It is better for us to leave the ranks of Asian nations and cast our lot with civilized nations of the West. As for the way of dealing with China and Korea, no special treatment is necessary just because they happen to be our neighbors. We simply follow the manner of Westerners in knowing how to treat them. Any person who cherishes a bad friend cannot escape his bad notoriety. We simply erase from our minds our bad friends in Asia.30
By the turn of the twentieth century doubts had crept in to this view of the world. ‘Asia is one’, argued prominent Japanese intellectual Okakura Kakuzo dramatically in The Ideals of the East.31 In regular correspondence with the circle of Bengali intellectuals around Rabindranath Tagore – the two had met in Calcutta in 1902 – Okakura became a practitioner of intra-Asian cultural exchange as well as its advocate.32 He argued for Asia’s cultural distinctness from the West, and the necessity for political unity. ‘The Himalayas divide’, he wrote grandly, ‘but not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and the Universal, which is the thought-inheritance of every Asiatic race’. It was this sense of the universal which distinguished Asians from ‘those maritime peoples of the Mediterranean and the Baltic, who love to dwell on the particular, and to search out the means, not the end, of life’ – peoples whom Okakura Tenshin was able to observe at close quarters in his day job as curator of the Asian collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Art. Asian traditions and ideals were integral to Japan’s own identity, Okakura suggested, and were something to celebrate, not denigrate – or replace.
After the Russo-Japanese conflict in particular, Tokyo became a metropolis for political pan-Asianism: Vietnamese nationalists and Chinese republicans rubbed shoulders with Japanese students, reminding each other that the West had no monopoly on civilisation, nor on modernity, nor on rights of political control. But how did Japan fit in? After all, on the one hand Japan was now a colonial power in east Asia, just like the Western powers, enjoying concessions in China just like they did and defending her acquired rights every bit as vigorously as the German or the Russian Empires, perhaps more so. On the other, Japan occasionally chose to dress up colonisation in the language of Asian emancipation, or the language of pan-Asian development. ‘It is to be regretted that some see in our progressive rule in Formosa a revelation of inherent racial power that gives rise to the cry of “Yellow Peril”’, Goto Shinpei, the Japanese governor of Taiwan, wrote in an article in the otherwise anti-colonial Africa Times and Orient Review, ‘that we have any reason to cry “White Peril” never, of course, occurs to them’.33 Meanwhile, British diplomats in Japan accepted that Koreans were ‘better governed, materially better off in almost every way’ under Japanese rule, than they had been under the Korean Empire – still, ‘one can discern at times a tendency to exploit rather than to control’. A case of the pot calling the kettle black, certainly – but one which showed the inherent ambivalences of Japanese colonisation in Asia.34
In 1913, two events in particular brought home Japan’s delicate place in the ordering of the world. The first came in April, when the Californian legislature introduced a law restricting Japanese immigrants from owning land in the state. For many Japanese this was a slap in the face. The numbers of Japanese in the United States likely to be affected by the law were themselves relatively few. As it was, a quiet ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ had been made a few years back to limit Japanese immigration into the United States; Japanese already living there had long been excluded from holding American citizenship. But, as President Wilson himself noted, the issue now was not so much the details of the California legislation itself – which he insisted that as President of a federal state he had no power to change – as what the Japanese thought it said about wider American attitudes, confirming a ‘feeling on our part that they [ Japanese] are not on the same plane with us [Americans]’.35 The California land law was, in Japanese eyes, a public rebuke – and a racist one, at that. ‘It touches a man’s pride’, Wilson noted – offering an explanation for Japanese anger, but not a solution to it.
Japan’s government and society swept into action to oppose the proposed Californian legislation. A formal diplomatic protest was lodged by the Japanese Ambassador in Washington. Japanese emissaries were sent to California to plead Tokyo’s case directly. The Tokyo, Kobe, Osaka, Yokohama and Kyoto chambers of commerce sent stiffly worded telegrams to their American counterparts urging them to lobby the California legislature on their behalf, so as to prevent negative consequences for trade. Others appealed to international law or to American traditions of justice and equality – to no avail. Some, including former Mayor of Tokyo Yukio Ozaki, threatened direct retaliation – refusing to take part in the planned Panama–Pacific exhibition of 1915, for example, or boycotting Californian ports in favour of Seattle.36 In Washington, the Department of the Navy reported to the President on the likelihood of war.
