Japanese geopolitics of the Imperial Period

This article analyses Japanese geopolitics of the imperial period by employing critical-geopolitical approaches to examine its formal and practical discursive levels. Its main objective is to explore classic Japanese geopolitical imagination juxtaposed to political (geo)propaganda, from the perspectives of space and their ideological origin. It starts by presenting selected autochthonous contexts and investigates how some Asian and non-Asian geopolitical ideas emerged in Japan. Afterwards, it turns to selected actors involved in the formal discourse, ranging from the academia to religious authorities, and confronts them with the practical discourse of political practice. A partial aim here is to localize some ideological elements supporting the classic geopolitical imagination and its role in legitimizing imperial ideologies. The analysis offers insights into the politization of spatial imagination in Japan of the imperial period. It is accompanied by a cartographic representation and an overview matrix of discursive actors.