 to be going live and we are recording now. Excellent, brilliant. So welcome back everyone and to the third of our book launches series and as I have been saying now for our two past events and I think in these times of pandemic and going back to exploring this as an opportunity to pick up a book and read something while our spirit in as we wait to find yet again some measure of normality is perhaps one of the most useful and sort of stimulating opportunities that we have and I am delighted today to welcome Jeremy Yellen and from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and and even though the format the webinar format that we were discussing this moment ago what are the advantages that it's a lot easier in this type of format to have a conversation and with about books and with orders that otherwise would be slightly more complicated and today I'm particularly pleased that because I am sure that the seminar is this webinar is going to be a success because of the book and because of the order but certainly we can say I am happy to say that it's probably going to be the it's going down in history as the most aptly timed webinar ever since I've just finished like two minutes ago to change a class on this very topic and the topic of the general's empire during war time so I'm very pleased with that and hopefully this will be the beginning of a nice conversation that we'll have throughout the hour and if some of our students sort of elect to join us and Jeremy completed his PhD at Harvard University before moving to Hong Kong and he implicitly correct me if I'm wrong I have the impression that you belong to the group of historians of Japan of modern Japan and they really sort of have been very important and populated the trans-historian space right that 1945 moment it's not a break it's not where things sort of end or begin but needs to be placed into a broader context and a lot of Jeremy's earlier research is really designed to flesh out some core issues whether it is about how the Japanese military and government elites decided to change course of action in 1945 and how the war was understood to perceive that among people in Japan during the war time period and then again some of these threads come together in the book that you can see on the shelf and my back which is fascinating for a number of reasons but from my perspective it does something that was absolutely missing in the storytelling of the empire and is exploring the empire from the perspective of the places that are that become part of the empire during the war and therefore these are the places where initial ideas that are coming together and in a piston condition sort of come to cash with the reality of of total war so for me it's an exciting opportunity to engage with the topic of that that that is not only sort of fascinating from an intellectual point of view but also extremely timely because the repercussions of that sort of of that negotiation of that sort of encounter between war time Japan and the territory of this newly acquired and expanded empire the the impetable act continues continuously with us today and so it is a wonderful opportunity to throw us through a book that historically introduces us to the complexity of a reality that continues to exist today and so for this reason i am absolutely thrilled to have Jeremy and to welcome him at King's looking forward to your presentation and we agree that that's 25 minutes roughly give or take to introduce some of the threads in the book then we'll start having a conversation and opening up the floor to everybody and what i would like you to say is that as usual you can use the Q&A function which will be the designated natural function for questions if you want to ask questions or submit comments but feeling that you can also use the chat which i will be monitoring throughout. Without any further ado Jeremy the floor is yours again welcome to King's. Okay thank you for such a wonderfully kind introduction i appreciate it. I appreciate being invited out by Dr Patalano and by King's College London as well as the grand what is it called the the center for grand strategy that's what it's called. Let me share my screen first and i have a power point today i think it'll be easiest to just start with this hold on you can see this right okay great so um i'm excited to have the chance to talk about my book today and i'm honored really to be the the last in this term as well and i've um i have been given 20 to 25 minutes to give this talk um but i'm going to air on the side of brevity that way we can because obviously the Q&A is always much more interesting than the talk itself but before i even begin my talk um hold on a second before i even begin why is this not working uh here we go i'd like to plug my book um i've given so many talks where i forgot to plug my own book so i decided this time i'm going to create a slide and um do so with the discount code you know on it for you guys so um if you if you are available you can just take a screenshot of this um but uh 09 flyer or if you're in the UK or Europe or Asia CS09 flyer and that will get you 30 off so i think the center for grand strategy is going to follow up by sending out discount details after the talk but better safe than sorry so i can guarantee to you guys that this is the best book i have ever written and that's the best plug i am going to give myself all right so let's start talking about the book so my book is on the greater east Asia co-prosperity sphere um it was declared on august 1st 1940 by japan's foreign minister at the time matsuka yosuke by the following year july 1941 the co-prosperity sphere became the central goal of japanese policy what's really interesting here is that this is despite the fact that very few people had any clue as to the specifics um after the outbreak of the pacific war in december 1941 the sphere which um it got to be quite big as you can see here i became the epitome of japan's wartime goals still this did not mean that people agreed about what it meant but since the end of the war the co-prosperity sphere has had a much much much longer life and it's become the euphemism for a specific understanding of japanese imperialism and a specific understanding of japanese order building so this is a concept that actually has