The Constitutional Protection Revolution: Pan-Asianism from Social Vernacular to State Doctrine, 1914–1936 (Part 2 of 3)

The Constitutional Protection Revolution:
Pan-Asianism from Social Vernacular to State Doctrine, 1914–1936 (Part 2 of 3)
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The tide of the world is mighty. Those who follow it prosper; those who resist it perish.
-Sun Yat-sen​

In 1914, Pan-Asianism existed more as a discourse of gesture and aspiration than as a socially rooted political creed. It circulated among a loose world of intellectuals and journalists, but had yet to become either a coherent doctrine of civilizational unity or a practical language of strategy. Twenty years later, it had been adopted by the Japanese state as something close to an official political idiom; within another fifteen years it had become, alongside its socialist competitor, one of the two great languages of mass politics across the vast and strategically vital Asian continent. How did this happen?

The rise of Pan-Asianism was not inevitable. It occurred because millions of men and women came to experience the events around them as confirmations of Pan-Asian claims and because Pan-Asianism itself seemed to offer uniquely compelling answers to the central questions of modernity. Like the other great ideologies of the twentieth century, it possessed extraordinary capaciousness and flexibility; it could be, and was, many things to many people. To policymakers, it offered a device of leverage; to ordinary Japanese citizens, a national mission; to colonized masses, the promise of liberation; to colonial elites, national independence without the upheavals of class war. Above all, it situated individuals within a wider civilizational horizon, binding them to an object larger than the nation alone and promising political transformations equal to the world-historical scale of the age.

1. The Fracturing of the West and the Making of a Pan-Asian Vernacular

Ever since the first days of the Meiji Restoration, Japanese nationalism bore a schizophrenic relationship to the West. For many of the early reforming samurai, the dual imperative was “Catch up with the Westerners!” and “Expel the Barbarians!” Yet while this contradiction could be suppressed for a time, it was never truly resolved. For the first generation of Meiji rule, at least until the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, the liberal West remained an object of both imitation and admiration, furnishing Japanese political thinkers and policymakers with a dominant image of what it meant to be “modern.” Early Pan-Asianism, rooted more in sentiment than in fully elaborated theory, was correspondingly cosmopolitan in orientation. Japan was imagined less as the nucleus of an alternative civilizational order than as a guiding light by which other Asian peoples might enter modernity through westernization and reform.

The Triple Intervention of 1895, in which France, Russia, and Germany prevented Japan from imposing its maximal aims on China after the Sino-Japanese War, led some Japanese to believe their nation was being held to a different standard than the white powers. Some began to suspect that Japan would never be permitted full entry into the West. Yet with the unequal treaties removed and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance concluded in 1902, such doubts were partially allayed and failed to decisively penetrate official circles. Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905 bolstered anti-colonial nationalists abroad and Pan-Asianists at home, but it also seemed to confirm the path Japan had already taken. In practice, Tokyo would almost certainly have been forced to sue for peace without generous British loans, while American mediation proved indispensable in securing a favorable settlement.

By the eve of the Great War, Pan-Asianism had nonetheless spread into a loose field of elite strategic reflection, anti-western sentiment, and civilizational romanticism. It circulated through limited networks of intellectuals, officers, Buddhist and Christian groups, journalists, and nationalist merchants. Yet the continuing prestige of the West, together with the constraining effect of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, prevented it from being adopted by the state as a plausible strategic doctrine, while its lack of real social depth kept it from becoming a viable instrument of mass mobilization. Both restraints would be badly shaken by the catastrophe of the Great War.

For many Japanese, the Great War transformed both their image of the West and of themselves. The first several years of the conflict were widely remembered as a boom-time in which industry expanded at an unprecedented rate and civilizational optimism abounded as Japan seized German colonies. In the latter half of the Great War, Japan followed the path of European Powers to a more thoroughgoing mobilization, albeit at a slower rate. The naval service ballooned as Japanese convoys were deployed into the Mediterranean and Atlantic, with the government aiming to use the leverage gained over Britain by its assistance to secure a free hand in China. But Bryan’s involvement in East Asia created fatal complications; the American-financed enlargement of the Beiyang Army was perceived as an existential danger to Japanese influence in Manchuria and ultimately convinced the military class of the need for a pre-emptive war to secure their position on the continent before it became untenable.

