Shumei Okawa

Shūmei Ōkawa was a Japanese nationalist and Pan-Asianist writer, who advocated for Japan's expansion and domination in Asia. He was influenced by Indian philosophy, Vedic literature, and Islamic studies, and he translated many works from Sanskrit, Pali, and Arabic into Japanese. He also wrote extensively on Japanese history, religion, and colonialism. He was the founder of the nationalist organisation Yūzonsha, along with Ikki Kita, and the magazine Nippon, which promoted his views on Asian solidarity and Japanese supremacy. He was involved in two failed military coups against the Japanese government in 1931, and he was arrested and sentenced to 15 years in prison in 1932. He was released in 1937, and he became a prominent broadcaster of Japanese government propaganda during World War II. He was also one of the main ideologues behind the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a political and economic bloc that aimed to liberate Asia from Western imperialism. After the war, he was indicted as a war criminal by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, but he was found mentally unfit to stand trial due to a nervous breakdown. He spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital, where he continued to write and publish books on various topics. He died of heart failure in 1957, at the age of 71.