ABSTRACT
When one reads Japanese journals and newspapers published during the period 1918-22, one soon notices that many authors criticized the Western powers such as Britain and the United States. They used such terms as ‘justice’ (seigi) and ‘humanity’ (jindo¯) to denote their moral high ground. Many people today may consider such a usage by the prewar Japanese authors unworthy of serious consideration. Yet this chapter deals with this point for two reasons. First, we need to examine why Western powers were often described as ‘unfair’, ‘unjust’, and as ‘acting contrary to the interests of humanity’. Second, some of these authors were not unwilling to co-operate with the Western powers and they would be considered in the domestic context as ‘internationalists’. There seems, therefore, to have been some confusion in the thoughts of these ‘internationalist’ intellectuals.
