'This volume is indispensable for understanding the intellectual history of Pan Asianism and to help understand current debates over Japan's wartime past. Recognizing the vast gap between rhetoric and reality, here the contributors help unravel the idealism that animated elite discourse and how this was used to indoctrinate and mobilize the Japanese people in a war that mostly victimized those who were supposed to benefit. One can only hope for a companion volume of similar quality focusing on regional discourse about Japanese Pan Asianism.'
'The 15 essays in this volume take the debate beyond how the ideology was instrumentalized and draw our attention to the intellectual history of Pan Asianism and how it morphed over the past century. These are detailed and complex scholarly essays that help readers understand that Pan Asianism was neither monolithic nor set in concrete.' - The JapanTimes Online
"...this collection should be required reading for graduate students and scholars of Japan who are interested in the complex and often contradictory relationship between the holy trinity of modern Japanese history--empire, nation, and state." - Bill Mihalopoulos, Journal of Asian Studies
'This volume is indispensable for understanding the intellectual history of Pan Asianism and to help understand current debates over Japan's wartime past. Recognizing the vast gap between rhetoric and reality, here the contributors help unravel the idealism that animated élite discourse and how this was used to indoctrinate and mobilize the Japanese people in a war that mostly victimized those who were supposed to benefit. One can only hope for a companion volume of similar quality focusing on regional discourse about Japanese Pan Asianism.'
'The fifteen essays in this volume take the debate beyond how the ideology was instrumentalized and draw our attention to the intellectual history of Pan Asianism and how it morphed over the past century. These are detailed and complex scholarly essays that help readers understand that Pan Asianism was neither monolithic nor set in concrete.' - The JapanTimes Online
'Collectively, these essays provide us with the most diversified perspectives on Japanese Pan-Asianism ever brought together in one volume. In them, we can sec how the idea engaged the interest, sympathies and even the passions of a range of Japanese thinkers, publicists, politicians and reformers due, undoubtedly, to the elastic nature of the concept, which offered something to a range of Japanese interests.' - Pacific Affairs
'This collection of essays is brimming full of ideas that cannot fail to provoke and questions that will become future research topics. Although some of the essays are too densely written for most undergraduates, this collection should be required reading for graduate students and scholars of Japan who are interested in the complex and often contradictory relationship between the holy trinity of modern Japanese history—empire, nation, and state.' - BILL MIHALOPOULOS, Northern Michigan University, The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 67, No. 3 (August) 2008
