membership in the ranks of the great powers was the ability ‘to put up a serious fight in
an all-out conventional war against the most powerful state in the world’ (Mearsheimer,
2001: 5). Japan had met that standard. The event was all the more surprising, not to say
shocking, given the racist assumptions of European statesmen at the time. Japan’s victory
demonstrated Asian strategic superiority over a great European power.
Japan fought with the Allies in World War I, and the war provided a glorious and
unique opportunity to siphon up all of Germany’s extensive island possessions in the
Pacific north of the equator, as well as its valuable concession on the Chinese coast. The
principal gain from Germany was the port of Kaiochow, with the fortress of Tsingtao, on
the Shantung peninsula. Not one to let the political opportunity for notable advantage
pass unexploited, in 1915 Japan served its notorious ‘Twenty-one Demands’ on the
Republic of China. In effect, the demands amounted to a Japanese claim for unique extra-
territorial rights. The Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek judged them to be ‘the
grand culmination of all the unequal treaties’ (quoted in Lamb and Tarling, 2001: 16).
But China had no practicable option other than to agree to most of the demands, since
its potential supporters had their minds and strategic endeavours focused on the contem-
porary trauma in Europe. Nevertheless, it is important to note that the demands were a
direct challenge to American policy on China. Since the turn of the century, Washington
had sought to insist that China must be able to present an ‘open door’ to the whole world.
It should not be permitted to fall under the sway of one or two great powers exclusively.
Subsequently, at Versailles in 1919, the United States succeeded in thwarting at least the
most outrageous of the Japanese demands. And in the package of treaties that comprised
the ‘Washington system’ of naval disarmament of 1922, the Nine-Power Treaty guar-
anteed that China would be approached diplomatically and strategically on a multilateral
basis by the great power signatories. This, needless to say, was a major political defeat
for Japan, and was to be the source of much anti-American sentiment in Tokyo in the
1920s and 1930s. Japan believed that it had been denied its just deserts as a loyal ally in
the Great War.
Against the background of political instability in Tokyo – with the Army collectively
as well as smaller groups of military officers intervening frequently and sometimes
murderously in public affairs: for example, Prime Minister Hamaguchi was assassinated
in November 1930 – Japan’s drive for continental empire changed its character in the
1930s. Beginning on 18 September 1931 with the so-called Mukden Incident, Japan’s
effectively autonomous Kwantung Army effectively took control of policy and strategy
towards China. Ignoring a barrage of international protests, though greatly irritated by
China’s ability to rally diplomatic support through the League of Nations, the Japanese
Army proceeded to turn Manchuria into a Japanese dependency. This dramatic step,
which was extended and consolidated in succeeding years, was the first blatant Japanese
challenge to the Washington system for stability in East Asia. Tokyo was widely
denounced for flouting the Nine-Power Treaty of 1922 on relations with China as well as
the Pact of Paris of 1928 which had obliged its contracting parties, including Japan, to
forswear the use of force in the conduct of their foreign relations.
Manchuria in 1931 was followed by half a decade of Sino-Japanese tension and minor
military clashes, which culminated fatefully in an unplanned skirmish at the Marco
Polo Bridge in Beijing on 7 July 1937. The incident entailed Chinese troops firing
at Japanese troops and the latter retaliating. Certainly on the Japanese side, the incident
World War II in Asia–Pacific, I 161