ABSTRACT
This chapter will investigate the recent proliferation of attempts to reinscribe Japan in Asia as a member of a community of Asian states. Through the major part of modern Japanese history, Asia has generally been regarded as an object of negative identification – the embodiment of everything that Japan wished not to be identified with. This discourse of difference and distancing is increasingly being replaced by one that stresses alleged essential similarities between Japan and other Asian societies, yet remains structured by a hierarchical conception of international relations reminiscent of the earlier Japanese pan-Asianism articulated before and during the Pacific War.
