Circumventing the Evils of Colonialism: Yanaihara Tadao and Zionist Settler Colonialism in Palestine

This essay links Japanese and Zionist settler colonialism through the writing of Yanaihara Tadao (1893–1961), professor and longtime chair of colonial policy at Tokyo Imperial University. In exploring the connection between Yanaihara and Zionism, this study treats settler colonialism as a traveling concept.

After reminding readers that Japanese and Zionist settler colonial projects operated in the same temporal framework—the early twentieth century—this essay sets out to challenge the traditional borders of knowledge, which organized scholarship into boundaries established by area studies. While the ideas Yanaihara was interested in may have derived from Zionists in Palestine, Yanaihara did not consider them to be exclusive to the Zionist project in Palestine. In fact, he considered them relevant for Japan's settler colonial enterprise in East Asia.

Through the work of Yanaihara, a much-heroized figure in Japanese colonial studies, this essay aims to demonstrate that Zionist and Japanese settler colonial projects were part of the same global moment and shared networks of knowledge. Suggested is the notion that the imaginations of colonial thinkers in Palestine and Japan were not constrained by narrowly defined national, racial, or cultural distinctions, as the exceptionalist literature on Zionism and Japanese nationalism indicates.¹ By exploring thematic points of contact between aspects of Zionist and Japanese settler colonialism, this work challenges the prevailing assumption that, as Paul Gilroy objected to in his book on settlers from Africa, The Black Atlantic, ideas always flow into patterns congruent with borders of essentially homogeneous categories of the nation-state—race, culture, and gender—or necessarily conform to a configuration where models are transferred from the industrialized West to the rest.²

In some classifications, settler colonies are considered to be one of several types of colonies together with occupation colonies, mixed colonies, and plantation colonies.³ In other renderings, settler colonies are treated as distinct from colonies of exploitation because settler societies have demonstrated "ties to different colonial powers and forms of imperialism, as well as to diverse social movements."⁴ In either categorization, settler colonies are widely understood as embodying "extensive systems of exclusion and exploitation . . . exercised through a variety of coercive, ideological, legal, administrative and cooperative mechanisms."⁵ They are recognized as having developed elaborate political and economic infrastructures to achieve de facto or de jure independence from the metropole, if they possessed one. Most pertinent to and the central focus of this discussion is that settler colonies have always exhibited a tendency to borrow systems of control over land and people in territories where colonists sought to settle.⁶

Zionism's tradition of modeling its movement and systems of colonization on other, primarily European, systems of control and exploitation has been well documented. As Illan Troen has pointed out, the process of seeking outside models was "inherent in Zionism . . . since its creation at the end of the nineteenth century."⁷ Projected onto Zionist settlement in Palestine were political, social, cultural, architectural, and aesthetic models rooted in the experience of Jews coming primarily from Eastern and Western Europe.

When it comes to Japanese colonial studies, historians know about Sino-Japanese intellectual interactions, about the Marxist impact on Japanese economic planning, and about European and American influence on Japanese colonial thought.⁸ Yet the active engagement of a prominent Japanese colonial thinker with Zionist writing, including research trips, has not been explored. This essay aims to show that Zionist ideas were at the heart of Yanaihara's concept of settler colonialism in its ideal form. The study also argues that ideas on settler societies affecting Zionism and Yanaihara in the early twentieth century were part of a larger corpus of thinking that sought to provide intellectual justifications for particularistic settler movements by claiming that they were capable of coexisting with the universal values of socialism.

This perspective represents a new and largely unexplored area of thinking by an important Japanese intellectual. There do exist studies on the treatment of Jewish refugees who passed through Japan and its colonies during the Second World War.⁹ Ben-Ami Shillony's book The Jews and...