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The Concept of Asia: From Geography to Ideology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2015

Hiroshi Mitani
Hiroshi Mitani*
Affiliation:
Department of Area Studies, University of Tokyo
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Extract

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.

Type
Articles
Information
New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 35: Special Issue on Comparative Turkish and Japanese Modernities , Fall 2006 , pp. 21 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © New Perspectives on Turkey 2006

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