The Imperial Cruise

by James Bradley

  “The Progress of Civilization.” Civilized and uncivilized Japanese. Japan’s “Leave Asia” strategy convinced Americans that Japan would spread Western values in Asia. (Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University)

  Cannons, rifles, and warships now became part of the state budget. Japanese military men strutted in Western-style uniforms complete with handlebar mustaches, just like their English, American, and Russian counterparts. Emperor Meiji was depicted in paintings wearing a splendid Western-style military uniform, his chest bearing shiny medals.

  While life in Japan’s rice paddies continued its timeless routine, the English-speaking Japanese who interacted with U.S. diplomats, businessmen, educators, and media projected a Western-friendly front. One American marveled, “This is one of the most remarkable events in history. In a word, it has, as it were, unmoored Japan from the coast of Asia, and towed it across the Pacific, to place it alongside of the New World, to have the same course of life and progress.”24

  The Japanese strategy to emulate White Christian ways was so successful that they became “Honorary Aryans” in the American mind, often referred to as the “Yankees of the Far East.” At the 1876 Philadelphia World’s Fair, American Indians were presented as headed toward extinction, Blacks were thickheaded laborers, and the Chinese were a dying race. A Philadelphia newspaper wrote of the Chinese, “Cut off from the rest of the world by its great wall, and isolated behind her old feeling of distrust and apathy towards the peoples of Europe, the old empire of China has received but little benefit from western civilization and advancement.”25 The Yankee assessment of the Honorary Aryans was all sunshine: “Japan renders her verdict in favor of American machinery. The Japanese have already adopted the American costume in dress, and the progressive spirit pervading the Old World is inclining her people to adopt American ideas and American machinery.”26

  A DOMESTICALLY FOCUSED AMERICAN citizenry quickly lost interest in Perry’s plan for expansion into Asia. But now the United States had a militarized, obedient ally on Asia’s coast—and perhaps Japanese expansion could serve the American Aryan.

  There were many impediments: The Japanese had lived in peace for centuries, and while there existed a samurai/warrior ethic, it had not been practiced on the battlefield for many years. The Japanese legal code was concerned with domestic order and there was no tradition of using international law to take over Others. For a generation after Perry, Japan seemed unable or disinclined to project its military force. Then an international incident occurred that the United States saw as Japan’s opportunity.

  In October of 1871, a ship from the island of Okinawa with sixty-nine people aboard had set sail for China. Okinawa was a tiny Pacific island kingdom located between Japan and China. To maintain its independence, Confucian Okinawa had traditionally paid homage to both China and Japan. And in Confucian style, neither China nor Japan threatened Okinawa or its people. On this trip, a fierce storm blew the Okinawans off course and smashed their boat on the southeastern coast of Taiwan. Sixty-six made it ashore safely, but natives from a local village massacred fifty-four of them. Twelve escaped and made it back to Okinawa safely.

  Charles De Long, the U.S. minister to Japan, had often encouraged the Japanese government to follow the sun west. De Long suggested that Japan dispatch a military expedition to discipline the Taiwanese and lay the groundwork for the takeover of the island nation. Minister De Long assured the Japanese that the United States “was partial to its friends who desired to occupy such territory for the purposes of expansion.”27

  Japan, Okinawa, Taiwan, China

  After Commodore Perry arrived in 1853, Japan looked westward.

  Such military moves under “international law” were old hat for American Aryans, but this was a new ball game for the Japanese and they hesitated. China had a substantial cultural influence over Taiwan and the Japanese feared their Big Brother’s reaction. De Long assured the Japanese foreign minister that according to Western international law, Taiwan “would in the final analysis be subject to possession by the country successfully holding it.”28 Still, the Japanese did nothing.

