Japan, its financial resources weakened, was in no
position to continue the war in the hope of exact-
ing better terms. On 5 September 1905 the Peace
of Portsmouth was concluded.
Japan did not use military force again, and
thereby risk all it had gained in its wars with
China and with Russia, for a quarter of a century.
By the time of the Meiji Emperor’s death in
1912, Japan had won international recognition as
a great power. Its alliance with Britain was
renewed, its ‘special’ position in northern China
acquiesced in, as well as its outright annexation
of Korea. Internally too, Japan had made great
strides during the forty-five years of the Meiji
Emperor’s reign.
But on the negative side there were tensions
building up in Japan. There was pressure from
below among the more prosperous and influential
merchants, administrators, landowners and the
educated elites, all desiring some share in power;
they resented the fact that an entrenched oligarchy
ruled Japan from behind the scenes and monopo-
lised all the important positions in the state. Within
the oligarchy, too, there was growing conflict
between the party-based governments demanding
independence of the genro, and the genro who
advised the emperor on all questions of import-
ance. For a time the genro continued to exercise
their traditional function. But the army, its prestige
raised by success in the Russo-Japanese War, won
a new place with the right to present its views
to the emperor directly, so bypassing the civilian
governments. The remarkable unity that had
been achieved during the founding years of the
Meiji era under the leadership of the emperor
and the genro no longer existed in the 1920s and
1930s. Instead, powerful rival groups sought to
dominate policy. In the absence of the genro and a
strong emperor, Japan lacked any supreme body
to coordinate its domestic and foreign policies.
The beginnings of strife between labour and
employers was also making itself felt as Japan
became more industrialised in the early twentieth
century. The educated Japanese became vulner-
able to a cultural crisis of identity. Should Japanese
ways be rejected totally? Western dress and con-
formity with Western customs became general
among the progressives. There also occurred a
nationalist-patriotic reaction. The Japanese elites
were obliged to choose between Japanese tradi-
tion and Western ways, or to find some personal
compromise between the two.
The First World War and its consequences brought
about a decisive change in the international power
relations of eastern Asia. The period was also
one of economic industrial boom for Japan,
whose earlier development provided the basis
for rapid expansion. Japan benefited, second
only to the US, from the favourable conditions
created by the Allies’ needs at war and their disap-
pearance as strong competitors in Asian markets.
The First World War enabled Japan to emerge as
an industrial nation.
Japan joined the Allied side in the war in 1914
after careful deliberation. China, after the revolu-
tion of 1911, was showing increasing signs of
losing its national cohesion. For Japan, the war in
Europe provided an opportunity to strengthen
and extend its position, especially in Manchuria.
But behind Japanese expansion there was also a
‘defensive’ motivation similar to the earlier impe-
rialism of the West and similar as well to fears
expressed by American strategic planners. What
would happen when the war was over? The genro
Yamagata was convinced that the Great War
among the Western powers would be followed by
a global racial struggle, a struggle between ‘the
yellow and white races’; Japan would therefore
have ‘to make plans to prevent the establishment
of a white alliance against the yellow races’. He
looked to friendly relations with Russia and the
avoidance of hostility with the US. The relation-
ship with China was critical. Here, Yamagata
sought the best of all worlds: the practical estab-
lishment of Japan’s senior partnership in a friendly
alliance. Japan should seek to ‘instil in China a
sense of abiding trust in us’. China and Japan,
‘culturally and racially alike’, might then preserve
their identity when competing with the ‘so-called
culturally advanced white races’. When the
Japanese made their Twenty-one Demands on
China in 1915, the Chinese naturally regarded
the Japanese from quite a different point of view
- more as enemies than friends. In their first form
the demands amounted to a claim for a Japanese
1
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