"Japan's population needed to rise 'as rapidly as possible' from around 70 million in 1938 to 100 million by 1960, with each Japanese couple being encouraged to have around five children. This would provide the surplus of Japanese necessary to colonize and run what had been known since 1940 as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. There were no necessary limits to the extent of that sphere. In 1942 Komaki Tsunekichi, a professor of geography at Tokyo Imperial University, had proposed that both Europe and Africa should henceforth be regarded as part of the Asian continent, while America should be known as 'Eastern Asia' and Australia as 'Southern Asia'. All the world's oceans, since they were interconnected, should simply be renamed the 'Great Sea of Japan'. The authors of the 'Investigation of Global Policy' were no more modest in their ambitions. Stages One and Two of their planned 'Enlargement of the Sphere of the East Asia Co-Operative Body' envisaged the incorporation of the whole of China, as well as nearly all French, British and Dutch possessions in Asia. Stage Three would have added the Philippines, India and all Soviet territory east of Lake Baikal. Finally, in Stage Four, the Co-Prosperity Sphere would have been extended to 'Assyria, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries, West Asia [and] Southwest Asia'."
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Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), pp. 470-471
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Japan_during_World_War_II
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Japan during World War II
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