When the Swarm Returns, the Protoss Awaken: The Legacy of Pan-Asia

Russia Invaded Ukraine. China Chose Russia and Threatened Taiwan. Japan Is Remembering What It Was Built to Do.

For most of the postwar era, Japan behaved like a country that had no desire to remember what military power was for. It became rich, then comfortable, then old; it constructed one of the world’s most capable industrial societies while treating armed force almost as an embarrassing utility that had to be maintained because Washington insisted upon it, and although Japanese governments periodically expanded the legal and political space available to the Self-Defense Forces, the deeper social instinct remained remarkably consistent: trade if possible, invest when useful, subsidize stability, avoid grand historical missions, and let someone else carry the theatrical burden of geopolitics.

That Japan is disappearing, not because a new generation suddenly rediscovered militarism, but because the Eurasian continent has begun reproducing the conditions under which Japanese strategic passivity becomes impossible.

Russia invaded Ukraine. Beijing did not respond by distancing itself from Moscow; it deepened a relationship already advertised as having “no limits,” expanded the economic channels that helped Russia endure Western isolation, and became so important to the Russian defense-industrial ecosystem that NATO eventually described China as a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war, citing large-scale support to the industrial base and transfers of dual-use goods. At the same time, Beijing intensified military pressure around Taiwan and expanded coercive activity across the maritime approaches of East and Southeast Asia. Whatever vocabulary diplomats prefer, Tokyo has had to confront a simple strategic picture: a revisionist military power is waging a major war in Europe while the most powerful continental state in East Asia supports its war economy and simultaneously rehearses coercion much closer to Japan itself. (NATO)

Japan’s 2022 National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy, and Defense Buildup Program therefore marked more than another bureaucratic adjustment. They signaled that the postwar bargain was reaching its limit: Japan would remain allied with the United States and formally committed to a defensive posture, but it would no longer organize national survival around the hope that threatening military environments could be wished away through commercial integration. Japan began building counterstrike capabilities, strengthening ammunition stocks and resilience, expanding security partnerships, and treating developments in Europe and the Indo-Pacific as parts of one increasingly connected strategic system. (Ministry of Defense Japan)

To understand why this transformation matters, however, one has to go much further back than 2022, because Japan’s present awakening is not merely the latest chapter of the American alliance system. It belongs to a much older Asian story.

The Year Asia Learned That the Continental Empire Could Bleed

In 1905, Japan defeated the Russian Empire.

That sentence has become so familiar that its psychological violence is easy to miss. The world in which the Russo-Japanese War occurred was still organized through an explicit racial hierarchy in which European empires were expected to command and Asian peoples were expected to accommodate themselves to the consequences. Japan’s victory did not abolish that hierarchy, and Japan itself was already becoming an imperial power, but it shattered one of the hierarchy’s most important assumptions: a modern Asian state could defeat a major European empire with modern ships, modern artillery, modern logistics, modern finance and modern organization.

Contemporary observers understood the shock immediately. Scholarship on the war records how Japan’s victory reverberated far beyond the Japanese archipelago, influencing political thought in China, Southeast Asia, the Islamic world and even Africa; it helped give Pan-Asianism much of its early political force precisely because Japan had demonstrated that European military supremacy was not a law of nature. (Cambridge University Press)

This is the first historical meaning of Japan that postwar narratives often obscure. Japan was not simply another country that happened to industrialize early. It became the first non-Western state in modern Asia capable of forcing the imperial system to negotiate with an Asian power on something resembling military equality.

For colonized Asians, that fact mattered even when they disliked Japan, distrusted Japan, or later suffered from Japanese rule. A contradiction can be real on both sides: Japan could become an empire while simultaneously destroying the myth that Europeans possessed an eternal monopoly on empire.

Pan-Asianism grew inside that contradiction.

It contained philosophers and opportunists, genuine anti-colonial internationalists and Japanese imperial administrators, revolutionaries seeking Asian autonomy and officials seeking Tokyo’s supremacy. It could mean cooperation among Asian peoples, or it could become a vocabulary through which Japanese power justified domination. Those histories cannot honestly be collapsed into a single moral category, because the entire significance of Pan-Asianism lies in the fact that a liberating proposition and an imperial project became entangled inside the same historical machinery.

What should be rejected is not criticism of Japanese imperialism but the much lazier proposition that, because Japanese imperialism became violent and coercive, the entire Pan-Asian rupture therefore meant nothing.

History says otherwise.

