20세기 초 미국 내 친일 담론의 네트워크 － 뉴욕 일본협회(Japan Society)를 중심으로

초록

In the early twentieth century, U.S.–Japan relations evolved beyond conventional diplomacy into a new arena of international politics mediated by public opinion. The brief power vacuum following the Russo-Japanese War was soon replaced by tensions over Pacific hegemony and the Chinese market, while the geopolitical position of both nations as non-European powers heightened the perceived necessity of interdependent cooperation. Centered on the Japan Society of New York, the pro-Japanese network functioned as both symbolic capital and a form of epistemic power. It translated Japan’s imperial messages into the idiom of American liberalism, Christian internationalism, and peace movements, shaping public opinion in domains beyond the reach of formal diplomacy and defending Japan’s expansion. The Society’s influence extended beyond propaganda; as a moral and intellectual network, it intertwined with peace and internationalist organizations across the United States, reframing Japan’s Asian policy and racial exceptionalism in the language of universal morality. Within the framework of the Washington System, this process represented a struggle for hegemony within American internationalism over the question of “Japan’s direction,” revealing the making of a distinctly “pro-Japanese internationalism.” Although the network disintegrated after the Manchurian Incident and Japan’s withdrawal from the League of Nations, the moral language of internationalism it fostered continued to resonate within subsequent internationalist discourses. The activities of the Japan Society and its affiliates, therefore, should not be reduced to pro-Japanese propaganda or isolated diplomatic episodes; rather, they constituted an experiment in governmentality through which public opinion and internationalism jointly reconfigured the logic of empire—an early twentieth-century instance of how the “international politics of public opinion” operated within imperial structures.

키워드