The Japanese had not been long at the Washington Conference, however, before their stock began to rise. The delegation was the most diligent, serious, modest body at the Conference, and so very grateful for every kind word! The contrast between the Chinese and Japanese delegations was striking. Nothing more modernized in manner and appearance, democratized in speech, gathered in Washington than the Chinese. They looked, talked, acted like the most sophisticated and delightful of cultivated Europeans. They understood and practiced every social amenity—suave, at home, frank, gay—I have never encountered anything more socially superior than some of the young Chinese. The two delegations were perfectly characterized by a woman friend of mine familiar with both peoples—“The Chinese look down on everybody; the Japanese look up to everybody.” That was the impression. But when it came to diplomacy, the Chinaman was the aristocrat begging favors, the Japanese the plebeian fighting for his rights.
The Japanese seemed to have felt that possibly there might be some intent on the part of their Western brothers to throw them out of China and go in themselves. We cannot blame Japan for such a thought if we review her experience with the West in the last twenty-five years. She was forced into Korea, after China had agreed with her to jointly suppress disorders if they broke out and both of them to withdraw when there was no longer need for their work. It was China’s refusal to abide by the treaty of 1885 that led Japan into war and that brought her, as a result of that war, Formosa, the Pescadores, Liaotung, with Port Arthur and Dalny. We all remember—that is, those of us living then—how only a few days after the treaty with China which gave Japan these territories the Czar stepped in and told Japan that he would “give her a new proof of his sincere friendship” by taking over Liaotung. There was nothing for Japan to do but accept the offer.
Pretty nearly all Europe at once proceeded, as everybody remembers, to give China and Japan further “proofs of sincere friendship.” Germany took over Kiaochow; England, Weihaiwei; France, Kwang chowwan. This is only a little over twenty years ago.
It was Russia’s obvious effort to get Japan out of Korea that caused the Russo-Japanese war, a war which amazed the world by its result, put Japan on the map, very possibly turned her head a bit. She had been studying the West, and the remarkable thing about this country which we call imitative, in studying it she had learned not only its power but its weakness. She had accepted its militarism at its full face value, but she had quickly put her finger on the weak spots in the militarism of different nations. She had seen how corruption, bribery, self-indulgence had weakened the militarism of Russia; she saw how the half-heartedness of France and England in war weakened them, how liberalism and pacifism undermined militarism; she saw how Germany had the pure science and undivided devotion, and she took Germany as her model. And then in 1914 her great chance came. She did exactly what the Prussian would have done if he had been in her place. She joined the strong, her great ally, England, against Germany, for Germany had possessions in China which Japan coveted. She out-Prussianized Prussia in the demands she made upon the corrupt and unstable Peking crowd. There is no shadow of defense for the twenty-one demands, except the defense that she was applying the lessons that she had learned from Russia, from Germany—lessons which she had seen applied, in a modified form, it is true, but still in a form by England and by the United States in the Philippines.
I could never forget all this in Paris. Japan came to the Conference peace table with her treaties—read them in that invaluable compilation of treaties which John McMurray has made and the Carnegie Peace Foundation published. England there sets down her approval; France sets down her approval; they promise the German rights in Shantung to Japan when the treaty shall be made; they promise her the Caroline Islands and the other island possessions of Germany north of the equator. This is all written down in the books, and this was what faced President Wilson when the matter of Shantung was taken up. What were England and France to do? England had gone into a war and we had followed her, largely, so we both claimed, because a treaty had been regarded as a scrap of paper. Were you now to treat other treaties as scraps of paper?
Italy would not have it so. She held France and England to their war promises. And when President Wilson balked, she left the peace table.
One of the things that interested me most in Paris was that Japan never left the peace table. She was apparently willing to trade anything to get that recognition of racial equality denied her, so far as one can make out, because she is so able, not at all because she is an inferior. She hung on, and by the sheer strength of her position, her refusal, whatever she got or did not get to quit the game, came out with a recognition, partial at least, of what may be correctly called her nefarious demands.
And then she found herself with a whole world jumping on her back. She had played the Western game and the West despised her. I could not help feeling in Paris that Japan must have been bewildered a little by the contradictions of the Occident she had tried so faithfully to follow. She saw the doctrine of force she had accepted grappling with the gospel of the brotherhood of man. There are many who think that the brotherhood got the worst of it in Paris. That gospel was driven into the world as never before there. More people were committed to it than ever before. More people realized that it is a power that you must count with in the affairs of nations as well as of individuals. More people accepted it and tried to get together to make it a practical reality. Japan herself bowed before the power of this spirit before she left Paris. She never gave up more because of it than she felt she must, but she gave up rather than quit the game. She was learning. She has been learning ever since. She has never stayed away from any international attempt to bring order to the world. She has had a bevy of her people at every meeting of the League of Nations. She has taken an active part in the work of all of its commissions. In 1919 Japan had eighty-seven delegates at the International Labor Conference held in Washington, and those delegates accepted the radical program there adopted. Japan means to understand the Occident; and she is making the same valiant attempt to ally herself with the best of the Occident that before the war she made to ally herself with the worst.
What we have to remember is that Japan is, like all nations to a degree, a dual nation; there are two Japans—the one clinging to the old militaristic, autocratic notion of government, the other struggling to understand and realize the meaning of a united, coöperating world in which each man and each nation shall have a chance at peaceful, prosperous living.