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The concept of Asia: From \

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Department of Area Studies, *

HirOshi Mitani University of Tokyo ™

In the contemporary world the word "Asia" invokes a sense of regional

integration or solidarity among Asian peoples. This sense of the word is
rather recent and can only be traced back to the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. In that period, Japan called on Asian people to unify
against the Western threat under its leadership. But until the late nineteenth
century, "Asia" was a purely geographical term; merely the name of one of the
five continents-a concept that had been modeled by early modern Europeans.
In this essay I will discuss how and why the political usage of the word
"Asia," stressing Asian solidarity, was invented by the Japanese around the
1880s. I also investigate the ways in which this sense of the word spread to
the rest of the geographical region of Asia. In order to understand the
unfolding of this historical process, we should first examine the traditional
concepts of world geography in Japan and how the European concept of
Asia was introduced into East Asia.

Concepts of the world in medieval and early modern civilizations

There had been various kinds of conceptions of the world before the
European concept of the five continents-with Asia being one of them-came
to prevail in the nineteenth century. Several different understandings or
representations of the world existed before the early modern era, including
the Chinese, the Indian, the Islamic and the European. The traditional
Japanese representation of the world was partly a product of the Chinese
perspective and partly related to a Buddhist worldview. In the following
section, I will discuss various versions of this conceptualization.
In East Asia, the predominant imagination of the world until the latter
half of the nineteenth century consisted of a single center and its
peripheries. 1 The center was dominated by an emperor who had the sole

1 Takeshi Hamashita, Modern China in International Context (Tokyo: The University of Tokyo Press,

New Perspectives on Turkey, no. 35 (2006): 21-35

22 Hiroshi Mitani

£ monopoly on the right to rule over the whole world. His monopoly on
a power was legitimatized by Heaven's Order to teach Confucian morality to
2 all human beings. In this view, the world was made up of concentric circles:
° at the core were the civilized people who enjoyed his government by
> morality, while in the peripheries barbarian peoples lived less human lives.
u The Emperor's direct dominion was called Chunguo, or the Middle Empire,
S; and the civilized people who resided there postulated absolute supremacy
£ over the barbarians. It should be noted that in this worldview there were no
j* clear boundaries that separated the center from the peripheries. Put
z
differently, this normative image of the world had no single line that
distinguished between the civilized and the barbarians; it merely projected
its normative values onto space and geography, namely the gradual decline
of humanity in proportion to the distance from the core.
Peripheral countries also shared this mono-centered, hierarchical image
of the world. While during the early modern era some of the peripheral
countries like Korea, Vietnam and Japan accomplished high-level learning
of Confucianism-that is, human morality- and experienced considerable
prosperity, they still continued to subscribe to this hierarchical world view,
although with some adjustments. Reproducing this concentric schema,
they began to perceive themselves as lesser centers of surrounding
countries and to view themselves equal to the Chinese Empire as long as
they remained within their domains. This picture maintained its
dominance until the nineteenth century when the European powers and
Japan began to challenge this particular normative rendering of the world.2
The Buddhist image of the world was also influential in East Asia. An
examination of a history of Japan written by Chikafusa Kitabatake during
the medieval era can clarify this point. Kitabatake was an aristocrat who
fought internal wars for the emperor Godaigo in the fourteenth century,
and his famous history Jinno Show ki was penned to legitimize the rule of
Godaigo.3 He stressed a Japan-centric view of the world, but he arrived at
this through a re-interpretation of the Buddhist view of the world popular
at the time. His explanation was based on Vasubandhu's Abihdharma kosa-
bhasya of the fourth century. According to this view, there were
1,000,000,000 universes, each of which was ruled by a Buddha. A huge
mountain, Sumeru, was located at the center of the disk-like universe.
Seven golden ring-shaped mountains and eight seas surrounded it and an

