From Utopia to Empire

Atarashikimura—“New Village”—was founded by the Japanese writer Mushakôji Saneatsu (1885—1976) in 1918 based on the utopian principles of restoring dignity to labor, communal living, and the actualization of the authentic self in artistic pursuits. The rhetoric and rationale of utopia extended to the founding of the puppet state of the Manchukuo in the 1930s as Japan's imperialism intensified. By 1943, Mushakôji wrote the infamous A Personal View on the Greater East Asia War, using the rhetoric for utopia to argue in favor of the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere. This paper will examine the allure and danger of Mushakôji's rhetoric of utopia, and how such rhetoric contributes to the escalation of war and colonization

Aesthetics · Art · China · Dignity · East Asia · Empire · Literature · Political science · Prosperity · Rhetoric · Sociology · Theology · Utopia · Chinese history and philosophy · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy

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