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

Japan’s modern engagement with other sovereign states began in the late nineteenth century and encompassed diplomacy, trade, education, cultural encounters, empire building, and warfare, in addition to the exchange of persons and knowledge with other nations. Isolated by geography and self-awareness as an island country (shimaguni ishiki 島国意識), Japan’s involvement with its East Asian neighbors before 1870 is best described as premodern interculturalism. After 1870, Japan deliberately joined boundary-crossing networks of interaction that formed the basis of a new internationalism. As Akira Iriye has pointed out, “internationalism is built upon the existence of sovereign states and would never displace nations.”¹ No longer encumbered by unequal treaties first imposed in 1858, Japan during the early twentieth century allied itself with Great Britain, joined the victors at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, and three years later in Washington signed both a five-power naval treaty and a nine-power commercial treaty (for trade with China), thus providing a degree of stability in its external relations for the next fifteen years. After 1900, numerous well-born undergraduates from Japan, mainly males, enrolled at elite universities in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere, while at the same time hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese flocked to Japan for study and technical knowledge. Meanwhile, international organizations—such as the Red Cross, Boy and Girl Scouts, and, slightly later, Moral Re-Armament—gained toeholds in Japan’s civil society, complementing internationalist initiatives by Japanese diplomats and businesses. Attempts at liberal social reforms in Japan, often inspired by counterparts in other countries, dotted the 1920s—efforts toward this new age of internationalism that were quickly followed by military aggression and mobilization for total war.

Jessamyn Abel’s The International Minimum: Creativity and Contradiction in Japan’s Global Engagement, 1933–1964, carries the narrative of Japanese internationalism forward for three additional decades, a time seldom considered internationalist by conventional measures. In eight chapters loosely linked under the rubrics of “global organization,” “cultural diplomacy,” and “regional organization,” the author seeks “to identify the framework within which foreign policy decision makers worked and the broad discourse that an educated person would have encountered … [in order to reveal] the relationship between diplomacy and public discourse” (p. 3). She uses internation­ alism “to encompass the varied ideas about international relations and Japan’s role in the region and the world” and to refer to “the normative conviction that building and strengthening cooperative ties among nations is the best way to promote peace, security, and prosperity” (p. 8). Abel regards “internationalism as a discursive and political practice that is shaped through the interaction of forces that can work from the ground up, as well as the top down” (p. 9). She concedes that the “trappings of internationalism” may well “be used toward aggressively nationalistic ends” (p. 12), yet she discovers elements of internationalism under many of the wartime stones she unearths. The book posits that the

evolving international mind in Japan colored foreign policy decision making during both the wartime and postwar periods.

(p. 8)

Ideas matter, even when they do not directly result in specific policies. Ideas kept alive in the harsh environment of wartime Japan sprouted new roots and flourished in the more favorable ecology of the postwar period.

(p. 13)

A chapter on Japan’s departure from the League of Nations in 1933 sets the tone for the volume, pointing out that Tokyo remained at least peripherally involved in League committees, the Permanent Court of International Justice, and the International Labour Organization until Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro declared Japan’s New Order in East Asia (Tōa shin chitsujo 東亜新秩序) in November 1938. Presumably these lingering affiliations showed that Japan still sought international legitimacy despite establishing Manchukuo on February 18, 1932; announcing the Amō (Amau) doctrine of Asia for the Asians two years later; and engaging in full...