1990), Joseph Needham and Wang Ling, Science and Civilization in China, vol. 3 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1959).
2 Hiroshi Mitani and Teruomi Yamaguchi, A History of Nineteenth-Century Japan (Tokyo: The
University of the Air Press, 2000), chapter 2.
3 A Collection of Japanese Classics, vol. 87 (Iwanami Shoten, 1965).
 23

iron ring-shaped mountain marked the edge of the universe. There were S
four continents in the eighth sea from the center. They were located east, „
west, north and south of Sumeru Mountain. Our world was the south £
continent called Jambu-dvipa. The south continent was shaped like an egg £
with the pointed end to the south. It resembled the shape of the Indian 2
subcontinent. It also had a high central mountain called Kanran-san (Olive E
Mountain) that corresponded to the Himalayas. To the south of the °
mountain, there were the five countries of Tenjiku, that is, India. Persia was ^
located to the northwest, while to the northeast there was China (Cina- 5
sthana). In this worldview, Japan appeared only as a series of tiny spots in *
the ocean, isolated from the salvation of the Buddha because of its distance
from the continent. Furthermore, this worldview also predicted the lapse
of the Buddha's grace in the near future. Hence, the self-image of the
Japanese was very pessimistic according to this Buddhist worldview
prevalent from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries.
Kitabatake's contribution was the positing of a non-pessimistic
Buddhist doctrine that began to view Japan as the center of the world by
means of re-interpreting Japanese history through its myths. Nevertheless,
the Buddhist geographical interpretation remained partially alive until the
seventeenth century when European geographical knowledge of the world
was introduced. 4
Closely related to the above model, the Japanese also imagined the
world through the so-called Three Countries Model. This world consisted
of Tenjiku (India), Shintan (China), and Honcho (this country). A
collection of tales, Konjaku Monogatari shu, from the eleventh century
classifies various tales according to these categories. 5 Although for the
medieval Japanese India was the origin of the most important teachings of
salvation, that is, Buddhism, there were no Japanese men of learning
trained in India. China was more familiar. The Japanese had adopted almost
all aspects of civilization from China. Some Japanese intellectuals traveled
to China and came back with a wealth of knowledge. Chinese monks were
welcomed by the Japanese. The Japanese also traded with Chinese
merchants. Meanwhile, the Japanese government recognized the authority
of the Chinese Empire, although it had no tributary relationships except for
a few Muromachi Shoguns during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
The echo of the China-influenced worldview is in some ways still
audible in the contemporary world. For instance, in wedding ceremonies,
Japanese parents praise their daughter by saying: "She is the best bride

4 A Selection of Old Maps Related to Japan, (Kobe: Kobe City Museum, 1994).
5 A Collection of Japanese Histories: An Enlarged and Revised Edition, vol. 16-17 (1930-1931).
24 Hiroshi Mitani

£ among the three countries." Yet very few today know the exact meaning of
a that term. The influence of this worldview began to diminish during the
z seventeenth century, when Buddhism was forced to retreat from the
° political arena. The image of India disappeared from the intellectuals'
> imagination. Instead, they began to view Japan as the center of the world,
u even though they could not ignore China as a competing unforgettable
S; other.
£ The European image of the world originates from the ancient
? Mediterranean world view that conceptualized the world along an
z
East-West axis. Ancient Greeks and Romans believed the world to be a
continent surrounded by an ocean, Oceanus. They divided the continent
into two parts according to the movement of the sun: Oriens pointed to the
place where the sun rose, and Occidens to the place where the sun set.
Undoubtedly, this concept was the source of the division of the world into
East and West. This was succeeded by two world views during the
medieval and early modern eras: one was the geographical articulation of
the five continents, and the other the more Eurocentric concept that
posited two Indies.6
Adapting the ancient world view to Christianity, medieval Europeans
created so-called T-0 atlases.7 The letter O stood for the Ocean
surrounding the world, which was divided into three continents by waters
making up the shape of the letter T. The vertical line of the T corresponded
to the Mediterranean, the left part of the horizontal line symbolized the
River Don leading into the Black Sea, and the right part symbolized the
Nile. Abovethe point of intersection was Jerusalem, the Christian center of
the world. Thus, the top of this atlas faced the East. The T-0 atlas
represented a non-Eurocentric view. It fixed the names of the continents:
Asia, Libya (or Africa) and Europe, all of which were derived from ancient
Mediterranean civilizations. This concept of the world was expanded to
have five sections, by adding America and Magallanica during the fifteenth
century, the age of European exploration. We have inherited this notion of
the five continents.
During the fifteenth century, a Eurocentric concept of the world
emerged. The Portuguese and the Spanish concluded a treaty at Tordesillas
in 1494, a treaty that divided the globe into two hemispheres: the Eastern
hemisphere was to be conquered by the Portuguese and the Western
hemisphere by the Spanish.8 Japan presented a source of dispute because it

