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was an international summit held in Tokyo from 5 to 6 November 1943, in which Japan hosted leading politicians of various component members of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The event was also referred to as the ''Tokyo Conference''. The Conference addressed few issues of any substance, but was intended from the start as a propaganda show piece, to illustrate the Empire of Japan's commitments to the Pan-Asianism ideal and to emphasize its role as the "liberator" of Asia from Western colonialism. ==Background== Starting in 1931, Japan had always sought to justify its imperialism under the grounds of Pan-Asianism. In 1941, when Japan went to war with the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the Netherlands, the Japanese portrayed themselves as engaging in a war of liberation on behalf of all the peoples of Asia. In particular, there was a marked racism to Japanese propaganda with the Japanese government issuing cartoons depicting the Americans and British as "white devils" or "white demons", complete with claws, fangs, horns and tails.〔Dower, John ''War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War'', New York: Pantheon 1993 pages 244-246〕 The Japanese government depicted the war as a race war between the benevolent Asians led of course by Japan, the most powerful Asian country against the utterly evil "Anglo-Saxons" led by the U.S. and the British Empire, who were portrayed as sub-human "white devils".〔 At times, Japanese leaders spoke like they believed their own propaganda about whites being in a process of racial degeneration and were actually turning into the drooling, snarling demonical creatures depicted in their cartoons.〔Dower, John ''War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War'', New York: Pantheon 1993 page 244〕 Thus, the Foreign Minister Yōsuke Matsuoka had stated in a 1940 press conference that "the mission of the Yamato race is to prevent the human race from becoming devilish, to rescue it from destruction and lead it to the light of the world".〔Dower, John ''War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War'', New York: Pantheon 1993 pages 244-245〕 At least some people within the Asian colonies of the European powers had welcomed the Japanese as liberators from the Europeans. In the Dutch East Indies, the nationalist leader Sukarno in 1942 had created the formula of the "Three A's"-Japan the Light of Asia, Japan the Protector of Asia and Japan the Leader of Asia.〔Dower, John ''War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War'', New York: Pantheon 1993 page 6〕 For all their Pan-Asian talk about creating a Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere where all the Asian peoples would live together as brothers and sisters, in reality as shown by the July 1943 planning document ''An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus'', the Japanese saw themselves as the racially superior "Great Yamato race", which was naturally destined to dominate forever the other racially inferior Asian peoples.〔Dower, John ''War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War'', New York: Pantheon 1993 page 263-264〕 Prior to the Greater East Asia Conference, Japan had made vague promises of independence to various anti-colonial pro-independence organizations in the territories it had overrun, but aside from a number of obvious puppet states set up in China, these promises had not been fulfilled. Now, with the tide of the Pacific War turning against Japan, bureaucrats in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and supporters of the Pan-Asian philosophy within the government and military pushed forward a program to grant rapid "independence" to various parts of Asia in an effort to increase local resistance to and possible return of the western colonial powers and to boost local support for the Japanese war effort. The Japanese military leadership agreed in principle, understanding the propaganda value of such a move, but the level of "independence" the military had in mind for the various territories was even less than that enjoyed by Manchukuo. Several components of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere were not represented. Korea and Taiwan had long been annexed as external territories of the Empire of Japan, and there were no plans to extend any form of political autonomy or even nominal independence. Vietnamese and Cambodian delegates were not invited for fear of offending the Vichy French pro-Nazi regime, which maintained a legal claim to French Indochina and to which Japan was still formally allied. The issue of British Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies was complex. Large portions were under military rule by the Imperial Japanese Army or Imperial Japanese Navy, and the organizers of the Greater East Asia Conference were dismayed by the unilateral decision of the Imperial General Headquarters to annex these territories to the Japanese Empire on May 31, 1943, rather than to grant nominal independence. This action considerably undermined efforts to portray Japan as the "liberator" of the Asian peoples. Indonesian independence leaders Achmed Sukarno and Muhammad Hatta were invited to Tokyo shortly after the close of the Conference for informal meetings, but were not allowed to participate in the Conference itself.〔Smith, Changing Visions of East Asia, pp. 19-24〕 In the end, seven countries (including Japan) participated. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Greater East Asia Conference」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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