The Empire Failed; the Rupture Survived

Japan’s expansion across Asia eventually produced invasion, occupation, forced mobilization, atrocities, resource seizures and an imperial hierarchy that contradicted its own language of Asian emancipation. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere never became an equal federation of Asian peoples, and any serious account of Pan-Asianism has to begin by recognizing that failure rather than hiding it.

Yet history did not return to 1930 when Japan surrendered in 1945.

That distinction is the key.

Before the Pacific War, enormous parts of Southeast Asia remained possessions of European empires. Indonesia was the Dutch East Indies, Indochina belonged to France, Malaya and Burma sat within the British imperial system, and other territories remained bound to colonial arrangements that had survived because European military superiority had ultimately been treated as the final argument of politics.

Then the European colonial states were physically removed from much of the region by another Asian military power.

Japan did not do this out of disinterested philanthropy; states rarely wage wars for philanthropic reasons, and Japanese occupation often replaced European domination with Japanese domination. Yet the destruction of European colonial prestige produced consequences that Tokyo could not later control. Europeans who had appeared politically permanent were suddenly shown to be removable, colonial bureaucracies were displaced, local political organizations expanded, and in several territories military or administrative experience acquired during the Japanese period passed directly into postwar independence struggles.

Indonesia demonstrates the paradox particularly clearly. Japanese rule was brutal and exploitative, but Japanese authorities also recruited and trained tens of thousands of Indonesians through organizations including PETA and other military formations. When Japan surrendered, those cadres did not politely restore the Dutch East Indies; many became personnel for the armed forces of the new Indonesian Republic and fought the returning Dutch colonial power. A Library of Congress country study notes that PETA and Japanese-trained auxiliaries became a ready source of trained military personnel for independent Indonesia after 1945. (Library of Congress Tile Viewer)

The point is not that Japan “gave” Indonesia freedom. Indonesians won Indonesian freedom, often by exploiting a geopolitical rupture created by powers pursuing their own interests. The more interesting point is that three and a half centuries of Dutch colonial authority could survive countless declarations about Asian inferiority but could not survive the destruction of the political psychology on which that authority depended.

Someone who had lived under a European colonial regime and then watched Asian soldiers throw Europeans out, learned something that could never be unlearned.

The master could lose.

The colony could arm.

The hierarchy could reverse.

An Asian population that had been treated as labor for someone else’s empire could become the military and political nucleus of its own state within a few years.

This is why the Pacific War cannot be understood only through the moral vocabulary of the states that won it. Japan lost the war, but Europe’s nineteenth-century Asian colonial order did not win the peace.

Within two decades of Japan’s surrender, almost the entire classical European colonial architecture of Asia had disappeared.

The Japanese empire died; the rupture it had accelerated survived.

Taiwan and the More Difficult Legacy of Japanese Rule

Taiwan reveals another part of the same contradiction because Japanese colonialism there lasted not three years but half a century, long enough to become an institutional system rather than merely a wartime occupation.

Japanese rule was colonial rule, accompanied by political repression, assimilation, unequal citizenship and attempts to remake Taiwanese society in the image required by the empire. Education itself served assimilationist objectives, as historians of colonial Taiwan have documented. (Cambridge University Press)

It was also a state-building project involving roads, railways, water systems, public institutions, agricultural restructuring, industrial development and bureaucratic capacity. Historical records of Taiwan’s later economic development explicitly note that the island inherited railways, roads and a modest industrial base from the Japanese period; Japanese rule also involved substantial public investment in infrastructure and institution-building. (Library of Congress Tile Viewer)

Recognizing that fact is not an endorsement of colonial rule. It is an insistence that colonial systems differ in what they leave behind, and that people who actually inherit those systems often remember them more ambiguously than later ideological narratives permit.

The relevant comparison for today’s Asia is therefore not between an imaginary benevolent Japanese empire and an imaginary uniquely evil European empire. It is between different forms of power and the social orders they produce.

One form of power may dominate while constructing railways, schools, ports and institutions because it expects the territory to become more economically useful and administratively capable; another may dominate principally by destroying autonomous organization, narrowing information, weakening property security, subordinating institutions to political obedience and making society increasingly dependent upon the center.

Both can be imperial.

They do not leave the same society behind.

This distinction becomes important again when discussing the People’s Republic of China.

The Asian State That Chose the Continental Empire

Beijing describes itself as the natural political expression of an ancient and continuous China, but its actual institutional genealogy is far more modern and far more awkward. The People’s Republic inherited much of the territorial imagination of the Qing and Republican eras while constructing its governing system through a Leninist party-state modeled heavily on Soviet organizational technology. The Chinese Communist Party itself grew in the ecosystem of the Communist International, received Soviet assistance, adopted Leninist forms of political organization and built a political order whose basic grammar—party supremacy, democratic centralism, political policing, ideological penetration of institutions and hostility toward autonomous organization—belonged much more clearly to the twentieth-century Bolshevik tradition than to any timeless “Chinese civilization.”