had a longer and more powerful post war life than matsuka could have ever imagined a washington post editorial in 1988 hinted that japanese businessmen across asia were now seeking to recreate japan's failed co-prosperity sphere by economic means and more recently people have begun to notice strong parallels you can see right here china's new greater east asia co-prosperity sphere so strong parallels between china's belt and road initiative and shijin ping's community of common destiny they're using the same terms that was used in the 1940s and so there's linkages to the present so for better for worse i think the co-prosperity sphere has provided a language um from which asia has and the world has really drawn and so it was this power behind the slogan and the power behind japan's wartime empire that drew me to this topic and as i was researching it i saw contemporary chinese efforts at promoting regionalism regionalism 2.0 i guess so my research became even more interesting and the prospects of telling the story about what the co-prosperity sphere is it became even more interesting when i started seeing more and more evidence that wartime leaders did not agree or even know what the co-prosperity sphere was much of the war was spent groping towards its possibilities so today i'm going to use this as my lens and my opportunity to talk about some of the main points of my book not all of course so i believe that the co-prosperity sphere and i argued that it's more than a simple economic bloc it's more than a simple slogan for imperialism or pan asian ideology it was also a reaction to the challenges of diplomacy and empire in the 1930s and it was a sincere attempt to envision a new type of political economic order for the region and so i argue that the co-prosperity sphere is best understood as a contested and negotiated process of envisioning the future during a time of total war and it happened not only in japan but in occupied territories as well i argue this in my book by telling two stories the first story is the story i'm and together i'm telling a political history of empire the first story is about high policy in japan for japan the co-prosperity sphere is really the story of imagining a regional order that was to take shape after the end of the war but it never consolidated into a system or an ideology and if you guys are interested we can talk about this later it was never a true grand strategy either it was constantly in flux it was hazy it was vague or subject to debates among core agencies thinkers and policymakers policymakers only agreed upon the central goals for the sphere from 1943 by which time it was almost impossible to implement so for japan this the the sphere was i'm i guess a history of failure a failed process of building asia anew my book also focuses on the reception in southeast asia i focus on two independent dependencies one berma and the other the philippines i'm not going to talk about why i chose those two so if you have a question you can ask me why i chose those two so for southeast asian elites in berma and the philippines the co-prosperity sphere is a different story it's in part the story of shepherding their countries to an independent future in the era of decolonization that followed the war so in all the co-prosperity sphere was brutal and oppressive but it also brought to varying degrees opportunity on bermes and philippino elites they collaborated in caretaker governments or newly independent regimes and it was in this that they pursued efforts at state building where they gained broader experience in national governments and in the process they strove to co-opt japan's empire for anti-colonial ends so these are the two stories my talk will focus on and they're the two stories that are told in my book so historians and political scientists they often talk about the co-prosperity sphere as a real thing as if japan had a plan that it sought to institute for the region there were plans i i don't disagree with that there were many plans the plans were a dime a dozen but they were never finished products so the co-prosperity sphere was a moving target it meant different things to different people at different times so instead of talking about the sphere as a single entity it was more a contest or a fight for visions for the future and those fights the phases in which these fights happened or conflicts happened you can see on this slide i'm not going to talk about this slide much i'll because i'll go into in depth into each one i'll talk about these three phases before i move on to a discussion of burma and the philippines all right phase one was with foreign a foreign minister matzuka yosuke he was the person who had the clearest vision at least initially for the greater east asia co-prosperity sphere so what was matzuka's co-prosperity sphere well for him it was the central component of his foreign policy it was the central it was the centerpiece matzuka believed that the world would break up into a number of blocks led by strong states japan would have its block the soviet union um europe would be under germany and italy the british empire parts of that were for the taking and the united states as well so matzuka then tried to build japan's greater east asia sphere through what i talk of as i call it sphere of influence diplomacy and he advanced this upon becoming foreign minister in august and september of 1940 he pushed for the axis packed with germany really with germany and italy but it was to gain from germany diplomatic recognition of japan's preeminent position in asia this was actually a major reason why japan declared the greater east asia co-prosperity sphere to begin with in doing so it was giving notice that its interests extended to greater asia and i guess we could talk about what that means in the q and a what greater asia means um yeah i'm signposting you guys for q and a so if you're interested you can just ask all the questions that i'm telling you to ask or you don't have to do that if you don't want to but from this point on matzuka sought to extend japan's new order to southeast asia through bilateral agreements and also by convincing the great powers to respect japan's regional hegemony this was the basis for matzuka's diplomacy um the most important thing he did was um try to