『The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Japanese Diplomacy in the 1930s: The Search for and Failure of the New Order in East Asia』（Chikura Shobo、2022）
Hayato Yukawa
（Associate Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences）

I am honored to receive the prestigious Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize. I would like to express my gratitude to everyone at the foundation and the selection committee.

My book, “The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Japanese Diplomacy in the 1930s: The Search for and Failure of the New Order in East Asia,” is based on my doctoral thesis, which I submitted to Kobe University in January 2017. When I obtained my doctoral degree, many researchers of similar age were publishing their own books one after another. In contrast, it took me five years to publish my book. I cannot deny that I felt some impatience during that time. However, I received many comments and feedback on my dissertation from many scholars and incorporated them into my manuscript, I felt a sense of excitement that it was turning into something interesting. Winning the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize confirms that the past five years of my journey were not in vain, and it gives me the confidence to continue research in the future.

Japanese diplomacy in the 1930s, which my book dealt with, is very complex and cannot be understood from a one-sided perspective. Therefore, many researchers have tackled the subject from various viewpoints. Based on their excellent previous research, my book considered what kind of new order in East Asia the diplomats of the 1930s aimed to construct. The result is quite different from former Prime Minister Masayoshi Ohira’s vision of Pacific Basin Cooperation aimed at coexistence and prosperity under the region’s cultural diversity. However, the consciousness of aspiring to be a regional leader in shaping the regional order, as the diplomats of the 1930s did or as Ohira did, underpins Japan’s diplomacy since modern times. If this award helps position my book not only as a single volume to understand Japanese diplomacy in the 1930s but also as a volume to understand the history of Japan’s relations with Asia and Pacific countries from a broader perspective, it would be a great pleasure for me.

Profile
Hayato Yukawa is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hiroshima University, who specialize Japanese Diplomatic History. He obtained M.A. (2013) and Ph. D. (2017) in Political Science from Kobe University. He studied at the University of Iowa as a visiting researcher from September 2013 to June 2014 and was a chief researcher at the Research Strategy Center, Hyogo Earthquake Memorial 21st Century Institute from April 2018 to March 2019.