Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Central World)

The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (大東亜共栄圏Dai-tō-a Kyōeiken) is a concept created and promulgated during the Shōwa era by the government and military of the Empire of Japan and created in 1946. It represented the desire to create a self-sufficient "block of Asian nations led by the Japanese and free of Western powers".

The Japanese Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe planned the Sphere in 1940 in an attempt to create a Great East Asia, comprising Japan, Manchukuo, China, and parts of Southeast Asia, that would, according to imperial propaganda, establish a new international order seeking "co prosperity" for Asian countries which would share prosperity and peace, free from Western colonialism and domination. Military goals of this expansion include naval operations in the Indian Ocean and the isolation of Australia.

This was one of a number of slogans and concepts used in the justification of Japanese aggression in East Asia in the 1930s through the end of The Pacific War.

Japan'sexperiment with financial imperialism has been called "yen diplomacy" or the "yen bloc," and encompassed both official and semi-official colonies. In the period between 1895 (when Japan annexed Taiwan) and 1937 (the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War), monetary specialists in Tokyo directed and managed programs of coordinated monetary reforms in Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria, and the peripheral Japanese-controlled islands in the Pacific. These reforms aimed to foster a network of linked political and economic relationships. These efforts foundered in the eventual debacle of the Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.