Conférence - Naoko Shimazu : Symbolic Diplomacy: Tojo and the 1943 Tokyo Conference

Anne Cheng

Collège de France

Histoire intellectuelle de la Chine

Année 2024-2025

Conférence - Naoko Shimazu : Symbolic Diplomacy: Tojo and the 1943 Tokyo Conference

Naoko Shimazu

Professor and Deputy Director, Tokyo College

Naoko Shimazu est invitée par l'assemblée du Collège de France sur proposition de la Pr Anne Cheng.

Résumé

The Greater East Asia Conference was held on 5 and 6 November 1943 in Tokyo, under the chairmanship of Prime Minister General Tōjō Hideki. Variously known as the Tokyo Conference, the Greater East Asia Congress, or the Assembly of East Asiatic Nations, the conference gathered the five 'independent' states of the Manchukuo, Reorganised National Government of China (the Nanjing Regime), the Philippines, Burma, and Thailand within the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, to show a united front against the Allied powers, and most importantly, to confirm the establishment of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. It was the only large-scale diplomatic pageantry held in wartime Japan that attempted to make some diplomatic capital out of its short-lived Co-Prosperity Sphere. This lecture offers a novel perspective on this conference by privileging 'performance' as an analytical prism and consider the role of the emotive or the 'affect' in international diplomacy. This presentation which examines the Greater East Asia Conference of 1943 as a symbolic performance, represents two overarching intellectual enquiries I have: first to examine competing notions of 'Asia' at key historical junctures in twentieth-century Asia; second, to develop and apply an interdisciplinary methodological framework that can explain symbolic meanings in politics and diplomacy, in order to illustrate how 'Asia' came to be envisioned and enacted. In the end, we shall discover that Tojo was both the choreographer and the dancer/actor of the show that became emblematic of his notion of Greater East Asia. Indeed, the multiple role-playing of Tojo, and the importance he attached to it, becomes pivotal to our understanding of this particular story.