Organizer: Frederick R. Dickinson, University of Pennsylvania
Chair: Albert Craig, Harvard University
Discussant: F. Hilary Conroy, University of Pennsylvania
Lord Hailey's dictum that "Imperialism is not a word for scholars" notwithstanding, the study of empire is alive and well among specialists of European history. From economic to strategic to social imperialism, from the notion of "informal empire" to the most recent debate surrounding "cultural imperialism," historians continue to probe the causes of European expansion and domination in the l9th and 20th centuries as central to the history of national development and international conflict that defines the modern age.
While rarely a party to this debate, Japanese historians have long sustained a discussion of their own on Japanese imperialism that has stressed the internally generated semi feudal and material origins of expansion. Western specialists of Japan have, in the main, rejected this "atavism" and economic determinism to view the Japanese empire as the offshoot of great power rivalry in Asia. And recent research on Japanese colonialism and "informal empire" has maintained the focus on the periphery. The overall impression in the English language scholarship remains that Japanese imperialism was a logical response to a turbulent and threatening world.
How logical was Japanese expansionism? While none of the three presenters views economic factors as preeminent, they nonetheless restore the focus on the metropole to consider Japan's empire builders as less passive surveyors of their surroundings than conscious manipulators of events. Tak Matsusaka focuses on strategic discussions immediately following the Russo Japanese War and finds that the Japanese cabinet and army staked a claim in Manchuria not because of national security concerns but in spite of the costs and risks involved. Fred Dickinson highlights the politics of empire during World War I to demonstrate how important continued expansion on the continent becomes for the domestic political position of the genro, bureaucracy, and the army. Finally, Louise Young focuses on empire as reflected in the media and popular culture in the 1930s to argue that aggression abroad depended upon the liberal circulation of imperial myths at home. Japan's pursuit of empire was neither a "logical" nor instinctive response to external events but a conscious tailoring of circumstances for geopolitical and political aims that required an active and sustained commitment by Tokyo's empire builders.
Y. Tak Matsusaka, Wellesley College
Historians have often invoked the notion of "forward defense" in explaining Japan's expansionist thrust in Manchuria (Northeast China) in the decade after the Russo Japanese War (1904-1905). There is little doubt that Japanese leaders regarded the control of the Korean peninsula as essential to the security of the home islands. The argument that the defense of Korea would in turn depend on securing a forward base in Manchuria would seem to be a plausible extension of the same logic.
An examination of the Manchurian policy deliberations of the cabinet and the army general staff immediately following the conclusion of the Treaty of Portsmouth (1905), however, suggests a different interpretation. Most policy makers, military and civilian alike, regarded any attempt to establish a Japanese sphere of influence in Northeast China as a strategic liability. From the perspective of defense, a far less costly and risky alternative would be to neutralize the territory under some form of international guarantee. Not only would such a measure deter the Russians from mounting a much feared "war of revenge," but it would also relieve Japan, already in dire financial straits as a result of the war, of the burden of massive military expenditures. The neutralization option, however, was rejected after much debate in the autumn of 1905. The principle reason for this decision appears to have been the conviction shared by a majority of leaders that a sphere of influence in Northeast China was a desirable goal for reasons other than national security. The economic and geopolitical benefits of staking claims in Manchuria, they believed, would outweigh the costs and risks of extending Japan's defense perimeter.
Japan committed itself to an expansionist program in Manchuria, therefore, not because of strategic anxieties as often argued, but in spite of the dangers entailed in such a course of action. To be sure, defense considerations often dominated the subsequent formulation and management of policy. This military emphasis, however, was a consequence rather than the cause of continental expansion.
Frederick R. Dickinson, University of Pennsylvania
Like much of Europe, Japan celebrated the outbreak of war in August 1914 as an unparalleled opportunity. While David Lloyd George applauded the emergence of a "new Britain" with "the Great War," elder statesman Inoue Kaoru hailed the "divine aid of the new Taisho era for the development of the destiny of Japan." But while Lloyd George and his countrymen trained their sights upon the defeat of Imperial Germany, Japanese war aims focused on the pursuit of rights in China. Japanese troops would complete operations against the Germans at Qingdao in November 1914, but the debate surrounding aims in China would continue. The persistence of this debate from 1914 to 1919 and the fundamental questions about the nature of the Japanese polity that it raised ensured that the "European War" would become for Japan, no less than it was for the other belligerents, a defining event in the twentieth century.
Like the Sino and Russo Japanese Wars, the outbreak of war in Europe demonstrated the unifying effects in Tokyo of continental expansion. Unlike the two previous wars, however, the Great War concluded with a Japanese political canvas more fragmented than ever. To the elder statesmen, bureaucrats, and the army, who had looked to a renewed campaign for rights in China as a means of recovering their waning political authority, President Woodrow Wilson's redefinition of the conflict as a war to make the world "safe for democracy" represented a disturbing trend. The established elite had hoped in 1914 for a restoration of the national unity and state authority that had been severely compromised by the 1912 Taisho political crisis, only to face in l919 a burst of enthusiasm for arms control, universal manhood suffrage, and labor rights.
The political polarization that typified Japan's experience in the First World War left an enduring legacy. While a succession of party cabinets in the 1920s promoted continental retrenchment, arms limitations, universal manhood suffrage, and labor reform, soldiers and bureaucrats, in particular, continued to press for a return to the traditional conception of state that emphasized empire, authoritarian government, and armed might. It was their losing battle to party politics at home that compelled this established elite in 1931 to once again stress the importance of empire abroad, this time with the disastrous consequence of war with the United States.
Louise Young, New York University
With the military occupation that began in 1931, the provinces of northeast China, or Manchuria, were transformed from a sphere of influence into the puppet state of "Manchukuo." The building of Manchukuo was a tremendous undertaking, involving ongoing military campaigns to crush native resistance, elaborate development plans to integrate the Japanese and Manchurian economies and create a self sufficient productive sphere, and a grandiose immigration scheme, projecting the transportation of five million Japanese farmers to the Manchurian frontier.
These efforts-military conquest, economic development, and frontier settlement-brought hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers, entrepreneurs, and agricultural immigrants to northeast China while at home many times their number labored to build the empire in indirect though no less essential ways. This paper looks at the mobilization of domestic society for empire, the war fever that rallied people around the defense of "the Manchurian lifeline," the economic boom that convinced businessmen to underwrite "Manchurian development," and the immigration fever that impelled farmers to abandon their homeland for a "Manchurian paradise." For all the changes wrought on the Manchurian landscape, imperialism entailed a corresponding transformation at home.
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