China. By the time of the crisis in relations with the United States in 1941, Japan had
long detached Korea, de factoManchuria and de jureTaiwan from China. The decline
and fall of imperial rule in China with the end of the Manchu Dynasty (1911), and the
subsequent protracted turmoil which consumed the new Republic of China, offered to a
predatory Japan an irresistible temptation to expand. Henry Kissinger has explained the
phenomenon in general terms. He wrote about ‘the realities of global power, one of the
lessons of which is that vacuums always get filled and that the principal issue is not
whether but by whom’ (Kissinger, 1994: 548). Japan was ready and ruthlessly willing to
provide Kissinger’s ‘whom’. As China ceased to function as a centralized state that was
able to protect its interests effectively against rapacious colonial powers, so Japan stepped
in, time and again, to take what it could.
Japanese expansion at China’s expense began in earnest as early as 1879, with the
annexation of the Ryuku Islands. In the 1880s, Japan intervened militarily in Korea,
a country nominally under Chinese sovereignty, and war was only narrowly avoided
by the Convention of Tientsin (18 April 1885). The pace of Japanese strategic history
accelerated from the 1890s onwards. In 1894–5, Tokyo announced to the world that it
had arrived as a major regional power in East Asia by decisively defeating the largely
moribund, but still functioning, China of the Manchus. Japan was rewarded diplo-
matically for its strategic arrival as a state of some significance when, in 1902, it was
offered, and accepted, alliance with Britain. This was diplomatic promotion indeed. In
British calculation, the Japanese alliance provided valuable insurance against Russian
troublemaking in Central Asia, especially in Afghanistan on the most obvious invasion
route to India.
But Japan’s debut on the world stage, as opposed merely to the regional platform, was
declared and then strategically demonstrated in 1904–5 in a way that stunned most
foreign observers. In 1904, Japan moved to assert its interests in Korea and forcefully to
expel its Russian competitor. Japan was victorious on land and sea, and the Russians were
humiliated, although it is true that the latter had to fight at a great logistical disadvantage.
As noted already, their army in Korea and Manchuria was connected to European Russia
by means of a solitary single-track railway line, 5,500 miles in length, with the added
complication of a 100-mile gap at Lake Baikal. Also, when Russia decided to reinforce
its naval power in Korean waters, particularly in support of the besieged naval base of
Port Arthur, it was obliged to dispatch its Baltic Fleet from Kronstadt, all the way around
Europe, Africa and Asia. Given Britain’s alliance with Japan and France’s alliance with
Russia, the unfortunate Russian fleet staggered from one French coaling station to
another at a painfully slow pace. Alas, when it arrived off Korea it was met and all but
annihilated by a more modern and better-handled Japanese opponent in the Strait of
Tsushima.
On land, the fighting was bitter and in many tactical respects it anticipated the
conditions of 1914–18. However, the Japanese Army appeared to demonstrate that it had
found a workable solution to the tactical crisis discussed in earlier chapters. Soldiers
could advance in the face of modern firepower, provided they were willing to accept very
high casualties. The keys to such acceptance, of course, were discipline and, above all
else, morale or fighting spirit. Russia, struggling to survive revolution at home in 1905,
was in no condition to impose a long war on the Japanese. The latter’s consequent victory
carried the implication that they had arrived as a great power. The military standard for
160 War, peace and international relations