Japan and the Great War

Antony Best, Oliviero Frattolillo, Antony Best, Oliviero Frattolillo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137546746
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia militare e marittima

In this book, seven internationally renowned experts on Japanese and Asian history have come together to investigate, with innovative methodological approaches, various aspects of the Japanese experience during and after the First World War.

Part I

International Aspects

1

The Great War in China and Japan

Xu Guoqi

The importance of the First World War to Japan cannot be fully understood without realizing the central place that China occupied in relation to Japanese participation. While China was key to Japanese involvement, it can also be argued that concern over Japanese intentions was the crucial factor that drove China to enter the war. In its examination of how the Chinese and Japanese war policies and post-war agendas were mutually entangled, this essay will address the following questions: first, how did the Great War help shape the modern fates of both nations. Second, how did the Chinese and Japanese use the Great War to achieve their national objectives? And third, how do the War and its aftermath still affect Sino-Japanese relations?

The war waged before the Great War

The story of China and Japan’s participation in the Great War begins with their first major modern conflict that happened nearly twenty years earlier. The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 planted the seeds and provided the motivation for China and Japan’s eventual entry into what began as a European conflict. Having witnessed what happened to China after the Opium Wars of the 1840s, the Japanese decided to subscribe to the Western system and follow in its footsteps with the launch of the Meiji Restoration in 1868. In less than a generation, Japan became confident enough about its potential to turn into a Western-style empire that took on China, formerly the economic and cultural giant of Asia. The military campaign that began in 1894 resulted in China being soundly defeated by 1895. This made Japan a major power in east Asia and an empire having Taiwan as its first colony, which China had been forced to cede to Japan. That war also laid the groundwork for Japan to acquire a second colony by forcing China to abandon Korea, traditionally a Chinese vassal state. As the new power in East Asia, Japan seemed ready to enter a major international military game, just as the antagonism between the future Entente and the Central Powers began to intensify. The war with China prepared Japan to compete with the major European powers should the opportunity arise.

A German connection was also involved in Japan’s entry into the Great War. Germany had played a leading role in the so-called triple intervention following the Sino-Japanese conflict. In the wake of the Japanese triumph, the Germans joined the Russians and French in ‘advising’ Japan to return one of the fruits of its victory, the Liaodong peninsula, to China. This infuriated the Japanese, who became determined to find a way to take revenge on Germany. One Japanese newspaper headline of the day reading, ‘Wait for Another Time’, clearly conveys this sentiment.¹ Japan achieved a major diplomatic coup in 1902 when it signed a treaty of alliance with Britain. On the basis of the relationship created by this treaty, Japan managed to insert itself on the Allied side when war broke out in 1914. Against this background it could be said that Japan had been preparing for this opportunity since its war with China in 1895.

As the rising power in Asia, Japan was determined to become a leading player in international politics and turn China into a dependent state.It was difficult for Japan to fulfil its growing ambitions, however, without external help, so many Japanese considered the outbreak of war in August 1914 as a great opportunity. Elder statesman Inoue Kaoru hailed the news as ‘divine aid in the new Taishō era for the development of the destiny of Japan’.² Four days after Britain entered the war, on August 8, the Japanese government decided to declare war on Germany, although the official declaration was not made for another week. Retaliation for being forced to surrender the Liaodong Peninsula was certainly a convenient excuse for the Japanese. As Baron Katō Takaaki, the Japanese foreign minister, explained to one American journalist in 1915:

Germany is an aggressive European Power that secured a foothold on one corner of the province of Shan-tung. This is a great menace to Japan. Furthermore, Germany forced Japan to return the peninsula of Liao-tung under the plausible pretense of friendly advice. Because of the pressure brought to bear on us, Japan had to part with the legitimate fruits of war, bought with the blood of our fellow countrymen. Revenge is not justifiable, either in the case of an individual or a nation; but when, by coincidence, one can attend to this duty and at the same time pay an old debt, the opportunity certainly should be seized.³