get recognition of the co-prosperity sphere from the great powers the lynchpin of this strategy was not the united states it was the soviet union he made his whirlwind trip to europe in march and april of 1941 not to bring about a quadripartite pact but instead to bring about greater acceptance for spheres of influence and he was strikingly successful in moscow he secured a five-year treaty of neutrality he got a pledge to respect spheres of influence as well uh japan's was in manchuria and the soviet unions was in the mongolian people's republic this was his sphere of influence strategy and it was only to be the beginning but matzuka's efforts died a quick death just as he was sobering up from his drunken train ride home from moscow station nonetheless his time was critical the idea of the sphere it actually thrived after matzuka's fall by july 1941 it had become the central goal of japanese policy tied to japan's self-existence and self-defense and the ideal of building the sphere it played a role in japan's descent to war with the allied powers phase two happened during the greater east asia war it was only after japan's war for greater and by the way i'm not like a mad right-wing nationalist but uh in many ways it makes more sense for my project to call the war the greater east asia war as opposed to the pacific war but i use them interchangeably but anyways it was after japan's war for a greater east asia began that um the sphere began to take on a new life this makes sense japan was at war it needed to plan or prepare for what came after and as you can see from this map japan's early advance it happened quite rapidly the rapid advance in the euphoria that it created it kind of injected new life into ideas for the sphere so what happened well strikingly strikingly for me and this is what really interested me um leading policymakers were still unclear as to what it was there was a liaison conference between government and imperial headquarters in late february 1942 where prime minister told johideki the man who's charged with creating the co-prosperity sphere he needed he felt it necessary to ask a question what is the co-prosperity sphere and how is it different from a defense sphere what's even more astonishing than the question was the lack of any real response the members of the conference um and they were the de facto decision-making group in wartime japan they thought that or they agreed that further study was necessary this was astonishing to me i'm going to give one more example and i'll try to be short with it um the greater east asia construction council was a governmental council that convened from february 1942 to plan for the future of asia one committee man oh tani cozy he um he could not understand what it was he complained that the government had not provided a convincing definition i'm gonna start from the middle he says i don't know where it is interpreting from a narrow sense the co-prosperity sphere is composed of manchuria and china but before we knew it it had become a co-prosperity sphere in greater east asia i have absolutely no understanding what greater east asia is deeper thinking was sorely needed so it was necessity that bred imagination um from 1942 a broad discussion had begun to articulate different possibilities for the co-prosperity sphere so in this sense it was the outbreak of war for greater east asia that forced policymakers and intellectuals to contemplate what japan ought to achieve with a new order and i'm not going to talk about the many visions that emerged um many of the groups that that created them were the groups on this slide but there were a number of recurring themes um all visions were both political and economic they all saw the future international order as an organic hierarchy under japan and all called for um i guess you could call it exploitative development where they would create a regional economy that would serve japan's needs that's exploitation of course but also modernize or develop greater east asia and unite it into a productive whole so in the end these were just visions they were nothing more they were not implemented into policy aside from the creation of the greater east asia ministry which is pictured here and that was the only thing that the tojo cabinet accomplished during the first year of the war the closest japan came to crafting a new policy for the sphere was with this greater east asia construction council but there were disagreements at the council between the commerce ministry and the cabinet planning board and those disagreements ended up leading them to produce a watered down document that served as little more than reference material so at the height of japan's wartime successes when it looked like japan could overtake asia the co-prosperity sphere remained a vague abstract idea in fact the ruling elite could not decide on what the co-prosperity sphere meant until it was almost too late to create what led leaders to finally agree was geopolitical crisis this is actually a picture from 1942 but it kind of highlights japan's geopolitical crisis because by 1943 the war was not going well at least for japan and this led japanese leaders to rethink their wartime strategy and to create the only widely accepted vision for the greater east asia co-prosperity sphere and that's the vision that gets the most play these days when the netto yoku the right wing net people start talking about what japan did for asia so no man was more instrumental in the shift than shigemitsu from 1942 while he was ambassador to nanjing he produced a number of widely circulated position papers that were harshly critical of this unidimensional military first ham-fisted nature of japan's war to shigemitsu um he wanted he wanted japan to win of course but he thought that victory depended on winning hearts and minds across asia and to do this japan had to support actual independence and equality japan must craft a new vision to rally asia behind japan and to convince japan's enemies to make peace so by april 1943 tojo called on shigemitsu to become foreign minister and with his help japan supported limited independence among select countries like the philippines and berma and formulated a new internationalist language for economic cooperation and they also and it also called for respect