What intellectuals in Meiji period saw in the West.

Fukuzawa

Whenever I go abroad and stay in Europe or in the United States, I frequently have unpleasant experiences because the peoples of these nations tend to treat me less than cordially. Recently I took a voyage across the Indian Ocean. During that trip, I saw the English officers land on many places in China and elsewhere that they controlled. They were extremely arrogant and their attitude to the natives was so brazen that it was not possible to believe the English were dealing with the same human beings. In seeing all of this, my reaction was a mixture of pity for the natives and of envy for the English. Even now I cannot forget the promise I made secretly in my heart. We are Japanese and we shall some day raise the national power of Japan so that not only shall we control the natives of China and India as the English do today, but we shall possess the power to rebuke the English and to rule Asia ourselves. page 105 "Japan rising" Kenneth Pyle

Fukuzawa was wrong just as the kind of feminist who think acting, and thinking like a man makes women equal to men.


Konoe

Konoe scorned the gap between U.S. rhetoric and reality. The high minded ideals of democracy, peach, and justice that the victors proclaimed and that were sweeping the world, including Japan, he wrote should be understood not in an abstract but rather as a mask of Anglo-American self interest in preserving the status quo.....Even in the West, as the British historian E.H. Carr tartly observed, the English speaking peoples became known on the European continent as "master in the art of concealing their selfish national interest in the guise of the general good." Carr added that "this kind of hypocrisy is a special and characteristic peculiarity of the Anglo-Saxon mind. page 176 "Japan rising" Kenneth Pyle

...in East Asia [Britain's] primary purpose was not territorial control. ..Instead, the British brought to bear sufficient force to exercise "informal imperialism", imposing treaties that assured "free trade." They could exploit their comparative industrial advantage and technological superiority by insisting on rights of free trade, a unified international monetary system, and a set of international rules protecting private property.........
Free trade was the ideology of the strong , a dogma preached by a nation in the firm confidence that No other country could compete with it. To other nations unable to compete, the British ideology of free trad smacked of hypocrisy, to say the least . The British, after all, decades earlier had protected their own domestic industries from foreign competition until they were strong enough to outperform the competitors. The German Friedrich List ....wrote:

It is a very common clever device that when anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed up, in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up after him.

page 71

Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere might have been his way of emulating western hypocrisy.