Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [237]
When they arrived in Tokyo on 25 July, Alice dazzled the Japanese to such an extent that the Congressional wives might just as well not have disembarked. For all her independent Western ways, she took to the local culture at once, lunching with the Mikado, posing prettily with Princesses Nashimoto and Migashi-Fushimi, and sitting cross-legged for hours without fatigue.
She was also present when Taft dined with Prime Minister Katsura, but had no idea that the two men were engaged in business that directly affected her father’s peacemaking. On 27 July, they agreed on a “memorandum of conversation,” which Taft thought important enough to flash to the White House, in a cable of Brobdingnagian length.
Although the memorandum was only agreed on, not agreed to, it was plainly an informal declaration of intent regarding the security concerns of Japan in East Asia, and of the United States in the eastern Pacific. Since the conversation enjoyed executive privilege—Taft representing his President, Katsura his Emperor—legislators in neither country were required to ratify it, or even know about it. Unenforceable yet morally binding, friendly yet wary, its importance lay in its timing, just weeks before the presumed negotiation of a peace treaty that would recognize Japan as a power of the first rank. Taft wanted a statesman’s assurance that Hawaii and the Philippines would not be menaced in future years. Katsura wanted Korea.
As the Prime Minister observed, Korea had been “the direct cause” of the Russo-Japanese War. Japan was entitled to suzerainty over the peninsula as “the logical consequence” of her military successes. Allowing Koreans to mismanage their destiny, as they had in the past, would merely invite further wars, or an indefinite extension of this one.
Regarding the Philippines—which Katsura understood was a subject of peculiar importance to Taft—Japan’s “only interest” would be to see the archipelago governed “by a strong and friendly nation like the United States.” If the word like conveyed a slight hint of ambiguity, Taft did not seem to notice it, so encouraged was he by the Prime Minister’s emphatic tone.
Taft said that, in his judgment, “President Roosevelt would concur” with Japan’s views on Korea. However, he cautioned that he had no authority to nullify the American-Korean protection treaty of 1882. The most he could do, if the Prime Minister needed further evidence of concurrence, would be to communicate the substance of their conversation to Roosevelt and Elihu Root—who had just been sworn in as Secretary of State, and whom he felt some “delicacy” in supplanting.
“If I have spoken too freely or inaccurately or unwittingly,” Taft wired Root afterward, “I know you can and will correct it.… Is there any objection?”
Roosevelt answered with two terse sentences.
YOUR CONVERSATION WITH COUNT KATSURA ABSOLUTELY CORRECT IN EVERY RESPECT. WISH YOU COULD STATE TO KATSURA THAT I CONFIRM EVERY WORD YOU HAVE SAID.
As far as Roosevelt was concerned, Korea was better off as a Japanese colony than a Russian one, or even a Chinese one. And American interests were greatly enhanced. Unless Count Katsura was as big a liar as Count Cassini, he knew now that Japan would not take advantage of the fragility of the Philippines’ civil government. Hawaii, too, was safe. Japan’s postwar development of Korea should create another immigrant market, and slow the “yellow” influx that Californians were objecting to. Last, a gratified Japanese delegation to the peace conference must surely, now, listen to his pleas for magnanimity toward the Russians.
ALICE, UNAWARE OF why Katsura smiled at her with such satisfaction, passed her five days in Tokyo in a daze half ecstatic and half erotic. Her philandering idée fixe, Congressman Nicholas Longworth, was a member of Taft’s party, and dancing with him on warm nights aboard ship had reduced her to a state of almost desperate lust. “Oh my heart my heart. I can’t bear it. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.… He will go off