PARIS 1919 (58 page)

The Japanese were painfully aware of their own vulnerability. They had very few resources of their own. What if other nations chose to cut their access to raw materials and markets? The nationalists' solution was for Japan to follow the example of other powers and establish an empire. There was talk of Japan's historic mission to lead Asia. China, in particular, offered an irresistible temptation. Its last ruling dynasty was moribund and the country was splintering in the face of uncontrolled corruption, regionalism and banditry. An abortive revolution in 1911 only led to more anarchy. China had so much that Japan needed, from raw materials to markets. And Manchuria, just beyond Korea, was so empty, an important consideration in a country whose population had increased by 45 percent between 1885 and 1920 and whose leaders feared that overpopulation would lead to social unrest, even revolution. But if the other powers were willing to give Japan a relatively free hand in Manchuria, they drew the line at China proper, where they had their own interests to protect.

Nationalist dreams worried liberals such as Saionji. “I am not worried about any general lack of patriotism,” he said, “but afraid of where an abundance of patriotism might lead us.” He was first and foremost an internationalist, who believed that a stable international order would allow Japan, along with other nations, to flourish peacefully. If expansion into Asia hurt Japan's good relations with the other powers, then it must be stopped.
¹⁶
The outbreak of the Great War only intensified the debate.

The Japanese watched the conflict itself with detachment—in the words of an elder statesman, “like a fire on the far bank of the river.” The government initially hesitated over what it should do. Should it stay clear of the struggle? Back the Central Powers? (Many officers in the army had been trained in Germany and had a profound respect for its forces.) Back the Allies? (The view of the navy, which had close links with Britain.) The debates in the cabinet were largely pragmatic and revolved around where Japan would get the best deal. The decision was for the Allies. “Japan must take the chance of a millennium,” said the government when it declared war on August 23, 1914, “to establish its rights and interests in Asia.” In attacking Germany, Japan was choosing a low-risk way of advancing those interests. Germany had some concessions in China in the Shantung (Shandong) peninsula and a string of small islands in the north Pacific— the Marshalls, the Carolines, the Marianas—and no means of defending them. The campaign was over by November 1914.
¹⁷

The rest of the war was equally good to Japan. It not only brought orders for Japanese manufacturers but handicapped much of the prewar competition. Japan's merchant marine doubled in size as exports to Britain and the United States doubled, those to China quadrupled and those to Russia sextupled. In 1918, Hughes warned Balfour that the industrious Japanese were moving in everywhere. “We too must work in like fashion or retire like my ancestors from the fat plains to the lean and rugged hills.” And it was not just the economic threat that worried the British; at sea, Japan was more powerful than it had been in 1914, and on land, it was extending its influence over China and moving into Russian Siberia.
¹⁸

The Japanese were worried by the resentment. During the war, the elder statesman Prince Aritomo Yamagata noted: “It is extremely important . . . to take steps to prevent the establishment of a white alliance against the yellow peoples.” In 1917 the Japanese general staff said that it was out of the question to send troops to fight in Europe. They would be needed, when the war ended, to help Japan resist Western competition in China. Shortly before the war's end a Japanese journal asked leading figures what, in their opinion, Japan should get out of the war. The answers showed a considerable pessimism about Japan's international position and about the designs of Britain and the United States in Asia. The fears of an anti-Japan coalition of white powers were not as fanciful as they seemed. By the end of the war even responsible Western leaders had reluctantly come to the conclusion that there might have to be a showdown one day. In 1917, in a memorandum to the War Cabinet, Balfour commented, almost as an aside, that Britain would almost certainly defend the United States if Japan attacked. Japan's dilemma, which was to become more acute by the 1930s, was whether to trust the white powers, work with them in strengthening the international order, or assume that it had better look out for itself.
¹⁹

