Title: Imagining Agriculture in Nanyo and the Formation of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: the Writings of Itō Chōji (伊藤兆司),1938–1944
Stream: History/Historiography
Presentation Type: Oral Presentation
Authors:
Xiaomei Wu, Duke University, United States
Abstract:
Research on colonial knowledge in the Japanese South Seas Mandate often highlights the tension between the Mandate's welfare obligations and the economic exploitation by Japanese monopolies. Scholarship on broader Nanyō explores how the discipline of Colonial Policy Studies at Imperial Universities provided epistemic legitimacy for policies of Southern Expansion and a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere by applying race science to colonial subjects, despite many of its exponents being deemed liberal. This essay explores some of the contradictions of Colonial Studies through the economic vision of an individual academic, Itō Chōji 伊藤兆司—an agricultural economist specializing in Southeast Asia at Kyūshū Imperial University—and his 1938 book, Theory of Agricultural Resources in the Nanyō. Situating Itō’s writings within the nascent discourses of Southern Expansion and transition to the Co-Prosperity Sphere, the paper shows how his economic reasoning and “anthropological” examinations of Nanyō’s native peoples produced a colonial and capitalist imaginary of agriculture, paving the way for Japan’s 1942 invasion of Outer Nanyō (Southeast Asian countries outside Japan’s colonial control). Ito framed the native populations and Western powers in Outer Nanyō as obstacles to Japan's resource development in Nanyō. Consequently, he proposed a plan for Japanese small farmer migration as an alternative to corporate investments to expand Japan's resources amid intense international competition. This paper demonstrates how Itō’s academically legitimized capitalist agricultural imaginary provided a materialist framework that prioritized Japanese economic control and racial hierarchy, thus adding a distinct, profit-driven ideological layer to Pan-Asian discourses that foregrounded an anti-Western rhetoric of ethnic harmony.
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