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Beginning in the late 1930s, the notion of the East Asian Community gained currency among Japanese intellectuals as Imperial Japan attempted to justify its invasion of China and colonization of its Asian neighbors. The East Asian Community was characterized by Japanese intellectuals’ new logic of an East Asian empire that incorporated Chinese and colonial subjects and was led by Japan. Moritani Katsumi was a converted Marxist social scientist who found the project of building an East Asian community feasible in colonial Korea. Involved in a wide range of academic and political activities in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Moritani called for imperial Japan to restructure the Korean economy, the agricultural sector in particular. His writings on Korea show one important facet of Japanese intellectuals’ wartime concepts of colony as he tried to change Korean society to a total-war- optimized one for imperial Japan in the name of economic development.
