Table of Contents

1. Introduction 2. Dreaming Big About Pan-Asianist Education: From ‘Asia University’ to ‘Kenkoku (Nation-Building) University’ 3. Exploring the Meanings of Pan-Asia: Japanese Students’ Experiences at Kenkoku University 4. Calling Asia a New Home: Korean and Taiwanese Students’ Experiences at Kenkoku University 5. Learning to Become ‘Chinese’ at a Japanese School: Chinese Students’ Experiences at Kenkoku University 6. Building a Utopia Together: Kenkoku, a Juku Periodical, as a Window into Kenkoku University’s Institutional Practice of Pan-Asianism 7. Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index

Promotional Information

Using Kenkoku University in Japanese-occupied Manchuria as a case study, this book examines the institutional practice of Japanese's wartime ideology of Pan-Asianism and how it was perceived, critiqued, and experienced by individuals.

About the Author

Yuka Hiruma Kishida is Assistant Professor of History at Bridgewater College, USA.

Reviews

[The] book goes beyond the institutional history of Kenkoku University: the microhistory approach offers fresh insights into the historiography of the relationship and tensions between the universalism of Pan-Asianist idealism and the particularism and power hegemony created by notions of Japanese privilege and supremacy within the imperial context … Hiruma Kishida’s book is an example of the sophistication and maturity in the historiography of Japanese imperialism and Pan-Asianism.
*The Journal of Japanese Studies*

Yuka Hiruma Kishida has written a thoroughly researched and informative book ... Kishida makes a significant and unique contribution which adds to previous scholarship ... The book ultimately deepens our understanding of the complex incentives for personal and national advancement provided within the framework of the Japanese empire, the conditions forging a spectrum of political worldviews, which had lasting impact in the region, and the nuanced gray areas between collaboration and resistance.
*Social Science Japan Journal*

Kishida’s study offers fascinating insight into the disillusionments, agonized choices, and occasional satisfactions, that resulted when youths resolved to devote themselves to genuine ethnic equality and pan-Asianist coprosperity within a hierarchical system dominated by Japan. This thoroughly documented inquiry lays bare the ideological contradictions that inhered throughout Manchukuo and the entire wartime Japanese empire.
*J. Victor Koschmann, Professor of History, Cornell University, USA*

I expect Butler’s work will inspire many important conversations … This work should be read widely. In addition to all practitioners and scholars of transhumanism, Black theology, and philosophy of religion, it will be of interest to many, including those in the fields of cognitive science of religion, critical theory and critical race theory, posthumanism, contemplative studies, new materialisms, and spirituality studies.
*Reading Religion*

This impressive study presents intriguing conclusions regarding the dissemination and reception of pan-Asian thought at grass-roots level. It is a valuable addition to the growing literature on the history of regionalism in East Asia.
*Sven Saaler, Professor of Modern Japanese History, Sophia University, Japan*