Seen from a Pan-Asian perspective, this creates an inversion that conventional nationalism prefers not to examine.

Japan, for all the imperial violence committed under its flag, emerged historically as the Asian state that first defeated Russian imperial expansion in the modern era.

The communist regime in Beijing emerged from a movement whose formative international patron was Soviet Russia.

One does not need romantic racial mythology to see the structural irony. In the decisive ideological conflict of the early twentieth century, one Asian modernizing project attempted to construct enough indigenous power to resist the continental Russian empire, while another political movement imported an organizational technology created in that empire and eventually used it to govern a vast part of Asia.

This is why the label “Chinese” can conceal as much as it reveals.

The PRC can be interpreted less as the inevitable political culmination of thousands of years of Chinese civilization than as a twentieth-century hybrid: Leninist political machinery governing territories inherited through the collapse and recombination of earlier empires, while subsequently wrapping itself in an increasingly civilizational nationalism as revolutionary Marxism lost credibility.

In that sense, Beijing’s conflict with Pan-Asianism is not merely a quarrel among Asian states. It is also a conflict between two answers to the question of how Asia should modernize: through plural states embedded in maritime exchange and capable of autonomous political evolution, or through a continental party-state whose deepest institutional reflex remains the concentration of power.

That difference is becoming harder to hide because China has accumulated enormous material power without accumulating comparable regional trust.

China Accumulated Power; Japan Accumulated Trust

After 1945, Japan performed one of the strangest geopolitical conversions in modern history.

It converted military defeat into economic presence, economic presence into institutional familiarity, and institutional familiarity into trust.

For decades Japan financed infrastructure, expanded manufacturing networks, transferred technology, supplied development assistance and embedded Japanese corporations inside the ordinary economic life of Southeast Asia. Seventy years of Japanese ODA became not merely a foreign-policy instrument but a form of accumulated political memory. Japan’s own foreign ministry describes this history explicitly in terms of cultivated trust, while independent regional surveys provide unusually strong evidence that the effect is real rather than merely Japanese self-congratulation. (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan)

The ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute’s 2025 survey found Japan the most trusted major power in Southeast Asia at 66.8 percent, ahead of the European Union, United States, China and India. In 2026, Japan remained Southeast Asia’s most trusted major power even as its hard-power profile became more visible. Regional analysis now describes Japan as an increasingly consequential security actor with growing defense relationships involving the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia. (ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute)

This produces an extraordinary strategic asymmetry.

China accumulated power; Japan accumulated trust.

For roughly two generations, Beijing could plausibly assume that time favored it because China’s economy and military were becoming larger while Japan’s population aged and its relative economic weight declined. If geopolitics were simply a spreadsheet comparing GDP and ship counts, the conclusion would have been obvious.

But power and trust compound differently.

Material power can grow quickly and disappear quickly because it depends upon demography, productivity, capital formation, fiscal capacity, technological access and the willingness of society to continue financing the state. Trust usually grows much more slowly, but when established across decades of predictable behavior it can survive economic stagnation and changes of government.

China’s problem is that its power is becoming more expensive to maintain at precisely the moment that its behavior is increasing the strategic value of Japan’s trust.

Japan’s opportunity is the inverse: after spending eight decades accumulating trust while deliberately limiting military power, it is now rebuilding power without yet destroying the trust.

That combination is far more consequential than either variable alone.

Beijing Keeps Manufacturing a Harder Japan

This is where Japan’s domestic political evolution begins to matter.

For decades, Beijing behaved as though public condemnation could discipline Japanese politics. Japanese leaders who visited Yasukuni Shrine, expanded defense policy, spoke more explicitly about Taiwan, revised security legislation or challenged Beijing’s preferred interpretation of history could be branded “militarists,” attacked through diplomatic channels and presented as dangerous deviations from a supposedly proper postwar Japan.

The tactic produced publicity, but its long-term selection effect may have been the opposite of what Beijing intended.

Junichiro Koizumi was once treated as dangerously provocative.

Then came Shinzo Abe, who appeared considerably more willing to redefine Japan’s strategic role.

After years of pressure against Abe-era policies, Japanese politics did not return to some imagined permanently apologetic equilibrium. The boundary of what could be discussed moved again, and later political figures operated inside a security debate that Abe himself had helped normalize.