for independence respect for autonomy autonomy and they tried to promote a cooperative regionalism and this culminated in the greater east asia conference and it was attended by the independent with scare quotes around the independent states of the coprosperity sphere and it also led to the production of a highly idealistic joint declaration that promoted a new liberal internationalist vision for the sphere that stressed independence autonomy peace cooperation economic growth this was the new and ultimate vision for the greater east asia coprosperity sphere liberal internationalism the motives behind this liberal internationalist turn were largely pragmatic leaders they sought to rally asia to make war and to convince the allied powers to make peace so what's interesting here and what's really interesting for me was that the closer japan came to defeat the more japan's leaders began to pair its coprosperity sphere with liberal internationalist norms so this far i've only really talked about the japanese side i don't have that much time left or i'm trying to end kind of early but i want to switch briefly and spend maybe like in five minutes on the southeast asian side of my story um my book it questions why nationalist leaders in the rangoon actively collaborated with japan and the ways in which they sought to benefit at least in the short term from such collaboration those philippinos and bermes who chose to collaborate with japan they received nominal independence within the coprosperity sphere in 1943 it's easy to dismiss them as puppets but they were not mere puppets and i um i ended up choosing to call these elites in the colonial capitals who worked with japan patriotic collaborators bermes nationalists in rangoon they worked with japan to seize independence from great britain which had refused over a period of time to give either assurances of future independence some type of constitutional advance or dominion status philippino governmental elites in manila they also went over en masse to create a caretaker regime and most sought to use the japanese empire for anti-colonial ends these patriotic collaborators were a major feature of world war two i was going to say world war two in southeast asia but you could i mean uh if you look at robert paxton's book you can make the same argument for france or if you um if you look at indonesia and and all the work that's been done there they were a major feature of world war two their prevalence it owes to this fact that political elites especially in southeast asia they found themselves caught between two empires the invading japanese and their former colonial masters so many found much to gain by temporary cooperation to ensure that they could bring about positive effects afterwards and and my book it shows how this cooperation with japan was in part a pursuit of nationalist ends both countries received independence in 1943 it was sham independence but sham independence brought opportunity so i highlight how um filipino and burmese collaborationist governments they use their independence to engage in state building projects to um both governments created new functioning diplomatic establishments with new foreign ministries and embassies they created new central banks that ended up not doing very much and burma was unique here in the institutionalization of a fully functioning defense establishment symbolized by the burmese army and headed by a ministry of defense and these were providing hands on training and giving valuable experience as well so i try not to overstate the historical impact of wartime state building that said there were um there were some legacies for the philippines the main impact of the co-prosperity sphere was the creation of the diplomatic establishment and a number of people major players in the the wartime ministry of foreign affairs went on to serve in the post-war department of foreign affairs for burma the main legacy was more military in nature um it was really more than anything else the rebirth of the burmese army and after 1942 it was military men not politicians or colonial officials that would dominate the political stage in burma so to end this um the greater east asia co-prosperity sphere it was not wholly one-sided um certainly the sphere was oppressive it was domineering it was brutal but it also provided limited space that enterprising leaders in the periphery could use to their advantage the patriotic collaborators in manila and rangoon they used this space to create new governmental institutions and to gain experience in governmental affairs now the defeat of japan in 1945 and the return of the colonial um empires to the philippines and bermas they actually undermined most of these efforts but the wartime period still had lingering legacies well into the post-war era of decolonization so the co-prosperity sphere is thus um best seen as a contested process that served both imperial and anti-imperial ends and it left its traces on asia well after its collapse so i went a little bit over time but uh thank you very much and i guess i will stop my screen share here wonderful thank you so much um but to be honest like you could have carried on for another 10 minutes i was there like this is really cool i'm really enjoying myself this is wish that yeah don't stall go on hong kong hong kong academy has prepared me for well for giving very short talks but um i was hoping that uh we could talk much more about this in the q and a as well and there are questions that are starting to sort of come in so i would invite anyone who is um on the webinar today um if you have any question or or or sort of comments please by all means do so i would start to do while while we're collecting the first few questions together there were two things that destroyed me but first of all um you know you mentioned the the question of um when you look at what is happening in the philippines and berma and then reading your book my mind is well run to france and sense that this is not just something that is happening in that part of the world but but this this sort of like a expansion of empire and and it creates creates a at national level opportunities challenges oppression all sorts of different words come to mind but i really i was very pleased that that's that you made that