282.5
Rôyama Masamichi's East Asian Cooperative Community Theory

Tuesday, July 15, 2014: 4:30 PM
Room: 304
Oral Presentation
Aelee SOHN , Korea University, South Korea
Rôyama Masamichi’s East Asian Cooperative Community Theory

While I was conducting the long-term project “Northeast Asia’s Transnational Space”, I was interested in the problem of when and how East Asia became identified as a unit. Soon, I became interested in the way that ‘East Asia’ is called and requested.

To approach the task, I have been interested in East Asian Cooperative Community(EACC) theorists such as the philosopher Miki Kiyoshi, economist Kada Tetzi, and international politics scholar Rôyama Masamichi, and I will mainly talk about Rôyama Masamichi in the presentation.

The core of Rôyama’s EACC Theory is a region or regionalism. I would like to talk about the issues related to regionalism in the relationship between East Asia and the world, which is the relationship between particularity and universality speaking in the abstract. I will divide Rôyama’s regionalism into three aspects based on universalism.

First, it is the attempt to escape from the international universal order caused by the Manchuria issue.

Second, it is the attempt to make ‘East Asia’ into a meaningful region, emphasizing the special identity of East Asia.

Third, it is not that the regionalism of the EACC is a particularization of the world order but that the EACC itself constructs a universal world order.

Lastly I will wrap up my paper by discussing following 3 topics. 1)Japan’s leadership position 2)Horizontal regional order vs. Vertical intra-region order 3)The fact that the vertical intra-region order, which was attempted by Japan through the war, was realized by the U.S. after Japan’s defeat.