Using a wealth of resources, including diaries, newspaper accounts, and contemporary journals, Asia for the Asians dispenses with dominant narratives to explore the Meiji view of China, imagined, real and evolving, through the eyes of five people who actually lived and travelled in China and worked with the Chinese.

Conventional scholarship reads the story of Japan's late 19th-early 20th century encounter with China backward through the lens of wartime, cherry picking evidence to develop a picture consistent with Japan's later acts of aggression. Using a wealth of resources, including diaries, newspaper accounts, and contemporary journals, Asia for the Asians: China in the Lives of Five Meiji Japanese dispenses with dominant narratives to explore the Meiji view of China, imagined, real and evolving, through the eyes of five people who actually lived and traveled in China and worked with the Chinese. The new picture that emerges, while highly complex, suggests that the potential for cooperation was stronger, the road to conflict less certain, and the responsibility for things gone wrong more difficult to assign than is usually assumed.