Red Sun Rising by Nick Shepley

Author:Nick Shepley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Japan, China, War, Pearl Harbour, Nanking, Tsushima, 1905, empire, First, World, War
ISBN: 9781782345831
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2013
Published: 2013-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

Part Three

Inter War Japan

When Japan attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 the head of the delegation, the Marquess Saionji Kinmochi, an elder statesman of Japanese politics and former Prime Minister put forward the argument that racial equality should be the guiding principal in relationships between states and should be enshrined in the charter of the newly formed League of Nations. Woodrow Wilson, an overseas liberal but at home one of the most reactionary racists to have ever sat in the Oval Office, was not amused. The very idea that racial equality should be enshrined as a global principal was an anathema.

Similarly the British, under intense pressure in India from the Congress movement to acknowledge the right of a new Indian political class for greater involvement in the running of the subcontinent, were not in the least interested in the proposal.

Saionji was perhaps one of the most enlightened and liberal of the advisors to the Imperial Court, and whilst he had attended the conference to further Japan’s interests, he was also interested in cementing arrangements with other countries and with the League of Nations that would make conflict less of an inevitability.

Saionji was ill for much of the conference, his advanced years came with a variety of ailments, so the focus of negotiations fell upon Baron Makino Nobuaki, who also argued in favour of racial equality, knowing that the passing of such a clause would help Japan’s accession to great power status.

The other issue that had to be resolved at the Conference was that of Shandong. The province had been promised secretly to the Japanese during the war by Britain, but also it had been offered to the Chinese as part of the reward for joining the Allied cause in 1915.

The ‘Shandong problem’ was exacerbated by the fact that the province was thought to be the home of Confucius, and, as the Chinese put it, they would no sooner hand it over than a Christian nation would hand over Jerusalem. It was a very topical analogy, since Jerusalem had been claimed under the Palestine mandate by the British.

The Americans favoured returning the province to the Chinese, but in the realpolitik climate of the conference, it was the superior military prowess and the expansionist inclinations of the Japanese that won the day, Britain and France were in no mood to cross them over a province in China.

Lou Tseng-Tsiang, the head of the Chinese delegation, refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles, and he was the only delegate who boycotted the treaty, outraged at clause 156 that robbed China of everything she believed she was entitled to.

Even though the Japanese had managed to achieve recognition of their rights in China and in the Pacific, a simmering anger now existed in military and diplomatic circles following the rejection of the racial equality clause. There was a powerful sense in Tokyo that Western hegemony in Asia must one day be brought to an end, and that a refusal to recognise Japan as an equal was a monstrous affront.

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