ABSTRACT
Chapter four starts with the cross-cultural journey of American historian Charles Beard to Japan in 1922. Beard was invited to Japan by the Japanese powerbroker and mayor of Tokyo Baron Gotō Shimpei to help make Tokyo into a modern city. Beard had resigned from Columbia University during World War I over questions of academic freedom and support for the war, and he had become the head of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research. He had developed great prestige as a leading American historian and internationalist. Surprisingly, the city he found in Tokyo was already quite modern, with sophisticated sanitation and transportation networks. Another Columbia intellectual, James T. Shotwell, rose to become one of the premier American internationalists working to resolve conflicts through modern rational scientific thinking. In addition to almost single-handedly establishing the International Labor Organization in 1920, he helped author a proposal for nations to agree to end offensive wars that was eventually implemented by France and United States as the Kellogg- Briand Pact, signed by more than 50 nations by 1929. But Shotwell’s trip to East Asia in 1929 and his efforts to resolve the conflict between Japan and China there failed and showed the limits of western influence. Jane Addams was also heavily involved in internationalism, promoting world peace in the interwar period. Confronted by an outraged Chinese delegate to a peace conference in China, she admitted western internationalists had little influence to transform China from its colonial status and chaotic politics. In Japan, liberal internationalist intellectual Yoshino Sakuzō rose to prominence in 1918 by arguing for Peoples Rights or minponshugi through his leadership of the Taisho Democracy Movement. But his most important intellectual role lay in rejecting the outlines of western thought about political sovereignty. He adjusted Japanese political theory to allow for an Emperor and at the same time a functional popular sovereignty supported by calls for more democracy. He moved toward constructing an alternate vision for Japan in the modern world, taking a liberal approach and at the same time opening up an argument for Japan’s unique path to modernity. Yoshinō believed the Japanese Empire if properly administered, could bring Japan’s singular modernity to the rest of East Asia. Although he saw Japan’s destiny as a modern nation-state linked to other democracies internationally, he believed Japan would develop its own characteristics. Like Fukuzawa, Yoshinō had to take account of the nation in his construction of modernity for Japan. Yoshinō’s nationalist interpretation of internationalism presaged a strong move toward nationalism in the 1930s among modernists.