6 Takeo Oda, A History of Maps and Atlases (Kodansha: 1973).

7 Rodney W. Shirley, The Mapping of the World: Early Printed World Maps 1472-1700 (London: The
Holland Press, 1983).
8 Koichiro Takase, The Age of Christianity in Japan (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1977).
 25

was situated opposite the demarcation line in the Atlantic. This division of „
the world corresponded to the dichotomy of Indias Orientales and Indias „
Occidentales. The term "Indias" denoted the areas inhabited by non- *>
Christian and non-Muslim peoples. This concept was inherited by the m
Dutch, the British and other Europeans. The Dutch had a branch of their 2
East India Company at Nagasaki, the only port open to Europeans in early S
modern Japan. This name suggests that the word "India" was more widely °
used than the word "Asia" in the world's cultural, economic and political ^
representation, as far as early modern European imagination was concerned. *

The introduction of the concept of Asia to East Asia

When the Europeans appeared in East Asia during the sixteenth century,
East Asian people preferred the Five Continents Model to the concept of
the two Indies to compliment their own world geography. This was
because the former was more harmonious with the Chinese intellectuals'
Sino-centric worldview and with Japan's Three Countries Model.
The word "Asia" was introduced into East Asia through the publication
of the first European-style atlas in China. Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary
from Italy, published The Complete Atlas of the Earth and Countries in
Beijing in 1602. 9 It depicted the world known to Europeans up to that date
while shifting the center from Europe to China. At the four corners, he
included medallions showing the shape of the globe and the universe based
on Ptolemaic theory. He represented the world according to the five
continents named by Europeans: Europe, Libya, Asia, America (South and
North), and Magallanica. We can see the Chinese characters for Asia
spanning the areas from the western part of Siberia to the Malay Peninsula.
Ricci explained the structure of the universe and the world briefly in a
column to the right. He describes Asia as extending southward to "the
Sumatra and the Luzon, northward to the Svalbard and the North Sea (the
Arctic Ocean), eastward to the Japanese Islands and the Great Ming Sea (the
Pacific Ocean), and westward to the Tanais River, the Sea of Azov, the
Western Red Sea, the Smaller Western Ocean." He did not include any
comments on cultural or political aspects of the Asian continent. The word
"Asia" only depicted the land outside Europe and situated to the East. Ricci
also used two Japanese words, "Toyo" and "Seiyo," which would later be
used as translations for "Orient" and "Occident." However, he used these
idioms only in terms of their Chinese meanings, that is, Eastern Ocean and
Western Ocean. In this atlas, the Greater Western Ocean stands for the
Atlantic, the Smaller Western Ocean for the Arabian Sea, the Smaller