sort of that quick reference in the talk because it really it spoke to me and and particularly sort of the berma case that that one is perhaps less familiar with it it's absolutely it comes across as a striking thing and and for anyone with with the japan expertise of traveling towards south east asia that's also one of the reasons why sometimes in your own personal experience you're very likely to see very different reactions and those differences really draw back on the complex and sort of contested nature of of how the simple idea is a articulated process and then regurgitated and but it is happening in a wartime experience which in itself is a very complicated thing so that that to me is is a massive sort of massively important point but i also was struck by something that you you mentioned in the book and then you were talking about in in in the talk how the japanese elites themselves are struggling well in the 1941 and 1942 as to what exactly is there we're talking about and as a military historian for me one of the very interesting elements of the story is how there's a lack of at least on the surface of things up until 1942-43 the great copper sphere to sphere doesn't seem to reconcile with the long-lasting sort of yamagata it almost inherited the idea of a line of sovereignty as opposed to a line of influence and i think there is a passage in the book in in which is sort of like you briefly mentioned it and i was wondering whether while you were researching the greater corporate sphere because it is something that is also coming from the ministry of foreign affairs was there any sort of like place where the values departments of government were interacting with each other or the confusion that you see at the imperial conferences level is a genuine reflection of the lack of exchange among different stakeholders over these sort of geopolitical visions of the future so your so if your question if i understand you correctly after well i'm glad you talked about france because uh mark pack was it mark paxton is that his name who wrote the book on vichy france he got me thinking about collaboration in new ways but your main question if i understand you correctly is how were ideas being formulated and then how were they being hashed out and transformed into actual decisions well so that's a very interesting and difficult question to deal with because it was i mean you can think of there were plenty of stove pipes that were leading up to specific bureaucracies the general staff had its own ideas of what should come after they they produced a document in march of 1941 that became the the initial policy for japan's occupation strategy in southeast asia it was drafted by three people who had no clue about or no experience in southeast asia but they somehow decided that this was what japan would do if it came to war and that sat on you know a shelf collecting dust for eight months until it was resuscitated in november of 1941 and that is one case where a group of three officers their ideas on the future actually had an impact the other ideas for the sphere were being created by multiple different groups but it was left largely to political intellectuals and to government overall government groups which joined intellectuals with businessmen and whatnot i mean the big thing that was supposed to create the greater east asia co-prosperity sphere was the greater east asia construction council which was supposed to create a plan for the next 15 years but the problem was was that all of the groups that participated in this they all had their own core ideas based off of economists based off of businessmen's ideas of what the future regional economy should look like and they could not agree and when they could not agree it went all the way up to liaison conferences and the liaison conferences were the major decision makers of wartime japan they had to make a decision about whether to use it or not but you know because the document became so watered down in the process of you know consensus building nothing ever happened so this is a kind of a long-winded way of saying you know there were many plans there were many groups participating but there was no coordinated centralized structure that allowed for a true vision to emerge it was only from 1943 when japan was panicking that a true vision began to emerge does that answer your question it does but it also reinforces is something that in the liaison conferences comes across very strongly and that's this the fact that when you had big decisions to be taken they would have to come up to that level but the problem was that the body was not designed to make that kind of decision and the people leading in it had different priorities in terms of what what you should take a decision upon and so and so and so in a way kind of like it's it's it's incredibly interesting that the stovepipe nature of the system right wanted everything to go upwards but then he did not deliver on the on the body that was supposed to make this kind of decision exactly and that body was not it was not an official body it was a de facto body that was supposed to coordinate all the elite groups that said there I mean I did talk about it a little bit in a book I wrote a paper on grand strategy more recently where I elaborated on this idea a lot more um the very aspect of liaison conferences made decision making possible because if somebody could hijack the liaison conferences someone like Matsuoka Yosuke who was very successful in doing so they could guide policy and this is why Matsuoka's iteration of the sphere was successful until around late April or May of 1941 where he kind of lost control of the beast that is because he was able to corral everyone onto his side do you think so so on on top of my head I mean I was working on the imperial conferences minutes and one thing that always distract me is that one thing that sort of comes across is that if you look at the headlines of the agendas for the values of meetings what happens is that from that midspace sort of May June 1941 the military side of the story takes over because what they started to talk about is the operational sort of aspects of expansion and so you see ideas or figures like Matsuoka not being able to keep control if you want of the narrative of the discussion simply