But the matter was not easily settled. Indeed, its ramifications spread. Within a matter of months, the Californian land law dispute rapidly had become the subject of international attention and comment. Andrew Fisher, a former Labor Prime Minister of Australia, voiced his support for California on a visit to New York: Australia no more wanted to be overrun by Asians than did the Pacific coast of the United States, he noted.37 Japan’s proper place in the world was debated on the pages of the London Times and other foreign newspapers, vividly exposing the feelings of many Westerners that the Japanese were not now and perhaps never would be their true equals, and subjecting the Japanese to arrogant judgements about their aptitude for assimilation into ‘civilised’ society. In turn, leading Japanese journalist Tokutomi Soho launched a campaign against Hoku Batsu, or white snobbery, in the pages of his newspaper.38 In a much-reported speech in Kyoto Dr Sanjiro Ichimura of the Imperial University in Tokyo listed the following characteristics of whites:
1. White men consider that they alone are human beings, and that all coloured people are on a lower scale of creation. 2. The whites are extremely selfish. They insist on their own interests to the utmost, but persist in unreasonable treatment of those whom they regard as their inferiors. 3. White men are full of racial pride and conceit. When they gain an inch they grasp a mile. To make a concession to them is to lay up a store of humiliation. 4. White men run to extremes. They excel the Japanese both in greatness and in vileness. 5. White men worship money as omnipotent, and believe that it is the key to all things.39
Elder statesman Count Okuma warned that the racial prejudice behind the Californian legislation meant that ‘even if the present agitation is successfully suppressed troubles of a similar nature will continue to crop up’.40 But was Japan therefore compelled to indefinitely accept the prejudices of the West, bearing them as best she could? Was Japan forever to be slighted?
Nor was this the end of it. For in some ways the worst thing about the California land law was not that it was discriminatory against Japanese, but that it failed to discriminate between Japanese and other Asians. ‘Classifying the Japanese with the Mongolians [the Chinese] … when the former are attempting to become a great nation, naturally hurts their feelings’, Professor Yokoyama of Johns Hopkins University explained to the Los Angeles Times.41 William Elliot Griffis, an American academic who taught at the Imperial University and who had written a number of noted books on modern Japan, declared it ‘absurd’ for Californian law to place the Japanese alongside the ‘Mongolians’, a group for which there was a quite proper ‘instinctive cuticular repulsion’.42 The Japanese were racially distinct from the Chinese, he noted: how else could one explain Japan’s conspicuous success?
Japan’s fragile sense of her place in the ordering of the world was revealed in a different way in China later in the year when, in the midst of that country’s brief so-called Second Revolution, Japanese interests were looted in Nanjing, and several Japanese subjects killed. Though the number of Japanese deaths was relatively small – just three died in the first instance – the Japanese flag h
ad been burned, the empire insulted and the Japanese community put into a state of panic. Back home, public opinion was reported to be ‘sizzling with indignation’.43 Angry demonstrations followed. The Chinese are worse than the ‘unspeakable Turk’, it was said in the Japan Times, helpfully adopting a long-standing European prejudice and applying it to the East Asian context. Chinese government troops were presented as ‘bandits’. ‘A pack of wolves would not work so much havoc’, wrote one journalist, ‘a band of tigers would have caused less panic’.44 This time, Count Okuma appeared to be in a less conciliatory mood. ‘All this outrage is the outcome of the contempt in which the Chinese government holds the diplomacy of Japan’, he told a reporter, ‘we should first occupy strategic points in China, and then carry on negotiations with the Chinese government’. The Japanese army was said to be supportive, seeing an opportunity to prove the worth of its men and kit, and to reassert its position as the more important of Japan’s armed services.
