Japan’s rapid advance was viewed with proprietary pride
and admiration by sympathetic observers in the United
States. Unfortunately, the Japanese did not just imitate
the domestic policies of their Western mentors; they also
emulated the latter’s aggressive approach to foreign affairs.
That they adopted this course is perhaps not surprising.
In their own minds, the Japanese were particularly
vulnerable in the world economic arena. Their
territory was small, lacking in resources, and densely populated,
and they had no natural outlet for expansion. To
observant Japanese, the lessons of history were clear.
Western nations had amassed wealth and power not only
because of their democratic systems and high level of education
but also because of their colonies, which provided
them with sources of raw materials, cheap labor,
and markets for their manufactured products.
Traditionally, Japan had not been an expansionist
country. The Japanese had generally been satisfied to remain
on their home islands and had even deliberately isolated
themselves from their neighbors during the Tokugawa
era. Perhaps the most notable exception was a
short-lived attempt at the end of the sixteenth century to
extend Japanese control over the Korean peninsula.
The Japanese began their program of territorial expansion
(see Map 3.3) close to home. In 1874, they claimed
compensation from China for fifty-four sailors from the
Ryukyu Islands who had been killed by aborigines on the
island of Taiwan and sent a Japanese fleet to Taiwan to
punish the perpetrators. When the Qing dynasty evaded
responsibility for the incident while agreeing to pay an
indemnity to Japan to cover the cost of the expedition, it
weakened its claim to ownership of the island of Taiwan.
Japan was then able to claim suzerainty over the Ryukyu
Islands, long tributary to the Chinese Empire. Two years
later, Japanese naval pressure forced the opening of Korean
ports to Japanese commerce.
During the 1880s, Sino-Japanese rivalry over Korea intensified.
In 1894, China and Japan intervened on opposite
sides of an internal rebellion in Korea. When hostilities
broke out between the two powers, Japanese ships
destroyed the Chinese fleet and seized the Manchurian
city of Port Arthur (see the box on p. 48). In the
Treaty of Shimonoseki, the Manchus were forced to recognize
the independence of Korea and to cede Taiwan
and the Liaodong peninsula, with its strategic naval base
at Port Arthur, to Japan.
Shortly thereafter, under pressure from the European
powers, the Japanese returned the Liaodong peninsula to
China, but in the early twentieth century, they returned
to the offensive. Rivalry with Russia over influence in Ko-
rea led to increasingly strained relations between the two
countries. In 1904, Japan launched a surprise attack on
the Russian naval base at Port Arthur, which Russia had
taken from China in 1898. The Japanese armed forces
were weaker, but Russia faced difficult logistical problems
along its new Trans-Siberian Railway and severe political
instability at home. In 1905, after Japanese warships sank
almost the entire Russian fleet off the coast of Korea, the
Russians agreed to a humiliating peace, ceding the strategically
located Liaodong peninsula back to Japan, along
with southern Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands. Russia
also agreed to abandon its political and economic influence
in Korea and southern Manchuria, which now came
increasingly under Japanese control. The Japanese victory
stunned the world, including the colonial peoples of
Southeast Asia, who now began to realize that Europeans
were not necessarily invincible.
During the next few years, the Japanese consolidated
their position in northeastern Asia, annexing Korea in
1908 as an integral part of Japan. When the Koreans
protested the seizure, Japanese reprisals resulted in thousands
of deaths. The United States was the first nation to
recognize the annexation in return for Tokyo’s declaration
of respect for U.S. authority in the Philippines. In
1908, the two countries reached an agreement in which
the United States recognized Japanese interests in the region
in return for Japanese acceptance of the principles of
the Open Door. But mutual suspicion between the two
countries was growing, sparked in part by U.S. efforts to
restrict immigration from all Asian countries. President
Theodore Roosevelt, who mediated the Russo-Japanese
War, had aroused the anger of many Japanese by turning
down a Japanese demand for reparations from Russia. In
turn, some Americans began to fear the rise of a “yellow
peril” manifested by Japanese expansion in East Asia.
World History