The government also had to listen to its own public opinion, which was demanding compensation for the costs of the attack on Germany, which in China alone amounted to two thousand Japanese lives and fifty million yen. And public opinion was something of which the élites who ran Japan were becoming afraid. The prosperity of the war had not touched all sections of society equally and there was significant resentment of the newly wealthy. The Russian Revolution gave a troubling example of what might happen. In the middle of 1918 serious riots over the cost of rice led to the fall of the government.
²⁰

The new government that took over was determined to hang on to Japan's gains but hoped to do so without alarming the other powers. Japan's delegation was dispatched to Paris with three clear goals: to get a clause on racial equality written into the covenant of the League of Nations, to control the north Pacific islands and to keep the German concessions in Shantung. Otherwise, according to instructions, it was to go along with Wilson's Fourteen Points. The prime minister personally told Makino to cooperate with the British and the Americans.
²¹
This was easier said than done.

The Pacific islands—the Marshalls, the Marianas and the Carolines— came up first at the Supreme Council. Thousands of tiny atolls and reefs dotting the vast stretch of the Pacific between Hawaii and the Philippines, they had passed the centuries in peaceful obscurity, and so had their peoples. Imperial rivalry, the spread of modern technology and the growth of modern navies had made them valuable to outsiders, first the Germans and now the Japanese. The Japanese military insisted that Japan should be able to control enough of the Pacific to protect itself and to control access to markets and raw materials on the mainland of Asia. That in turn meant being able to deal with other naval powers. Japan had defeated both China and Russia before 1914 and it had a naval treaty with Britain—but it had not come to a satisfactory accommodation with the United States. Nor was it likely to.

In 1898, during the Spanish-American War, the United States had taken charge of the Philippines and the important base of Guam to the east. Partly to protect its new acquisitions, it had also annexed Hawaii. At one step the United States had moved thousands of miles closer to Japan. Until the First World War, the American navy was still based in the Atlantic, but there were signals that American strategy was shifting to cope with its Asian responsibilities. In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt sent a fleet steaming around the world. He pushed increased naval appropriations through Congress and started work on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. By 1914 the United States had the third largest navy in the world, after Great Britain and Germany. The following year the Panama Canal, built with American money, opened, making it easy to move ships from one ocean to another. By 1916 the American government was openly committed to a “two-ocean” navy.
²²
Some Americans were talking about manifest destiny, about how the United States was bound to go on expanding westward. Unfortunately, American destiny was bound to clash eventually with Japanese, and what looked like defensive moves by one country might well be seen as aggression by the other.

Both Japanese and American military planners were aware that their countries were starting to bump up against each other. Each side drew up plans for a possible war with the other, mainly as a precaution. On both sides, though, there were those who took the prospect of war quite seriously, even enthusiastically. In the United States, novels appeared in the years before 1914 to terrify their readers with the nightmare of a successful Japanese invasion. These sold particularly well on the West Coast. The sensational Hearst press made much of the “yellow peril” and had a field day with talk of plots by the Japanese government to build a naval base when a group of simple Japanese fishermen tried to take a lease on a bay in Mexico's Baja California. Japan experienced strangely similar scares, and the phrase “white peril” began to appear in the Japanese press. A retired Japanese naval officer wrote a novel,
Our Next War,
about a future in which Japan attacked the United States and seized American islands in the Pacific. When Japan prepared to move on the German concessions in China in 1914, many officers and men apparently thought that they were being mobilized to fight the United States. The Japanese navy advised its government that Japan must keep the islands as an outer perimeter to screen a hostile American advance or, conversely, as bargaining chips to exchange for an agreement on demilitarization in the Pacific.
²³

