Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman's “Pan-Asianism as an Ideal of Asian Identity and Solidarity, 1850-Present” deals with Pan-Asian ideas in a broad context, from the earliest encounters with Western imperialism and nationalism to contemporary concepts of “Asian Values.” They argue that Pan-Asianism only became part of Japan's mainstream political vocabulary in the 1910s, and it was problematic from the start. Unresolved questions included: Did Japan want to lead Asia in resisting European imperialism, or did it want an alliance with Great Britain? How should Asia fit into a European-dominated world? How did Korea and China, both of which Japan had long and complicated relationships with, fit into the vision of a Japanese-led Asia? Saaler and Szpilman also make clear that as time went on, Japanese proponents of Pan Asianism increasingly imagined the future as one of Japanese domination over the rest of Asia rather than equal partnerships, and they also found themselves winning increasing support from the Japanese government. The authors provide a thorough survey of the varieties of Japanese Pan-Asianism's leading thinkers and texts, (as well as many Chinese and Korean responses), briefly touching on all the issues discussed below.

Japan had the predominant role in creating the discourse of Pan-Asianism because it won the Russo-Japanese War. Gerhard Krebs's “World War Zero? New Literature on the Russo-Japanese War 1904/05” surveys some of the recent work on that war and the impact of Japan's victory around the world. It captured global attention as a racial war, since it was the first time an Asian nation had defeated a white nation. The greatest impact was in China and Korea, but Japan's success also influenced Pan-Islamic thought and the “Japanizers” of Ethiopia.

Although the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-5 had radically changed the relationship between Japan and China, it was the Russo-Japanese war that lifted Japan out of the mass of Asian nations and into the status of a world power. Victory in this war first gave Japan a chance to speak as the voice of Asia to the Western powers. This achievement encouraged many in China and elsewhere in Asia to model their national reconstruction efforts on Japan. In Southeast Asia colonial subjects of the European empires hoped that Japan would help them gain independence. Although these hopes would not be dashed immediately, some people became aware of the contradictions between Pan-Asianism and the growing Japanese empire very early. Chinese intellectual Zhang Taiyan (who had famously said that the relationship between Japan and China should be as close as “lips and teeth”) became convinced that Japanese Pan-Asianism was not leading to what he desired, an “Asian Humanitarian Brotherhood,” but to Japanese imperial domination. By 1907 he was denouncing Japan as the “public enemy” of Asia.

In the early 20th century Japanese Pan-Asianists were often explicit supporters of movements of national liberation. They supported Filipinos trying to free themselves from Spanish and American colonialism and Chinese trying to free themselves from the Unequal Treaties, Manchu rule, and China's general “backwardness.” Yet even then the story was complicated.

Sato Kazuo, in “Sun Yat-sen's 1911 Revolution Had Its Seeds in Tōkyō,” not only describes some of Sun's activities but gives a concrete example of the contradiction at the heart of Japanese Pan-Asianism by discussing two of Sun's friends. Miyazaki Toten is rightly remembered as a democrat who wanted to “promote reforms in Japan as well as the rest of the world through the revolution in China.” Sun was also aided, however, by Utsunomiya Taro who saw the 1911 revolution as a chance to split China into smaller units that could more easily be dominated by Japan. At that point there was no clear consensus among Japanese on what Japan should become, but all sides used China to project their visions of a Japanese future.

While many Chinese studied in Japan, Lu Xun was iconic both because of his status as China's most important modern writer and because of the impact his time in Japan had on his life. Lu Xun was preparing to be a medical doctor until his teacher showed a slide of listless Chinese prisoners at the end of his anatomy class. Lu was shocked by his compatriots’ passivity and the laughter they induced from his Japanese classmates, and he later wrote that this experience convinced him to abandon his studies of modern medicine and return home to awaken the Chinese people. This became known as the Magic Lantern Incident, and it is probably the best known story of nationalist awakening for modern Chinese.

One of the most significant Pan-Asian figures outside of China and Japan was Rabindranath Tagore. Indian Pan-Asianism had little practical connection to that of China and Japan, as Japanese Pan-Asianism tended to mean only East-Asianism, but Tagore, who traveled in both China and Japan, was a globally famous writer, playwright, composer, and poet who became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1913). Tagore was a perfect Pan-Asian interlocutor between the two countries, and Zeljko Cipris's “Seduced by Nationalism: Yone Noguchi's ‘Terrible Mistake’: Debating the China-Japan War With Tagore” looks at a series of letters he exchanged with the Japanese poet and former internationalist Yone Noguchi in 1938. Noguchi claimed that the Japanese invasion of China was an attempt to save the Chinese people and their ancient culture from the evils of Chiang Kai-shek who had killed thousands of Chinese by blowing the Yellow River dikes (to stop the Japanese), and, Noguchi claimed, sold his country to the West, diverging from “oriental ethics.” Tagore refused to give this interpretation any credit, denouncing imperial Japan's betrayal not only of Pan-Asian but of universal values. The letters reflect the complete absorption of Noguchi's flavor of Pan-Asianism into Japanese imperialism, much as did Dazai Osamu's fiction, discussed in the previous article.