At the time, Pan-Asianism was concentrated amongst conservative and reactionary elements of Japanese society, while the comparatively liberal civilian administration still hoped for cooperation with the West. Pan-Asianists had long urged the government to cooperate with and ultimately enlist China in an anti-western alliance. The initial nationalist revolution received nearly unanimous approval even in the most reactionary Pan-Asian circles; Sun Yat-sen had himself studied in Japan and been closely associated with Pan-Asian circles. War with China thus had a deeply disorienting effect on existing Pan-Asian circles, whose conservative politics generally inclined them to support the military but who could hardly do so without risking ideological incoherence.

The evolution of the Gen’yōsha, a secret society of Pan-Asianist Japanese elites, illustrates the contradictory effects of the 2nd Sino-Japanese war on Pan-Asianism. The first publications and speeches during the conflict emphasized that the intervention in China politics was not incompatible with a broader Pan-Asian mission - Japan’s Manchurian rights were, after all, “legitimately obtained with Japanese blood”. But there were early notes of hesitation amongst some members early into the war; Shumei Okawa, one of Japan’s most prominent Pan-Asianists, urged for a “quick settlement to the war”, but this became impossible when it catalyzed broader nationalist resistance.

By 1919 Pan-Asianist rhetoric was no longer employed in the majority of recorded meetings and individual publications; instead, it was the Darwinist, ultra-nationalist language of the Great War which surfaced more and more. In form and substance, this did not differ greatly from the Manichean screeds of the German far-right. But a critical minority continued to wed itself to Pan-Asianism. The revolutions of 1919 - above all the Indian revolt - provoked a general resurgence of Asian solidarity. Under popular pressure, the Japanese government became the only major capitalist power to formally recognize the new government in India, at the risk of imperiling its admittedly already strained relations with Britain. Meanwhile, war with America and Britain’s refusal to honor its alliance strengthened the Pan-Asian intuition that the white race could not be trusted to treat Japan equitably. As the Gen’yosha increasingly identified itself with the government’s policy of military expansion with China, Okawa and a number of his followers splintered from the group, forming the “All-Asian Group” and establishing connections with a number of Indian nationalists.

Over the course of the war, Japan’s steadily deteriorating position in China and the Western Pacific led to mounting discontent in the metropole. Pan-Asianism slowly migrated from reactionary circles such as the Gen’yosha and was adopted as a more general register of critique and moral approbation. Employed to criticize the war by suggesting the government had engaged in a “betrayal of Asian peoples”, it began to circulate among journalists disgusted by oligarchic militarism, students radicalized by Japan’s humiliating losses against the Americans, Christian and Buddhist social reformers repulsed by the government’s facile ultra-nationalism, and sections of the urban middle strata alienated by inflation and the continued insistence on national sacrifice. With the prestige of the imperialist West shattered by the Great War and the European revolutions, critics whispered that old elites had behaved not as the true vanguard of Asia but as the imitators of dying Western Empires. By forcing the ideology to confront the contradiction between Asian solidarity and Japanese aggression, the war broke open the earlier conservative shell of the ideology and made it available as an instrument of critique, thereby pluralizing and diversifying both its social carriers and internal content.

Following the Constitutional Protection Revolution, Pan-Asianism was given the opportunity to flourish in an environment of unprecedented press freedom. It soon acquired a much more durable civic life even as the Constitutional Protection Party resisted incorporating its vision as official state doctrine. In the large western cities, especially Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe, and Nagasaki, it was sustained by networks of small but firmly rooted associations: student reading circles, Christian and Buddhist reform leagues, discussion clubs, and language schools. Chambers of commerce concerned with “Eastern markets,” and legal-aid societies assisting colonial students and seamen also gradually absorbed its concepts. The Society for Asian Fellowship (Ajia Kyōwakai), founded in Kyoto in 1925 by journalists, ministers, and schoolteachers, held regular lectures on the Indian revolt, the Algerian troubles, and the “lessons of the European collapse.” In Nagasaki and northern Kyushu, where dockworkers, Christians, and students overlapped in unusual ways, Pan-Asian language entered municipal public life through penny newspapers, church halls, workers’ night schools, and “friendship evenings” held for Indian, Chinese, and Korean visitors. Long before it became official policy, Pan-Asianism became a way for the different strata of Japanese society to interpret the disorders of the age, the decline of the West, and to (re)imagine Japan’s place within a larger historical world.

