Warring internationalisms: Multilateral thinking in Japan, 1933--1964

This dissertation explores the range of internationalist activity, thought, and rhetoric prevalent in Japan between its withdrawal from the League of Nations and its acceptance into the United Nations. This includes not only the kinds of activities that are traditionally considered internationalist, such as participation in League conferences and committees, but also the use of internationalist rhetoric as a justification for imperialist expansion. Three overarching themes run through this study: the role of internationalism in Japanese imperialism; Japanese anxieties about the country's position among the world powers; and, most importantly, the rise of internationalist rhetoric as the lingua franca of international relations in the twentieth century, which necessitated the continual redefinition of internationalism.; Far from the demise of multilateral participation, Japan's withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933 was, in fact, the occasion for the diversification of its internationalist efforts. Proponents of a "people's diplomacy" campaigned to bring the 1940 Olympic Games to Tokyo and established the Society for International Cultural Relations, a national organization for international cultural exchange. But as Japanese society was increasingly mobilized for war, even such efforts at international cooperation were made to contribute to the imperialist project. Some internationalists envisioned regional configurations of cooperation to replace what they saw as a flawed global framework dominated by the Western powers. As the war intensified, these ideas of regional cooperation, too, were co-opted for the justification of Japan's imperialist domination of East Asia. In the decade after the war ended, familiar internationalist rhetoric became a keystone in the construction of a so-called new Japan.; However elastic these definitions of internationalism may seem, any student of Japanese international history in the twentieth century must take them seriously, or miss both the appeal of the sleight-of-hand ideology of wartime imperialism and the continuities underlying the apparently sudden shift to mulilateral cooperation in the postwar period. The world views that undergirded a wide range of positions, from proponents of cooperation with the League of Nations to the architects of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, were not so different as they seem.