From what I understand the idea of Pan-Asianism was adopted in the early 20th century by key Japanese figures in an attempt to "unify" Asian countries against the influence of the west, essentially the white race. As an ideal it sounds pretty interesting to remove colonial rule over China, India, and the rest of South East Asia. Japan had proved itself as a Asian powerhouse of the time especially after it's war with Russia, so it makes sense that they would want to "lead" something like this. So what went wrong, and why did other Asian countries not want to join Japan?
I also looked at this post that discusses Japan coming to war with the US during WW2. This is the first time I've heard of Pan-Asianism, so please correct me where I'm wrong and provide resources for me to learn.
Except in the Philippines, it didn't. Pan-Asianism as a rhetorical tool was extraordinarily successful at gaining the support of its target audience - non-Chinese Asians. Its failure in China was a foregone conclusion because it was a fundamentally anti-Chinese ideology.
Perhaps surprisingly, pan-Asianism had both Japanese and Korean roots, and spawned largely as an effort by Japanese officials and Korean collaborators to create pro-Japanese messaging in the wake of Japan's victory against China in 1895. At that point, most of the country's newspapers were owned by the Japanese-aligned Progressive Faction, which, after a failed coup attempt in 1884 and the flight of some of its chief leaders to Japan, was essentially under Japanese control.
These newspapers sowed the seeds of the ideology that would eventually become pan-Asianism. The three angles these papers alleged were as follows:
At its core, pan-Asianism was an attempt to present Japan as a liberator against three oppressors - traditional aristocrats, the West, and China. Korean collaborators argued that Japanese intervention would rid Korea of its inferiority complex towards China (known later as Sadaejuui, or serve-the-great-ism), abolish the caste system, and abolish the unfair trade treaties with the West.
In Taiwan and Korea, pan-Asian rhetoric, which exploded in popularity following Japan's victory over Russia in 1905, was highly successful in limiting local resistance to the Japanese. Japan's counter-insurgency annals from this period record only 14,000 insurgents killed or captured (this is almost certainly an overstimate as Japanese forces tended to kill civilians and call them insurgents) throughout the existence of the Korean insurgency, and only 110 Japanese and Japanese Korean Army troops killed. Mentioning the JKA, the collaborator army in Korea reached 350,000 in World War 1 without extensive conscription. In Taiwan, the only large-scale "insurgency" was an 1895 defense of the island waged largely by former Qing troops who refused to give up an "integral part of China" despite Qing orders. After its defeat, the only significant resistance came from native tribes in the mountains, who were ethnically distinct from the Han majority. In both these countries, Japanese bureaucrats advertised themselves as the promoters of modern laws, infrastructure, legal equality, and resistance against Western and Chinese domination.
Come the Second World War, pan-Asian rhetoric succeeded in mobilizing all of Southeast Asia except the Philippines against Western forces. In Indonesia, the collaborationist leader, Suharto, retained power after the war. Thailand, the only independent country in the region, voluntarily joined the Japanese war effort. In Indochina, even Emperor Bao Dai of Vietnam agreed to collaborate. In Malaya, most of the significant opposition was from the Chinese minority. In Southeast Asia as in Korea, Japan leveraged Sinophobia to win supporters. Japanese forces massacred possibly up to 25,000 Chinese after taking the city. Elsewhere, they worked with the local majorities to institute repressive codes and instigate reprisals against the Chinese. Pan-Asianism had such a large market in these areas because there had existed significant anti-Chinese sentiment for the better part of a century. Businessmen hailing from Chinese immigrant communities had established dominance over several economies in the region throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the attitude of the locals towards them has often been compared to European antisemitism.
Given the nature of pan-Asian rhetoric, it should be no surprise that the Japanese did not succeed in using it to pacify Chinese guerillas in the Second Sino-Japanese War. However, it might surprise one to learn that, for a while, even an inherently Sinophobic philosophy did manage to generate some goodwill in China. After Japan's victory over Russia, many Chinese offiers, namely future President Chiang Kai Shek, studied at the Imperial Japanese Army Academy. During the 1904-05 war against Russia, the local guerillas and bandits worked with the Japanese against the Russians. Two successive Chinese administrations in control of Beijing - the Duan Qirui and Zhang Zuolin regimes - made themselves de facto Japanese client states duing the Warlord Era. Even the conquest of the massive and economically well developed territory of Manchuria in 1931 resulted in surprisingly low guerilla activity against the Japanese - while far more Manchurians took up arms against Japan than had locals in any other Japanese conquest, they still represented fewer than 1% of the population. So, while pan-Asian rhetoric did not succeed in China nearly to the same degree as in the rest of Asia, Japan still held some goodwill there. This goodwill rapidly evaporated in 1937, when Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China and committed atrocities that were broadcasted the world over. Soon, President Chiang and his warlord rivals like Mao Zedong and Yan Xishan were in a race to compete for nationalist credentials by making a show of their anti-Japanese resistance.
The only place where the Pan-Asian angle absolutely failed was in the Philippines, where Japan faced an insurgency supported by potentially hundreds of thousands of Filipinos. There, Japanese claims to be liberating the Philippines from the West fell on deaf ears, because America had already promised the Philippines its independence before World War 2, and was making moves to put that promise into action.
Ultimately, Pan-Asianism played on a dual resentment of an emerging Asian middle class towards China and the West. Its tone-deafness in China as a result was a foregone conclusion, while, unsurprisingly, it achieved great success in most of Asia outside China.
Sources:
Garver, John. The Soviet Union and the Xi'an Incident.
Duara, Prasenjit. The Discourse of Civilization and Pan-Asianism. Takeuchi, Yoshi. Asianism.
Chisaka, Kyoji. The Japanese Avant-Garde and Asian Masses: The Revolution and War of Asianism.
Kimitada, Miwa. Pan-Asianism in modern Japan: nationalism, regionalism and universalism.
Szpilman, Christopher. Between Pan-Asianism and nationalism: Mitsukawa KametarÅ and his campaign to reform Japan and liberate Asia.
De Ceuster, Koen. The Nation Exorcised: The Historiography of Collaboration in South Korea.