ABSTRACT
Introduction In selecting the political scientist Rōyama Masamichi (1895-1980) for discussion, I am attempting to explore the margin, or boundary, of Pan-Asianism. That is, Rōyama’s perspective on Asian unity can be located at the rationalist extreme of Pan-Asianism, some of whose proponents embraced highly intuitive, naturalistic, or culturalist visions of Asia, many of which are implicitly backward-looking. The distinction between Rōyama and the culturalist panAsianists can be illustrated by situating both in the framework employed by the historian Tetsuo Najita in his survey of modern Japanese intellectual history. I refer to his distinction between “restorationism,” which he defines as faith in a kind of “traditional idealism” or “cultural spirit” that emphasizes human values and community, and “bureaucratism,” which focuses on “effective, measurable . . . performance” toward materialistic goals.1 Culturalist PanAsianism – which seeks implicitly to “restore” some ontologically pure cultural unity in Asia – falls historically on the side of restorationism,2 while Rōyama’s perspective would clearly be on the bureaucratic side. Indeed, Rōyama was one of Japan’s leading specialists in the field of public administration.
