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AN IMPERIAL PATH TO MODERNITY: Yoshino Sakuzo and a New Liberal Order in East Asia, 1905-1937. Harvard East Asian Monographs, 346. Byjung-Sun N. Han. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center; Harvard University Press [distributor] 2012. vil!, 231 pp. (B&W illus.) US$39.95, cloth, ISBN 978-0-674-06571-0.
International historians of twentieth-century Japan have understood for a long time that liberals found ways to accommodate die colonialism and expansionism of Imperial Japan. This is usually portrayed as a reluctant compromise with ascendant authoritarian ideologies and behaviours. The contribution of Jung-Sun N. Han's new work is the assertion that leading liberal political theorists, notably Yoshino Sakuzö, embraced the goal of Japanese expansion on die continent and advocated achieving tiiis goal through liberal internationalism. Japanese imperialist stature abroad would enable at home a political life that met the needs of people regardless of pedigree.
An Imperial Path to Modernity fulfills two purposes. First, it is an intellectual biography of Yoshino. It treats Yoshino as a tiiinker while a student at Tokyo University and in Europe, as a Christian of Hongö Church and disciple of Ebina Danjö, as an on-site observer of die human and political realities in China and Korea, and as a scholar at Tödai and a publicist for Child koron and the As ahi newspaper. Han does not take die reader on excursions into Yoshino's childhood, his family, his personal religious faith, or his final years. Second, it is an account of die journey of a set of notions, labeled variously by Han as "liberal imperialist expansion." These concepts solidified in Yoshino's mind during die Russo-Japanese War and the Great War, persisted through the Manchurian Incident in die hands of die Japanese Council of die...