Japan’s real goal, in fact, was to expand its interests in China while the major powers were preoccupied in Europe. Japan’s greatest reward would be kicking German interests out of Asia altogether and establishing itself as the dominant foreign power in China. China was engaged at this point in the messy process of becoming a republic, as part of its road to renewal and strengthening itself in the face of modern threats, but Japan was determined to increase its influence over China before this transformation could be completed. The Ōkuma cabinet declared, ‘Japan must take the chance of a millennium’ to ‘establish its rights and interests in Asia’.⁴ When Japan demanded that Germany transfer its Chinese concessions to it and Berlin refused, the Japanese launched an attack. For this fight to win Chinese territory Japan contributed much larger forces than did Britain. For instance, 2,800 British and 29,000 Japanese troops engaged the Germans at Qingdao. Even more revealingly, the Japanese military effort in the Great War largely ended, with the exception of the Siberian intervention that began in 1918, with the fall of Qingdao, that resulted in about 2,000 Japanese casualties. On 11 November 1914 Qingdao was transferred from German to Japanese control. This meagre and focused military support for the Allied cause makes sense since Japan’s true motive was the expansion of its interests in China. Once the first objective of taking Qingdao had been achieved, Japan’s next goal was to set itself up as the dominant force in China – economically, politically and diplomatically. As the Europeans exhausted each other in battle, Japan’s support (and its threatened withdrawal) became the key card that it played to ensure that it would have a free hand in East Asia. Over the course of the Great War, the Japanese played a brilliant game with the West that secured Japan’s rise as a world power at the expense of China.

If the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 set the stage for Japan’s involvement in the Great War, it also nearly sealed China’s fate and in doing so prompted its eventual entry into that same war. The Chinese defeat of 1895 meant many things. It certainly subjected the country to much more extensive foreign control, but its psychological impact was even greater. The Sino-Japanese War compelled the Chinese leadership to think seriously about the country’s destiny and the value of its civilization; more importantly, it caused them to question its traditional identity. That war awakened the Chinese from what Liang Qichao, an influential author and thinker of the late Qing and early Republican period, called ‘the great dream of four thousand years’.⁵ The sense of frustration, humiliation, and impotence in the face of Western incursions and a Westernized Japan provided a powerful motivation for change.

One of the major impacts of the 1895 war on China was that it helped unleash the power of public opinion. Prior to the Sino-Japanese War there had been no independent non-governmental Chinese political press.⁶ The war changed that, presenting new opportunities for the vigorous development of Chinese journalism. The rise of public opinion in politics started with the so-called public vehicle petition (gongche shangshu) organized by Kang Youwei. In April 1895 8,000 provincial degree holders, who had assembled in Beijing for the triennial national civil service examination, learned that the Qing government had accepted the disastrous treaty of Shimonoseki. Shocked, the graduates mobilized to submit petitions to the Qing court demanding reform, and further broke with tradition by organizing study societies and independent political newspapers that would introduce their voices into national politics. The views expressed in these newspapers and among the wider public were catalysts for the growth of national consciousness and nationalism.⁷ Public opinion had clearly become a player in Chinese politics and society. As Bao Tianxiao remembered, after the Sino-Japanese War, ‘Chinese nationalism had been aroused. The increasing attention to the national fate and nationalism helped shape Chinese attitudes to foreign affairs. Most educated people, who had never before discussed national affairs, now began to ask: “Why are others stronger than we are, and why are we weaker?”’⁸ With greater access to new information concerning national and foreign affairs, many Chinese began to demonstrate a greater-than-average interest in foreign policy and became what can be considered to be a true foreign-policy public. Moreover, with the rise of modern nationalism, even non-elite Chinese (or in historian Thomas Bailey’s phrase, ‘the man in the street’) began to take foreign affairs into their own hands;⁹ their weapons were boycotts and strikes against foreign goods and companies.

With the rise of public opinion and the emergence of a foreign-policy public and nationalism in China, profound changes occurred in the period between 1895 and 1914. Although the course these changes took riddled China’s efforts to become a modern nation-state with contradictions and ambiguities, they nonetheless set the stage for its socialization within the new world order. The devastating defeat at the hands of the Japanese served as both a turning point and shared point of reference for Chinese perceptions of themselves and the world. Chinese elites, no matter what their attitude to their own tradition and civilization, agreed that if China was to survive, it had to change. In this process, China began to abandon the institutions of Confucian civilization and transform itself from a cultural entity with no official name, despite its long history, into the first modern republic in Asia. Nationalism and social Darwinism replaced Confucianism as its defining ideologies.

China’s social transformation and its cultural and political revolutions coincided with the First World War; the war provided the momentum and opportunity for China to redefine its relationship with the world. As James Joll has noted, the Great War represented ‘the end of an age and beginning of the new one’ in the international arena.¹⁰ It signaled the collapse of the existing international system and the arrival of a new world order, a development that coincided with China’s desire to change its international status. The young republic’s weakness and its domestic polit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Japan and the Great War
• Part I  International Aspects
• Part II Domestic and Long-Term Aspects
• Index