Asian Parliamentarians Union and Japan’s Anticommunist International, 1965–75

What were the limits and contradictions of anticommunist internationalism and conservative worldmaking in Cold War East Asia? From the 1940s to 1970s, Tokyo was a key site of anticommunist internationalism, hosting massive gatherings of Moral Rearmament (MRA) and the Asian People’s (later World) Anticommunist League (APACL). Enmeshed in a world of transnational spiritual movements, anticommunist leagues, and American conservative media circuits, Japanese of the Right drew inspiration, developed policies, and formulated plans that reimagined Japan as a civilizational bridge between the decolonizing Third world and First world. The most important counter-organization of the transnational Right in 1960s East Asia was the Asian Parliamentarian Union (APU).

The inaugural conference of the Asian Parliamentarians Union met in Tokyo in 1965, a decade after the famed Bandung Conference of the Asia-African movement. As part of the transition from imperial to postcolonial order, the APU inspired and mobilized nationalist and anticommunist military, religious and political leaders through elaborate conferences, mass-based rallies, publications, and technological transfers. The founders of the APU believed modernization and development had a transnational dimension that required a moral and cultural answer. To this end they pursued an agenda centered on transnational elite making, cultural collaboration, and fostering the idea that anticommunism was the one true path to material and social progress.

Through the APU, Japanese conservatives fashioned a new role for their country in mediating the economic inequalities and racial hierarchies of the postimperial world. By connecting anticommunism with modernization and developmentalism, this paper examines how Japanese conservatives came to support the Asia-Africa movement even as they sought to shape its dynamics and advance their own interests. As a bridge between Japan’s “severed” colonial ties and the Cold War, the APU challenges received notions of the incompatibility of nationalist claims, imperial memories, and internationalist commitments.