9 Matteo Ricci, The Atlas of Whole Continents and Countries (1602).

26 Hiroshi Mitani

w Eastern Ocean refers to the coast of Japan, and the Greater Eastern Ocean
" denotes the Pacific. Ricci thus followed the traditional usage of these words
z in China.
° However, one of his successors slightly changed the use of the above
> words. Giulio Aleni published his Supplemental Geography in 1623,
u adding new geographical knowledge to Ricci's atlas.10 He equated the term
S; "Western Sea" with Europe, although we cannot find the term "Eastern
£ Sea" as equivalent to "Orient," "Asia," or "China." In this respect, Aleni
j* continued to abide by the Sino-centric view; he called China the Middle
z
Empire and placed it at the beginning of his book, praising it for its long
history, civilization and prosperity. He also praised Asia in general as a
place that witnessed the emergence of not only the first human beings but
also great thinkers-cum-leaders. Aleni did not describe the whole world in
his book, because he thought Chinese official geography already supplied
detailed knowledge about China and its tributary countries. Interestingly,
he also ignored Japan in his book.
The word "Asia" was introduced to China by Europeans. The Ching
dynasty commissioned Catholic missionaries to produce a more refined
and detailed world atlas as well as maps based on field surveys covering all
of its domains.11 However, Chinese intellectuals themselves showed little
interest in the geography of the outside world. This created a major
difference between China and Japan during the early modern era.
There were two paths along which the word "Asia" was introduced to
Japan.12 One was a direct path from Europe; the other was an indirect
course through importing atlases and geography books published in China.
In this essay I will concentrate on the direct path, not only because it was
more influential, but also because the intellectuals who adopted this path
equally integrated information from Chinese atlases into their geography.
The first and the most influential world geography in Japan was written
by Hakuseki Arai (1657-1725) during the 1710s. He was a well-known
Confucian and an encyclopedist who wrote books on various topics,
including Japanese history and protocols for the reception of Korean
envoys. As he recounts in his Hearings from the West (around 1715), his
lord, a soon-to-be Shogun, ordered him to investigate a Catholic
missionary by the name of Giovanni Battista Sidotti who had sneaked onto
an island in the southern part of Kyushu and had been arrested.13 While

10 Giulio Aleni, Supplemental Geography (1623).

11 Needham and Ling, Science and Civilization in China.
12 Shintaro Ayusawa and Toshiaki Okubo, Japanese Knowledge of Outside World during the Era of
Seclusion (Kengensha, 1953).
13 Hakuseki Arai, Hearings from the West (1968).
 27

writing about this missionary, Arai examined geographical information ^

based on a Matteo Ricci atlas and a Dutch atlas published by Joan Blaeuw in „
1648, as well as the teachings of Christianity. In addition to Hearings from »
the West, Arai also wrote in Chinese A Collection of Foreigners' Words m
Representing the World (around 1713), a geography book describing i
various countries. 14 He combined the information he had gathered from E
Sidotti and Ricci with that he had obtained from the director of a Dutch °
factory in Nagasaki, Cornells Lardijin. He also utilized Chinese histories of jj
Mongolia and of the Ming dynasty. However, there is no indication in his *
m

book that he knew about the abovementioned Aleni atlas. "

In his geography, Arai accepted the European concept of the five
continents, but modified its components: he excluded Magallanica because
he thought there was little reliable evidence and instead divided America
into two parts. He began his description in Europe, with Rome. This
indicates that he wanted to explain the European geographical view of the
world. Probably it is because of this aim that there is no information about
Korea to be found in this geography, since European missionaries had not
yet visited Korea at that time. In his books, Arai called Europe the Western
Sea and Europeans Western People. This is a relatively early usage of the
term "western" to depict Europe (except for Aleni), before this adjective
was to become commonplace in Japan in the eighteenth century. It is quite
noteworthy that there was no corresponding equation between the Eastern
Sea and Asia in Arai's books, a fact that suggests that the binary
oppositional coupling of East and West during the early modern period had
not existed universally before.
In 1802, Yamamura Saisuke (1770-1807) wrote a supplement to Arai's
A Collection of Foreigners' Words Representing the World.15 He not only
corrected Arai's mistakes, but also added new information from several
Dutch sources, including Pieter Goos's Zee-Atlas (1676) and Johan
Hubner's Kouranten-tolk (1732). Yamamura was a remarkable scholar who
studied European sciences from Dutch books as well as from Portuguese,
French and Latin dictionaries.
In correcting the contents of Arai's book, Yamamura pointed out that
Turkey belonged to Asia and not to Africa. But he also classified Turkey in
Europe when naming the three great emperors of Europe. In this book, we
can also find the first equation of the Eastern Sea with Asia or the Orient,
based on a book written by a Dutch captain (Voyages in Oriental Countries),