because the agenda is not one that places the topic they can sort of gain leadership upon and central to the agenda would you would you think that is sort of somebody that that came across the room experience well that was actually how policymaking was supposed to work you know documents would come up if you're with the army it would be from the the ministry the bureau of military affairs and it would come up to the liaison conference and the army minister would want to rubber stamp it and they wouldn't spend much time talking about them and they would rubber stamp these things and that's actually one of the processes that led Japan to war but more the the sidelining of Matsuoka it really came because people started to think that he wasn't handling us japan's negotiations with the us well he was stonewalling it and then once the war against once the german-soviet war heated up people started to think that he went crazy so it's so there's a number of other reasons why he wasn't able to shepherd policy in the direction that he wanted to brilliant okay so now we've got lots of questions and just for the purpose of those who would be typing the question into the chat i will i will try to get them all and and sort of create a bit of a narrative that follows on a disconversation which leads to two initial questions that's that really sort of follow up on what we've been discussing and one thing of course is um Bill Hayton is asking could this fear have ever become a progressive egalitarian space was it always predicated upon the sense of Japanese superiority that's actually a very good question and i kind of i tangentially deal with it in in my book um so the question is what point are we talking about if japan was able to establish the sphere in the middle of 1942 and they were able to you know gain control over much of asia in the process and they got the great powers to recognize them then no it would not have been an egalitarian space it would not have been progressive it would have definitely have been um predicated as you said upon the sense of superiority but from 1943 things change and in this point where in the lead up to the greater east asia conference where japan begins to promote limited independence to places throughout the sphere and promotes a new ideology of cooperation of regionalism of um ideology that's promoting the abolition of racial discrimination i mean that's more if we're talking liberal internationalism this is more wilsonian and wilson um you could make an argument that they might have been bound by this new ideology that they were creating you know whether they want to the co-prosperity sphere to remain um you know a japanese dominated space is one question but would they have been able to do so and what's really interesting and what i talk about a little bit in the book is how after um japan promoted this i i call it the pacific charter because it's in relation to the atlantic charter but it's really called the greater east asia joint declaration that's the official name of the document after they promote this all of a sudden their partners across asia start coming out and saying well what about us why aren't we getting independence too so the vietnamese come out and they say well what about us why aren't we going to the greater east asia conference and the philippinos who did go to the conference they um president jose laurel he um sent a message to the japanese saying well look at what you're doing in the philippines you are beating us you are um you were slapping us you are requisitioning laboratories that we need to advance philippino production how is this a line with either our pact of alliance or the greater east asia joint declaration and the same thing happens in berma as well so there's no there's no evidence or at least i didn't find any evidence that the japanese budged in any way on these questions but um the very act of creating this ideology i feel it might have bound japan um had the empire survived into the post war and there is also a point there that by 1944 the the evaluation of what you can and cannot allow to do is very different because the resources are not coming through or not as they used to so the the the value issue the calculations in tokyo as well as changing incredibly so you're absolutely right that is a there's a question of timing right the moment they start coming out as you said and with this important statement is also the least congenial point for them to act upon it because everything that they need to do push them in a different direction yeah so i mean you could look at it as a statement that supports empire and undermines it at the same time bravo exactly that's that's exactly the thing that i have okay so we've got based on this i'm going to take two questions together that are really interesting and they speak to of to some of the the uh the background to your story in the sense that in in the talk you very much sort of start with 1940 and the rule of matzwalker has because that's where formally this idea is is um is declared but i've got two questions one from jeff and another one that is slightly different from eufaly but they are related in the sense that where does matzwalker's idea come from is this something that was already part of ideas that within the ministry of foreign affairs diplomats were discussing um was matzwalker's own thing that came at that point um and was there any sort of process of borrowing from others say for example hate less concept loosely defined as a new order um so was what happens in 1940 something that is matzwalker's child or is part of a bigger process that one needs to look a bit further back and if so where are the sources of inspiration and and eufaly pushes this even further with the specific question of manchuria if manchuria at the beginning is part of the original sort of definition of the greater corpus ferrity sphere does that mean that the ideational logic behind it is the same that you could push back down to 1905 and the beginning of the continental expansion of japan or mainland china not me yeah these are very interesting questions if you are going to push back as far as you can i think the critical turning point is world war one i wouldn't go as far as the russia japanese war um but to and i talk about this actually