A new Asian order: some notes on prewar Japanese nationalism

Abstract

Clio, in the modern manner, sings her sages with many verses. This multiplicity is readily apparent in the telling of the Pacific War, its origins and its effects. Here, in Kuala Lumpur, there is slight compulsion to linger on the ironies and paradoxes of that story. In 1941, Imperial Japan presented itself as the Liberator of Asia, the slayer of the European colonial dragon; the United States became the advocate of the Four Freedoms and the Knightly champion of human freedom and democracy; and the European nations, without sufficient armor, invoked the battle cry of bygone jousts, vowing they would never abandon the ramparts of empire. If each of these standpoints possessed some truth, they did not tell the whole story. In defeat, moreover, Japan, in many ways, had slain Western colonialism; and, in victory, the United States learned that the demise of Japanese militarism ushered in no era of peace and stability. Clio must wonder about the victors and the vanquished. Presently she may relate with confidence that the Pacific War was neither a momentous but isolated episode in Asian history, nor was it exclusively a Japanese-American affair. It was one part of a drama which commenced with the intrusion of the Occidental nations into Asia, and this drama has not yet ended. The Pacific War was not the first confrontation between an Asian nation and an Occidental nation, nor was it the last of such confrontations.