"...flawed assumptions. Japanese pan-Asianism seldom, if ever, took on any flavor that did not have the Home Islands as the bright red sun around which the rest of Asia (at the very least, East Asia) orbited. However, the achievement of such pan-Asianist ambitions nonetheless mapped out onto two superficially similar but in practice considerably different forms of Japanese influence and supremacy.
The first was popular with the militarists and ultraconservatives among the genro and Japanese intellectual class (and, unsurprisingly, its Army and Navy), which was that a series of puppet states and outright colonies could be formed and seized throughout Asia. This line of thinking looked at European imperialism, primarily in Africa and South or Southeast Asia, and persuaded itself that Japan was due the same prestige and power. It was this approach that had been borne out of the Meiji Reforms attempting to "Europeanize" Japan and make it more modern to compete, that had created the Anglophilic Navy and Prussophile Army, and that had partially motivated the Japanese ambitions to drive Spain from the Philippines in 1903. This was an ideology and doctrine of pure force, that Japan deserved to take whatever she wanted within her sphere of influence like Europeans had done in theirs.
The second line of thinking was not exactly egalitarian but centered in a more opportunist point of view that looked to the success of the Katipunan in the Philippines, the Guomindang in China, and the remarkable ability of the Ghadarite mutineers in Punjab and other parts of North India over the course of 1915 to hold out against considerable British pressure. The revolutionary wave in Asia that started in the late 1890s and was now picking up steam spoke not only to starry-eyed, utopian pan-Asian Japanese intellectuals and students but also to more pragmatic centrists in the government who saw it as a chance to create a unified Asian bloc that would drive European influence out totally and create something of an Oriental facsimile of the Congress of Vienna, in which Japan sat clearly at the top of a hierarchy of continental powers in control of Asian trade and finance and playing local despots and potentates off of one another for influence. Pan-Asian revolutionaries were to them not a threat but an opportunity, friends to be made and catspaws to be used.
Part of the reason this second line of thinking began to become such a prominent strain in Japanese foreign policy approaches in the mid-1910s is that, by and large, the revolutionaries across Asia tended to be strongly Japanophile, particularly in the Guomindang. The Meiji Reforms had been viewed as a blueprint, most prominently in Korea and Siam, for smaller buffer states to increase their own ability to keep Europeans out of their domestic affairs, and the nationalist, republican and progressive ideal espoused by the Guomindang in China began to appeal to young, often educated Asians who were tired not only of European hegemony but of the often corrupt and feudal native dynasties that were used to prop up said control.
Nonetheless, both of these similar strategems were born of a place of Japanese arrogance, and the Opportunists around Foreign Minister Kato Takaaki took the line that they needed to reveal the potential success of their approach for it to have any chance of crystalizing before another war with a European power erupted. It was also the case that several successive Japanese Cabinets, including those steered by men as esteemed as Ito Hirobumi, had been consumed and sunk by scandals, and Tokyo badly needed a public relations win. As such, Kato issued in November of 1915 the now-infamous Shandong Demands, a brief missive to Nanking in which Japan outlined its views on the future relations between Japan and China, a decision which was in the end a total disaster that ended his career almost as soon as it began.
The Demands essentially suggested that China should allow Japan full and unfettered access to the market of Shandong via their concession at Tsingtao, access that included extraterritoriality, and would have secured Japanese ownership of all railways in Shandong, its raw resources, and veto power over all provincial officials in matters of finances, taxation and even education. Less harsh demands included a Japanese-Chinese defensive alliance with Japan "guaranteeing the sovereignty of Chinese waters" with its substantial navy, the elimination of any barriers to Japanese students and educators going to China and vice versa, and a reworking of Chinese debts to Japan both from the Boxer War and other general commercial endeavors that while favorable to Tokyo was by no means unreasonable.
Japan made several assumptions in issuing this diplomatic note, most of them incorrect. Their first assumption was that France and Austria, which had the concessions of Chefou and Weihai on the northern coast of Shandong, would quietly acquiesce to Japan's rendering of both treaty ports as effectively worthless, which France in particular did most certainly did not. Their second assumption was that China would "be honorable" and negotiate with Japan in secret, rather than publish the demands and thus excite both Chinese public opinion as well as alarm European powers, who just like in the Triple Intervention of 1903 collaborated immediately to support Nanking's position. There was also the belief that the United States, which was occupied with its Great American War but which enjoyed extensive commercial interests in Korea and China and was the largest provider of Christian missionaries in Asia (slightly ahead of Britain), was too busy to notice; the conservative incumbent administration in the United States responded by sending a valuable dreadnought across the Pacific to its treaty port of Chusan, near Shanghai. A similar belief about Britain in India also failed to materialize as the Royal Navy's Hong Kong squadron nearly doubled in size and Singapore was further reinforced. Japan's hopes that Russia would support it failed to materialize, as Saint Petersburg, unwilling to risk the Oriental stability it finally enjoyed with its Manchurian puppet and worried that taking too Japanophile a line would risk its considerable and growing influence in Korea, quietly but firmly refused to take Tokyo's side.
The worst assumption, though, was that because the Guomindang - specifically its chief ideologue, Sun Yat-sen - admired Japan so much, and viewed it as a model for Chinese reforms, that the revolutionaries in Canton and other parts of the Chinese southeast would act as something of a Japanese advocate internally within China. Two things were gravely wrong with this thinking. The first was that the Guomindang admired Japan's capabilities to reform, not Japanese culture or, more specifically, foreign policy; while they had praised Tokyo for its intervention on behalf of the Katipunan in the Philippines, they did not want to be puppetized as the Katipunan to an extent had been. The Guomindang after all were the Chinese Nationalist Party and they took that nationalism seriously, and though their pan-Asianism was of the more collaborative school, the Shandong Demands were anything but.
The other was that Sun's influence was waning and Song Chiao-jen, who was very pointedly not a Japanophile, was ascendant, and elections were to be held in late January of 1916 which the Guomindang sought to win after coming so close in 1913. The Demands were thus issued at a time when both the creaky, traditionalist conservative administration of Li Yuanhong needed to burnish its nationalist credentials and the Guomindang needed to show the Chinese people that it could defend their real-world interests against hated foreigners. The Chinese elections of 1915-16 thus descended into a show of outward xenophobia, largely directed at Japan.
The incident did little to advance Japanese interests and instead isolated her from not only Europeans but also Asians, while disempowering for the time being the Opportunist faction and instead suggesting to the more extremist voices in Japan that if European influence in Asia was to be ended, it would have to be done by sending their fleets to the bottom of the sea. Many lessons were learned in the fall of 1915 on both sides of the Yellow Sea - Japan, perhaps, learned the wrong ones..."
- Our New Asia: Revolution and Retrenchment in the Early 20th Century Far East
) and then we have Grits vs. Wheaties - which is somewhat hilarious 
