McPherson
Banned
There is a lot of confused thinking on this subject. The idea of provocation has to be defined in terms that goes beyond the Post WWI or interwar period. Therefore I would suggest that US-Japanese international causes of tensions, and the consequences thereof, have to go back at least a century before WWII minimum.
a. It must be understood, that the Japanese and the Koreans were regarded and sort of treated as akin to East Asian pirates by the Americans, as well as other Western Imperialist powers seeking to make inroads in China around the beginning decades of the 19th Century. 1853 is often taught to American schoolchildren as the year when Mathew Perry's squadron "opened Japan". What is not taught well, was that the Japanese, a couple of centuries earlier, been subjected to a campaign of foreign cultural imperialist proselytization that sought to change the nature of Japanese culture as it existed at that time. The ruling Shogunate resisted the attempts to change Japanese sopcial and religious mores by closing the country to such foreign attempts and they had enough power to make the "western barbarians" back off.
b. The Japanese remembered this imperialist attempt to destabilize their country and it became a matter of government policy to resist such imperialist aggression against Japan proper.
c. After Perry, a representative of a second rate power little more regarded than Spain, showed up to demand that; "American sailors washed up on Japanese shores not be executed as invaders." , and incidentally we, Americans", want a treaty concession trade port of entry, like we have in China, so you can be a captive market." Well...
d. The Japanese spent a TOUGH couple of decades deciding what to do. They decided if they could not beat US, they would have to join US in the race to become capitalist imperialist interlopers in China. This reform is called the Meiji Restoration.
e. Insofar as the United States is concerned, it should be noted that at this time, along with the importation of cheap Chinese labor to build American railroads in the Pacific states west of the Rocky Mountains, there was an influx of Japanese immigration that started as a trickle in the 1870s, but which picked up momentum from the 1870s onward.
f. Then came the Russo-Japanese War and the first modern instance of East Asians defeating Europeans in a widely publicized and massive military disaster which is widely publicized in the United States, and I mean the Russians lost BADLY. Never mind that the Chinese had beaten the French first. This was the Yellow Peril news that Hearst pushed.
g. At the Versailles Conference, when the Japanese asked politely for the insertion in the League of Nations Charter, which that piece of racist evildoer human scum, Woodrow Wilson, was pushing on the reluctant victor allies, one nation of which was Japan; the Japanese wanted that racial equality clause, to legally define in international law, that so called social Darwinist claptrap theories about one race being superior to other races was just that; claptrap and utter rubbish. The chief opponent to that clause was not necessarily the British, or the French or the even the Italians (The Italian government supported the Japanese position.); it was that rat bastard, Woodrow Wilson. That bolo, he made, put Japan and the US on a permanent enmity basis, mostly on mutually induced racial based hatreds and bigotries. I have to write as an American, that the Japanese were more sinned against than sinning in that regard. On this specific point, the opinion cannot vary. The racism was all too real and the acts the US government carried out on its end made the problem much worse.
h. Then there is China. The Americans teach, that they were disinterested neutrals trying to keep China from being carved up and parceled out like Africa was among the Europeans, during "The Berlin Conference." Bull. The Americans had created a lodgement in southern central China just as imperialistic and exploitative (American Concession (Shanghai)) as the equivalent British one. In fact the Spanish American War of 1898 could be seen as an extension of "Manifest Destiny" to bring American influence to bear on China up close and personal. The Japanese so saw it, but the Russians were closer, were in China in force and were building up a land army and navy threat to Metropolitan Japan. Remember Perry in 1853?
I. Japan saw her safety lay in dominating China and forcing out the western imperialists. Russia first (1906). Then Germany (1915). That left only 2 imperialist threats... the British and then the Americans.
Japan's foreign policy in peace and war must be seen as in their eyes from a. to i. This does not excuse Japanese war-crimes at all and it does not change the fact that the Japanese practiced the same kind of evil that the western imperialist powers, including Americans, did in the western Pacific Ocean and east Asia. The Japanese were just as racist, just as much in the rape, pillage, burn, loot, murder for fun, and impose foreign customs and race based social mores and economic exploitations and inequalities "game", as the other imperialist powers.
I hate racism and imperialism and the hypocrisy its practitioners teach as history and as social science. Can you tell?
McP.
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