Regionalism, Hegemony, and Universality in the International Order of the Far East

This chapter contextualizes Japan’s engagement with the notion of universality ingrained in nineteenth-century European international law and argues that such engagements were informed by the historical pattern of Japanese responses to hegemony and the discourse on cultural superiority in the Far East that shifted from Sinocentrism to the unbroken imperial lineage to the national-spirit. Although Japanese scholars accepted and engaged with the European standard of civilization after the forced opening up of Japan to the Western world in the mid-nineteenth century, they did so for instrumental purposes and soon translated ‘civilization’ into a language of imperialism to reassert supremacy in the region. This narrative offers an analytical framework not only to go beyond Eurocentrism but also to identify various other loci of hegemony.