A Passage to India: Pan-Asianism, the Yellow Peril, and Anglo-Japanese Travelogues in the 1920s

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Kanokogi Kazunobu, Japan’s pioneer of the modern Buddhist pilgrimage, was deported from India in 1919 on a charge of supporting the Indian independence movement. Research into diplomatic papers in Britain and Japan make it clear that almost every Japanese tourist after the Kanokogi case was monitored and reported on by the Indian people with regard to whether they were making contact with revolutionaries or Pan-Asianists. By contrast, Irish theosophist James Cousins came to Japan and worked with the Black Dragon Society. Although Cousins had been suspected of propagating Pan-Asianism, his activities, including setting up the Tokyo lodge in 1920, turned out to be more international and complicated. For instance, Gurcharan Singh, the founder of Indian pottery, was inspired by the universal brotherhood of theosophy through Cousins and, produced ceramics imitating Korean white porcelain which Muneyoshi Yanagi and Takumi Asakawa had highly appraised.