Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History, Volume 1 (1850-1920) and Volume 2 (1920-Present) ed. by Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman (review)

The publication of Pan-Asianism is a seminal event: until now it has been almost impossible to find translations on this strand of thought, which (apart from the wartime period) has existed outside the political mainstream and often been discredited as deceiving, hypocriti­cal, expansionist, or fascist. The famous China scholar Takeuchi Yoshimi attempted to make Asianism more respectable by means of his collection of sources in the early 1960s, ¹ but it was only in the late 1990s that scholars such as Yamamuro Shinichi did away with the taboo and turned prewar and wartime Japanese views of Asia, including Asianism, into a respectable subject of study. ² In the last decade Japan has seen a wave of related publications, including many reprints of Asianist works by prewar right-wing opinion leaders. Christopher Szpil­man is one of the most knowledgeable scholars in this field and has been instrumental in the publication of these Japanese-language sources. Sven Saaler, meanwhile, has functioned as the nucleus of an international group of scholars on Pan-Asianism ever since a conference held in 2002 ("Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History"), the results of which made up the first serious academic volume on this subject in the English language. ³ That volume was a prequel to the collection under review, which can be regarded as the culmination to date of the group's efforts.

This two-volume collection is even more ambitious than its prequel, and not merely in size. It ranges from the late Tokugawa period to the contemporary era and is not limited to Japan: the original sources also come from Korea, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey, and France and even include female voices, and the three dozen scholars who contributed to these volumes represent no fewer than four continents. It is simply impossible to review the content of this collection within the space allotted here, as the variety is almost breathtaking: the editors have chosen to present us with hundreds of relatively short translations-all with introductions that are sometimes substantially longer than the translated sources-divided over seventy-four chapters. Although some may prefer more sizable translations, there can be no doubt that in its scope and variety this easily is the best sourcebook on Pan-Asianism available in any language. Every academic library on Japan should stock this collection, and many scholars on modern Japan and Asia will benefit from owning it.

With the trend of increasing attention to regional unification in (East) Asia, this collection is very timely. However, there is a strong ambivalence to Japan's participation in-and con­tribution to-regional endeavors to bring about an economically or politically unified Asia. The sources collected in these volumes prove that this ambivalence has very deep roots, which arguably go back as far as the crafting in the late Edo period of an entity called "Japan" and of a Japanese identity in the form of kokugaku (often translated as nativism, national learning, or proto-nationalism, but perhaps best rendered as "Japan studies").

Matsuda Kōichirō gives us a concise but important insight into these roots and empha­sizes that throughout the Edo period "Japanese intellectuals by and large did not accept the concept of 'Asia' as symbolizing a common regional and cultural identity" (vol. 1, p. 45). While on the one hand the new concept of "Asia" was a useful tool in doing away with the sinocentric view of the world, on the other it was a foreign concept that was gaining increas­ingly wider usage concomitant with Western dominance in the world. The following quota­tion of Aizawa Seishisai is very clear:

It is only the Westerners' arrogance that has made them use the term "Asia" and include our divine land as part of it. For that...