ABSTRACT
The primary concept of Pan-Asianism that underlies this volume may be stated as follows: an ideology or facet of thought representing an extension of Japanese nationalism overseas, based on the Japanese belief that the Japanese share common physical traits with their continental neighbors, Koreans and Chinese, or that they belong to an East Asian world system with historical roots. The most obvious common denominator of this historical world system was the use of Chinese ideographs, through which various ideas were interchanged among the peoples of this region. These were not necessarily exclusively Chinese in origin, like Confucianism. In fact, not only Buddhism, which originated in India, but also Western concepts, after being transferred into Japanese from Western languages in modern times, were disseminated from Japan to intellectuals in this East Asian world. As a result, by the midtwentieth century, the written Chinese language had become as much Japanese, especially in the field of modern scientific literature, as the Japanese had been Chinese.
