The Imperial Cruise

by James Bradley

  JAPAN HAD JUST FOUGHT Russia over the past nineteen months in the Russo-Japanese War. They had whipped the Russian army in the largest land battle in history, then whipped the Russian navy in history’s largest sea battle. The average Japanese was near delirious with pride over Japan’s victories. Just fifty-two years earlier, Japan had been a closed, preindustrialized society. Now Japan had amazed the world by becoming the first non-White, non-Christian country to defeat a White Christian power.

  In welcoming the Taft party, the Japanese were cheering their own accomplishments and hedging their bets. Although Roosevelt had declared the United States neutral in the conflict, the Japanese were well aware of America’s tilt. Surely this visit by an American Princess and the head of America’s war machine was one more indication that Japan’s stunning performance in the Russo-Japanese War meant great things. Japan had been shamed in the past by White Christian powers, but now after administering such one-sided beatings to the Russians, the Japanese expected that Alice’s father would ensure a square deal for their country.

  Only a few Japanese leaders, including Emperor Meiji, knew that the president had a secret plan for their country, a plan whereby Roosevelt would grant them a protectorate in Korea in exchange for Japan’s assisting with the American penetration of Asia.

  ONE TOKYO NEWSPAPER REPORTER observed, “This is truly the highpoint in the long history of Japanese-American relations.”7 In fact, for the first seventy years of America’s existence—from 1783 to 1853—the United States had no relations with the nation known as Nippon. But as the United States took possession of its own Pacific territory, it began to seriously eye China. America’s preeminent navy leader in the 1850s was Commodore Matthew Perry, who in the war with Mexico had commanded the largest U.S. invasion operation in history with a fleet that would not be equaled until Operation Torch—the U.S. invasion of North Africa in 1942. Commodore Perry followed the sun, proclaiming in a speech, “It requires no sage to predict events so strongly foreshadowed to us all: still ‘Westward will the course of empire take its way.’… The people of America will, in some form or other, extend their dominion and their power, until they shall have brought within their mighty embrace the islands of the great Pacific, and placed the Saxon race upon the eastern shores of Asia.”8

  With Pacific ports now under Washington’s control, Perry foresaw an American Aryan march to Asia. The Russian army had advanced into northern China overland and the British navy had bombarded its way into southern China. Now Perry dreamed of establishing a chain of stepping-stones for the U.S. Navy’s approach to China.

  Commodore Matthew Perry. After helping to conquer Mexico, Perry turned his attention to America’s expansion to Asia. (Library of Congress)

  The U.S. Navy used coal as fuel, and its ships required island coaling stations to complete long journeys. The Pacific—at eight times the size of the Atlantic—required big thinking. The distance from California to Hawaii is 2,100 miles, and American steamships could re-coal there. The real challenge was the distance from Hawaii to China—4,700 miles. If America could establish coaling stations in Japan to bridge the gap, the American Aryan could at long last project its naval power in the region and compete with the British and Slavs for the riches of China.

  Perry’s strategy seems obvious today, but in his time, this was expensive, futuristic thinking and its implications were financially staggering. And there was one big challenge: Americans knew almost nothing about Japan.

  White Christian missionaries had first arrived in Japan in 1543. The Japanese were open-minded about other religions and welcomed the Christians. The Japanese animist belief system—Shintoism—coexisted peacefully with Buddhism, which had been imported from India via China. These were inclusionary belief systems—one could recite a Buddhist sutra at a Shinto shrine with no conflict. But the Christianity that came from the West was jealous and exclusionary, and the missionaries demanded that a choice be made. Japan’s ruler, Shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa, became suspicious of a religion whose first commandment required loyalty to one non-Japanese God. And when he studied world conditions, Tokugawa realized that Christianity was a conquest religion in the service of state militaries. The Japanese scholar Seishisai Aizawa wrote in the 1820s, “The European powers endeavor to attack all nations in the world. The wicked doctrine of Jesus is an aid in this endeavor. Under the pretext of trade or whatever, they approach and become friendly with people in all areas, secretly probing to see which countries are strong and which are weak. If a nation’s defenses are weak, they seize it by force. But if there are no weaknesses to pounce on, they take it over by leading the people’s minds astray with the wicked doctrine of [Christianity].”9