14 A Collection of Japanese Histories.

15 Yamamura Saisuke, Revised and Enlarged Edition of Looking at Foreigner's View, 2 vols. (1802). Also
see Shintaro Ayusawa, Yamamura Saisuke (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 1959).
28 Hiroshi Mitani

£ recounting his travels from Jakarta to China. Although Yamamura's book

* was not published, he presented it to Shogun Ienari; thus it provided
^ significant knowledge to the Japanese government and intellectuals at a
° time when the Russians had begun to visit the country and Japanese
> intellectuals were beginning to worry about the future course of their
u relations with European countries.
S; Just after the Opium War between China and Britain, which caused
£ drastic change in international relations in East Asia, Shogo Mitsukuri
j* (1821 -1847) published A Commentary on the World Atlas (1845), a world
z
geography that was to be used together with his New World Atlas (1844). 16
For one, this book introduced new information on Japanese geography, as
its Dutch sources were relatively recent in contrast to earlier Japanese books
that had little concern about the date of their sources. Because Mitsukuri
relied on new knowledge, he integrated America in his geography and
added Australia as the fifth continent.
More importantly, he began his account with "the Grand Empire of
Japan." This implied that Japan was the center of the world. It is notable
that, as a scholar trained in the Dutch School, Mitsukuri shared the
normative view of the world asserted by the National Learning School. 17
Significantly, he also divided countries into two distinct categories:
independent countries and subordinated countries. In his introductory
notes, Mitsukuri explained that he would describe subordinated countries
in paragraphs with smaller characters. This is reminiscent of the modern
Western conception of the world order in which there are sovereign states
of equal standing, subordinated countries, and colonies. The book's
hierarchy among societies must have left Mitsukuri's readers with the
impression that the tributary states of the Chinese Empire were inferior.
Mitsukuri conceptualized Asia as follows: The first group is the Grand
Empire of Japan and Morokoshi, that is, China. Although he did not use the
Chinese phrase "the Middle Empire," following Japanese tradition his
evaluation of China was relatively high in spite of its recent defeat in the
Opium War. The second group is the Great Tartars, composed of China
Tartars and Russian Tartars. Korea and the Mongols belonged with the
China Tartars. The third group is the Independent Tartars, including Tibet
and Turkistan. The fourth group consists of Eastern Turkey, Arabia, Persia,
and so forth. He did not use the term "Ottoman Empire" and classified
Turkey into Europe. The fifth group is Tenjiku, or India. Following

16 Mitsukuri Shogo, A Commentary on the World Atlas (1845).

17 See Hiroshi Watanabe, Kingships and Political Ideologies in East Asia (Tokyo: The University of Tokyo
Press, 1997), chapter 9.
 29

European usage, he called the Indian sub-continent East India, and *

Southeast Asia Far India. He concluded his description of Asia with famous ,
islands in the Indian Sea, including not only Ceylon but also Luzon. This »
reveals that he did not reject the European concept of India and partially m
used it alongside his concept of Asia. -
In describing India, he wrote that most Indian groups had been S
subordinated or conquered by the West and that only a few, such as the °
Marathas and the Sheiks, had resisted such subordination. But even these ^
two groups had failed, according to him, because they "did not unite £
together against the British. On the contrary, they attacked the Deccans and "
reduced [their] people to a small country as well as losing their own
military power. How stupid they were!" Obviously, in making this
observation, his concern was about the future of Japan as a land comprising
more than 260 daimyo states, that is, feudal kingdoms. The introduction to
Mitsukuri's book was written by Toan Koga, a Confucian scholar teaching
at a Tokugawa school, who warned that Japan would not survive if it
continued to neglect building international relations or making
armaments. It should be noted that the Tokugawa government officially
sanctioned the publication of this book. It may be argued that Mitsukuri
and Koga were warning Japanese intellectuals about an impending crisis
with the West only eight years before the American envoy Matthew C.
Perry arrived in Japan.
Just after the restoration of the Emperor in 1868, the new Meiji
government officially declared its open-door policy to foreign countries.
This redirection of foreign policy necessitated practical knowledge about
world geography. Yukichi Fukuzawa (1835-1901), a leading figure in the
Meiji intellectual scene, foresaw this demand and published two world
geographies in 1869. One was A Handbook ofWorld States, a small manual
intended for businessmen that offered practical knowledge about Western
countries, such as exchange rates and military power. The other was
Countries in the World, a book intended for the general populace, especially
for mothers who would educate future generations. 18 It included maps,
pictures of landscapes, information about goods produced in various
countries as well as famous people, and was organized in such a way as to
help the reader visualize those lands.
The significance of these books stemmed from their novel
conceptualization of world societies according to the criteria of the modern
European concept of civilization and their influence on Japanese
intellectual life. Fukuzawa introduced contemporary European

