Tgk1946's Blog

From The Long Shadow (David Reynolds, 2013) pp120-2

Although France and Britain were beneficiaries of the crisis of empire in Europe and the Near East, the Great War accelerated the emergence of imperial rivals in the Pacific: Japan and the United States. In each case empire and race were tightly entangled — Japan being the only non-White great power while America, though intensely racist, prided itself rather casuistically on not being a colonial empire. Both of them ended the Great War as major naval powers in the Pacific and this created a new challenge for the British.
At the Paris peace conference Japan was treated as one of the Big Five allies, adjudicating the post-war order. All this seemed to vindicate the modernization policy of the past four decades, using Western methods to make Japan a great power with an empire of its own in Manchuria and Korea. Yet, in racial terms, Japan did not feel one of the club, being stigmatized in the West by the growing outcry about the ‘Yellow Peril’. The idea, derived from the writings of the French author Arthur de Gobineau, that there were three basic ‘races’ — white, black and yellow — was widely held around 1900, not least in Japan. In 1908 the intellectual journal Taiyo devoted a special issue to ‘The Clash of the Yellow and the White Peoples’. Resentment was particularly intense about racial discrimination against Japanese workers in Australia, Canada and the United States. So there seemed an inherent contradiction between ‘the treatment of Japan as a first-class power’ in the new world order and the treatment of ‘the Japanese as second-class citizens in the Anglo-Saxon territories’.72
This issue was entangled with the debate in Japan about democracy. In the late nineteenth century the country’s principal model had been Bismarck’s Germany, whose militarist, oligarchic ethos suited a polity in which power still resided largely with elder statesmen (Genro) drawn from a few clans. But, Japan also had a minority tradition of Anglophilia, attracted by Britain’s flee trade and parliamentary politics, and this was institutionalized in the Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902 — Britain’s attempt to break out of its turn-of-the-century sense of isolation. During the Great War Japan’s navy, much of it constructed in British shipyards, proved a useful adjunct to British seapower, both in the China Seas and for the defence of India. In the crisis of 1917 two flotillas of Japanese destroyers were sent to the Mediterranean to help protect Britain’s trade. In return the British backed Japan’s claims to Germany’s rights in China and the North Pacific. On Japan’s side the alliance had even larger significance as the first acknowledgment by a European great power of Japan’s equality of status.73
The Japanese debate about German and British models of development intensified during the Great War. September 1918 saw the installation of Japan’s first government formed by a political party, as distinct from an oligarchic faction, and Hara Kei, a former journalist and diplomat, became the first commoner to serve as prime minister. This historic moment coincided with imperial Germany’s defeat and disintegration and with the craze for Wilsonianism. Pro-democrats in Japan, such as the Tokyo professor Yoshino Sakuzo, predicted that ‘the trend of the world’ was now ‘the perfection of democracy’ at home and the establishment of ‘egalitarianisrn’ in international relations. Joining the League of Nations became the prime aim of Hara’s new government. But many vocal conservatives suspected the League as a device for continued ‘Anglo-Saxon’ dominance. In response, Japan’s delegation at Paris requested that the League’s Covenant endorse the principle of ‘equal and just treatment’ of nationals from all member states, ‘making no distinction, either in law or in fact, on account of their race or nationality.’74
This principle, which became known as the racial equality clause, reflected long—standing Japanese resentment about immigration restriction but it was intended above all as a test of whether Japan was regarded as an international equal. The term ‘racial’ equality is actually misleading: there was never any question of ending the oppression of Chinese and Koreans within Japan’s empire. Most Japanese had a ‘two-tiered’ approach to race, seeing themselves as equal to the West but a cut above the rest of Asia. This double standard aside, Japan’s démarche put the Paris peacemakers on the spot. The French, true to their universalist ideology, endorsed it as ‘an indisputable principle of justice’, even though honouring it more in the breach than the observance within their empire. The British wriggled out, claiming that Japan’s proposal was mainly about immigration and therefore, constitutionally, a matter for individual Dominions. This allowed Billy Hughes of Australia to turn it into a fundamental challenge to his ‘White Australia’ policy and a platform to prove his nationalist credentials before the next election, ‘Sooner than agree to it,’ he ranted. ‘I would rather walk into the Seine — or the Folies Bergeres with my clothes off.’ So embarrassing was Hughes’ demagoguery that even Louis Botha, the South African premier, no advocate of racial equality, told the Japanese delegation, ‘strictly between ourselves, I think he is mad.’ In the end Wilson blocked the proposal to avoid a damaging public row that might have jeopardized the creation of the League but Western rejection of the racial equality clause was not forgotten in Japan. In 1946 Emperor Hirohito cited it as a prime cause of the Second World.75
A further slight was the US immigration act of 1924, intended to preserve the ‘Nordic’ character of Americas population. Migration from the ‘Slavic’ countries of southern and eastern Europe was restricted by tight national quotas, but immigrants from Asia were totally prohibited, The act, which remained in force until after the Second World War, was built on long-standing discrimination against ‘Orientals’, especially in California, ostensibly because their cheap labour threatened American jobs but essentially on racial grounds. ‘The Chinese and Japanese . . . are not the stuff of which American citizens can be made,’ pontificated Senator James Whelan, a leading Californian Democrat. He called them ‘a blight on our civilization’.