regionally – towards China in 1894–5 and Russia in 1904–5 – and was committed to
building a first-class navy. One did not require a crystal ball in order to anticipate trouble
in the future for Japanese–American relations.
For more than thirty years the US Navy planned how it would defend the Philippines.
Basically, its operational task would be to fight its way across the Pacific, seizing island
bases as it went, leading to a heroic showdown with the Imperial Japanese Navy either
in Philippine waters or close to Japan itself. Japan constructed a world-class navy that
even in the context of the Washington Naval Arms Limitation Treaty with its 5:5:3
tonnage ratio (USA:Britain: Japan) would be superior in fighting power to that of the
United States in Asian waters. It would be difficult to exaggerate the magnitude of the
American naval task. To be blunt, the United States could not defend the Philippines. No
matter how competently American and Filipino forces performed, they could not possibly
hold out until the cavalry arrived from over the eastern horizon. Physical geography
decreed that the centre of America’s power was too remote from the scene of the needful
action in Asian waters. In the absence of an existing well-fortified American or usable
Allied base structure in East Asia, swift American military moves to counter Japanese
aggression were simply a logistical impossibility. Japanese naval and military superiority
over the United States and Britain in Asia was guaranteed by the deadly item in the
Washington system which forbade the construction of new fortifications west of Hawaii
and north of Singapore.
In addition to the unpromising strategic dimension to Japanese–American relations,
one must not neglect the power of reciprocal cultural antipathy and the political
antagonism that it stirred. Popular American distaste for Japan and the Japanese had
two principal sources. First, there was elemental racism: many Americans despised
Asians simply on racial grounds, though it is only fair to note that such racism was
fully reciprocated by the Japanese. American disdain for the Japanese as Asians found
expression in both legal and extra-legal discrimination against Japanese immigrants,
especially in California. Furthermore, for all its high-flown rhetoric, the administration
of Woodrow Wilson (he of the Fourteen Points and other declarations of universal
virtues) steadfastly declined to endorse the principle of racial equality. This may have
been a necessary contemporary evil, given America’s domestic racial context, as well as
the severe complication of the multiracial colonial empires of the European victors of
1918, but to reasonable Japanese in the 1920s it was unambiguous evidence of both a
lack of respect and, indeed, hypocrisy.
The second major source of socio-cultural tension between Japan and the United
States concerned the future of China. To the Japanese, China was the site of the origins
of their culture, a vast domain with which they had a long, troubled special relationship
mandated by history and geography. Also, China was viewed as the necessary continental
anchor to the empire that they judged it essential to build if they were to win promotion
to the premier league of great powers. The Japanese were genuinely puzzled by America’s
strange obsession with China. After all, the United States had no obvious strategic stake
there and no extraordinary economic ties with Chinese society. One had to strain the
imagination in order to understand just why so many Americans appeared to care deeply
about China’s fate. The Japanese never quite grasped the cultural fact that American
society, notwithstanding its brutally racist mistreatment of Chinese immigrant labour,
felt a powerful sentimental and paternalistic tie to China. Far from being respectful of
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