in the introduction so if you get the book and if you feel like reading it then there's like maybe five or six pages in the introduction that are dealt that are dealing with this but where was matzwalker getting these ideas from um well it didn't just emerge in 1940 there was a much longer process a lot of it had to do with reactions to the washington treaty system that had been constructed in the early 1920s with the destruction of the washington treaty system in the mid 1930s really 1937 japan had already decided to go its own and create you know a regionalist vision for east asia and it was called the new order in east asia and that was part of the brainchild of the konoe administration in um in yes in 1937 38 38 i'm sorry 1938 so um there was a longer history behind it um i don't think that matzwalker created that and this is i'm going off an attention here i don't think that matzwalker created the term um greater or east asia co-prosperity sphere i found it in um foreign ministry documents even a few months before matzwalker stated or announced the establishment of the co-prosperity sphere so i think you know he was just um borrowing terminology that was pre-existing but i haven't found you know the source of this term co-prosperity sphere if that's what you were asking um it definitely has traces back to ideologies of um what is it coexistence and co-prosperity that japan was promoting back in the world war one era as well so i i don't know if i'm answering your question well but uh no i think this is the you know i think that that allows us to sort of get a sense and and i think the critical point is really to take away is that the exercise of going back you need to be very very you need to be careful and you need to sort of engage you with the specific of the content of these ideas to the to see the extent to which there are continuities or just accidental sort of places that there are more the you know the brainchild of geopolitics and geography rather than a conscious to sort of going back and stretching back as far as the early 1900s now um there's um i'm conscious of the time and um we've got quite a few questions still coming in but there's one thing very quickly um one of the so one of the one of our guests today says i'm a filipino and in school we had talked about this uh with the japanese having the intent of asia for Asians but didn't really cover your view um as an opportunity for nationalists to actually experience gain experience of self-governance do you think it has helped to further to develop the the anticolonial sentiments during that time or because he's saying even from my perspective it for the Philippines it doesn't seem to be the case as we were pro-american in our perception then as we are today what is your sort of um uh feeling in terms of how much it fostered that national all right so the Philippines is a difficult story it's it's a very difficult story and the reason it's a difficult story was because um it was not a place that was largely pro-japanese they were highly pro-american they were highly pro-american and it was the place with the biggest um guerrilla movement i mean i'm sure you learned about the hawk bala hawk movement as well it was the place where you had millions of people who were fighting against the japanese as well so it's not like all the sun the filipinos raised up their arms and said oh we welcome you with open arms they did not so the story of the that i'm telling of the philippines is a little bit different than the story actually it's very different than the story i tell about berma because the philippines they did not welcome the japanese but empire arrived and they had to deal with it and the ways in which they dealt with it um allowed them in some ways to gain specific types of experience in governmental affairs they had no they had no central bank beforehand and they went to japan to learn about creating central banks they had no department i'm sorry a ministry of foreign affairs before and under in the wartime regime of jose laurel they had their first ministry of foreign affairs with an embassy in tokyo and they had to engage with this process of dealing with foreign countries um and before it was all the nasi onelista oligarchy that was doing this on a personal level but now it was institutionalized and what's interesting with the philippines is that the um i i think it's like something like 60 of the higher positions in um in the bureaucracy in the foreign ministry bureaucracy during the wartime they ended up moving directly into the department of foreign affairs after independence so and you know the perfect example of this is leon guerrero who ended up serving as vice minister of foreign affairs in 1954 so i'm i'm trying to more highlight these connections between what japan did or rather what filipino collaborationists did and their future in building institutions that um went on to have post or afterlives in the area of decolonization the philippines was still very pro-american and they were one of the real cold warriors in asia because of this so i'm i'm not i maybe my argument came across a little bit differently because i'm i'm painting with these big brushstrokes but i go into a lot more detail in the book brilliant and two um i wanted just to go over with you on on a couple of any short questions really quite quite specific and and then we we move towards the sort of like if you want the long-term relevance and impact of the book with a couple of questions about links with today but before we do so two very quick things did japan ever view india as part of the sphere or was there more of the propaganda opportunity against the britain and and in that regards that's from judas and also john is asking about um whether it would extend the point you made about in the talk that there was no you know the the great um core prosperity sphere was not really a grand strategy was it due because it never really reached to a stage that you had a coordinated grand strategic statement with clear priorities in it and and more and sort of it remained like a stove pipe process that you were so okay a quick question was india part of the gig or was it just for propaganda reason and was the stuff by nature of the decision-making mechanism reason why you don't see this a grand