The Root-Takahira Agreement of 1908 came about as a result of the desire of the United States to protect its interests in Asia and to ease tensions between America and Japan. The Russo-jAPANESE War of 1904-05 had tested the resolve of American administrations to enforce the Open Door Policy in Asia. At the time, Japan saw Russia’s military presence in Manchuria as a direct threat to its own economic and territorial expansion. On February 8, 1904, the Japanese navy destroyed the Russian fleet in a surprise attack at Port Arthur. By 1905, the Japanese army had defeated the Russians at Mukden, where 97,000 Russian soldiers died, and the navy had sunk the Russian fleet in the straits of Tsushima. But Japan had drained its financial and military resources. On May 31, Minister Kogoro Takahira asked President Theodore Roosevelt to negotiate a peace treaty with Russia and Japan.
Seeking a balance of power to protect American interests in the region, Roosevelt invited representatives from the two countries to meet at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on August 9, 1905. In the Treaty of Portsmouth, the Russians acquiesced to most of the Japanese demands. They agreed to allow Japan to take over the Liaodong Peninsula and the railroad from Harbin to Port Arthur. They conceded to the withdrawal of American troops from Manchuria, and they accepted Japanese freedom of action in Korea. The two parties stalemated on the issue of Russia ceding the island of Sakhalin. Czar Nicholas II then agreed to divide the island when Roosevelt wired the Czar to propose a partition between the two parties. Even though the czar refused to pay the indemnity that Japan demanded, Japan accepted the terms of the treaty on August 29.
In the aftermath of the war, Japan emerged as the dominant naval power in the Pacific, and relations between the United States and Japan eroded. Domestic problems in California heightened tensions between the United States and Japan. In addition to pushing for an extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882, 1892, and 1902), nativist white workers in San Francisco demanded that Japanese immigrants be legally excluded. When the San Francisco school board voted to require Asian children to attend a separate “Oriental School” in 1906, anti-Asian riots broke out in California and William Randolph Hearst’s papers published inflammatory stories about the “Yellow Peril.”
Roosevelt eased tensions with Japan by making two agreements with the country. First, the president reached the Gentlemen’s Agreement with Japan. In exchange for Japan agreeing to stop the flow of its immigrant laborers to the United States, Roosevelt agreed to have the school board withdraw its mandate for a separate school. Second, the two countries reached an understanding in the Root-Takahira Agreement of 1908. In the agreement, the United States and Japan promised to accept the territorial status quo in the Pacific. In addition, the two nations agreed to abide by the Open Door and to uphold the territorial integrity of China.
Even though Roosevelt saw the Root-Takahira Agreement as evidence that Japan did not plan to act aggressively against the United States, American leaders favorable to China saw it as a sanction of Japanese territorial expansion in Asia. To ensure that Japan abided by the agreements, the president sent a bold message of American military strength by ordering the Great White Fleet, composed of 16 naval ships, on a world tour that stopped by Japan.
Further reading: Akira Iriye, Pacific Estrangement: Japanese and American Expansion, 1897-1911 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972); Charles E. Neu, An Uncertain Friendship: Roosevelt and Japan, 1906-1909 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).
—Glen Bessemer
World History
