Brij Tankha is Professor of Modern Japanese History at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Delhi and Honorary Fellow, Institute of Chinese Studies, CSDS. His published work include Narratives of Asia: From India, Japan and Asia (edited with Madhavi Thampi, Sampark, 2005) and Kita Ikki and the Making of Modern Japan: A Vision of Empire (2006).

This volume explores four key themes emanating from Okakura Tenshin’s philosophy and legacy: Okakura Tenshin and the Ideal of Pan-Asianism; Other Forms of Pan-Asianism (especially Islam and China); Art and Asia, and Ways of Defining Asia (up to the present day). Okakura Tenshin (1862-1913), art historian and ideologue driven by a notion of Asia bound by culture, is a significant figure in Japan’s modern intellectual history. His writings in both Japanese and English became part of a growing discourse that positioned Japan as the guardian and protector of Asia against the depredations, cultural as much as economic and political, of the West. At the outbreak of the Pacific War, the first line of Okakura’s 1903 book (‘Asia is One’), The Ideals of the East, was celebrated posthumously by the Japanese military as the most powerful expression of Japan’s goal of political ascendancy in Asia.