  Then, in the fall of 1872, an American arrived to teach the Japanese how to invade other countries. His name was Charles LeGendre, but everyone called him the “General,” and he looked the part. In the Civil War he had twice walked through a hail of enemy bullets, which had torn away a section of his nose, a portion of his jaw, and one of his eyes. The New York Times described LeGendre as “an adventurer who fought for the fun of it, and who, though riddled with bullets as the result of this Civil War career, still longed for the clash of arms.”29

  General LeGendre had been on his way home from China, where he had served since 1866 as a minor U.S. diplomat. In Tokyo, Minister De Long told the general how he was encouraging the Japanese to invade Taiwan. LeGendre’s ears perked up. During his service in China, he had lectured Chinese officials that they should invade and civilize the Taiwanese. LeGendre had gone as far as to submit legal briefs to the Chinese Foreign Office showing how they could justify the use of military force against Taiwan. He had even visited Taiwan and mapped its territory.

  Over and over LeGendre had harangued the Chinese about how the U.S. government had acquired vast territory by civilizing uncivilized Indians and that China either had to follow international rules and civilize the Taiwanese or some other power would do it. The Chinese mandarins had shrugged and told the one-eyed “Foreign Devil” not to worry, that China was indeed sovereign over Taiwan, without using military force to prove it.

  Now LeGendre sat before De Long in Tokyo with legal rationales for the invasion of Taiwan and military plans of how to do it. De Long arranged a meeting between LeGendre and the Japanese foreign minister. The one-eyed general made a big impression. De Long reported to Washington that the Japanese were “surprised and delighted… to be brought in contact with one so well-informed on a subject so very interesting to them.”30

  The Japanese Foreign Ministry promptly offered LeGendre a job to help them civilize Taiwan, and the former U.S. Army general became “the first foreigner employed in a Japanese government post.”31 LeGendre resigned from his post as United States consul on December 12, 1872. LeGendre wrote a friend in the United States that he took the job after “it was proved to me that, in doing so, I was but aiding in the carrying out of certain views which our government looked upon with extreme favor.”32 In fact, assuming that he would be appointed governor of Taiwan if Japan acquired the island, he told his son that the opportunity was a way to “lay by quite a little fortune.”33

  General LeGendre had the ear of the founding fathers and consulted with Emperor Meiji a number of times. In terms of Japan’s strategic big picture, he preached from America’s founding document of international relations, the Monroe Doctrine. In 1823, President James Monroe had announced that from now on, only the United States could meddle in the Americas; the United States would view further European actions in the western hemisphere as aggression requiring U.S. military intervention. Now LeGendre suggested a Japanese Monroe Doctrine for Asia: “One must act courageously for the purpose of pushing forward the flag of the rising Sun in Asia and for the sake of the expansion of our empire. These actions are necessary in order to become the protector of the various nations in Asia against European expansion into our sphere. This policy resembles the one taken by the United States in the wake of the European filtration and encroachment into the American sphere of interest.”34

  Although Japan would later use similar words in the 1930s and 1940s in its wars against China and the United States, this was radical thinking at the time. No non-White, non-Christian country in the 1870s had a Monroe Doctrine–like sphere of influence. LeGendre suggested how Japan could sell the West on the idea: “Japan must keep her plan in the deepest secret, but must make adequate publicity to the people in the world that she is under-taking to bring the whole of Asia from its barbarous and primitive stage to the civilized stage.”35
>
  But how was Japan supposed to move Asia from barbarism to civilization? LeGendre recommended Anglo-Saxon methods: “Pacify and civilize them if possible, and if not… exterminate them or otherwise deal with them as the United States and England have dealt with the barbarians.”36

  LeGendre told his employers that by disciplining the Taiwanese over the murder of the Okinawans, Japan would be seen as the guardian of the Okinawan people and could thus claim both Okinawa and Taiwan: “Inasmuch as [the Taiwanese aborigines] have murdered Japanese subjects [Okinawans], and there is no known way of dealing with them as a community, Japan is perfectly justified in taking the matter into her own hands and occupying their territory.”37

  To deal with Taiwan and Okinawa, LeGendre first had to confront his old nemesis, China, which viewed those islands as part of its cultural realm. LeGendre had the Meiji government issue an imperial edict abolishing the kingdom of Okinawa. Okinawa became a Japanese fief, its king a Japanese peer, and its foreign relations a matter for the Japanese Foreign Office. Retroactively, the Japanese government claimed the Okinawa shipwreck victims as Japanese subjects so it would have a legal foundation on which to launch a punitive expedition against Taiwan.