  Commodore Perry’s Strategy

  Commodore Perry’s strategy to tap the China trade. In the 1850s the wide Pacific Ocean was a barrier to commerce between the United States and Asia. Commodore Perry envisioned Japanese coaling stations as U.S. stepping stones to the riches of China.

  In 1614, to prevent a Christian takeover of Japan, Tokugawa ordered a policy of sakoku, or “closed country”—the complete sealing off of the island chain. He banished all Western missionaries. Japanese converts had the choice of renouncing their new faith or being crucified. Laws forbade travel abroad by Japanese and foreigners’ vessels from entering Japan. Only ships with squared-off sterns could be built, thus making them unseaworthy for long voyages. Death sentences awaited those who received foreign documents or gave foreigners information about Japan. Shogun Tokugawa even shut down profitable commerce with the West, trading only with the Dutch—and then very little—because the Hollanders agreed to trample upon crucifixes that had been laid before them by Japanese government interrogators. These Dutch merchants conducted their business from a small, prisonlike artificial island in Nagasaki Bay, an isolated spot where the Japanese could keep an eye on them.

  The result was the Taihei, or “Great Peace”—more than two centuries of peaceful Tokugawa family rule and no wars. The country had no army or navy preying beyond its shores. Samurai rarely used their swords and instead became bureaucrats and teachers. And all of this occurred during the same period that White Christians in Europe and the Americas were constantly warring. These centuries of peace were a boon to the development of Japanese culture. With no expensive military, the Japanese government invested in its people. The arts by which we know Japan today—haiku poetry, the tea ceremony, wood-block prints, Kabuki theater—either originated or found their footing during this period. Japan became the most literate country in the world, with nearly every adult male in Japan’s major cities able to read or write.

  While sakoku protected Japan, it also created a power vacuum, and Britain, Russia, Spain, and the United States were free to contest for control of the Pacific.

  THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT KNEW Japan asked only to be left alone to live in peace, but the U.S. Navy repeatedly demanded that the Japanese “open” their closed country. “Between 1790 and 1853, the Japanese turned away at least twenty-seven visiting U.S. vessels.”10 As Japanese officials wrote to one U.S. Navy captain:

  Foreigners have come to us from various quarters, but have always been received in the same way. In all cases we have positively refused to trade and this has been the habit of our nation from time immemorial. In taking this course with regard to you, we only pursue our accustomed policy. We can make no distinction between different foreign nations—we treat them all alike; and you, as Americans, must receive the same answer with the rest. It will be of no use to renew the attempt, as all applications of the kind, however numerous they may be, will be steadily rejected. We are aware that our customs are in this respect different from those of some other countries, but every nation has a right to manage its affairs in its own way.11

  The Japanese phrasing “every nation has a right to manage its affairs in its own way” seemed naive to those who followed the sun. In an 1846 speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Senator Thomas Hart Benton noted that Asians were infe
rior to the American Aryan and, “like all the rest, must receive an impression from the superior race whenever they come in contact.”12