Among the younger intellectuals, no figure better embodied the transformation of Pan-Asianism than Miki Kiyoshi. Electing the unusual course of studying in revolutionary Germany in the middle years of the decade, Miki encountered not the confident liberal Europe of Meiji admiration but a continent shattered and proletarianized. In Berlin and Leipzig he attended workers’ lectures, municipal forums, and university seminars in which social philosophy was discussed alongside housing policy, labor law, and the moral failure of imperial civilization. Returning to Japan, he became an early member of the Social Mass Party. Over a series of writings in journals such as Reconstruction and Humanity, Miki helped give Pan-Asianism a more theoretically ambitious language. Asia, in this emerging idiom, was not simply a coalition of injured nations nor merely a strategic rear for Japanese power, but a uniquely privileged site of a higher historical synthesis: a region in which civilizational dignity, social cooperation, and co-equal development could be united in terms no longer dictated by Atlantic liberalism or European class catastrophe.

Miki’s thought also ably addressed one of the central crises of interregnum Japanese political thought. The West, which had traditionally served as a unified and prestigious image of imitation for Japan, had been shattered into multiple different political forms. European socialism’s enduring success made it into an unmistakable part of modernity. The world had been fractured into multiple civilizational possibilities, and it was now up to Japan to choose between them - or forge its own. What was no longer possible, however, was for Japan to simply treat itself as an eager pupil: it too, had its own historical vocation. For Miki, the new question of the age was how to integrate the masses into politics and make “the substance of the state social”. Conveniently, Miki argued that the Constitutional Protection Revolution had opened up the space for Japan to accomplish just this by implementing a “cooperative Asian socialism”.

What distinguished the Pan-Asianism of the later 1920s from its more rarefied antecedents was less doctrinal coherence than social breadth. The League for the Relief of Asian Political Prisoners, founded after the renewed imprisonment of Indian nationalists in the mid-1920s, raised funds through women’s groups in Osaka and Yokohama. The All-Asian Youth Union, formally a student federation but in practice a travelling network of hostels, translators, and newspaper editors, brought Japanese undergraduates into contact with Burmese, Indian, Chinese, and Korean activists. Buddhist modernists associated with the Eastern Renewal Association recast old civilizational language in anti-imperial terms, while Christian social reformers in Nagasaki and Kobe spoke of “Asian fellowship” as the moral alternative to both Western plunder and Japanese military nationalism. By the turn of the decade, Pan-Asianism had ceased to be the possession of a few conservative intellectuals and become an ideologically diverse public language, at once academic and popular, ethical and strategic, anti-western and self-critical.

Perhaps the most vexed conundrum within this discourse was the “Chinese Question”. Here Asian solidarities confronted Japanese nationalist aggrievement most directly; in the 1920s, many Japanese citizens could not easily attribute the conflict with China solely to the mistakes of an earlier, militaristic government. Rapprochement with their larger neighbor was typically advocated, but friendship seemed like a less realistic proposition.

Japanese reformers also had to confront the demands of their Korean and Taiwanese subjects. Some were sufficiently self-critical to allow colonized voices to speak, and they learned that the position of Japan’s own colonized people did not bear meaningful differences to those of Indians or Africans. Yet most Pan-Asian societies resisted calls for immediate independence, instead favoring gradual, reformist measures which would keep the Japanese Empire intact while creating a different, “Asian” model of colonial tutelage. Others believed that this had already been achieved, and treated the protests of the colonized as so much ingratitude. So long as Pan-Asianism remained a mostly Japanese phenomenon, these contradictions could be papered over; when it was adopted as state policy and promoted internationally, however, they posed serious threats to Japan’s credibility as an Asian liberator.

