Greater East Asia Conference

The Greater East Asia Conference (大東亜会議, Dai Tōa Kaigi^?) 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.

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. 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. 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". 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. 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.

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