The International Minimum: Creativity and Contradiction in Japan’s Global Engagement, 1933–1964 by Jessamyn R. Abel (review)

In his 1945 propaganda classic Know Your Enemy: Japan, Frank Capra repurposed Japanese rationalizations for its wartime empire as, instead, an indictment of that empire. Japan’s self-glorifying slogans and celebratory images served as ample evidence, in his view, of the perfidy of Japan’s mission and the hypocrisy of its ideology. Late in the film, the screen flashes with heart-rending images of child victims of war to cement its characterization of the treachery of Japanese soldiery. With each image, the narrator solemnly recites a word from Japan’s Pan-Asianist lexicon: “co-prosperity,” “peace,” “enlightenment.” Audiences would naturally have dismissed Japanese claims to such universalistic language.

Jessamyn Abel’s The International Minimum seeks to cast this wartime rhetoric in a new light. Rather than engage in endless gainsaying over who gets to call whom a hypocrite, Abel analyzes the sources and intent of Japan’s universalistic rhetoric from the 1930s through the 1960s. She constructs an ambitious transwar framework to reinterpret this language as commentary on the evolving place of internationalism in Japanese society. In her view, “the flexibility inherent in the rhetoric and frameworks of internationalism” allowed the Japanese to adapt and reconfigure internationalist ideas across wartime and postwar periods (p. 97). Diplomatic necessity and global standards compelled them to do so. Internationalism had become the new vocabulary of diplomacy, and the Japanese adopted it as a minimal standard of participation in diplomatic discourse. Even the staunchest defenders of Japan’s unique mission to liberate East Asia, she argues, had to abide by this new “international minimum.”

Working from these assumptions, Abel’s monograph falls in line with the new international scholarship on internationalism—a trend whose impetus comes in large part from the efforts of Glenda Sluga, Mark Mazower, David Armitage, Susan Pedersen, and others operating in an Anglo-European context.¹ They have succeeded in demolishing the mutually exclusive binary frameworks that typically afflict and misframe histories of foreign policy thought: realism/idealism, expansionism/isolationism, imperialism/internationalism. Readers of this journal will not be surprised to learn that these works have little to say about Japan’s internationalism, but Abel begins to explore some of the interpretative pathways revealed by them.

The author also distinguishes herself from scholars engaged in an older historiography that looked upon internationalism as an achievement of key individuals. That approach analyzed the intellectual fidelity and policy commitments of supposed Japanese internationalists taken to be paragons of one sort or another—Nitobe Inazō, Uchimura Kanzō, Yoshino Sakuzō, and Ishibashi Tanzan—celebrating their insights and nuances and pillorying them for their flaws and blind spots. Abel follows a different line of reasoning. There are neither heroes nor villains in her account; there is scarcely any biographical development for the figures cited. Japanese internationalism, she demonstrates, may be a minority tradition in Japanese foreign policy thought, but it has had its profound moments in identifying Japanese national interests, charting its foreign policy agenda, and shaping diplomatic language. Abel’s work thus follows Akira Iriye and others seeking to contextualize Japanese internationalism as a historical phenomenon responding to prevailing foreign policy contexts and discourses.²

Abel argues boldly, writes clearly, and provides a solid structure. She organizes her work around three transwar narratives: (1) Japan’s exit from the League of Nations in 1933 and its entry into the United Nations in 1956; (2) the rise of cultural diplomacy, especially as embodied in the 1940 and 1964 Olympics; and (3) the rhetoric of Asian brotherhood exemplified by the pursuit of an East Asian alternative to the League and the non-aligned movement expressed at the Bandung Conference of 1955.

Abel is on her surest footing in linking the exit from the League with the eventual admission to the United Nations by attributing both to the persistence of “Wilsonian internationalism”—a broad term encompassing a variety of prewar impulses— in Japanese foreign...