideologies of international politics in the decades following World War I. Akami first attempts to come to grips with intraorganizational politics, an effort that will make the book of value to practitioners within NGOs today and students wishing to learn lessons from comparisons with other such entities, especially given the rising academic belief in the utility of NGOs and nongovernmental expertise in international relations as we open the twenty-first century. That the American government at first thought the creation of the IPR to be a bad idea will be of interest here. She also comments on the different definitions of a "Pacific Community" held by leading participants, although the presence and identification of competing views should not be surprising given the nature and purpose of the Institute. The pursuit of regional cooperation assumes a lack thereof, and few organizations have members who all have the same motives or think the same way about the organization they have joined.

This said, Akami's decision to set the IPR within the context of Wilsonian or liberal internationalism is useful, given the relationship between many early IPR leaders, the creation of the League of Nations, emerging international-affairs think tanks, and the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), even if the Pacific Community idea can be traced back to a time earlier than Akami suggests. Still, her certainty that for most participants Pacific Community "meant an American-led regional order" (p. 123) is questionable. The detailed evidence she presents may suggest this to be the case in the United States and Japan, but it less evident elsewhere. What is needed now is for fellow researchers to take up the challenge of researching the participation of other countries in the Institute and for Akami herself to consider making more use of other works on the IPR, especially when it comes to the difference between the IPR and other types of NGOs (differences which make her conclusions on page 280 problematic), the Institute's relationship with the Rockefeller Foundation, its role as a precursor of Asian studies in Western academe, the changing definitions of "security" within the IPR over time, the connection between the IPR's pre-1945 and post-1945 histories, and the link between...