special rights and spheres of influence. The
second proposition was more a moral hope than
real politics. Nevertheless, these principles were
not abandoned. They were reasserted in the
1920s and 1930s.
For Japan, the Washington treaties of 1921–2
stabilised international conduct towards disinte-
grating China and lessened the chance of conflict
with the Western powers. Japan would now main-
tain its existing rights against a new possible
threat, Bolshevik Russia, without fear of conflict
with Britain and the US. A third reason for
Japan’s peaceful adaptation to the entirely new
post-war world was its inability to compete in a
naval race with the US. Japanese finances were
exhausted. Japan was dependent on the West to
a degree matched by few modern nations. Its
capacity to modernise was at the mercy of the
Western powers, especially the US. A Japanese
journalist in 1929 summed up Japan’s position,
reflecting views widely held at the time:
Japan is a country whose territory is small and
whose resources are scarce. It has to depend
upon other countries for securing such mater-
ials. Furthermore, to sustain the livelihood of
its excessive population, Japan finds it impera-
tive to place a high priority upon exporting its
products abroad.The worldwide depression hit Japan less seriously
than the West. Japan had an industrious and well-
organised people to further economic progress.
With the help of a large devaluation of its cur-
rency, it had pulled out of the slump by 1932.
But now the need for capital, especially from
the US, and for raw materials (cotton, coal, iron
ore and oil) from abroad became increasingly
essential. The Japanese believed that their own
continued economic existence, the ability of
the nation to progress, depended on develop-
ing the resources of Manchuria (where the
Japanese could secure some of the raw materials
they needed) and on continued access to the
American market. The heavy rearmament pro-
gramme launched in 1936 and the needs of the
military in China, moreover, could not be sus-
tained without American imports of scrap metal
and oil. Thus, the poverty of resources was
Japan’s Achilles heel.
Recognition of this weakness united the
Japanese leadership in the military, business,
diplomacy, bureaucracy and politics in one aim:
that Japan had to maintain its economic empire
in China. Four-fifths of all Japan’s overseas invest-
ment at the close of 1929 was in China. On the
importance of China there was no difference
between the ‘pacific’ 1920s and the militaristic
1930s. The rift occurred between the leaders who
argued that Japan could achieve this while staying
within the legal framework of treaties and con-
cessions held in common with the West, and
those who wished to extend the Japanese eco-
nomic empire not only at China’s expense but
regardless too of Western economic interests in
China. The whole of eastern Asia and south-
eastern Asia would become a Japanese-dominated
empire serving Japan’s interests under the high-
sounding guise of a cooperative Japanese com-
monwealth of Asian nations called the Greater
Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. Foreign Minister
Matsuoka of the later 1930s, looking at Western
behaviour with its earlier emphasis on imperialism
and its later support for the League of Nations,
simply derided it as a cynical way of changing the
rules of international law to suit the West’s own
selfish interests. ‘The Western Powers had taught
the Japanese the game of poker’, he once
remarked, but then, ‘after acquiring most of the
chips they pronounced the game immoral and
took up contract bridge.’
One significant strand in Japanese thinking
about the world was the belief that only by its own
endeavours would Japan be accepted as an equal
of the ‘white’ world powers, which did not treat it
as an equal. It was still in the process of catching
up militarily and industrially with the leading
Western nations; to survive among the world
powers it must grow in strength or go under.
Since the days of Meiji, Japan, for all its later talk
of Asian cooperation against the West, did not
seek a new role as the leading anti-imperialist
nation; it wanted to join the imperialist powers
and foresaw a partition of the whole world among
them. In that partition Japan and its empire would
dominate Asia. Now inevitably this set Japan on a