Dr Chris Harding

they have a sense of Asia as being partly overrun by white Western power.

And they see it in quite racialized terms.

And they say what Japan's job is, the first Asian country to modernize, we will build ourselves up and we will gather together a community of Asian nations.

They talk about this as quote unquote pan-Asianism.

Gather them together and we will lead them to steadily push back.

Because their vision, I suppose, of Japanese history going back centuries is you've got Indian culture in the form of things like Buddhism made its way through China and Korea into Japan.

Lots of Chinese culture has been at the roots of building up Japan, as has Korea.

But now all those countries, India, China, Korea, are having a bad time of it, right, at the hands of Western colonialism.

Korea is in a sort of a confused state.

if we as Japan can be the leader of these nations, the place where all the best bits of their culture are gathered together and then combined with Western technology, we'll be unstoppable and we will raise Asia up.

And I think people genuinely believe that in Japan.

in the 1870s, early 1880s.

The trouble with it is that that becomes a very strong ideological basis for kind of doing whatever you want militarily in Asia.

And so Japan has a victory over China, 1894 to 5, which is a big shock.

So they do that with China, a little bit inconclusive, I think.

The big thing for Japan, though, I think, is the takeover of Korea, the colonisation of Korea, completed in 1910, really on the basis that we will modernise Korea.

We will give them railways.

We'll give them banks.

absolutely but then i suppose people who are fans of european history in this period will have heard of the civilizing mission they will have heard of that will have heard the british and the french saying very similar things and the japanese do exactly that they'll sort of plant their flag they'll have a rhetoric of civilization they even go to the extent where they send medics and even psychiatrists right to korea after they colonize it um in the early 1900s and some of the psychiatrists

write back to Japan and they say, more and more people in Korea are suffering anxiety and depression.