ABSTRACT
Building a Pan-Asian empire in the late 1930s and early 1940s was closely associated with the question of restructuring East Asian geography and space. Constructing a self-sufficient East Asian bloc needed to maximize the politico-economic mobilization and exploitation of human resources and raw materials in China and Japan’s colonies. This chapter critically examines the question of how the knowledge of space and geography in wartime Japan rationalized the (re)making of Japan’s colonial empire. Especially, this chapter traces two distinctive groups of Japanese geographers; the Kyoto School of Geography and geopoliticians in the Tokyo area. Geographers trained at Kyoto Imperial University attempted to link their spatial theories to the spiritual notion of the Imperial Way. On the other hand, geopolitics in the Tokyo area tended to emphasize spatial reconstruction and economic development in both Japan proper and the colonies.
