ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses mainly on expansionist Asianism. Asianism, especially that promoted by the expansionist idea, was based not only on the strategic thinking of proclaiming an Asian identity, but also the notion of de-Asianization. As discussed below, some elements of Asianism differentiated the cultural borders between Europe/West and Asia/East according to whether a nation was a maritime nation or not. Modern Japan broke the barrier between Asia and the West by transforming itself into a maritime nation. For some 19th-century intellectuals, Japan was geographically a part of Asia named by Europeans; however, Japan is already on the way to transforming itself into a Western state on the epistemic level. The chapter clarifies the relation between expansionist Asianism, the notion of de-Asianization and the maritime nation imagination, and the sea power theory, the following discussion focuses on the translation of Mahan's text and the emergence of discourses on Asia and the maritime imagination in the late Tokugawa period.
