도바타 세이이치(東畑精一)와 제국 일본의 식민정책학

Tobata Seiichi and the Japanese Colonial Policy Studies

This study examines the theoretical ground of the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere during the Pacific War, taking an intellectual history approach to the works of Tobata Seiichi who taught the Colonial Policy Studies in Tokyo Imperial University from 1939 to 1945. It explores the core concepts in Tobata’s colonial theory and agricultural economics, such as Movement of Capital, Colony as Creation, Counter-Colonization and Japan s Grossraumwirtschaft, and concludes that his colonial policy theory was a Schumpeterian economics which also combines Yanaihara Tadao’s version of Adam Smith with the economic theory of Friedrich List, and was an academic search for a “model of economic community for rapid development among underdeveloped countries in Asia.” Problematizing the tendency that the existing scholarship has dismissed the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere as a mere propaganda, this study holds that it had its own theoretical logic and, because of that, it continued to be applied to the former Japanese empire region even in the era of de-colonization: its main ideas remained as a theoretical framework for the economic cooperative organizations between Japan and other Asian underdeveloped countries (ODA, the Official Development Assistance) in the Cold War period when Modernization Theory and Developmental Dictatorship Policy prevailed.