How BK Sarkar’s visits to Japan and China helped him critique the West with his Young Asia theory

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The success of the republican revolution in 1911 had enabled Chinese revolutionaries and reformers in Japanese exile to return to their homeland. The “father” of that revolution, Sun Yat-sen, retained his Japanese connections, which he renewed through occasional visits. For public intellectuals and political activists from colonised Asia, the attraction of Tokyo as a diasporic city space for anti-colonial action grew during World War I. To be sure, Berlin and Istanbul also emerged as diasporic spaces for the congregation of global revolutionaries as Germany and Ottoman Turkey ranged themselves against the British and other Western empires that dominated Asia. Yet...