Meanwhile the press campaign against England continued. A typical sample is this editorial from the Tokio Yamato: “Great Britain never wished at heart to become Japan’s ally. She did not wish to enter into such intimate relations with us, for she privately regarded us as an upstart nation radically different from us in blood and religion. It was simply the force of circumstances which compelled her to enter into an alliance with us. It is the height of conceit on our part to think that England really cared for our friendship, for she never did. It was the Russian menace to India and Persia on the one hand, and the German ascendancy on the other, which compelled her to clasp our hands.”[29]
At the same time many good things were being said about Germany. At no time during the war was any real hostility to the Germans apparent in Japan. Germany was of course expelled from her Far Eastern footholds in smart, workmanlike fashion, but the fighting before Kiaochow was conducted without a trace of hatred, the German prisoners were treated as honored captives, and German civilians in Japan suffered no molestation. Japanese writers were very frank in stating that, once Germany resigned herself to exclusion from the Far East and acquiesced in Japanese predominance in China, no reason existed why Japan and Germany should not be good friends. Unofficial diplomatic exchanges certainly took place between the two governments during the war, and no rancor for the past appears to exist on either side to-day.
The year 1917 brought three momentous modifications into the world-situation: the entrance of the United States and China into the Great War and the Russian Revolution. The first two were intensely distasteful to Japan. The transformation of virtually unarmed America into a first-class fighting power reacted portentously upon the Far East, while China’s adhesion to the Grand Alliance (bitterly opposed in Tokio) rescued her from diplomatic isolation and gave her potential friends. The Russian Revolution was also a source of perplexity to Tokio. In 1916, as we have seen, Japan had arrived at a thorough understanding with the Czarist régime. The new Russian Government was an unknown quantity, acting quite differently from the old.
Russia’s collapse into Bolshevist anarchy, however, presently opened up new vistas. Not merely northern Manchuria, but also the huge expanse of Siberia, an almost empty world of vast potential riches, lay temptingly exposed. At once the powerful imperialist elements in Japanese political life began clamoring for “forward” action. An opportunity for such action was soon vouchsafed by the Allied determination to send a composite force to Siberia to checkmate the machinations of the Russian Bolsheviki, now hostile to the Allies and playing into the hands of Germany. The imperialist party at Tokio took the bit in its teeth, and, in flagrant disregard of the inter-Allied agreement, poured a great army into Siberia, occupying the whole country as far west as Lake Baikal. This was in the spring of 1918. The Allies, then in their supreme death-grapple with the Germans, dared not even protest, but in the autumn, when the battle-tide had turned in Europe, Japan was called to account, the United States taking the lead in the matter. A furious debate ensued at Tokio between the imperialist and moderate parties, the hotter jingoes urging defiance of the United States even at the risk of war. Then, suddenly, came the news that Germany was cracking, and the moderates had their way. The Japanese armies in Siberia were reduced, albeit they still remained the most powerful military factor in the situation.
Germany’s sudden collapse and the unexpectedly quick ending of the war was a blow to Japanese hopes and plans in more ways than one. Despite official felicitations, the nation could hardly disguise its chagrin. For Japan the war had been an unmixed benefit. It had automatically made her mistress of the Far East and had amazingly enriched her economic life. Every succeeding month of hostilities had seen the white world grow weaker and had conversely increased Japanese power. Japan had counted on at least one more year of war. Small wonder that the sudden passing of this halcyon time provoked disappointment and regret.
The above outline of Japanese foreign policy reveals beneath all its surface mutations a fundamental continuity. Whatever may be its ultimate goals, Japanese foreign policy has one minimum objective: Japan as hegemon of a Far East in which white influence shall have been reduced to a vanishing quantity. That is the bald truth of the matter—and no white man has any reason for getting indignant about it. Granted that Japanese aims endanger white vested interests in the Far East. Granted that this involves rivalry and perhaps war. That is no reason for striking a moral attitude and inveighing against Japanese “wickedness,” as many people are to-day doing. These mighty racial tides flow from the most elemental of vital urges: self-expansion and self-preservation. Both outward thrust of expanding life and counter-thrust of threatened life are equally normal phenomena. To condemn the former as “criminal” and the latter as “selfish” is either silly or hypocritical and tends to envenom with unnecessary rancor what objective fairness might keep a candid struggle, inevitable yet alleviated by mutual comprehension and respect. This is no mere plea for “sportsmanship”; it is a very practical matter. There are critical times ahead; times in which intense race-pressures will engender high tensions and perhaps wars. If men will keep open minds and will eschew the temptation to regard those opposing their desires to defend or possess respectively as impious fiends, the struggles will lose half their bitterness, and the wars (if wars there must be) will be shorn of half their ferocity.
The unexpected ending of the European War was, as we have seen, a blow to Japanese calculations. Nevertheless, the skill of her diplomats at the ensuing Versailles Conference enabled Japan to harvest most of her war gains. Japan’s territorial acquisitions in China were definitely written into the peace treaty, despite China’s sullen veto, and Japan’s preponderance in Chinese affairs was tacitly acknowledged. Japan also took advantage of the occasion to pose as the champion of the colored races by urging the formal promulgation of “racial equality” as part of the peace settlement, especially as regards immigration. Of course the Japanese diplomats had no serious expectation of their demands being acceded to; in fact, they might have been rather embarrassed if they had succeeded, in view of Japan’s own stringent laws against immigration and alien landholding. Nevertheless, it was a politic move, useful for future propagandist purposes, and it advertised Japan broadcast as the standard-bearer of the colored cause.
The notable progress that Japan has made toward the mastery of the Far East is written plainly upon the map, which strikingly portrays the broadening territorial base of Japanese power effected in the past twenty-five years. Japan now owns the whole island chain masking the eastern sea frontage of Asia, from the tip of Kamchatka to the Philippines, while her acquisition of Germany’s Oceanican islands north of the equator gives her important strategic outposts in mid-Pacific. Her bridge-heads on the Asiatic continent are also strong and well located. From the Korean peninsula (now an integral part of Japan) she firmly grasps the vast Chinese dependency of Manchuria, while just south of Manchuria across the narrow waters of the Pechili strait lies the rich Chinese province of Shantung, become a Japanese sphere of influence as a result of the late war. Thus Japan holds China’s capital, Peking, as in the jaws of a vice and can apply military pressure whenever she so desires. In southern China lies another Japanese sphere of influence, the province of Fukien opposite the Japanese island of Formosa. Lastly, all over China runs a veritable network of Japanese concessions like the recently acquired control of the great iron deposits near Hankow, far up the Yangtse River in the heart of China.
Whether this Japanese imperium over China maintains itself or not, one thing seems certain: future white expansion in the Far East has become impossible. Any such attempt would instantly weld together Japanese imperialism and Chinese nationalism in a “sacred union” whose result would probably be at the very least the prompt expulsion of the white man from every foothold in eastern Asia.
That is what will probably come anyway as soon as Japan and China, impelled by overcrowding and conscious of their united potentialities, shall have arrived at a genuine understanding. Since population-pressure seems to be the basic factor in the future course of Far Eastern affairs, it would be well to survey possible outlets