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Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz, Yuka Hiruma Kishida. Kenkoku University and the Experience of Pan-Asianism: Education in the Japanese Empire., The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 3, September 2023, Pages 1424–1476, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad271
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The literature on Japanese Pan-Asianism has largely leaned on intellectual history, when seeking to pluralize the movement and be generous to its offerings, and on political and imperial history, when charting its violence and the historical arc of the Japanese Empire. Regarding the empire and Pan-Asianism’s central case of Manchukuo, the most generative analyses have crosscut these methodologies while shifting our focus to new sets of political agents, unsettling historical assumptions in the process. Mariko Asano Tamanoi examined nongovernmental actors and blurred the opposition of colonizer and colonized. Louise Young, Rana Mitter, Hyun Ok Park, and Norman Smith incorporated civil society and Chinese and Korean experiences, illuminating more complicated on-the-ground relations than the collaboration-resistance binary suggested. Prasenjit Duara took seriously Pan-Asianism’s reworkings of sovereignty and authenticity and theorized the creation of an East Asian modern that anticipated global neoimperial forms.
Yuka Hiruma Kishida’s Kenkoku University and the Experience of Pan-Asianism: Education in the Japanese Empire continues this break with the nation-centric view of Manchuria while applying a microhistorical approach to the study of Pan-Asianism, bringing Kenkoku University (abbreviated “Kendai”) into intimate examination over 1938–1945. Manchukuo’s governing authority envisioned the colony from 1932 as a utopian polity that would pioneer the Japanese Pan-Asianist order for East Asia, representing its founding principle of rule by the “kingly way (ōdō)” to realize “ethnic harmony (minzoku kyōwa),” though, in reality, it only deepened Japan’s informal colonial control of the region. The university was positioned similarly. It was a distinct institution, with relative prestige and autonomy within the Japanese Empire, that led Manchukuo’s ideological Pan-Asian effort and was the most important imperial laboratory for Pan-Asian praxis.