2. The Dual Challenge: The End of the Third Reform Offensive, the Rise of the Right, and the Adoption of Pan-Asianism as State Ideology

The exhaustion of the third reform offensive was the first clear sign that the internal momentum generated by the Constitutional Protection Revolution was at last beginning to ebb. The incorporation of labor into the developmental state disturbed sections of the business community, but ironically it was rural landowners and the petty bourgeoisie of Japan’s outlying districts who reacted with the greatest alarm. Weakly incorporated into Ozaki’s coalition from the beginning, they feared that the government was now importing the social forms of the revolutionary states under constitutional cover, and thereby inviting subversion into the countryside itself. In fact, landowners were already embittered by electoral reforms that limited their traditional patronage over rural voting. Until this point they had been kept within the regime by developmental largesse from the center, but now a rushed stampede to the right began.

Above all, however, it was the World-Fleet Act of 1934 that struck most directly at the prestige of the Constitutional Protection government. America’s bid for maritime supremacy in the Western Pacific posed a direct challenge to Ozaki’s earlier diplomacy, which had imagined Japan as a middle power maneuvering between blocs, building itself up commercially while avoiding the burdens of renewed naval-imperial competition. The World-Fleet threatened to render Japanese strategic usefulness in the Pacific redundant, and with it the concessions Tokyo had extracted from Washington. In the long run, critics warned, this would mean not open conquest but something more insidious: a gradual loss of real sovereignty and Japan’s reduction to a peripheral outpost of an American imperium. No plausible alternative appeared to exist short of a much deeper accommodation with the socialist world, a course made steadily less realistic by Japan’s booming transpacific trade. The nakedly imperial tone of American rhetoric only deepened nationalist resentment. Ozaki’s party now stood accused of having failed to solve the “American problem” before it had even found an answer to the World-Fleet itself.

In this atmosphere of nationalist outrage, the old language of Japanese militarism once again began to sound plausible. Rural landowners, conservative petty proprietors, a minority of capital, and remnants of the old military classes flocked to the Kokumin Dōmei (“National Alliance”), a parliamentary formation that until then had failed to poll above ten percent of the national vote. In the elections of 1935 it finally broke through, capturing over a quarter of the electorate and coming close to depriving the Constitutional Protection Party of its outright majority in the Diet. Only the regime’s entrenched dominance of the urban press, which waged a partisan campaign portraying the National Alliance as the stalking horse of a return to military despotism, prevented the result from becoming a political rout.

The government’s turn toward Pan-Asianism thus came at a moment of acute domestic and geopolitical tension. The state faced rising challenges from the parliamentary right in the rural countryside, the possibility of defections among the urban laboring masses, and an increasingly menacing American maritime-industrial power poised to use its productive supremacy to marginalize Japanese commercial and diplomatic strategy. Pan-Asianism had already become both an organizing discourse among Japanese intellectuals and a felt solidarity within sections of the popular classes, yet the government had long resisted embracing it openly, fearing that such a move would cast Japan as the declared political enemy of the old colonial empires. Now, in an atmosphere of mounting international conflict and domestic strain, the apprehensions of the Constitutional Protection Party’s center began to give way.

The Japanese state did not adopt Pan-Asianism in a single act, but in a tightly linked sequence of premeditated moves. First, the old diplomatic style was displaced; next came a public proclamation of a new national mission; finally, a conference was convened to gather a broader Asian political public around it. Kijūrō Shidehara, the statesman most closely associated with the “Diplomacy of Suspended Balance,” resigned quietly after the elections of 1935, bringing to an end more than a decade as foreign minister. In his place, Arita Hachirō was appointed. Arita had long been associated with the more reformist and anti-imperial currents of Pan-Asian thought, having published a number of editorials critical of British and American imperialism, yet he had never before served in the cabinet, and his elevation to the foreign ministry was widely understood as an event in its own right. Though closer to the party’s left than to its centre, he had kept a careful distance from the more populist figures in that camp, and had publicly congratulated Ozaki after the close of the third reform offensive on the “magnificent strides made for the laboring nation.”

The Japanese public debated feverishly what the new foreign minister’s first act would be. Yet little more than a week after Arita’s appointment, it was Ozaki himself who appeared before the Diet to deliver an address broadcast by radio across the country. Its title — “The Fate of the Constitutional Protection Revolution” — seemed designed to provoke conjecture and speculation. It is worth reproducing the central portion of the speech directly:

Excerpt from the address of Prime Minister Yukio Ozaki before the Imperial Diet, broadcast by radio, 1935

_Twelve years ago, in the hour of our trial, the Japanese nation stood on the edge of disintegration. That which once promised strength had blinded us. The old order might command obedience but it could not command confidence. It could levy sacrifices but it could not offer the nation a dignified vocation. Therefore the Japanese people were summoned into history, to recall the Restoration of 1868 to its true purpose.

