Empire and Social Science: Shinmei Masamichi and the East Asian Community in Interwar Japan

In the early 1930s, a group of Japanese social scientists began producing theories of an East Asian community as a new order for Imperial Japan. Heavily influenced by the political climate of ‘Europe in crisis’ in the aftermath of the Great Depression as well as domestic situations that drove Japan to ultra-nationalism, these Japanese intellectuals grappled with the question of incorporating China and Japan’s colonies into a new multi-ethnic empire. This article pays special attention to Shinmei Masamichi, whose social scientific thinking was first nurtured under the progressive and liberal academic atmosphere of Taisho Japan, but came at the forefront of the rationalization of the Japanese empire in the 1930s and early 1940s. Rejecting both western democracy and the capitalist economy, Shinmei strove to theorize an empire based on anti-racism and multi-ethnicity. In doing so, he provided a strong ideological foundation for Japan’s wartime mobilization efforts in Asia. The intellectual trajectories of Shinmei’s social scientific thinking clearly show how the progressive and liberal social scientific tradition in prewar Japan resulted in an endorsement of imperialism and colonial violence during the wartime period.