By 2026, Japan under Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi was already being examined in Southeast Asia not as an accidental militarist aberration but as the political leadership of a country whose hard-power profile had been rising for years. Regional analysts simultaneously noted that Southeast Asian trust in Japan remained high. (ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute)

This is the deeper mechanism that Beijing repeatedly fails to understand.

If a government attacks relatively cautious Japanese politicians as though they were extremists, it gradually destroys the political premium attached to caution.

If compromise earns no reputational reward, uncompromising politicians pay less additional cost.

If every revision of defense policy is described as militarism, the accusation eventually depreciates.

If every Japanese government is told that Beijing will distrust it regardless of what it does, then future Japanese leaders have less reason to organize policy around earning Beijing’s approval.

The same mechanism operates outside Japan.

Pressure on Taiwan makes Japanese concern for Taiwan appear less theoretical.

Pressure in the South China Sea increases the demand for alternatives among maritime Southeast Asian states.

Russian aggression in Europe makes military preparedness more respectable inside countries that previously treated it as a historical embarrassment.

Chinese support for Russia connects what once looked like separate theaters.

Every attempt to prevent strategic encirclement produces another layer of strategic coordination.

The irony is almost mathematical.

The Return of Pan-Asia Will Not Look Like 1942

If Pan-Asianism returns, it will not return through an imperial map colored red from Tokyo.

That world is gone, and it should remain gone.

The new Pan-Asianism will look less like a centralized empire and more like a distributed security civilization: Japan providing technological, financial and increasingly military weight; Taiwan providing industrial and strategic depth; South Korea contributing technological and military capacity even while maintaining its own national interests; the Philippines serving as a maritime hinge; Vietnam guarding its strategic autonomy against continental domination; Indonesia operating as the demographic center of maritime Southeast Asia; India balancing the Eurasian landmass from the southwest; Australia connecting the Asian maritime order to a wider Pacific system; and the United States functioning not as the colonial ruler of Asia but, at its best, as the offshore power whose presence makes any single continental hegemon’s monopoly more difficult.

There will be disagreements inside such a system, because real alliances are not utopias and Asia is not a civilization with one mind. Southeast Asian states will continue trading heavily with China, hedging between larger powers and resisting anything that resembles subordination to Tokyo or Washington.

That does not weaken the argument.

It strengthens it.

The most durable Pan-Asian order would not be one in which Tokyo commands Asia again, but one in which no external or continental empire can command Asia because multiple Asian centers possess enough capability to resist.

Japan’s historical legacy matters precisely because it supplies a memory of Asian agency, while Japan’s postwar behavior supplies something its prewar empire never possessed in sufficient quantity: trust.

The future Japanese strategic proposition can therefore be much stronger than the old one.

Japan no longer needs to say: follow us because we are powerful enough to lead Asia.

It can say: work with us because eight decades of experience suggest that we do not need to own you in order to remain secure.

That is a radically more attractive foundation for regional leadership.

The Fear Beneath Moscow and Beijing

Why, then, have Russia and China behaved in ways that seem so consistently effective at creating the coalition they claim to fear?

Because the central driver may not be confidence at all.

It may be fear.

The Soviet collapse left behind a traumatic lesson for every political elite whose legitimacy depends upon holding together large territories through centralized power: systems that appear permanent can dissolve with astonishing speed once the center loses the ability to command money, coercion, information and elite loyalty.

The post-Soviet Russian state inherited that trauma directly.

The Chinese Communist Party inherited it intellectually. Chinese party institutions spent decades studying the Soviet collapse because the Soviet Union was not merely another foreign country; it was the predecessor system from which the CCP had borrowed crucial organizational technologies and whose disappearance demonstrated that a Leninist state could die.

For Moscow and Beijing, therefore, decentralization can look like disintegration, autonomous civil society can look like political infection, independent capital can look like potential escape, border identities can look like separatism, uncontrolled information can look like regime penetration, and neighboring democratic societies can look dangerous not because they are planning invasion but because their existence demonstrates alternative ways of organizing political life.

A state governed by such fear does not experience restraint as security.

It experiences restraint as lost time.

So it centralizes.

It surveils.

It accumulates military capacity.

It restricts exit.

It disciplines capital.

It suppresses alternative centers of organization.

It strengthens territorial nationalism.

It attempts to shape neighboring societies before those societies can shape it.

Eventually, if leaders convince themselves that time is working against them, preventive behavior becomes increasingly tempting.

This is the tragic mechanism at the center of the present Eurasian crisis: the measures designed to prevent a second collapse can accelerate the conditions that make collapse more imaginable.

The Ship Approaching the Waterfall

Imagine Russia and China aboard a large ship moving downstream.