The Constitutional Protection Revolution was never undertaken merely so that one ministry should replace another, nor that one faction of the propertied classes should prevail over the other. Its purpose was greater. It was to rejuvenate the state with the nation, to place public power under public responsibility, and to fit Japan for life in an age no longer governed by the counsels of a few insulated men, but by the awakened energies of whole peoples.

In these years we have not been idle. We have broken the old military tutelage. We have widened the political nation. We have restored the finances of the state, rebuilt our capital, expanded our industry, and given protection to those whose labor sustains the nation. The object of our efforts has not been indulgence nor simple prosperity, but the making of a national order in which labor, talent, learning, and enterprise might all be sustained in a higher cooperation.

Yet let no one say that the work is finished because the first foundations have been laid. The world through which we now move is a new one. Around us, empires tremble, peoples once thought mute have begun to speak, and the old powers of the Atlantic, unable to govern themselves properly, prepare to extend their domination across the seas under new and more terrible forms.

There are many who still believe that what is most prudent is for us to remain silent. That we in Japan must accept our place in arrangements devised elsewhere, and it is dignity and not humiliation for the people to measure their future according to plans made in foreign capitals. I reject this utterly. Japan is a free nation; no free nation can accept vassalage and remain truly free in spirit. No people that has brought itself into history can consent to become a watchman stationed at the edge of another empire.

We do not seek a return to the errors of the former era. We have seen too much of that world, and we know too well the disasters to which it leads. Our task is of another kind. If Japan has any vocation in the present age, it lies not in imitation of the exhausted imperialism and class anarchy of the West, but in proving there exists within Asia another path into modernity: one founded not upon the egotism of the capitalist, but his social responsibility to a greater collective; not upon class war, but the cooperation of the whole nation; not upon colonial extraction and oppression, but co-equal national development and civilizational dignity.

Asia is not simply a geographical expression. It is not a map colored in by imperious foreigners nor a coterie of subject races awaiting instruction from a superior culture. Asia is a living historical world, inhabited by venerable peoples who have suffered division and contempt, and who now begin to stir against the weight of constant humiliation. We in Japan will not remain indifferent to this awakening. The fate of Japan and the fate of Asia are not separable questions.

…The question before us is not whether Japan shall enter the new age. She is already in it, and she has already succeeded where other, supposedly more civilized nations have failed. The question is whether she will enter it as a subordinate appendage of other powers, or as the first great polity of Asia which, by joining constitutional government, social responsibility, and national development into a single living form, will serve as a guiding light for an entire continent which has begun to shake off the fetters of a dying era. Upon our answer to this question depends not simply the fate of this ministry but the historic standing of our nation in the century now unfolding…_

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3. Pan-Asianism and the Re-ordering of Japanese Domestic Politics

The turn to Pan-Asianism reconfigured the political and ideological field, throwing the temporarily emboldened opponents of the centrist Constitutional-Development bloc into confused disorientation. Unsure of how to calibrate their response to the new politics, resistant of giving direct assent to another group’s program but too unsure to speak out forthrightly against a vision they held some sympathy with, they made themselves vulnerable to crushing rhetorical blows. The traditional right, standing outside the Constitutional Protection Party and now organized in a rising parliamentary party, had committed itself to a ill-conceived resuscitation of the old militarism and the expansion of empire. They were now accused of wishing to “repeat the colonial sins of the West”, of desiring a “resurrection of the follies of the Great War”, of lacking true sympathy and fellow-feeling for their “Asian comrades” abroad. The right, hoping to become identified with the cause of the nation, now found itself cast out of it. They eventually caught on - equivocally, slowly, with hesitation and no small number of missteps - but by then their growing momentum had been shattered.

