WI: Japan pushes for more concessions in the Treaty of Portsmouth

At the end of the Russo-Japanese War, the Treaty of Portsmouth, mediated by Theodore Roosevelt, was signed. Under the terms of the treaty, there was to be a immediate ceasefire, Russian troops were to be evacuated from Manchuria, Russia was to return Port Arthur and Tallen to China and to turn over the Southern Manchurian Railway and it's mining concessions to Japan.

However, a large degree of the Japanese public, including a young Hideki Tojo, believed that the treaty outright humiliated them. Popular opinion had demanded that Japan annex Eastern Siberia and keep it's conquests in the Liaoning Peniinsula and the northern tip of Sakhalin and that Russia pay war reparations to Japan. They believed that since the Americans mediated the Treaty, that they cheated Japan out of what was rightfully theirs. They went so far as to start a riot in Tokyo on the 9th of September 1905

What the people were unaware of was that military, the Japanese got the best it could out of the treaty and out of the war as a whole. Despite the unbroken string of victories by Japan, Japanese forces were overextended in Manchuria, and the Japanese economy could no longer sustain a prolonged war effort. The latter was nearing bankruptcy.

But what if there were two divergences

(1) The Russians somehow agree to these terms and Japan occupies Siberia and the Liaoning Peninsula.

(2) Russia leaves the negotiating table and the war resumes.
 
The Tsar's advisors were assuring Nicholas that the completion of the Trans-Siberian railroad and the arrival of supplies assured success if the war resumed. They were probably right even if Nicholas wanted peace for domestic reasons. If Japan persisted in the demands listed, it is likely that Britain will cut them loose as the Morocan crisis erupted in Europe

A defeat or two ould teach the Japanese a nice lesson
 
(2) Russia leaves the negotiating table and the war resumes.
Japan was running out of money, and buyers for the Bonds they were issuing to pay for the War, that had funded around 82% of the War

The War was costing an average of 96,000,000 Yen a month during the War, and they were still trying to pay down those debts when WWI started. That War cost 1,826,290,000 Yen
 
Simultaneous Russian and Japanese mutinies and revolutions is certainly an early start to the 20th century’s political argument over wage labour.

Peripheral revolutions might lead to a different debate in the 2nd international over imperialism and the central locus of revolutions.

I am of course predicting that the revolutions end in blood and rope.
 
Top