  As the American Aryan’s desire to expand across the Pacific grew, Christian ministers observed that heathen Japan needed salvation and that Japan’s seclusion policy was not God’s way. The missionary Samuel Wells Williams wrote, “I have a full conviction that the seclusion policy of the nations of Eastern Asia is not according to God’s plan of mercy to these peoples, and their government must change them through fear or force, that his people may be free.”13 In 1852, the secretary of the Navy, John Kennedy, wrote that Japan must recognize “its Christian obligation to join the family of Christendom.”14 Echoing similar arguments made earlier about Native American gold mines, the secretary of state, Daniel Webster, argued that Japan had “no right” to refuse the U.S. Navy’s “reasonable” request to commandeer Japanese sovereign soil for its coaling stations because the coal at issue was “but a gift of Providence, deposited, by the Creator of all things, in the depths of the Japanese islands for the benefit of the human family.”15 The American Declaration of Independence established the right of an independent country to control its own destiny, and the State Department—in an 1851 memo to the Navy during the planning of the coming confrontation with Japan—maintained that every nation has “undoubtedly the right to determine for itself the extent to which it will hold intercourse with other nations.”16 So how could the U.S. government justify forcing itself on a sovereign nation? Writes Michael Rollin in his thesis The Divine Invasion:

  The easiest way out of this dilemma was to treat the Japanese in the same manner that the American Indians were treated: “as living outside of the law of nations, peoples undeserving of civilized treatment.” Americans, by the 1840s and 1850s, simply did not conceive of a place for non-White or even non-Anglo peoples in the grand scheme of human and social evolution…. Having spread across North America with relative ease, there was little reason for American Anglo-Saxons to believe that this seemingly immutable historical and teleological trend would differ in the lands across the Pacific.17

  The Western Spread of American Empire

  Manifest Destiny followed the sun west.

  On the American continent in the 1850s, many Indian chiefs were learning the lesson that their demise began the day an American Aryan arrived to negotiate a friendly treaty. Now President Millard Fillmore gave Commodore Perry a treaty of friendship for the heathens of Japan.

  The cover story was that Perry was on a peaceful mission, but the plan was to use U.S. military power to shock the Japanese into capitulation. Perry sailed to Japan with the largest fleet of American warships to ever travel so far. Perry expected that his display of industrialized military might would strike terror in the pre-industrialized Japanese. He wrote that his arms “would do more to command their fears, and secure their friendship, than all that the diplomatic missions have accomplished in the last one hundred years.”18

  On July 8, 1853, Perry sailed unannounced into Tokyo Bay with a fleet of U.S. Navy warships bristling with civilizing cannons. As Perry had planned, the noisy, belching vessels shocked the Japanese, who had never seen such industrial machines, much less militarized ones. Temple bells pealed the alarm. The word spread quickly: Fleet-footed messengers ran through villages with incomprehensible news that the “Black Ships of the Evil Men” threatened and that one hundred thousand devils with white faces were about to overrun the country. Families fled their homes with their possessions on their backs. Out-of-practice samurai tried to scrape rust off their swords, but against civilizing American military power, Japan was defenseless.

  Though they had no desire to get into negotiations, the Japanese were forced to allow Perry ashore when the commodore threatened violence. A Japanese observer wrote, “Perry said that he would enter into negotiations, but if his proposals were rejected, he was prepared to make war at once; that in the event of war he would have 50 ships in nearby waters and 50 more in California, and that if he sent word he could summon a command of one hundred warships within twenty days.”19 (Perry made his demands known with the aid of interpreters who used the Dutch language to bridge the gap between English and Japanese.) Perry further “warned them of what had happened to Mexico when it insulted and defied the United States.”20 To emphasize this point, Perry gave his Japanese counterparts two books—War in Mexico and History of the War in Mexico—that highlighted Perry’s role as the commander of the huge American amphibious assault of Mexico.

  Soon America’s first consul to Japan—Townsend Harris—arrived to negotiate the treaty of friendship. When Japanese leaders hemmed and hawed, Harris threatened that he would call on nearby British ships to bombard Japan. Convinced that the threat was real and immediate, the Japanese reluctantly signed the United States–Japan Treaty of Amity and Commerce on July 29, 1858.

  Shame upon shame followed. On March 13, 1861, Russia invaded the island of Tsushima in the Sea of Japan between Japan and Korea. Several Japanese died in the fighting before the Russians withdrew, but Japan’s rebuff of the intruders was seen by some as evidence of its increasing vulnerability. And in 1863 and 1864, the navies of both the United States and the United Kingdom shelled Japanese civilians in the port city Shimonoseki to discipline the Japanese for firing on their ships.

