Mukden made a new situation. The European Powers were prompt to recognise the fact. Doubt even came to Great Britain whether the part she had played as foster-mother to this Asiatic infant of wonderful growth had been a wise one. A peace was practically forced upon Japan, a peace which secured for her at the moment nothing in the way of indemnity, but little in the way of territorial rights, and not even the positive elimination of her enemy from the Asiatic coast. True, she has since won Corea on the basis of that peace and has made secure certain suzerain rights in Manchuria, but this harvest had to be garnered by resolute diplomacy and by maintaining a naval and military expenditure after the war which called for an extreme degree of self-abnegation from her people.
If the present position of affairs could be accepted as permanent, there would be no "problem of the Pacific." That ocean would be Japan's home-water. Holding her rugged islands with a veteran army and navy; so established on the mainland of Asia as to be able to make a flank movement on China; she is the one "Power in being" of the Pacific littoral. But as already stated, the verdict of the war with Russia cannot be taken as final. And soon the United States will come into the Pacific with overwhelming force on the completion of the Panama Canal—an event which is already foreshadowed in a modification of the Anglo-Japanese treaty to relieve Great Britain of the possible responsibility of going to war with America on behalf of Japan. The permanence of the Japanese position as the chief Power of the Pacific cannot therefore be presumed. The very suddenness with which her greatness has been won is in itself a prompting to the suspicion that it will not last. It has been a mushroom growth, and there are many indications that the forcing process by which a Power has been so quickly raised has exhausted the culture bed. In the character of her population Japan is in some respects exceedingly rich. The events of the past few years have shown them to possess great qualities of heroism, patience and discipline. But they have yet to prove that they possess powers of initiative, without which they must fail ultimately in competition with peoples who make one conquest over Nature a stepping-stone to another. And it is not wholly a matter of race prejudice that makes many observers view with suspicion the "staying power" of the character of a nation which thinks so differently from the average European in matters of sex, in commercial honesty, and in the obligations of good faith. Many of those who have travelled in the East, or have done business with Japan, profess a doubt that an enduring greatness can be built upon a national character which runs contrary in most matters to our accepted ideas of ethics. They profess to see in the present greatness of achievement marking Japanese national life a "flash in the pan"—the astonishing precocity and quickness of progress of that type of doomed infant which quickly flowers and quickly fades in the European slums and which is known as "The Mongol" to medical science because of a facial peculiarity which identifies it infallibly. "The Mongol" of European child-life comes to an astonishingly early maturity of brain: its smartness is marvellous. But it is destined always to an early end from an ineradicable internal weakness which is, in some strange way, the cause of its precocious cleverness.
Whether the Japanese cleverness and progressiveness will last or not, the nation has to be credited with them now as a live asset. But apart from the national character the nation possesses little of "natural capital." There is practically no store of precious metals; a poor supply of the useful minerals; small area of good land; and the local fisheries have been exploited with such energy for many generations that they cannot possibly be expanded in productivity now. The statesmen of New Japan have certainly won some overseas Empire as an addition to the resources available for a sound fabric of national greatness. But what has been won is quite insufficient to weigh in the scale against the "natural capital" of almost any of Japan's rivals in the Pacific.
For want of territory to colonise under her own flag, Japan has lost many subjects to alien flags. Japanese settlements of some strength exist on the Pacific coast of America, in the Hawaiian Islands, and in parts of China. There is little doubt that Japanese policy has hoped that in some cases at least her flag would follow her nationals. Talk, not all of it quite irresponsible, has credited Japan with definite designs on many Pacific settlements, especially the Hawaiian Group where her nationals to-day outnumber any other single element of the population. But there are now no islands or territories without a protecting flag. Even when, as was said to be the case with Mexico and another Latin-American country, a weak and friendly nation seems to offer the chance of annexation of territory following a peaceable penetration, there is the power of the United States to interpose a veto. Japan thus cannot add to her natural resources without a war; and she has not, it would seem, sufficient natural resources to back up a war with the enemies she would have to meet now in the Pacific.
If she were to put aside dreams of conquest and Empire, has Japan a sound future in the Pacific as a thriving minor manufacturing and trading power? I must say that it seems to me doubtful. The nation has drunk of the wine of life and could hardly settle down to a humdrum existence. No peaceable policy could allow of a great prosperity, for the reasons of natural poverty already stated. It would be a life of drudgery without the present dream of glory. To study the Japanese emigrant away from his own country is to understand that he has not the patience for such a life. In British Columbia, in California, in Hawaii, the same conclusion is come to by European fellow-residents, that the Japanese worker is arrogant, unruly, unreliable. In Japan itself there are signs that the industrial population will not tolerate for ever a life of very poor living and very hard working if there is not a definite and immediate benefit of national glory promised.
The position of Japan in the Pacific seems to me, then, that she cannot reasonably expect to win in a struggle for its mastery: and yet that she will inevitably be forced to enter into that struggle. A recent report in a Tokio paper stated: "At a secret session of the Budget Commission on February 3, Baron Saito, Minister of Marine, declared that the irreducible minimum of naval expansion was eight battleships of the super-Dreadnought class, and eight armoured cruisers of the same class, which must be completed by 1920, construction being begun in 1913. The cost is estimated at £35,000,000." And the paper (Asahi Shimbun) went on to hint at the United States as the Power which had to be confronted. That is only one of very many indications of Japanese national feeling. She has gone too far on the path to greatness to be able to retire safely into obscurity. She must "see it through." Feats of strength far nearer to the miraculous than those which marked her astonishing victory over Russia would be necessary to give Japan the slightest chance of success in the next struggle for the hegemony of the Pacific.