Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [207]
In the interwar years Japan did what the American navy had feared. Although the mandate terms forbade the establishment of military bases or the building of fortifications, this proved impossible to enforce. While foreigners found it increasingly difficult to visit the islands, Japan moved in settlers and the military. Japanese contractors built big new harbors and Truk, in the Carolines, was turned into Japan’s main South Pacific naval base.28 In the war to come, what had been obscure islands—Tinian, Saipan, Truk—became the sites of great battles.
What came to be known as “the racial equality clause” in the League covenant turned out to be far more problematic. In the years before the war, Japanese businessmen complained that they were frequently humiliated when they traveled abroad. In California, Japanese nationals first lost the right to buy land, then the right to lease it, and finally the right to bring their wives to join them. In 1906 the San Francisco School Board voted to send Chinese and Japanese children (of whom there were fewer than a hundred in total) to segregated classes lest they overwhelm the white children. Japanese (and Chinese and Indian) immigrants found it more and more difficult to get into Canada and the United States, and impossible to enter Australia. Even during the war, when Japan was fighting as an ally of the British empire, its nationals continued to be excluded.
The Japanese government had been conciliatory, offering to limit emigration, but it was under pressure from its own public opinion. In 1913, twenty thousand Japanese cheered when a speaker pronounced that Japan should go to war rather than accept the California laws on land ownership. In 1916 the government sent what was by Japanese standards a blunt message to Britain: “a general feeling of regret is prevalent in the Imperial Diet that anti-Japanese feeling is still strong in British colonies.” As Japan prepared to take its place at the Peace Conference, Japanese newspapers were full of exhortations. “Now is the time,” said one editorial, “to fight against international racial discrimination.”29
Senior statesmen warned the government that Japan should approach the proposed League of Nations with great caution. What if it was simply another way to freeze the status quo and keep Japan in the second rank? Even Wilson’s promises of a new diplomacy were suspect. Democracy and humanitarianism were nice sentiments, wrote a young patriot in an article that caused a considerable stir, but they were simply a cloak for the United States and Britain to maintain their control over most of the world’s wealth. If Japan was to survive, wrote its author, Prince Fumimaro Konoe, it might have to be more aggressive. The Japanese delegation was dispatched to Paris with instructions to delay the creation of the League, and, if that were not possible, to make sure that the League’s covenant contained a prohibition on racial discrimination. Konoe went along as an aide to Saionji. Years later he was to be Japan’s prime minister when his country slid toward war with the United States. In 1945 he drank poison before he could be tried for war crimes.30
Since Wilson insisted that the League be the first item of business at the Peace Conference, the Japanese delegates worked quietly behind the scenes for the racial equality clause.