Roots of Samurai Rage VI
The Great War
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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.
Japan took part in the 1914-1918 war in an alliance with the Entente Powers and played an important role in securing the sea lanes in the Western Pacific and Indian Ocean against the Germans. Given this opportunity, Japan embraced the chance to expand its sphere of influence in China, and to gain recognition as a great power in postwar geopolitics.
Siezing German Territory
The Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) seized German possessions in the Pacific and East Asia, but there was no large-scale mobilization of the economy. The IJN, by then a nearly autonomous bureaucratic institution, made its own decision to undertake expansion in the Pacific without reference to Tokyo or the leadership. It captured Germany’s Micronesian territories north of the equator and ruled the islands until 1921.
The Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) had plans for the Shantung Peninsula and the German colony/base at Tsingtao. In a long and successful campaign, the IJA landed on the peninsula on 27 August 1914 and accepted the surrender of the Tsingtao garrison on 7 November. A British regiment from China joined the campaign, which was not without its problems, especially in logistics. It was logistical issues that compelled Japan to turn down France’s request for fifteen Japanese divisions to serve in France, which would have required more shipping capacity than Japan possessed.
Naval Power Exercised.
At the beginning of the war, Japan helped in the search for Germany’s East Asia Squadron in 1914, and helped hem in SMS Emden in the Coco Islands. As Britain’s ally, Japanese marines were called on to quell mutinies of Indian troops in Singapore in 1915. Beginning in 1917, a Japanese destroyer squadron escorted Allied ships in convoys in the Mediterranean. Japanese naval squadrons patrolled the Pacific coast of Canada beginning in 1915, and the United States beginning in 1917, the sea lanes from Australia to the Red Sea from the beginning of the war to the end, and the northern coasts of Australia. These duties gave the IJN an excuse to expand the fleet, eventually enlarging its budget to twice the Army’s. The IJN thus gained significant political influence over national and international affairs, and Japan gained British recognition for her new Pacific island possessions and the Shantung.
The Twenty-One Demands
While the Great War in Europe and the Middle East distracted everyone else, on 8 January 1915, Japan issued its Twenty-One Demands (Taika Nijūikkajō Yōkyū) to Yuan Shikai, at the time the most powerful warlord in China and ostensibly the President of the Republic of China.
There is very little in the annals of Western political experience or history like the Twenty-One Demands that has not resulted in a major war. Prime Minister Ōkuma Shigenobu (a founder of several conservative political parties) drafted the Demands, and Foreign Minister Kato Takaaki (a former ambassador to Great Britain), and approved by the unofficial body of elder statesmen known as the genrō. It is said that the Taisho Emperor Yoshihito approved the document, but it is unclear whether he was mentally well enough to appreciate its content or its implications. The Keeper of the Privy Seal, Prince Fushimi Sadanaru, or the Imperial Household Minister probably decided for the Taisho.
Knowing who authored the Demands sheds little light on its content, for the list essentially demanded that China become little better than a client state of Japan. In toto, the Demands declared the Taisho wanted China—and everyone else—to recognize the territorial gains Japan had made at Germany’s expense in 1914, and surrender China’s sovereignty to Japan. We can break down the written demands into five groups.
The first group was a confirmation of Japan’s recent seizure of German ports and operations in the Shantung Peninsula that included Tsingtao, and a demand to expand Japan’s sphere of influence over the railways, coasts and major cities of the entire peninsula. The second group required an extension of the leasehold of Japan’s South Manchuria Railway Zone for 99 years, and the expansion of Japan’s “sphere of influence” in southern Manchuria and eastern Inner Mongolia. This was to include rights of settlement and extraterritoriality, appointment of financial and administrative officials to the government, and prioritizing Japanese investments. Japan also demanded access to Inner Mongolia for both raw materials and manufacturing, and as a strategic buffer against Russian encroachment in Korea.
Because China was deep in debt to Japan for its loss in the first Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), the third group was to give Japan control of the Hanyeping mining and metallurgical complex in central China. The fourth group barred China from giving any coastal or island concessions to any other foreign powers.
The fifth group, originally kept secret—and the most objectionable—required China to hire Japanese “advisors” to take control of all of China’s finance and law enforcement. Japan was also to be empowered to build major railways, Buddhist temples, and schools in China. Finally, Japan was to gain effective control of Fujian Province, opposite the island of Formosa (modern Taiwan).
The United States, not yet militarily involved in WWI, strongly objected to the Demands, in that they effectively rejected the McKinley administration’s “Open Door” policy on China dating from 1899. The Wilson administration issued a note on 13 March reaffirming America’s “special interest” in Manchuria specifically, and China in general. Britain, Japan’s ally since 1902, interpreted the demands as a sign that her once reliable partner in East Asia had lost trustworthiness. The Chinese people boycotted Japanese goods; imports dropped precipitously. Japan’s economy took a significant, if short-term, hit. In the depths of World War I, there was very little money available to make up the shortfalls, so joblessness and a minor famine followed.
If there was a way to sugar-coat this functional annexation and trampling of Chinese sovereignty, the diplomats never found it, but the genrō did: they deleted the fifth group entirely on 7 May. The diplomats ratified the resulting Thirteen Demands on 15 May, even though they didn’t grant Japan anything more than she already had, except for the extension of the Manchurian Railroad lease. This compromise, even though it came from the genrō, enraged elements in the IJA, who saw it as yet another humiliation on the same level as the Triple Intervention in 1895.
