Benevolence and Aggression in Modern Japanese Asianism

The limits of explaining Asianism through Hua-Yi discourse alone

Existing scholarship often uses the Hua-Yi distinction to explain the aggressive side of Asianism: Japan developed its own version of the Hua-Yi order (the “Japanese-style Hua-Yi order”), in which “martial power” (bui) replaced ritual as the organizing principle, Japan positioned itself as “Hua,” and Qing-ruled China was relegated to “Yi” status. This framework shares structural features with Asianism: both place Japan as leader, both organize relationships by civilizational hierarchy, and both wrap regionalism in universalist overtones.

This paper argues that such interpretations essentialize East Asian thought and reproduce a Eurocentric narrative of progress. Using Hua-Yi thought as a premodern, hierarchical understanding of order to explain only the “aggressive” side of Asianism ignores the internal complexity of Hua-Yi discourse. Categories like “Hua” and “Zhonghua” were fluid and contextual, not fixed essences. In this sense, Hua-Yi language is less an eternal doctrine of exclusion than a flexible conceptual tool for marking sovereignty and inclusion. It only takes effect within concrete political speech and practice.

Hua-Yi discourse alone cannot explain the coexistence of benevolence and aggression. To account for that coexistence, the paper turns to the structure of the international legal order.

International law: how formal legality accommodates violence

The paper’s central theoretical framework comes from Carl Schmitt’s analysis of nineteenth-century international law. The argument proceeds in three steps.

Step one: the positivist turn and the grey zone between war and peace. The nineteenth century saw international law undergo a positivist transformation. “War” was narrowed to a strict formal definition; armed conflicts that did not meet that definition could be tolerated as “peace.” This opened a large grey zone between formal war and factual peace, in which military operations could proceed without triggering the legal category of “war” and its attendant obligations. The “standard of civilization” divided the world into civilized, half-civilized, and uncivilized states. “Civilized” states were said to have not only the right but the moral duty to “civilize” so-called barbaric lands. “Half-civilized” states received only partial recognition.

Within this framework, “aggression” and “benevolence” belong to two separate registers. Aggression is defined in strictly formal terms: whether an act counts as war under the legal definition. Benevolence belongs to the sphere of substantive justification: the moral language attached to the act. The two can coexist without contradiction because formal legality tends to overshadow, or even replace, questions of justice. Acts that are not formally “war” can be treated as peace; appeals to “benevolence” or “civilization” then attach to these acts as moral gloss. This is the mechanism the diagram below illustrates.

Japanese intellectuals understood this structure clearly. Fukuzawa Yukichi’s (福澤諭吉) famous remark captures the instrumentalist worldview: a hundred volumes of international law count for less than a few cannons, and stacks of friendship treaties count for less than a box of ammunition. This was not merely cynicism. Japanese intellectuals recognized something real about how international law actually functioned: “civilization” was the entry ticket to the international community, and military power was the ultimate guarantor.

“When Japan was immersed in the peaceful arts, she was called barbarous; when she began to commit wholesale slaughter on Manchurian battlefields, she was called civilised.”

Okakura Tenshin, The Book of Tea (1906). Public domain.

Step two: from the European jus publicum Europaeum to an abstract global “international law.” Schmitt argues that the original European law of nations (the jus publicum Europaeum) was a concrete spatial order: it presupposed a community of European Christian states with shared substantive commitments, and it organized the globe into European and non-European spaces with different legal statuses. When non-European states were formally admitted on the basis of the “standard of civilization,” this concrete order was dissolved into an abstract, supposedly universal “international law” that claimed formal equality among all sovereign states. But the substantive community that had underwritten the original order was gone. What remained was a set of formally “equal” sovereigns with no shared spatial structure and no common substantive foundation. The “civilization” standard was not a neutral threshold; it was the disguised boundary between European and non-European worlds, repackaged as a universal criterion.

Asianism as spatial order: translation and failed antithesis

The role of the Hua-Yi distinction in this framework. By reinterpreting Hua-Yi thought as a flexible cultural logic rather than a fixed hierarchy, the paper shows how it functioned as a conceptual intermediary that enabled Japanese intellectuals to translate the European law of nations into an Asian context. The hierarchical order in the historical Hua-Yi system was not necessarily an obstacle to Japan’s acceptance of international law, but a medium of translation for the international order. Hua-Yi discourse and the “civilization” standard of international law operated on similar concentric, hierarchical models. Far from being an obstacle, the legacy of Hua-Yi thought may have made it easier for Japanese elites to grasp and accept the graded, exclusionary logic of nineteenth-century international law.

Step three: Asianism as a failed antithesis. Drawing on Schmitt’s concept of the Nomos (spatial order), together with Foucault on power-knowledge, Jennifer Pitts, Antony Anghie, and Karuna Mantena, the paper argues that Asianism can be seen as an antithesis to this international legal order. In theory, its regionalism and emphasis on “benevolence,” “the kingly way,” and “moral principles” were meant to counter a discriminatory spatial order with an alternative one grounded in Asian solidarity. In practice, Asianism accepted the East-West binary and the modernization narrative defined by Europe. It simply recentered the axis: Japan became the spatial center and temporal pinnacle of Asia. Its moral vocabulary offered a potential critique of Western domination but was ultimately absorbed into imperial ideology.

This antithesis failed. It never clarified what it opposed in “the West” and “modernity,” or with what it hoped to oppose them. A stance defined primarily by opposition cannot generate genuine transcendence. Calls for a “plural” world history were tied to the idea of East Asia as a single substantive unit, which in turn erased internal plurality. The imperial spatial order that Asianism tried to construct collapsed under the same unsustainable tensions that doomed other empires: it created a shared space in order to extend its own interests, but did so on unequal terms; within that space, enduring nationalisms and new nation-states made any stable, collaborative regional order impossible.