strategy all right um so can i share my screen really quickly yeah go for it so um where was it here sure boom let's get rid of this so um why is this not working uh because it's slow uh there you go so i mean if you notice at the at here you have um you have subhash chandra boz here at the greater east asia conference that's what i wanted to show you um i noticed somebody else wrote a question about subhash chandra boz um india was too probably it depends so it was probably to be a part and that's actually really one of the interesting things is um why did berma get independence well the reason they got independence is because japanese leaders thought that berma having independence would spur on indian nationalist to demand to seize independence from the british and then to join forces of course japan also sponsored the indian national army um which eventually was led by subhash chandra boz so you know there's a very real reason that japan saw india as a huge part of the sphere in fact it was so much more important than berma and it's why berma got independence um the second question was on grand strategy and why you don't think that the corpusperity sphere was not a grand strategy so um grand strategy needs to have two components it needs to have vision on the one hand and then tactics that are you know reasonably understandable tactics that you can use to achieve that japan had vision in spades but it did not have tactics and even when it had um a clear cut policy japan was never able to control the um the central government was never able to control the actions of the army and navy in the periphery so without being able to coordinate elite interests there's no way grand strategy would have been possible so i mean this is one of the one of the interesting things um this was a wartime creation because i noticed somebody might have asked i think someone asked about um the the contemporary chinese version and the differences between the japanese version so the japanese version it was a wartime creation and because of that um it was very difficult for leaders to get their acts together and to um to affect control over the variety of policies necessary to institute a grand strategy whereas china today this is a peacetime thing so for lack of a better word so because this is a peacetime entity it's much more likely to have a more long lasting influence on the regional structure of asia than japan could have when it was engaged in global war and i suppose also it ties with the question of a sense of urgency of having to prioritize and think long and hard the world to prioritize which wartime is essential and this time you've got time you know time is on your side very briefly and and i'm going to apologize to those uh because some of the last questions left are very important and excellent questions but also kind of complex and i don't think we have the time so i will close on on this last one what are the traces of the greater east asian co-prosperity sphere that can be linked today with the concept of asian regionalism well um so lots of the same terminology that was used in world in world war two era japan is now being used in contemporary china um i'm gonna type in the chat for which should i panelists and attendees is that how i do it the the term for those of you who read it is um i don't know what is in chinese so i'm just typing it in japanese that is what shijin ping is touting at least from 2017 as the fundamental ideology behind his new bri initiatives that that there is a community of common destiny community of community of fate the difference between that so there's a very clear connection there in the the lexicon that's used to describe it that said they're very different things in world war two it was minzoku it was minzoku sorry for writing in japanese minzoku that was the the people it was the the ethnic groupings that so really it was the japanese it was the japanese themselves that were the community of fate whereas um shijin ping's his is a very different entity because i what i assume he's trying to get at with this is um the community of fate is or community of common destiny is all of asia that is working with china so in in some senses they're they're very similar and in other senses they're very very very different even the similarities are different so that uh i don't know if you call like the the japanese coprosperity sphere coprosperity sphere version one and the current one version two people have been doing that but um because one was a wartime entity and the other is a peacetime entity you have to see them as totally separate beasts no i couldn't agree more and and the fact that they talk about um a sense of community or they're trying to appeal to a sense of community it's part of it seems like a logical choice rather than a conscious sort of effort um in that regard and and the point you were making about the difference is the idea of minzoku very much has got a ethnic connotation that it does not have in the in the more contemporary sort of a reincarnation of this notion of original spirits and jeremy as i said we could carry on for a couple of hours it would be unfair to you even the fact that in hong kong is quite late and you've been extremely generous with your time and but but it's been an absolutely genuine pleasure and thank you so much for your time and and and sort of engaging with us on this for this wonderful conversation um again a fantastic book um and um best of luck with it and and we're looking forward to more of your work and some more opportunity to get together thank you very much and before i leave um if i could just say thank you as well and for those of you who who um want to engage in conversations with me i'm on twitter and i'm also easily accessible online so um i can vouch for the answers on twitter so it's it's it's true um my phc students uh my phc students say it's easier to get a hold of me on twitter than it is in real life mine too i mean this is it's easier to get a hold of me on whatsapp and twitter than it is in real life so the times we live in uh having said this thank you very much for everyone to stay on with us today and for the absolutely terrific questions and comments that we got through uh thank you very much goodbye for now we'll see you soon thank you bye bye