18 Fukuzawa Yukichi, Complete Works of Fukuzawa Yukichi (Iwanami Shoten, 1959).

30 Hiroshi Mitani

w classifications of humankind: five races (white, yellow, red, black and

a brown), four levels of civilization, about 860 language groups, three or five
^ kinds of polities (monarchy, aristocracy, empire, kingdom, prince's state,
° count's state and democracy), and so forth. Among these classifications, the
> criteria for and scale of civilization became very influential in Meiji Japan,
t) Fukuzawa distinguished four levels: anarchy, barbarian, to-be-civilized,
S; and the civilized. The civilized were limited to Europeans, and the Japanese
£ were classified within the category of to-be-civilized, along with the
j* Chinese, the Turks and the Persians. As it may be observed in
z
contemporary newspapers, this idea spread rapidly among Meiji
intellectuals, and it became a national obsession to make every effort in
order to be recognized by the Europeans among the civilized.
To summarize, the early modern Japanese accepted the European term
"Asia" as one of the five continents, while refusing the idea of the two
Indies. They began to equate the West with Europe and the East with Asia.
By the mid-nineteenth century, Japanese intellectuals located Japan at the
center of the world and classified various countries according to a yardstick
of independence. After the Meiji Revolution, they accepted the hierarchical
view of societies based on the modern European concept of civilization.
However, it was not until the 1880s that they began to use the term "Asia"
in political discourse.

The beginning of the political usage of the concept of Asia

The Japanese had no conceptualization of a regional identity when they
first entered into diplomatic relations with the West during the last years of
Tokugawa rule.19 The Tokugawa government sought to enter into relations
with Western states on an individual basis. At first, it tried to alleviate
European pressure by creating friendly ties with the US, Russia and the
Netherlands, while perceiving Britain and France as hypothetical enemies.
However, the government showed little concern with the neighboring
countries of Korea and China. By 1812, Korean envoys were no longer
invited, and the government had maintained no diplomatic relations with
China since the early seventeenth century. There was no idea of regional
solidarity with neighboring countries.
However, the image of Asia as a region emerged in Japan soon after the
Restoration of the emperor in 1868. At that time, both the Meiji
government and ex-Tokugawa intellectuals began to publish newspapers
that reported news about Western civilization.20 Editors reprinted news