  Furthermore, the shocked Japanese now encountered White Christians—banned for centuries—strutting their streets like little kings, immune from punishment thanks to unequal treaties that protected foreigners even when they committed violent crimes for which they would be punished back in their home countries.

  In response to such conditions, Japanese patriots arose from the southern island of Kyushu and fought their way into the royal capital of Kyoto. Early on the morning of January 3, 1868, these brave samurai stormed the royal compound and took control of the young emperor, then only fifteen years old. They renamed the boy “Meiji” (“enlightened rule”) and called their revolution the “Meiji Restoration,” though they didn’t “restore” the emperor; instead they used his Oz-like image to exercise power.

  The Japanese founding fathers were a remarkable group of men who would create the new Japan and guide her fortunes into the twentieth century, negotiating Japan’s future with American presidents from Millard Fillmore to Theodore Roosevelt. Not surprisingly, Japan experienced the outside world primarily as a military threat. America had forced the country open at gunpoint. And a glance across the Japan Sea made it obvious there was much else to worry about. Once-proud China was being dismembered and sucked dry by Western merchants who used gunboats to foist opium upon the populace. Farther south, the Dutch had conquered Indonesia; the French ruled Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; while the acquisitive British held vast colonies in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Burma, and India. To its north, Japan saw the marauding Russian Slav subjugate all within its path as it hacked its way to the Pacific coast.

  No non-White country had ever maintained its independence once a White military force had landed on its soil. China, India, and Egypt all had rich histories but were under the heel of White boots.

  * * *

  THE JAPANESE UNDERSTOOD THAT White Christians felt justified in subjugating Asians because they thought the Yellow man was racially inferior. So the Japanese set out to identify themselves as separate from other Asians, and more like White westerners. The Japanese military strategist Yukichi Fukuzawa wrote, “We cannot wait for neighboring countries to become enlightened and unite to make Asia strong. We must rather break out of formation and join the civilized countries of the West on the path of progress.” Fukuzawa advocated a “Leave Asia” policy: the Japanese would present themselves as a separate race, disconnected from Asia just as their island chain was unattached to the Asian mainland. And the Japanese would emulate the West’s military prowess. To the Japanese who had faced Commodore Perry’s cannon, the most salient fact of White Christian power was that their imperialism was built upon industrialized militaries. Japan ado
pted a new national slogan: Fukoku kyohei, or “Rich country, strong military.” To build a strong military and become a rich country, Japan did what no other non-White, non-Christian country had done: it threw open its doors to Western ways, modernized and militarized. Fukuzawa observed, “A hundred volumes of international law are no match for a few cannon. A handful of friendly treaties cannot compete with a little gunpowder. Cannons and gunpowder are machines that can make principles where there were none.”21

  Japan also took an important theological step toward the West: Japan had many Shinto and Buddhist gods, but none of them were conquest-minded. As the Pulitzer Prize winner John Dower writes in Japan in War and Peace, “Japan’s new leaders soon concluded that they needed a counterpart to God and Christianity in the West.”22 With this in mind, the founding fathers reinvented their boy emperor in the Christian tradition: Meiji was made to be a god and “State Shinto” was born.

  Another step was sartorial. Instead of shunning foreign ways as China and other Asian countries had, the Japanese doffed their Chinese-style robes and donned trousers and ties. And this was just the beginning. They strung telegraph wire, practiced with knives and forks, and opened Japan to Western teachers, missionaries, and governmental advisers. The founding fathers also dispatched the crème of Japan’s youth to study abroad. When the first two Japanese students to attend Rutgers University were asked what they’d be studying, they answered “that it was to learn how to build ‘big ships’ and make ‘big guns’ to prevent the [Western] powers from taking possession of their country.”23