Japanese Colonial Policy Studies, 1909-1945: Nitobe Inazo, Yanaihara Tadao, and Tobata Seiichi

Abstract

ABSTRACT

My dissertation explores the historical origins, development, and transformations of Colonial Policy Studies, an academic discipline in Japan in the era of imperialism, through the writings of its three leading scholars, Nitobe Inazō, Yanaihara Tadao, and Tōbata Seiichi. Founded at Sapporo Agricultural College in Hokkaido, this new, academic discipline took a more systematized form when Nitobe established it at Tokyo Imperial University in 1909. Until 1945, when the Japanese empire collapsed, the discipline provided Japanese society with a basic framework through which they defined colony, colonization, and colonial policy, and legitimized Japanese colonization as a universal phenomenon of the time. Previous studies have dealt with the three economists within a binary framework of ethical judgment, namely, whether they were internationalists believing in benefits of empire or imperialists advocating exploitation. By placing the colonial policy scholars in the discursive context of their times, my dissertation demonstrates how these opposing terms were, in fact, mutually implicated in their attempts to explain, legitimate, and sometimes criticize Japan’s expanding colonial enterprise. Moreover, my study elucidates the continuities that link the conceptual assumptions and theoretical foundations of the three scholars and lend the discipline an internal coherence. Each of the three scholars represents a distinctive phase in modern Japanese history: Nitobe representing the “nationalist” 1910’s, Yanaihara, the “internationalist” 1920’s and 1930’s, and Tōbata, the “militarist” late 1930’s and the early 1940’s. This discursive analysis of their lecture notes, monographs, scholarly pieces, and policy papers for the Japanese government demonstrates that they all advocated colonization in some form as an engine of development leading to a greater good, and all believed that empire could be disentangled from imperialism as exploitation, whether in the present or in an imagined future. All three saw colonization as an encounter between different societies with different stages of economic development and as the collective efforts of these societies to utilize all available resources to the maximum to increase human wealth, freedom, and equality for the benefit of all. Ultimately, I show that they served to legitimate and veil Japan’s actual exploitative colonial policies by claiming colonization to be development without exploitation.