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Imperial Shrines: Shinto Architecture, Multiple Modernities, and Colonialism in Manchukuo

Wenqi Tian
pp.44-48 DOI: 10.62051/8vxqcx44 July 2, 2026
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Abstract: This study concludes that Japanese Pan-Asianism, as manifested in the Shinto architecture of Hsinking, is not a binary opposite of Western modernism, but a distinctive form of "multiple modernities"—one that appropriates and reinterprets Western modernist tools (architectural technology, urban planning, symbolic violence) to serve intra-Asian colonial hegemony, while wrapping itself in the rhetoric of Asian unity and anti-Western imperialism. The Shinto shrines of Hsinking are the material crystallization of this ideology: they materialize the contradictions of Japanese Pan-Asianism—its rhetorical anti-Westernism and practical reliance on Western modernism, its claim of "ethnic harmony" and its essence of Japanese hegemony —and reveal the inherently colonial nature of Japan’s Pan-Asianist project. This project was never a genuine pursuit of Asian solidarity, but a means for Japan to replace Western imperial powers and establish its own intra-Asian colonial empire, with colonial modernism as its core material and ideological tool.
Keywords: Kantian ethics; Autonomy; Universalisation; Self-interest; Sidgwick.
APA Citation: Wenqi Tian (2026). Imperial Shrines: Shinto Architecture, Multiple Modernities, and Colonialism in Manchukuo. Transactions on Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, 16(1), 44-48. https://doi.org/10.62051/8vxqcx44

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