For years they have survived partly by consuming the ship itself.

Every time independent institutions are weakened, a piece of the hull disappears. Every time productive citizens move assets or lives elsewhere because they distrust the future, another plank is lost. Every time information is distorted to protect political authority, the crew becomes less capable of seeing rocks ahead. Every time local initiative is replaced by obedience, another part of the vessel becomes dependent upon instructions from the bridge.

This process can continue for a surprisingly long time because a large ship contains enormous reserves.

Then the passengers hear a waterfall.

Suddenly the behavior changes.

The people who spent years damaging the vessel become terrified that it may not survive the river, so they attempt to escape the current through increasingly dramatic maneuvers. They jump toward the bank, but discover that many of the routes to safety have already been burned by their own previous actions: neighbors distrust them, capital is leaving, demographic trends are worsening, alliances are weak, technological dependence has become dangerous and societies that might once have preferred neutrality are organizing against them.

They try to return to the ship.

But the maneuver itself has shifted the vessel closer to the falls.

This is the strategic paradox of contemporary Russia and China.

Russia invaded Ukraine partly in the name of preventing a geopolitical future it feared, and thereby produced a larger NATO, a more militarized Europe, a permanently hostile Ukraine and stronger links between European and Indo-Pacific security.

China has pursued military pressure, economic coercion and ever closer alignment with Moscow partly because it fears encirclement, separatism and strategic decline, yet those policies have helped normalize Japanese rearmament, deepen US-Japan coordination, strengthen security relationships between Japan and Southeast Asian maritime states, and make Taiwan’s survival increasingly relevant to countries that once regarded it as a remote Chinese question.

They are not simply approaching the geopolitical environment they feared.

They are manufacturing it.

When the Swarm Returns

This is why the transformation underway in Japan should not be described primarily as a return of militarism.

Militarism means treating military power as a political end in itself, glorifying war and organizing society around expansion. Contemporary Japan still displays little appetite for any of these things. Its population remains cautious about war, its security transformation has been incremental rather than ecstatic, and its emerging regional role remains deeply intertwined with economic cooperation, alliance networks and institutional legitimacy.

Something older and more interesting is occurring.

When Russian continental power pressed into Northeast Asia at the beginning of the twentieth century, Japan became the Asian state capable of stopping it.

When European colonial supremacy still defined Asian political possibilities, Japan demonstrated that the racial hierarchy of military power could be broken.

When Japanese imperialism later corrupted Pan-Asianism into a hierarchy centered on Tokyo, it discredited the very ideal it had helped awaken, but the war simultaneously shattered European colonial permanence across Asia.

After defeat, Japan spent eight decades doing almost the opposite of empire: accumulating influence without territorial conquest, embedding itself through trade and infrastructure, and allowing trust to replace fear as the principal currency of its regional power.

Now the Eurasian continental threat is returning in another form.

Russia has chosen war.

China has chosen Russia while increasing coercion around Taiwan.

Japan has therefore begun recovering military power, but this time it is recovering that power after decades spent accumulating trust.

That is historically new.

The first Japanese rise produced power before trust.

The second may combine both.

For Beijing and Moscow, this is the part worth fearing, because an Asia organized around Japan today would not need to resemble the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of 1942. It could instead become a plural maritime system in which Japan is influential precisely because other states are free not to obey it.

That is a much more difficult system for a continental authoritarian power to defeat.

An empire can attack another empire.

It is harder to attack a network of states that have independently concluded that your behavior gives them the same strategic problem.

This is the legacy of Pan-Asia that survived 1945: not the right of Japan to rule Asia, not racial supremacy, and not nostalgia for imperial borders, but the refusal to accept that Asian peoples must live permanently beneath continental or overseas empires simply because those empires happen to be larger.

In 1905, Japan demonstrated that the continental empire could bleed.

Between 1941 and 1945, the Pan-Asian idea was militarized, corrupted and turned into empire, yet the European colonial order it confronted never recovered.

Between 1945 and 2020, Japan transformed much of its old power into trust.

After 2022, Russia and China began recreating the conditions under which Japan again requires power.

The final irony is therefore not that Pan-Asia survived its defeat.

It is that the governments most frightened by its possible return are doing more than anyone else to resurrect it.

China accumulated power while Japan accumulated trust; now China’s power is becoming harder to sustain, Japan’s trust continues to compound, and Beijing’s own choices are giving Tokyo the reason to rebuild the one thing it deliberately gave up after 1945.

When the swarm returns, the Protoss awaken.

And this time, they awaken carrying the legacy of Pan-Asia.