The War of Resistance Against Japan, also known as the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945, devastated much of the Chinese countryside and its major cities. The war brought more Chinese into contact with Japan than ever before. Earlier contacts were sometimes peaceful interactions, ranging from intellectuals reading Japanese books to workers laboring in Japanese textile mills. After 1937 the contact primarily meant that ordinary Chinese were likely to be bombed, turned into refugees, or in some other way suffered direct violence under Japanese occupation, in some cases at the hands of fellow Chinese. In “China and Japan at War: Suffering and Survival, 1937-1945,” Diana Lary outlines the impact of the war on Chinese society. These years still have a profound influence on contemporary Chinese attitudes towards Japan because the war has also had a profound impact on Chinese national identity. The Chinese Communist Party came to power in part because of the war, and the Party claims their resistance to Japan as a key source of legitimacy.

On 30 October 1940, six days after meeting with Adolf Hitler in the railway station at Montoire, Philippe Pétain announced on French radio that “a collaboration has been envisioned between our two countries.” Since then, “collaboration” has been the word by which we denigrate political cooperation with an occupying force. Pétain's choice of language to characterize the arrangement he made with Hitler—he claimed he would shield France from the greater threat of military occupation—was not of his own devising. The French army had signed an armistice with Germany four months earlier that committed French officials “to conform to the decisions of the German authorities and collaborate faithfully with them.” This first iteration was vague and innocent; Pétain's was not, and less and less could be. As war and occupation subordinated France's economy and polity to German control, collaboration unravelled into a tangle of compromises that few could anticipate at the outset of the war.

Ang Lee's 2007 movie, Lust, Caution (Se, Jie) based on a short story by Zhang Ailing, is a deeply unsettling exploration of enmity and collaboration filtered through the medium of the erotic. The Chinese head of the Japanese Secret Service in 1942 Shanghai, Mr Yee, develops a sexual relationship with the winsome Mrs Mak who is a secret agent for the resistance and seeks to lure him to his assassination. The film maker skillfully utilizes the torrid sexual encounters between the two to register their ever-changing and volatile feelings of lust, hatred, violence and love.

The question of moral judgment looms large over every discussion of World War II collaboration, at times clouding and distorting our understanding of this complex issue, as Timothy Brook poignantly remarks in his contribution to this journal's recent symposium. This moral question is certainly relevant and should not be dismissed, since collaboration came to be more or less directly associated with the civic and human rights infringements perpetrated by the occupying forces. Always complex, this question becomes murkier when linked to the rhetoric of patriotism and to postwar political agendas, as is the case with the “resistentialist” postwar narrative that has dominated the debate on collaboration until recently. This narrative has mythologized resistance and enshrined it as the only patriotic, moral, and honorable response to foreign occupation, gliding over difficult moral dilemmas raised by some strategies and practices of resistance. In the process, it has polarized the debate on collaboration by offering only two opposite and monolithically-conceived categories: moral and patriotic resistance versus unethical and treasonous collaboration. It has therefore left no conceptual tool for gaining a more nuanced understanding of behaviors that do not fit this pre-established and rigid dichotomy, such as “nationalist” or “state-building” collaborationism—referring, respectively, to attempts at protecting nation and population from the occupying forces and at state building in the face of the complete and bewildering disappearance of the preexisting order, as in the cases discussed by Brook. Finally, this resistentialist narrative has constructed a universal image of collaboration, which tends to reduce various forms of this phenomenon in different countries to a common denominator, obliterating all political, social, and cultural differences.

While China was at the center of Japan's war, by 1942 Japan had occupied much of Southeast Asia, home of many ethnic Chinese. Often Chinese nationalists in those places were potential leaders of resistance to Japan. On the other hand, Japanese authorities knew that educated Chinese could be useful in subordinating other Southeast Asians to the Japanese empire, since they had played this role for European imperialists. Hayashi Hirofumi's “The Battle of Singapore, the Massacre of Chinese and Understanding of the Issue in Postwar Japan” and Vivian Blaxell's “New Syonan and Asianism in Japanese-era Singapore” both discuss the complexities of Japanese occupation in Southeast Asia. Hayashi shows that killing ethnic Chinese was explicit Japanese military policy because Chinese were assumed to be innately opposed to Japanese empire, showing the military's skepticism about Pan-Asianism. Nonetheless, as Blaxell shows, other Japanese simultaneously worked to win the support of two groups, Chinese and Eurasian Christians (usually part Chinese) through construction of two model villages, New Syonan and Fuji Village. In both cases, the actual ways that Japanese Singapore functioned was far more chaotic and contingent than high-level policy would suggest. The ironic contrast between Japanese war crimes happening side-by-side with Japanese attempts to find Chinese allies to build a new Asia was common everywhere.

On the east coast of the Malay Peninsula between Mersing and Endau, a few kilometers in from the silvery beaches along the South China Sea, one comes to Kampong Hubong. It is still and hot here. Isolated. Rice fields lie fallow. Coconut palms, bougainvillea, hibiscus, and tall grasses tumble together in the fields. Small buildings of stucco and timber, gone grey with age and monsoon rains, line one side of a short paved street. A couple of Chinese men sit in the shade of the shophouses. They yak in the Hokkien dialect. A red dog yawns.

The final reading is Erik Esselstrom's essay “The 1960 ‘Anpo’ Struggle in The People's Daily: Shaping Popular Chinese Perceptions of Japan during the Cold War.” After World War II and the victory of the Chinese Communists in 1949, the U.S. government enlisted Japan as an important Cold War ally in the effort to “contain” China. While this arrangement was in some ways favorable to Japan, it was extremely unpopular among Japanese citizens who wanted to create a less antagonistic relationship with China.