Japan could count on some support in Paris. In February 1917, in return for Japanese naval assistance, Britain had recognized Japan's claims to the islands, and Italy, France and Russia had followed suit. But the British dominions of New Zealand, Australia and, to a lesser extent, Canada were nervous, and vocal, about the growth of the Japanese presence in the Pacific. In Britain there was a feeling that Japanese help in the war had come slowly and reluctantly. The marmalade that the head of a large Japanese shipping company sent to British soldiers in the front lines and the more useful contribution of a squadron to the Mediterranean in 1917 did not entirely appease the British. (Their view of Japan's contribution was shared by the French; as Clemenceau told his fellow peacemakers in January 1919, “Who can say that in the war she played a part that can be compared for instance to that of France? Japan defended its interests in the Far East, but when she was requested to intervene in Europe, everyone knows what the answer of Japan was.”) Few of the European statesmen, engaged as they were in a life-and-death struggle, had the detachment to see that there was no good reason for Japan to intervene in Europe. Relations were not improved by the peace feelers that Germany put out to Japan. Although Japan did not respond to them, the impression created was of an unreliable ally. The British navy started to contemplate a future war against Japan.
²⁴

Nevertheless, the official British position at the Paris Peace Conference was to support Japan's claims. Members of the British delegation made this quite clear when the Japanese asked anxiously for reassurance. Why did Britain only say that it would support Japanese claims, rather than guaranteeing that Japan would get the territories it wanted? Because that was all that Britain had promised to do in the secret agreement of 1917. Lloyd George himself said that Britain intended to stick by that promise.
²⁵

Wilson had no use for secret diplomacy and he made it quite clear that, as far as he was concerned, the 1917 agreement was a private arrangement that did not involve the United States. He was also under pressure to be tough with Japan. Anti-Japanese feeling was strong among the American public, partly because of Japanese immigration, a perennial irritant, but also because of the German peace moves. Mexico was another problem; Japan had sold weapons to what many Americans considered the wrong side in Mexico's bloody civil war, and then in 1917, in a clumsy attempt to win Japan to the side of the Central Powers, the German foreign minister, in the notorious Zimmerman telegram, had asked Mexico to invite Japan to join an alliance against the United States. Again, this left a bad impression. At the war's end, when Japan expanded enthusiastically into Siberia, under the mantle of Allied intervention against the Bolsheviks, Wilson shared the general distaste for what was seen as a conniving Japan. Now he worried that if Japan kept control of the north Pacific islands, it would have a series of stepping-stones across the Pacific toward Hawaii. His naval advisers warned of future Japanese bases and airfields.
²⁶

On January 27, 1919, Makino read a statement to the Supreme Council in which he reminded his audience how seizing the islands from Germany had kept the shipping lanes safe during the war. The locals, he said, sounding like any other imperialist, were a primitive people who could only benefit from Japan's protection and benevolence. Wilson mildly reiterated his preference for mandates as opposed to outright possession. He was not prepared to confront Japan on the islands, because he was disputing its other demands, for instance for the German concessions in China. He confined himself to saying that the United States could not accept a Japanese mandate over Yap, which lies at the western end of the Carolines and was a major nexus for international cables. The Americans were to raise the issue of some form of international control from time to time over the next few years, but with no success. When the mandates were finally divided in May 1919, Japan got all the islands it wanted.
²⁷

In the interwar years Japan did what the American navy had feared. Although the mandate terms forbade the establishment of military bases or the building of fortifications, this proved impossible to enforce. While foreigners found it increasingly difficult to visit the islands, Japan moved in settlers and the military. Japanese contractors built big new harbors and Truk, in the Carolines, was turned into Japan's main South Pacific naval base.
²⁸
In the war to come, what had been obscure islands—Tinian, Saipan, Truk—became the sites of great battles.

What came to be known as “the racial equality clause” in the League covenant turned out to be far more problematic. In the years before the war, Japanese businessmen complained that they were frequently humiliated when they traveled abroad. In California, Japanese nationals first lost the right to buy land, then the right to lease it, and finally the right to bring their wives to join them. In 1906 the San Francisco School Board voted to send Chinese and Japanese children (of whom there were fewer than a hundred in total) to segregated classes lest they overwhelm the white children. Japanese (and Chinese and Indian) immigrants found it more and more difficult to get into Canada and the United States, and impossible to enter Australia. Even during the war, when Japan was fighting as an ally of the British empire, its nationals continued to be excluded.