  On March 12, 1873, LeGendre boarded a Japanese warship in Yokohama harbor. LeGendre intended to take a Japanese diplomatic delegation to China, where the general would once again harangue his old adversaries about how somebody had better civilize Taiwan like the United States had civilized its Indians. As Perry had arrived following the sun, now an American general would lead the Japanese westward.

  THE CHINESE HAD LONG viewed Japan as a young upstart—it was only two thousand years old, compared to China’s five-thousand-year history—seeing the Japanese as “Eastern dwarfs” who had imperfectly modeled superior Chinese ways. But times were changing. For centuries the Japanese had come peacefully to Beijing wearing Confucian garb. Now the Japanese came dressed in trousers and top hats, with a former U.S. Army general in tow. The Chinese took one look at the Western-dressed Japanese diplomats and sniffed that they had sold out to the White Christians. A Chinese viceroy saw the one-eyed Foreign Devil and snorted to the Japanese foreign minister, “We have made treaties before this one, and we did not find the need for foreigners to advise us; what reason is there for it now?”38

  The Chinese objected to the Japanese’s Western-oriented legalisms, saying that international law was a recent Western creation and that the affair should be settled on the basis of truth. But over the course of the months-long negotiations, LeGendre maintained that for a nation to claim Taiwan, that government must civilize the savages. He legalistically insisted that the Okinawans—“Japanese natives”—had been harmed and that Japan had the right to punish the aboriginal Taiwanese. The Chinese responded that they had heard of Okinawans being injured, but no Japanese. In one negotiating session, the Chinese admitted that their political rule extended only to the “mature natives” of Taiwan and not the “wild natives.” The Japanese would use this statement to justify their later attack on Taiwan.

  Satisfied that they had outmaneuvered their Chinese hosts with Western diplomacy, the Japanese and one pleased American general sailed back to an ecstatic welcome in Tokyo. Twenty-one-year-old Emperor Meiji honored LeGendre with an imperial audience on March 9. The Japanese government created a “Bureau of Savage Affairs” and incorporated new Western words like koronii (colony) into the Japanese language. Japanese newspapers Otherized the Taiwanese aborigines, calling them cruel and inhuman, and spoke of Japan’s responsibility to civilize the savages.

  In early May of 1873, Japan invaded Taiwan with U.S. military advisers supporting the operation. Within two months, the Taiwanese submitted to Japanese military force.

  AT THIS SAME TIME, Japan was also concerned about its neighbor to the west, Korea. Korea was a small kingdom enmeshed in a web of Confucian relationships with its neighbors. It had a father-son relationship with China summarized by the term sadae, “serving the great,” and Korea dispatched regular missions to Beijing, where her representatives subserviently kowtowed to the Son of Heaven, the emperor. The Chinese government in turn bestowed honorary titles on the Korean king, extended a military umbrella, and allowed Korean merchants to conduct a limited but extremely profitable trade.

  Korea’s relationship with Japan was more along the lines of brother-brother, known as kyorin, “befriending the neighboring country.” A comparably closed country, Korea had for centuries allowed Japanese traders access to just one port, just as Japan had done with the Dutch at Nagasaki.

  After centuries of peace with its neighbor, Japan now gazed at Korea through American-style expansionist lenses. Because Korea had not danced to the White Western tune and had not modernized, industrialized, and militarized, the Japanese judged the Koreans as uncivilized.

  But Korea was prey not only for Japan, but also for Russia to its north. The Russians had expanded to their Pacific coast in the 1600s and were edging into Manchuria in North China, next door to Korea.

  Because Korea was so near to Japan, jutting threateningly into the narrow Yellow Sea, Japanese alarmists styled Korea as “the dagger pointed at the heart of Japan.” If Korea fell to a White Christian country like Russia, they argued, the Korean peninsula would become the springboard for the invasion of Japan.

  The military theorist Fukuzawa provided a common-sense rationale for Japan’s course with Korea: “A man who lives in a stone house is not safe from fire if his neighbor lives in a wooden one. The person with the more secure abode should try to persuade his neighbor to rebuild, of course, but if a crisis should be at hand, he is justified in arbitrarily invading his neighbor’s land—not because he covets his neighbor’s land or hates his neighbor, but simply to protect his own house from fire.”39 Thus the Japanese concluded that Korea must be made into a buffer between Russia and Japan.