19 Mitani and Yamaguchi, A History of Nineteenth-Century Japan.

20 Inada Masahiro, Jiyuu minken no bunkashi: atarashii seiji bunka no tanjoo (Tokyo: Chikuma Shoboo,
 31

from English papers published in East Asian treaty ports, such as S

information about wars and riots in Asia, Europe and North America, ,
including, for example, the Ottoman-Russian wars. This raised awareness *>
of the Great Power rivalry for influence in the world and of the fact that £
n
only a few countries in Asia were independent. On the other hand, i
Fukuzawa's geography books introduced the European normative image of ™
the world that classified every country or people on the linear scale of °
civilization. Several newspapers—among them, for example, Yokohama £
Mainichi—spread this view during the early 1870s. Thus, Japanese *
intellectuals began to perceive Asia as a region in shared distress that held "
an inferior status compared to the West. Accordingly, Japan shared the
dishonorable semi-civilized status with other Asian countries, but also
having hope, because it had already started on a course of major reform on
the road to becoming civilized. 21
W h a t prompted the Japanese to perceive Asia as a region? It is
significant that newspapers during the early Meiji period were concerned
with the entire geographical entity of Asia and that their interest was not
limited to neighboring countries or only those Asian countries that had
signed treaties with European powers. In contrast, they had little interest
about the Americas and Africa. How can we explain this discrepancy in the
news about Asia versus the Americas and Africa? One plausible answer
may be that news editors were particular concerned about the international
relations of Russia. Russia had a strong army and it shared borders with
most of the Asian countries. Thus, the anxiety about Russia's military
power led to taking notice of Asian countries bordering on it.
Since the end of the eighteenth century, Russia was the focus of foreign
policy as formulated by Japanese intellectuals and the government. 22 In the
early nineteenth century, Japan had a military conflict with Russia, the sole
battle that the Tokugawa government had to fight. Seishisai Aizawa's book
New Theses (1825), which advocated the idea of "Revere the Emperor,
Expel the Barbarians," considered Russia the potential main enemy which
had two alternative programs of world conquest: one was to conquer Japan
first and then advance westward; the other was to conquer the Ottoman
Empire first and then turn eastward. After the opening of the ports, the
Japanese interpreted the news from the West as proof for this hypothesis.
It is not surprising that early Meiji intellectuals often maintained that "if
2000).
21 Tokitomo Kusama, "On Solidarity of Oriental Countries," Yubin Hochi, November 19 1879. For an
overview, see Takuji Shibahara, Takaaki Ikai, and Masahiro Ikeda, eds., A Perception of Foreign
Relations (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1988).
22 Mitani and Yamaguchi, A History of Nineteenth-Century Japan, chapter 2.
32 Hiroshi Mitani

£ wars in distant Asia cease, the diplomatic environment in East Asia will get
5 worse." Thus, early Meiji newspapers reproduced articles on Russia's war
z with the Ottoman Empire from 1877 to 1878, its conquest of Central Asia,
° and its support for Muslim independence movements in China as well as
> tribal chiefs in Afghanistan who resisted British invasion. Therefore, we
u may conclude that the diplomatic concern about Russia made Meiji
5; Japanese aware of Asia as a geographical region in its entirety.
£ However, there were also other factors at play. One of them was Japan's
9 keen sense of isolation. As Aizawa wrote, the Japanese perceived
2
themselves as isolated islands besieged by Western countries. This
psychological stress became intense as Japan's relations with Western
countries increased. It was only natural to seek friends in the neighboring
area after the Meiji government officially established itself within global
international relations. However, it was quite difficult for early Meiji Japan
to find support among its neighbors. The envoy who was sent to Korea in
order to announce the Restoration of the emperor was rejected by the
Korean government. Although Japan succeeded in establishing diplomatic
relations with China after a 270-year break, Japanese-Chinese relations
soon turned sour on account of the Ryukyu problem, to be discussed in
greater detail below.
In 1868, Korea refused Japan's request to renew relationships. 23 At that
time, the Korean government blamed the Japanese government about using
the title emperor for Meiji Tenno, because in the Chinese World Order,
according to them, only the Chinese emperor held the right to use that title.
The use of that title by the Japanese ruler would downgrade the status of
the Korean king who was dependent on the Chinese emperor. This
antipathy towards Japan was strengthened by the Japanese abolition of the
daimyo of Tsushima which was a tributary to Korea. In the meantime, not
a few ex-samurais in Japan had begun to express the wish to conquer Korea.
Similarly, Ch'ing China grew hostile to Japan when it began to pursue
its interests in the region according to international laws set by the West. In
1871, Japan and China concluded a treaty of amity and resumed diplomatic
relations as equals. However, Japanese-Chinese relations deteriorated soon
after the signing of this treaty, which, according to Japan, would challenge
the hierarchical Chinese World Order. Claiming to protect Japanese
subjects, Japan in 1874 sent an army to Taiwan where shipwrecked
Ryukyu fishermen had been killed. Ryukyu had been a kingdom
dependent on both China and Japan, but the Meiji government wanted to

