ABSTRACT
Introduction In 1924, Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) closed his address before an audience in the port city of Kōbe by challenging Japanese to determine whether their country would become “a cat’s-paw of the West’s Despotic Way (seihō hadō) or a bastion of the East’s Kingly Way (tōhō ōdō).”1 Sun’s death the following year spared him the irony of seeing his reliance on Confucian terminology to express pan-Asian idealism turned against him in Japan’s ultimate answer to his query, which was, in the apt phrasing of Marius Jansen, “to justify a rule of Might with Oriental maxims of Right.”2 Indeed, given the often glaring gap between the principles of virtuous rule and the brutalities of militarist despotism that marked Japan’s “Holy War” (seisen) to establish a New Order in East Asia, it comes as no surprise that historians have tended to conceive of Japan’s wartime Pan-Asianism as merely “false ideology” (giji-shisō) in the service of nationalist aggression.3