Siberia
China would have to wait, however, because Japan soon had bigger fish to fry a little further north; the largest and best known Japanese WWI campaign called the Siberian Intervention (Shiberia Shuppei). Of the Allied powers that sent troops to Siberia, Japan sent the largest contingent, stayed the longest, and seemed to be the only ones with specific, non-contradictory mission instructions from their government. The declared mission of the remaining Allies in Siberia—rescuing the Czech Legion—feels more like a weak cover story to disguise a land grab.
France initially asked Japan for help in guarding Allied ammunition stockpiles in Russia in early 1917, but Japan’s Masatake government declined. Before completing arrangements with Japan, Britain sent a cruiser from Hong Kong to Vladivostok in December 1917. Aghast, Terauchi ordered Katō Kanji to take two battleships, Iwami and Asahi, to Russia immediately. Iwami departed Kure on 9 January 1918 and arrived at Vladivostok on 12 January, two days before the British cruiser arrived.
Katō had no instructions to land any troops, but after a mob looted a Japanese-owned store and killed the proprietor, he landed marines and occupied the city, as did the British. In July 1918, Wilson asked the Terauchi government to supply 7,000 men as a part of a 25,000-man expeditionary force to help rescue the hard-marching Czech Legion coming down the Trans-Siberian Railway. After much debate in the Diet, Terauchi agreed to send 12,000 men under Japanese command. The planning for the expedition fell to Yui Mitsue, who had commanded the IJA 1st Imperial Guard and 15th Divisions before taking charge of the Siberian expeditionary force.
As early as February 1918, the IJA formed a planning committee to examine the possibilities of creating a separate trans-Baikal buffer state in the event of a Tsarist collapse…or a Red one. Their general plan was to invade with two forces: one from Vladivostok to Khabarovsk along the Amur River, and the other along the Chinese Eastern Railway. Ultimately, the invasion was to cut off the Trans-Siberian railway at Lake Baikal, making a separable chunk from there eastwards. By then, Terauchi was out of office, and Hara Takashi’s government refused to have anything to do with the scheme.
Regardless of what the civilians wanted, the IJA bulked up their expedition to up to 70,000 men and moved into Siberia as far west as Lake Baikal and Buryatia. By 1920, their zaibatsu—including Mitsubishi and Mitsui—were opening offices in Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Nikolayevsk-on-Amur and Chita. Also, they brought with them some 50,000 civilian settlers.
But by that time, Japan found itself bogged down in a political quagmire. The Reds executed the White Russian they backed in the Civil War, Alexandre Kolchak, on 7 February 1920. After that, they switched their faith to the Cossack Ataman Grigory Semenov, who fled the country in September 1921. In the spring of 1922, the IJA repulsed Red attacks on Vladivostok, but Japanese public opinion had turned against the enterprise, which had consumed half the national budget for two years and devastated the price of rice. On 25 June 1922, Uchida Kōsai announced Japan would withdraw from Siberia while keeping the northern half of Sakhalin Island as reparations for the Red massacre at Nikolayevsk in 1920.
The Siberian Expedition had cost Japan some 5,000 casualties, mostly to typhus and diarrhea. It had also cost about ¥1 billion and the enmity of the (now Red) Russians because of their support for the Whites. Diplomatically, the entire event was a fiasco, but served as a teaching moment for the samurai in the IJA, who realized that they needed more political power if they were to stop the hated Reds.
Versailles, the League of Nations, and the Washington Conference
As a new Great Power, Japan entered the Versailles conference while the Siberian mess was ongoing with confidence, but soon learned that the object was to punish Germany and reward Britain and France, nothing else. Despite Japan's global work and firm commitment to the Entente cause, France and Britain treated her almost as shabbily as they did Belgium and Italy, and hardly anyone heard her voice for the entire conference. When she presented a League of Nations Charter clause forbidding racism as a national policy, African and Asian states wholeheartedly agreed, but Britain’s Dominions, chiefly Australia, rejected the idea out of hand, and the clause was stillborn.
Even more insulting, in its way, were the 5:5:3 ratios the US and Britain placed on Japanese battleships at the Washington Conference in 1922, treating Japan as if she were a second-rate power. While these limitations were based on economy, money was not the only reason. Their aim was to prevent Japan from dominating East Asia and the Pacific—a barely disguised fact.
Japan’s rage roiled…
Roots of Samurai Rage and Fear: The Road to Destruction
Japan’s involvement in the First World War is little known outside of specialist circles, except for the ill-fated Siberian adventure. Roots of Samurai Rage and Fear explores how and why Japan sent so many men and ships to help the Entente, only to be snubbed in the end.
And Finally...
On 3 January:
1777: An American force of 4,500 men under George Washington attacked and defeated a British detachment of 1,400 at Princeton, New Jersey. Because of this third defeat in ten days at the hands of the Americans, Charles Cornwallis withdrew all British troops from New Jersey, a strategic victory for the Americans.
1868: The Honorable/Meiji Restoration begins in Japan, when the fifteen-year-old Meiji Emperor Mutsuhito reads a proclamation declaring the restoration of the emperor’s “direct rule” hours after two dominant clans captured the Imperial Palace in Edo (later Tokyo). While celebrated/observed for the next seventy years, the true power behind the throne was still the soldiers in the field.
And today is J.R.R. TOLKIEN DAY, commemorating the birth of the creator of the whole Middle Earth/Hobbit cycle, on this day in 1892, in Bloemfontein, South Africa. Tolkien’s trilogy and its accompanying works, translated into over 100 languages including braille, were named Britain’s best novels of all time in the BBC’s “The Big Read.” In 2015, the BBC ranked The Lord of the Rings 26th on its list of the 100 greatest British novels, and was included in Le Monde’s list of “100 Books of the Century.” It was impossible to have a conversation in 1960’s high school without knowing the story and the characters.