  * * *

  IN 1873, EMULATING COMMODORE PERRY’S mission, Japanese diplomats sailed west in an American-made warship across the Yellow Sea to open uncivilized Korea to Western ways. They brought along an American-style treaty of friendship.

  The shocked Koreans could hardly believe their eyes and ears. For centuries Japanese diplomats had come to Korea dressed similarly to the Koreans, in Chinese-style robes; now they came ashore in tight Western suits, wearing shiny, stiff top hats.

  The two countries had enjoyed peace between them for hundreds of years, so the sudden need for a treaty of friendship made little sense to the Koreans. And when Japan described the terms, the Koreans wondered if the Japanese had lost their minds. From time immemorial the two small countries had recognized the Son of Heaven in Beijing as an emperor and agreed that lesser kings ruled Japan and Korea. Now the outrageously dressed Japanese explained that Meiji was godlike and that he was also an emperor. The Koreans were dumbfounded. How could there be two suns in the sky?

  Japan’s Perry-like attempt at opening Korea was an embarrassing flop. The Koreans shamed the Japanese, calling them traitors to the Confucian order. They refused to respond to a treaty based upon the “emperor versus king” nonsense, questioned the legitimacy of the new Meiji regime, and even ridiculed the Japanese for wearing Western woolen suits. When the Koreans accused them of going back upon Confucian tradition, it infuriated the Japanese, reminding them that by dealing with westerners they had betrayed their own history. As Hilary Conroy observes in The Japanese Seizure of Korea, “As with the man who curses his wife for reminding him of something of which he himself is ashamed, the wrath that consumed [Japan] over the Korean issue was fierce beyond all proportion to the question at hand.”40

  AMERICA HAD EXPECTED JAPAN to make Taiwan a “koronii” and “lead the natives to civilization,” but cooler heads in the Japanese Foreign Ministry warned of war with China. Instead, Japan adroitly used the threat of colonization to extort an indemnity. The Chinese paid up and Japan withdrew from Taiwan at the end of 1874. In 1875, the Chinese government pacified the wild natives of Taiwan, and in later negoti
ations the Chinese recognized the “justice” of Japan’s invasion. That acknowledged, the Meiji government ordered Okinawan leaders to stop their tributary relationship with China.

  That same year, LeGendre retired from the Japanese Foreign Ministry, his mission accomplished. He had inspired the Honorary Aryans with the idea of a Japanese Monroe Doctrine for Asia, a vision that was championed by Japanese expansionists less than three generations later as the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. He had shown them how—using international law and military force—Japan could gain by civilizing the uncivilized. Before he retired, the general with one eye wrote a final manifesto urging Japan to go west and expand into Korea.

  KOREA HAD BEEN ABLE to shame Japan because big China was in its corner, so Japanese diplomats went to Beijing to argue that China should allow Korea to sign the proposed treaty of friendship. China saw little harm in the agreement—despite the conflict over Taiwan, the Chinese still saw the Japanese as a minor power—so Beijing allowed Korea to sign the treaty with Japan on February 26, 1876.

  China viewed the treaty as a mere trade agreement, but Japan saw it as a fundamental reordering of the China-Korea relationship. This was because the Japanese had used a Western legal trick and created two versions of the agreement. All previous communications among China, Korea, and Japan had been written in the Chinese language, but this time Japan drew up an English as well as a Chinese version. As the Harvard professor Akira Iriye explains, “As an Eastern state, Japan was cognizant of the extreme ambiguity of the terms expressing traditional relations in the Far East. An example of this is cha-ju chi-bang (tzuchu chih-Pang in Chinese), which literally means ‘a self-governing area or state,’ and could also be used to mean ‘an independent state.’ ” The Honorary Aryans, trained in American ways, were able to realistically exploit the convenient weakness: their English translation consistently used Japanese-friendly definitions. As a result, Iriye notes, “neither the Koreans nor the Chinese perceived any serious break in traditional Sino-Korean relations. China in fact considered it an affirmation of the long-established practice.”41