As the situation got worse in Nanking – the behaviour of Chinese soldiers now qualified as an ‘inexcusable crime in this enlightened age’, proof of Chinese barbarity – the anger of some Japanese turned them against their own government.45 Dr Moritaro Abe, director of political affairs at the foreign office, who had been reported as having urged that ‘we must not return violence for violence’ in the Nanjing case, was ambushed outside his home at 31 Reinanzaka-cho.46 According to the official statement from the foreign office, ‘two men appeared … one man held him from the back, while the other stabbed him with a dagger in the abdomen and thigh, and ran away’.
The following Sunday a meeting of 20,000 took place in Hibiya Park, a former parade ground which in recent years had become a popular site for pro and anti-government demonstrations. It was here that crowds had met in 1905 to protest what nationalists saw as the unacceptable peace terms of the Russo-Japanese War, a protest which had become a riot, injuring hundreds and killing several. Now, in 1913, speeches denouncing the foreign office were made again and 50,000 copies of a resolution distributed demanding immediate Japanese military intervention in China. ‘Among the more attractive figures on the rostrum was a young woman dressed like a student’, the Japan Times reported. ‘Her appearance was hailed with such encouraging remarks as “Brave girl!” “Give us stuff and fire!” and “A New Woman!”’, the Times continued:
Raising her voice above the hum of the multitude she concluded her speech with the following patriotic fulmination: ‘The rescue and redress of our fellow-countrymen in China is the duty that we women of the age of Taisho owe to the nation’47
The foreign office was then besieged by a crowd seeking to ‘interview’ the foreign minister. Only a heavy police presence and the iron gates of the ministry prevented it from being stormed. A gathering a few days later at the Meiji Theatre threatened to keep on holding popular meetings until government policy was changed – or the government itself overthrown.48
In Autumn 1913, the trees in Ueno Park now bare, Prince Katsura, master of the old order, died. ‘Ozaki killed me’ were said to have been Katsura’s last words, in reference to the denunciation he had received in the Diet earlier that year.49 ‘Prince Katsura was one of the most brilliant and successful soldier statesmen the country has ever produced’, the Japan Times opined.50 A symbol of the heroic era of Japanese nation-building was gone. In Britain, Katsura’s death was met politely, though there could be little hiding that the man had long been thought to be pro-German. In America, country of science, there featured a letter to the New York Times by American neurologist and anatomist Edward Charles Spitzka discussing the reported weight of Prince Katsura’s brain and what this said about Japanese race. At 1,600 grams, Sptizka noted, Katsura’s brain weight placed him sixteenth in a list of 108 eminent men whose brains had been measured at their death.51 This augured well for Japan’s future, Spitzka wrote:
… the brain weight of the Japanese compares favorably with that of Europeans of similar stature, and it may be shown to be superior in this respect to other races of the same general stature. These facts are not of a little significance in relation to the learning, industry and aptitudes of this progressive rae.
Katsura’s death represented the passing of a generation, and the passing of certainties associated with it. Within the span of his life, from 1848 to 1913, Japan had become a country on the threshold of modernity, with all the ambivalences that that entailed. Born into a semi-feudal regime, Katsura died in a nation-state. When he was born, Japan feared for its very existence as an independent political entity in an age of empires. By the time he died the sun had risen on a new era in Japan’s history, as an imperial great power itself – albeit one which looked around itself warily, and was looked at suspiciously by others. To what ends would Japanese power be directed? Would Japan prove a factor of stability and Western order – or would it be an expansionist force? Was Japan’s rise merely the presage of a still grander awakening – of Asia itself?
