大東亜Daitōa
A learning chamber for examining the phrase “Greater East Asia” through documents, maps, testimony, and postwar interpretation.
Meiji aftermath and imperial vocabulary
Modernization, treaty revision, military victory, and regional ambition changed how empire was discussed. The archive asks how words of “order” and “civilization” traveled beside coercion.
Classroom note: distinguish state aims from lived experience. Documents can reveal confidence in policy while hiding the costs imposed on colonized communities.
「近代化」was not a single road. It was argued, exported, resisted, and administered through unequal power.
Continental expansion
The Manchurian Incident and subsequent occupation demonstrate how military initiative, resource strategy, and diplomatic crisis converged. The visual register stays provisional: lines move, overlays disagree.
Ideology, propaganda language, and 「共栄」
Political language presented hierarchy as liberation and mobilization as shared destiny. The lesson is not to repeat slogans, but to inspect how slogans recruited emotion and obscured violence.
Administration, mobilization, and everyday coercion
Documents from occupied territories record labor demands, resource extraction, schooling policies, censorship, and survival strategies. Blank fields mark lives absent from state reports.
Surrender did not end interpretation; it began decades of memory, denial, testimony, restitution debates, and classroom responsibility.
After empire: memory under examination
The final table leaves space for questions. Which archives remain closed? Whose testimony is centered? How do educators separate historical explanation from justification?