This year marks the eightieth anniversary of the end of the Asia-Pacific War. From 1937 to 1945, the militarist state in Japan battled not only for colonies and resources but also to validate certain key ideas that continue to shape how we talk about Japan’s apparent distinctiveness. One of these ideas was Pan-Asianism: a mode of thinking that saw Japan as uniquely adept at synthesizing diverse peoples and cultures such that both the particular and the universal would co-exist within a single whole. While this form of Japanese exceptionalism manifested itself explicitly in wartime propaganda of the 1930s and 1940s, it goes at least as far back as art historian Okakura Kakuzō’s writings on Japanese aesthetics at the turn of the century and extends forward to the Japanese government’s ongoing Cool Japan campaign. Although the war ended in 1945, the ideologies that animated it remain, in mutated form, with us today.
Japanese imperialism in the years leading up to and during the Asia-Pacific War borrowed heavily from contemporaneous Western forms of imperialism, but it wasn’t simply derivative. After overthrowing the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868, the new Meiji government embarked on a program of intensive modernization—which was often synonymous with Westernization—under the slogan of bunmei kaika or “civilization and enlightenment.” Japan’s leaders sought to bring the country in line with the supposedly advanced nation-states of the West, and that meant emulating Western institutions and practices, including extending Japan’s influence over the countries surrounding it.
Japan acquired its first overseas colony, Taiwan, in 1895. It annexed the Korean peninsula in 1910. Like many other industrialized nations, Japan in the 1930s turned to fascism and the construction of autarkic economic empires as a solution to the instabilities engendered by capitalist modernity. Yet there was a major strand in Japanese political thought that set Japanese imperialism in this period apart from earlier European colonialisms and the expansionist activities of Nazi Germany and Italy. Japanese imperialist discourse in the 1930s and early 1940s often portrayed Japanese military aggression as a historic mission to liberate Asia from the European and American imperial powers that had dominated the region for centuries. Japan would then combine all the peoples of Asia into a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, namely, a regional political and economic system where each nation or race would perform a specific role determined by its “natural” cultural attributes.
This pan-Asian ideal was essentially a reaction against the prevailing assumption that being modern required non-Western nations to assimilate into a universal culture based on Western norms and to abandon the cultural traditions that made them unique. Wartime propaganda such as this postcard from Singapore promoted this view by featuring racialized human figures representing different national and ethnic groups gathered around a central Japanese figure (usually in military uniform). Japan, the militarist state insisted, was destined to lead Asia because it could do what no one else could: synthesize discrete elements into a harmonious whole yet maintain the distinctiveness of those elements.
This vision of particularity-in-universality took on its most obvious form during the war, but it had already emerged in earlier forms of pan-Asianism, most notably in Okakura Kakuzō’s English-language writings on Japanese aesthetics. Okakura was born in Yokohama in 1863 to a silk merchant family of samurai origins. He met the Orientalist scholar Ernest Fenollosa when he was a student at the Imperial University of Tokyo and was deeply inspired by the latter’s admiration for Asian art. He later became one of the foremost authorities on Japanese art in the Meiji period. Across his three English-language works—Ideals of the East (1903), The Awakening of Japan (1904), and The Book of Tea (1906)—Okakura developed a set of ideas that laid the foundation for subsequent narratives about Japan’s apparent genius for cultural hybridization.
In Ideals of the East, Okakura argues that Asian civilization is founded on a shared tradition of spirituality and that Japanese art uniquely reflects this tradition because of Japan’s ability to hybridize different cultures without melting them down into an undifferentiated mishmash. Okakura claims that, because the Japanese race is an “Indo-Tartaric” amalgamation, the Japanese people have been especially capable of absorbing Indian and Chinese culture since ancient times. He also asserts that the Japanese race has the special ability to combine the new with the old, the foreign with the indigenous. He uses the metaphor of tidal waves shaping the shore to illustrate his point, writing that “the history of Japanese art becomes thus the history of Asiatic ideals—the beach where each successive wave of Eastern thought has left its sand-ripple as it beat against the national consciousness.”
Okakura foregrounds “Japanese art” in his account of “Asiatic ideals” because he sees Japanese artworks and historic monuments as embodiments of a hybrid Japanese culture that encapsulates the whole of Asian civilization. Only the Japanese race, he explains, has been able to preserve its artworks and monuments due to its long history of isolation as well as the imperial family’s unbroken rule over the country. As such, only Japan exemplifies the whole of Asian spirituality from ancient times through to the present in the form of its artworks and monuments. By describing Japan as “a museum of Asiatic civilization,” Okakura asserts that Japanese aesthetics reflect Japan’s supposedly superior ability to mix different cultures; an ability which has enabled Japan, in Okakura’s account, to become the sole receptacle of Asian spirituality in an increasingly materialistic world.
