Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [204]
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