>Did our Greater East Asia War really result in total defeat? The former colonies that became battlegrounds all gained their independence during or after the war, and they have not fallen into white hands again. What are we to make of this fact? In the postwar years we were taught that this was an incidental byproduct of that detestable war. Yet as Japan’s official statements on war objectives make clear, the goal was to free East Asia from British and American domination and establish the area’s self-defense and independence. Again, if one asks Japanese war veterans why they fought, the reply comes that they believed they were fighting to liberate Asia. And indeed, Asia was liberated. It is a curious logic that denies any connection between this purpose and the war’s outcome. Is history so difficult that it can only be understood through such a strange logic?
>Applying this logic to the American Civil War will illustrate its distortion. It is generally recognized that the Civil War was fought not merely over the slavery issue but also over fundamental economic differences between the North and the South. Northern soldiers objected to having to die for the “niggers,” but they fought nonetheless because other issues were involved. Even Lincoln’s renowned Emancipation Proclamation was motivated by a hope to stimulate domestic and foreign support for the embattled Northern troops and to enhance the Northern position. Yet nobody today, except possibly some people in isolated regions of the Deep South, would maintain that the Emancipation Proclamation was an empty farce and that the concept of freeing slaves was foisted on the common people by a prowar Yankee faction attempting to cover up its invasion of the South. Nobody would cry out against the loss of young lives as a result of such demagoguery and insist that militarism must never again be permitted. Why is this interpretation so unpopular? Because the North won the war.
>But Japan lost, and defeat included denial of the ideals for which the losers fought as well as denial of their accomplishments. This was simply the inverse of “might makes right.”
>Did our Greater East Asia War really result in total defeat? The former colonies that became battlegrounds all gained their independence during or after the war, and they have not fallen into white hands again.
Have they really not? The Sinosphere remains divided mostly as it was at the conclusion of the war.
The modern Chinese state (whichever one one prefers) is built on a curious mix of Western nation-state ideology and the need to maintain territorial claims dating to the Ming and Ts'ing dynasties. It is no more capable of (re-)establishing East Asia's independence than Japan in its current subjugated form. But all under heaven, long divided, must unite.
I'm reading The History and Future of Hangul by Kim Jong-su. A Hangul Cultural Sphere could work.
>Who are we? How can we be ourselves? In order to make these simple questions meaningful, we must once more review the significance of the war. In Japan’s long history, only during this 100-year period was it necessary to wage war to preserve our identity. In order to wage this war, inevitably we were made increasingly aware of this identity.
This remains a taboo topic in some ways. Rarely are the origins of the Yayoi people properly discussed or investigated, though some aspects should be intuitive enough.
Everyone knows about sushi. And the people near the lower Yangtze still refer to their lands as the lands of fish and rice. So it shouldn't surprise anyone if some of these Yangtze river delta agriculturalists decided to get on boats and move to the south of an island archipelago where there is a similar humid subtropical climate necessary for rice farming. In all probability some of these people also settled the southernmost parts of the Korean Peninsula for some time, but that's not where rice was first domesticated.
Well, mainland Asia is quite large, and there is frequent debate about the relative genetic/linguistic/cultural contributions of any particular group of historical people. There was millet domestication along the Yellow River, rice domestication along the Yangtze. There was ethnogenesis in both, and many, such cases. A full investigation of what proportion of the Yayoi came from the Korean Peninsula, the Lower Yangtze, or a mixture of other parts of Asia could have consequences on cooperation between, for instance, the port cities of Shanghai and Nagasaki. It may not square well with "5000 years of Chinese civilization" or "Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus".
The civilizational-cultural sphere would still need to be held together by tried and tested social technology somehow. Just upgraded for the 21st century.
Well guess what, it didn't end on the Korean Peninsula and so it's actually still a stalemate. New ideas are needed.
>India and other subhuman nations
As with Europe and China, India is better analyzed as a cultural sphere than a nation. All I know is that plenty of material and social technology made its way to the Sinosphere from the Indic sphere.