endeavours to preserve peace’ in his well-known
‘Quarantine’ speech in Chicago on 5 October
- He called on the peace-loving nations to
make a ‘concerted effort’ in opposition to the law-
less aggressors; that lawlessness, he declared, was
spreading and the aggressors, like sick patients,
should be placed in ‘quarantine’. It was rousing
stuff but meant little in concrete terms. The
depression preoccupied the US and Britain at
home. Neither Congress in America nor Parlia-
ment in Britain would contemplate war with
Japan. After the Panayincident, and before full
Japanese apologies were received, Roosevelt for a
short while had considered economic sanctions.
What destabilised relations further was a renewed
naval race between Japan and the US.
Meanwhile, the powers with interests in China
had met in Brussels but the conference assembled
there could achieve nothing. Britain would not act
without US backing, or in advance of American
policy. The needs of the Dominions, Australia and
New Zealand, for adequate protection or peace
in the Pacific were obvious. Britain could not
match the worldwide defence requirements of
its Commonwealth with its available military
resources, which had been neglected for years. As
the crisis mounted in Europe the British navy was
needed in home waters and the Mediterranean
and could not be spared for Singapore. Although
recognising clearly the threat Japan posed to
British interests in China and Asia, a cautious pol-
icy had to be followed: conciliation and firmness
without risking war at a time of European dan-
gers. In 1939 the Japanese blockaded the British
concession in Tientsin, demanding that Britain in
effect abandon Nationalist China. It was a serious
crisis but the simultaneous threat of war in Europe
decided the British Cabinet in June 1939 to reach
a compromise with Japan.
The first tentative shift of American policy,
nevertheless, did occur just after Britain’s climb-
down in the summer of 1939. Of fundamental
importance for the history of eastern Asia was that
for a decade the US felt uncritically anti-Japanese
while Chiang Kai-shek became an American folk
hero.
The prime minister, Prince Fumimaro Konoe,
would have liked to bring the war in China to an
end but his ‘solution’ implied Chinese acceptance
of Japan as the senior member of the Asian
‘family’. That is how the Japanese deluded them-
selves that their aggression was really for the good
of all the Asian people. The vastness of Chinese
territory denied the Japanese army the possibility
of conquering the whole of China, even after
eight years of warfare. Within the huge areas they
did occupy, despite the utmost barbarity of the
occupation, which would have been unthinkable
in the Meiji era, much of the countryside remain-
ed under Communist or Nationalist control. The
Japanese for the most part could make their occu-
pation effective only in the towns and along the
vital railway lines.
Encouraged by moral and some material
American support, Chiang Kai-shek refused all
peace terms that would have subjugated China in
the manner of Japan’s Twenty-One Demands. In
November 1938 Konoe sought to make it clear to
Chiang Kai-shek, and the world, that Japan would
never leave China. Japan would establish a New
Order in Asia through the economic, political and
cultural union of Japan, Manchukuo and China.
The new order served notice to the Western
powers that there would be no room for Western
interests of the kind that had existed in China
before. Early in 1939 Konoe resigned. It is cer-
tainly mistaken to see him as a peaceful moderate,
though he endeavoured to avoid war with the US
without abandoning Japan’s anti-Western policy
in east Asia. German victories in Europe from
September 1939 to July 1940 greatly strength-
ened the impatient military. With the abolition of
political parties Japan became more authoritarian.
In July 1940 Konoe headed a second govern-
ment. Japan drew closer to Germany, concluding,
as a result of Foreign Minister Matsuoka’s urging,
the Three-Power Pact (Italy was also a signatory)
on 27 September 1940. It purported to be an
agreement on the division of the world. Japan
recognised Germany’s and Italy’s leadership in the
establishment of a ‘new order in Europe’;
Germany and Italy recognised the ‘leadership of
Japan in the establishment of a new order in
Greater Asia’. With the reservation of Japanese
neutrality towards the Soviet Union, the three
powers promised to help each other by all means,
including military, if attacked by a ‘Power at pre-