Roots of Samurai Rage And Fear X
China, Part I
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There were several events and phenomena in Japan’s history that supplied ample fuel to a simmering fire that seemed to have been burning in the minds of much of the military and naval leadership of Japan before 1941. While much of Japan was quietly intent on merely surviving, the dominant social group in the archipelago was constantly trying to either stay in charge or justify having been in charge. This essay is one of several that visit the most important elements of samurai rage against the West and their own subjects, and their constant fear of being overthrown or even contradicted. As shown by the various “insults” and momentous events in Japan over the centuries, the formation of movements and societies and the ensuing incidents happened all too easily. Too, Japan and the Japanese were apparently masters at holding a grudge.
China and Japan over the Centuries
The earliest historical mention of the islands of Japan in any written form is in the 1st Century Chinese Book of Han, or History of the Earlier Han. The brief mention refers to Japan as divided into more than a hundred countries that occasionally paid tribute to the Han dynasty of China (206 BC-AD 220). While this description seems minor, it would remain accurate until the 19th Century. Though Japan's origins remain hotly debated, China, as a trader, undeniably exerted the largest single influence on the structure of Japan’s society and economy up to the 19th Century, something that Japan has acknowledged.
Japan’s geography is unforgiving and not friendly to people. Over 85% mountainous, growing enough food to live has always been a challenge, which has made trade essential for Japan’s survival. Japan and China remained in continual contact through trade regardless of what was going on between politicians, soldiers, and emperors. As poor as Japan appeared to be in foodstuffs, she had rich deposits of gold and silver—some of the largest known before the 19th Century—and her artisans made some of the best steel in the world, albeit in small batches. While Japanese ships before the 1850s had limited range by design, there were many of them, and they could reach the markets of China in most weather.
What central law there was in Japan from about the 8th Century until the 19th was based on Chinese legal codes and traditions, except those affecting the Emperor. While Japan’s pre-Meiji domestic economy was based on rice, the yen used for foreign trade rose and fell on China trade. Chinese social mores and graces, the vague structure of its nobility, and Confucianism and Buddhism (alongside Shinto) thrived in Japan. At the same time, Japan was always suspicious of China’s contacts with the outside world while it tried to insulate itself from outside influences by keeping European traders restricted to enclaves.
China in the 19th Century
Through trade, Japan could see what was going on in China and shuddered at the outcomes of the two Opium Wars (1839-43; 1856-60) and the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64). While trade with Japan survived, Britain—and thus Europe and America—gained almost unfettered access to China’s vast resources while fueling China’s almost insatiable appetite for opium. Turkey may have been India’s biggest opium customer before 1860, but China quickly overtook it despite heavy prohibitions on opium consumption in China.
This sad phenomenon, coupled with the twenty to thirty million dead from the Taiping Rebellion (which had about ten million combatants) weakened the fragmented Qing dynasty’s hold on power, especially because it needed to use American, British and French mercenaries to defeat the rebels. At the west took what they wanted from China—as they did in Japan—the samurai especially looked askance at what China had become: a weak beggary with vast resources.
After Perry and the avalanche of Europeans made unequal treaties with Japan beginning in 1854, treaties that some welcomed but others reviled, Japan’s war of unification—the Boshin War (1868-69)—finally joined the clans of Japan under a central leader who wasn’t one of them. After another civil war or two, Japan had a central government, introduced politics, and still kept trade ties with China. As Western ideas and inventions flooded into Japan, barely paid for because Japan’s silver and gold became scarce, China’s political structure and society still had trouble absorbing modernity. (So did parts of Japanese society, but that’s another story.) Japan thought of China as ripe for the picking. Japan and China went to war in 1894, and Japan cruised to victory but lost her territorial gains in the European Triple Intervention—a political catastrophe that the samurai saw as a grave insult they would not forget. Tottering from the loss, the Qing Dynasty tried economic and social reforms, but the Empress Dowager Cixi imprisoned the Guangxu Emperor in 1898, ending them. Cixi then backed an anti-foreigner revolt known as the Boxer Rebellion that ended in 1900 with vast concessions to the hated foreigners, including Japan, that doomed the dynasty.
China in the early 20th Century
To pay the huge indemnity to Japan, China sold a leasehold to Russia to build a bypass of the Trans-Siberian Railroad through its territory, shortening the transit by at least a week while domestic chaos reigned and revolution brewed, finally breaking out in 1911. While well-intentioned, the civil wars that resulted made matters worse and gave rise to the warlords that fragmented the country, including China’s industrial heartland, Manchuria. While still legally a part of China, Japan had partly occupied Manchuria since 1905, when Russia turned the railroad concessions over to Japan as an indemnity for losing their 1904-05 war with Japan. China sent no troops or warships to fight the Germans in WWI, but she sent tens of thousands of laborers, and Japan captured Germany’s China colonies. Japan’s Twenty-One Demands (reduced to Fifteen) of 1915 stung China while granting Japan nothing more than what she had, but it was the principle of the thing, you see.
The rise of Chaing-Kai Shek’s decidedly anti-communist Nationalists beginning in 1927 marked a stern departure from the chaos of earlier Chinese warlords because Chiang got more warlords to work with him when he threw the foreigners, including the Japanese, out and negated their extraterritoriality. Foreign investment came pouring in while Chiang battled the nascent Reds under Mao Zedong.
Culturally and economically, Japan had grown beyond her China cultural ties, and China had become a semi-stable quasi-modern state by 1931, when Japan took over Manchuria. Emboldened by their success, the samurai took advantage of their firepower in the Shanghai Incident in 1932, burning down a Chinese factory after a riot. But Japan was still a poor, industrialized but essentially agrarian nation dependent on outside sources for petroleum and most metals. The international opprobrium that followed hurt Japan’s economy deeply, while the United States, with its decades-old Open Door outlook, took on China as something of a project. With increased foreign trade and the weapons markets of Germany, the US, and the Soviet Union open to them, China’s armed forces modernized, pushing the Reds into the hills while Japan had to disband divisions to research radios.
Samurai rage boiled.
Roots of Samurai Rage and Fear: The Road to Pearl Harbor
Without China, there likely would have been no Japan. As a trading partner, Japan could have had no substitutes to China’s easy access, but money was becoming tight. Their 1915 gambit to turn China into a vassal failed, so by the 1930s there was just one choice: takeover.
And Finally...
On 2 May:
1945: The Battle of Berlin ends with the surrender of the city to Soviet forces, which had been fighting day and night, block-by-block for just over two weeks. Though casualty figures are still unclear, the human cost was easily 1.25 million German (including Martin Borman on the last day), Soviet and Polish dead. Germany would surrender to the Allied powers seven days later.
1952: The first flight of a commercial jet airliner, a BOAC DeHavilland DH.106 Comet I, took place between London and Johannesburg, with 36 passengers on board, flying in quiet and fast luxury above the weather that other airliners had to fly through. All passengers were first class.
And today is NATIONAL LIFE INSURANCE DAY, marking the day in 1760 when the Presbyterian Corporation of New York sold the first life insurance policies in America. Life insurance salesmen have beset us at dinnertime ever since.