In this paper we discussed the argument over Asia of The Ideal of the East written by Okakura Kakuzō(1862-1913). The Ideal of the East, published <br />
in 1903, was a book in which Okakura made his first argument over Asia and it was began a famous phrase ‘Asia is one.’ For a long time, Okakura&#039;s book and impressive phrase have been regarded as a declaration of the independence and superiority of Asia towards Western countries. But it was not true, by our research, to think Okakura intended to let Asian people unit to one organised community or state. Because he said the phrase not to Asian people but Western readers, and he did not use Chinese the Asian Latin nor Sanskrit the root of Indo-European languages. For Okakura the phrase‘Asia is one’was just a symbolic one and used it as rhetoric. While his argument and critic about Western countries lacked some attention, so authority, military, nationalists and thinkers, who were posterity of Okakura and aimed to enlarge the power of Japan, used his argument and philosophy to justify the incursion of Japan in the 1930s and the 1940s. For these people Okakura was the prototype and standard bearer of the Great East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. Such a point of view had no validity if we would read The Ideal of the East carefully but they used Okakura’s ideas according to their own pleasure.