The right-wing of the Constitutional Protection Party, the old liberals and Atlantic Constitutionalists, were not so much headstrong nationalists as advocates of another internationalism - of a maritime world of trade and commerce, of cooperation between liberal powers. In their most honest moments they could admit they were nostalgic for the world of the 1890s, when a liberal “West” still stood undisturbed by the traumas of revolution. They, and the staid business interests associated with them, were in no way prepared for the upsurge in Pan-Asian sentiment. When they warned against “dangerous rhetoric” which could alienate Japan from its “trading partners and allies”, they were denounced for their “lack of imagination”, for trying to control the “cries of the people” to satisfy the “urges of their pocketbooks.” When they cautioned against the growing fiscal costs of Pan-Asian commitments, they were maligned for their hard-hearted selfishness and for neglecting the virtues of public cooperation in favor of the indulgences of private life.

The left-wing of Japanese politics did not fare much better. The left-laborist caucus inside the Constitutional Protection Party had found Pan-Asianism to be a potent tool for its own political propaganda, but with the centre now taking it up on its own, it had little option but to sit, applaud, and occasionally press for more maximalist stances. Its preferred language of politics had been co-opted, and though they could congratulate themselves on their success in this, they found their ability to push the government to enact further labor reforms steadily diminished. The Social Mass Party, on the other hand, found itself thrown into a much deeper crisis. The Marxist wing was quick to denounce Pan-Asianism as a new, “counterrevolutionary anti-imperialism”, a mere mask for a new militaristic Japanese Empire. However, the rest of the party, which had long embraced the language of anti-colonialism and self-determination, found that it could not resist the siren song outright. The party’s more reform-oriented right-wing insisted on a subdued “Pan-Asian Solidarity without Militarism or Excesses”, while some more populist elements embraced “The new anti-colonial mission” more forthrightly. The ruling Constitutional Protection Party lambasted the leftists for being “So ashamed of the Japanese Nation that they will not permit it to take up its new vocation. They themselves can recognize what we have done here in Japan, but they will not permit others to follow suit.”

Pan-Asianism shored up the power of the governing coalition and, by reordering the political field to its benefit and granting it a new hegemonic language, it granted Ozaki a new tool to discipline both Capital and Labor with. Business might prefer closer ties with Anglo-American finance, stable maritime arrangements, and a more restrained external posture. But once Pan-Asianism became societal common sense, doing so would be to align themselves with Atlantic dependence and civilizational timidity. Pan-Asianism thus stripped capital of the capacity to mobilize a governing majority on its own. Challenging the state’s mission straightforwardly would only isolate their parliamentary allies and expose themselves to charges of selfishness and cowardice. To contain its more worrying manifestations, capital would have to return to - and bargain with - Ozaki. He was the one figure who could plausibly mediate between more populist and developmental varieties of Pan-Asianism. Capital was therefore controlled politically without being subordinated economically.

Labor, too, was increasingly forced into a straitjacket by Pan-Asian demands. Not only were their political representatives weakened, but the “Japanese Social Model” was increasingly figured as a static ideal, not an ongoing object of contestation. If Japan had already achieved the reconciliation of labor and capital, the incorporation of workers into national life, and the construction of a developmental state, then what remained was not to deepen these achievements at home but to share them abroad. With a larger Asian mission, upsetting domestic arrangements opened one up to charges of selfishness and ingratitude. Moreover, Pan-Asianism was itself a language that had a progressive-populist strain, which could speak to workers and thereby bind them to the state.

In the short to medium term, Pan-Asianism significantly shored up the position of the Constitutional Protection Party. In the following parliamentary elections, the right was dealt a crushing defeat and Ozaki’s coalition once again cleared the super-majority threshold of 60%. It also licensed a quiet but considerable military expansion: Japan built the largest submarine force in the world to make any American war of aggression terribly costly, while refusing the militarists their facile dreams of battleship parity with the American behemoth. Military expansion also permitted Ozaki to further marginalize what remained of the old military caste in the army, decimating an important extra-parliamentary source of support for the right.

The charge of ‘counter-revolutionary anti-imperialism’ had more than a grain of truth. Pan-Asianism was indeed a means of disciplining labor, of forestalling deeper reform, of projecting Japanese influence across Asia. But it was also genuinely anti-western, genuinely developmental, and genuinely popular. The Marxist critique was analytically correct but politically impotent, a fate that would haunt the Japanese left for decades.