ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the intellectual origins of a Japan-led East Asian community in the mid-1930s. Since Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Japan was placed in a position of having to contrive its own logic of a regional empire. On the other hand, European intellectuals were producing various theories of the limits of a single nation-state framework in the international order. Highlighting Japanese social scientists’ writings on building an Asian empire beyond the conventional European colonial structure, this chapter shows that the violent vision of a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural empire became a central intellectual topic in the social sciences in imperial Japan. Among a group of Japanese imperial intellectuals, this chapter focuses on two renowned Japanese social scientists, Rōyama Masamichi and Shinmei Masamichi.
