Japan’s Identity and Its Separation from Asia

Abstract

This paper argues that Japan's modern national identity developed through a cyclical process of orientation toward the West and Asia, unfolding across four phases: pre-modern participation in the Sinocentric order; the Meiji-era construction of a new identity through deliberate separation from Asia, exemplified by Fukuzawa Yukichi's Datsu-A Ron; interwar disillusionment following Japan's racial rejection at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, which drove a turn toward Pan-Asianism and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere; and postwar reintegration into the Western order under American occupation. Rather than discarding earlier frameworks, each reorientation repurposed them, so that the hierarchical civilizational logic adopted during the Meiji period persisted even as Japan's stated allegiances shifted. This continuity, the paper contends, helps explain Japan's enduring Western alignment, its unresolved tensions with China and South Korea, and the contested legacy of empire shaping its regional relationships today.