A Spatial Conversion? The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and Japanese Imperial Geopolitics

Abstract In contemporary contexts, geopolitics is generally understood as great-power rivalry. Historically, however, a crucial aspect of geopolitics, understood as a political theory, is its role in disseminating modern European geographical knowledge, which demarcated the entire world into the bounded spaces of territorial states. A particularly intriguing puzzle in this context concerns how a non-Western power imported Western geopolitical ideas for its imperial domination and how it accepted power–knowledge relations. This study draws on the example of the Japanese Empire to examine this contradiction. Historical literature and International Relations theories have often portrayed Japan as mimicking European empires and contributing to the creation of a Western-led world order. Among its many faults is that such an understanding does not explain why, during the Second World War, imperial Japan insisted on the emancipation and unity of Asians. This move was neither a tentative turnaround nor wartime propaganda. Rather, it was built upon the tradition of anti-Western sentiment in Japan, which had coexisted with pro-Western sentiment since the mid-nineteenth century. This paper unpacks this ambivalence by examining the intellectual trajectory of a twentieth-century Japanese political scientist and politician, Masamichi Rōyama, who employed German geopolitics to develop the idea of the East Asian Cooperative, which later inspired wartime visions of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. By doing so, this study shows that Japan’s import of geographical knowledge was superficial and did not necessarily change its spatial perception.