Ethics and internationalism in Japanese education, 1933-45

After their government's 1933 withdrawal from the League of Nations, Japanese internationalists searched for new ways to engage with the world or struggled to accommodate their advocacy of international cooperation to the realities of the wartime empire. The idea of international morality was central to this effort. Ethics textbooks, which presented ideals of international behaviour, provide a particular view of this intellectual and policy endeavour of the 1930s and early 1940s, showing how the concept of morality became a means to reconcile internationalism with imperialism and war. Echoing many of the ideas current in both public discussion and behind-closed-doors decision-making on foreign policy at the time, textbook authors and other educators contributed to a broader redefinition of internationalism that enabled it to persist through a period of imperialism and war.