23 Meiji Ishinshi Cakkai, ed., Meiji Ishin and Asia. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 2001.
 33

absorb Ryukyu into Japan's territory. The Taiwan expedition nearly caused *
a war between the two countries, and the dispute could only be solved „
when China made a concession and agreed to pay compensation for the jj
dead Ryukyu people. The Japanese government considered this S
compensation China's approval of Japan's sovereignty over Ryukyu. It then _
prohibited the Ryukyu king from sending tribute to China and finally in £
1879 changed the status of the Ryukyu kingdom to a prefecture of Japan, °
Okinawa. The Ryukyu king and his officials resisted to this process and jj
tried to ask China for help. The Chinese government perceived Japan's £
absorption of Ryukyu as one of the many threats to the Chinese World "
Order, by then emerging all along its borders. Japanese-Chinese relations
became more hostile during the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century.
This situation fuelled Japanese intellectuals' quest to conceive of Asia as a
region. The establishment of the Society for the Development of Asia in
1880 by several Japanese intellectuals and military officers should be
viewed in this context. 24
Early Meiji Japan thus began to pay more attention to international
relations in Asia. However, this effort did not always mean an emphasis on
Asian solidarity. There were at least three different types of policies
proposed about how Japan should pursue international relations: first, it
was to pursue Western civilization on its own; second, it was to ally with
Asian countries to cope with the Western threat; and third, it was to
intervene in Asian countries in order to stimulate and encourage reforms to
adopt Western civilization.
Many Meiji intellectuals advocated the first way. They maintained that
Japan should not hesitate to leave Asian countries behind, to make every
effort to catch up with the West, and to improve Japan's inferior status vis-
a-vis European countries. They expected that neighboring countries such
as Korea and China would resist westernizing reforms. If this were the case,
then an alliance with them would only yield conflict and constitute an
obstacle to Japanese development. On the other hand, it was possible for
Japan to ally itself with its neighbors, if the Japanese could identify
reformist leaders in those neighboring societies. This suggestion
sometimes came close to the third one: intervention in neighboring states
for the purpose of inducing development. However, the idea of direct rule
and forcing reform on its neighbors should be chosen only when Japan
failed to find reliable reformers in those countries.
Another factor taken into account in this debate was the evaluation of
conflicts with Japan's neighbors. Some intellectuals were anxious about the

24 Kusama, "On Solidarity of Oriental Countries."

34 Hiroshi Mitani

u possibility of prolonged dispute with neighboring countries, because this

% would weaken the power of Japan to resist the major threat from the West.
z Some of the thinkers advocating this viewpoint were conservative
° Confucians who felt uneasy about the western reforms undertaken by the
> government. On the other hand, the majority of contemporary thinkers
u did not care about neighboring countries' hostility. They believed that
J; Korea and China had no ability to send armies to Japan, even if hostilities
£ developed into wars. Therefore, Japan could act in the region according to
5 its will, as its power was growing as a result of modernizing reforms.
z
Intellectuals writing in this vein concluded that Japan should accelerate its
efforts to adopt Western civilization, leaving other Asian countries behind.
Historians often claim that this attitude toward Asia was established
after Yukichi Fukuzawa published his article entitled "Leaving Asia" in
1885. However, the policy of self-help had been in formation from the
very beginning of the Meiji government and was maintained throughout
the Meiji era. The call for Asian solidarity was a secondary and even latent
stream of thought. However, we cannot neglect the idea of Asian solidarity
when we examine its role in East Asian history: This ideology later on
attracted many revolutionaries in Asia and offered them an intellectual
basis as well as opportunities for collecting financial aid at the turn of the
twentieth century, especially after the Japanese victory in the Russo-
Japanese war. Among these revolutionaries we may name Sun Yat-sen, who
played a major role in overthrowing the Ch'ing Dynasty and founding the
Republic in 1912, as well as Phan Boi-Chau, who started the nationalist
movement in colonized Vietnam. The role of the ideology of Asian
Solidarity during the 1930s belongs to a later episode in history when
Japan, with much more power, began to expand its empire to Northeast
Asia. The analysis of that story, however, is the task of another essay.

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