Tanzan Ishibashi’s conflict over “nationalism” ① Interview with Miwa Ueda, associate professor at Kyoritsu Women’s University | Special Feature | Toyo Keizai Online

Ishibashi Tanzan spent his life striving for unity between speech and action.

Miwa Ueda / Associate Professor, Kyoritsu Women’s University. Born in Kanagawa Prefecture in 1973. She attended graduate school at the University of Oxford in the UK, and received credits from the doctoral course in History (Japanese History) at the Graduate School of Letters, Waseda University.Her books include “Can Liberalism Stop War? Hitoshi Ashida, Masaru Kiyozawa, and Tanzan Ishibashi” and “Tanzan Ishibashi Theory: Speech and Action.”

Read other articles in the special feature “50 years after his death: Why Ishibashi Tanzan now?”

In June of this year, the Ishibashi Tanzan Study Group, a bipartisan coalition of politicians in the political world, was established. Even though half a century has passed since his death, why is there a movement to learn from his advocacy and way of life?

“Weekly Toyo Keizai 2023 November 18 Special Issue (Chinese Business in Despair)”[雑誌]” (Toyo Keizai Inc.) Click on the book image to jump to the Amazon site.

Tanzan Ishibashi believed that independence for one’s own country (one’s own country) and tolerance for others (other countries) can go hand in hand. His belief that a mutually beneficial (win-win) relationship could be built by doing business independently was also at the root of his small Japan policy.

However, this logic comes with the premise that “there must be no state of war.” During the war, Tanzan faced a harsh reality that contradicted this assumption.

Around the time he wrote his 1921 editorial “Resolve to Abandon Everything,” which advocated abandonment of colonialism, Tanzan said, “Anti-Japanese action represents the awakening of national consciousness.” It was seen as an awakening of nationalism. Japan also faced hardships in building a modern nation during the Meiji Restoration. He called for tolerance, saying that chaos in China, a vast country, was the “birth pain” of a new nation.

To accept colonial possessions

However, around the time of the Shanghai Incident (1932), which followed the Manchurian Incident, he began to express doubts, saying, “Unfortunately, there is no doubt that the Chinese people have the ability to govern their own country.” Regarding Manchukuo, he also came to accept the existence of a puppet state, saying, “We can’t abandon this ship now that it’s already come this far.”