LONDON
Beyond the Horizon
‘What will be the standing of the British Empire in AD 2013?’, asked the Evening Standard of its London readers in 1913.1 Certainly, it answered, it would not be an empire held together by force; rather it would be most probably a collection of ‘allied autonomous states under a common head’. The Standard speculated that Canada would have a population of 100,000,000 and the federal capital of the Anglo-Saxon Federation would be along the Canadian border with the United States. India might be a self-governing entity by 2013 – but probably not. Britain itself might have become an agricultural country again, its home population having peaked in 1950:
Of one thing we may be certain. Even if the centre of the Empire shifts across the Atlantic, the love and veneration of the entire race for its original home must preserve it inviolate from alien hands, and its monuments and antiquities will form the objective of thousands of overseas pilgrims, who will look with pride upon the handiwork of their forefathers, to whom they owe their lands their liberties, and their proud position among the peoples of the earth!
It was an intriguing image of a future Britain – a kind of Britannic theme park, or imperial shrine – and a strange vision of a twenty-first century British Empire: still the dominant force in global politics, but its structures transformed, even its capital city moved.
London in 1913 was still in its midday pomp. But the setting of the sun was not as inconceivable as it once had been. Empire could no longer be taken as a given, a God-given right extended to the British, the natural inheritors of the earth. For a hundred years the empire had expanded, almost without forethought, and with remarkably little effort. Now, it was widely recognised that the empire was entering a new and potentially much more difficult phase.2 Although it seemed fantastical to imagine a world without the British Empire, it was not impossible. ‘Will the Empire which is celebrating one centenary of Trafalgar survive for the next?’ wrote James Louis Garvin, editor of the pro-empire Outlook magazine, in 1905. ‘It is a searching question’, he continued, ‘and, despite the narcotic optimism which is the fashion of the hour, national instinct recognises that the answer is no foregone affirmative’.3
For many, the alarm bells had begun to ring during the Boer War, more than a decade previously. The war was, in plain military terms, an embarrassment. For years, a relatively small population of Boer settlers had pinned down the might of the British Army in a distant, drawn-out conflict leading to tens of thousands of casualties and costing a small fortune to win. And if dealing with a bunch of Dutch farmers in the open veldt of South Africa proved a strain on the empire militarily, how on earth would Britain cope with the defence of its other scattered realms, should the time come? While international mobility enhanced links between different parts of the empire, it also made the British Empire, spread out over so much of the world, uniquely vulnerable: could Britain truly be expected to fight and win a war in Asia, the Middle East and Europe at the same time? It was for this reason that in 1902 Britain entered
an alliance with Japan – unthinkable a decade previously – allowing Britain to focus its naval forces in Europe and perhaps start a long roll-back of its global position. It was in the same year, at the Colonial Conference held on the occasion of the coronation of King Edward VII, that Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain uttered words forever associated with the challenges of Britain’s comparative decline, and the risks of her imperial overstretch: ‘The Weary Titan staggers under the too vast orb of its fate’.4 A titan still, but one worn down by the consequences of success.
But it was not just the cost of the Boer War in blood and treasure which shocked public opinion back home in Britain, convincing some that Britain’s efforts at imperial reform needed to be redoubled, and convincing others that the old imperial game was on its way to being up. There was also the question of the way in which the war was fought. The policy of internment of Boer families, for example, was seen as unequal to the prize of placing all South Africa under British rule, and unworthy of Britain’s world-historical mission to bring peace, civilisation and British institutions alongside British control. Still more fundamentally, there was the question of why the war was fought. In 1902, the economist John A. Hobson argued in his study of empire that it was finance which was the motive force behind imperialism these days, not a quest to spread civilisation, nor a moral crusade: ‘Finance is … the governor of the imperial engine, directing the energy and determining the work’.5 Imperialism was not a process of equal benefit to colonised and coloniser, it was not a noble undertaking, but rather a ‘depraved choice of national life, imposed by self-seeking interests which appeal to the lusts of quantitative acquisitiveness and of forceful domination surviving in a nation from early centuries of animal struggle for existence’. Most Britons in 1913 saw the empire as a moral creation – or else as a self-justifying proof of British superiority – rather than analysing it in the same terms as Hobson. Still, if the Boer War was what imperialism had come to in the modern age, there were many in Britain who wanted none of it.
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