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Okakura’s ideas on Japan’s privileged position in Asia were immensely influential during and after his lifetime. In fact, his theories about Japanese aesthetics gained traction in the United States and Europe before they became widely circulated in Japan. (The Book of Tea was translated into Japanese only in 1929, followed by Ideals of the East in 1938, and The Awakening of Japan in 1940.) As Kinoshita Nagahiro notes in his essay on Okakura’s lifelong attempts to write a pan-Asian history of art, Okakura was very active outside of Japan. After publishing The Book of Tea in New York in 1906, he wrote several essays for Japanese Temples and Their Treasures, a guidebook published in preparation for the 1910 Japan-British Exhibition in London. In addition, he gave lectures and prepared reports on the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he served first as advisor and then as curator of the Department of Chinese and Japanese Art from 1906 to his death in 1913. In the Okakura’s obituary, published in the museum’s bulletin, trustee and collector of Japanese art William Sturgis Bigelow and John Ellerton Lodge, assistant curator of Japanese and Chinese art under Okakura, commend Ideals of the East for “explaining his [Okakura’s] important and now generally accepted analysis of the movements of thought and art throughout Asia.” They write of Okakura’s “encyclopedic” knowledge not only of Japanese, Chinese, and Indian but also Western art and culture, concluding with the assertion that Okakura, not only in his books and lectures but in his very person, succeeded in synthesizing East and West:
He was an “Admirable Crichton” in his way, with a grasp of the best intellectual products of the highest civilizations on both sides of the world, which completely invalidated Kipling’s famous line:
“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”
They met in Okakura-Kakuzo.
Even before the Japanese state appropriated Okakura’s famous slogan “Asia is One,” American cultural institutions and their supporters had already internalized the idea that Japan and the artworks that it produced had a special capacity for hybridizing the disparate cultures of East and West.
This ideology of “hybridism,” as Koichi Iwabuchi calls it in his 2002 book Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism, continues to shape contemporary perceptions of Japan, both in and outside the country. In 2002, the Koizumi government launched the Intellectual Property Strategic Program—more commonly known as the Cool Japan campaign—to capitalize on the transnational popularity of Japanese pop culture to export the products of Japan’s creative industries more effectively while increasing inbound tourism to Japan. Cool Japan has since become a mainstay of Japanese state policy. According to sociologist and cultural research Michal Daliot-Bul, at its deepest level Cool Japan is an attempt to construct a new national identity for Japan after more than a decade of economic recession and social malaise. While it’s primarily designed to sell anime, manga, and other Japanese pop cultural products to overseas markets, Cool Japan ultimately seeks to “re-brand” the nation as a cultural powerhouse that possesses a superior ability to bridge Asian and Western cultures and is therefore justified in taking leadership of Asia. Daliot-Bul cites the Yōkoso! Japan tourism promotion video from 2007, which features then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe proudly proclaiming that “Japan is ready to act as a bridge between Asia and the rest of the world.”
It’s now 2025, and the narrative has remained much the same since Okakura’s pronouncements on Japanese syncretism. In June 2024, the Cabinet Office of the Japanese government launched an updated version of its Cool Japan strategy, which the COVID-19 pandemic had halted temporarily. This new version contains a policy document from 2018 called “Nihon gatari shō” or “Guidelines for Narrating Japanese Culture,” to which both state and private organizations are meant to refer when marketing products, services, tourist attractions, and all things Japanese to international audiences. In the section titled “Mixing Japan,” the policy paper draws on the concepts of musubi (“tying or knots”) and awase (“putting together an assortment”) to reiterate the familiar narrative of Japan’s unique aptitude for cultural synthesis:
Japan is intrinsically multi-faceted and multi-layered. At the heart of its culture pulses a standard of duality—heterogeneous players coexisting in harmony— […] Power sparks in the nodes which link diverse components. The art of Japan’s editing [of its identity] manifests itself in the joining and mixing of boundaries…
The authors of the policy paper argue that Japan has always been good at mixing different cultures. “Throughout its history,” they write, “Japan incorporated systems and mechanisms from overseas and churned them into its own unique blend.”
As Iwabuchi observes, anyone can engage in cultural hybridization, but the ideology of hybridism problematically assumes that the ability to hybridize is an organic and ahistorical aspect of the Japanese national character. While such narratives of national uniqueness might seem like a harmless tool for promoting a country’s exports in a global economy, discourses of national exceptionalism can lead to a wrongful sense of entitlement in international affairs, as it did in the turbulent years of the Asia-Pacific War.
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