Opposition to Japanese labour immigration was not confined to the United States. Similar anti-Japanese feeling arose in Canada. In consequence of the outbreak of disturbances due to this cause a Canadian Mission was sent to Japan in November, 1907, for the purpose of restricting this emigration within what were described as proper limits, and thus averting any renewal of the trouble that had occurred. The object of the mission was attained by an exchange of Notes between the head of the mission, Mr. Lemieux, and the Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs. By the arrangement arrived at—which may have facilitated that concluded, as we have seen, in the following year between America and Japan—the Japanese Government undertook to adopt effective measures for restricting this immigration.
Of late years there has been a tendency, both in the Press and in books about Japan, to associate closely two things which are not necessarily connected—Japanese expansion and emigration. For instance, the author of Contemporary Politics of the Far East, speaking of Japanese emigration to the United States, observes that “Japan required room for her excess [sic] population, and outlets for her expanding commerce,” thus linking the two questions together. And other writers have used similar language. The tendency referred to is probably due to the fact that, different as the two things are—one being simply a movement of population, the other an enlargement of territory—there has in some countries been a direct connection between them. In Japan this is not the case. There, both movements have taken place, but they have remained distinct and separate.
Japanese expansion stands in a category by itself. It has attracted attention for the reason that it was unexpected, the tendency of Oriental countries in modern times being to contract rather than extend their frontiers; from its rapidity and wide extent; and also because it has been the result either of successful wars or of a policy of aggrandisement justified, in Japanese opinion, by State necessity.
Far otherwise is it with Japanese emigration. What importance it possesses is derived not from the scale on which it has hitherto been conducted—which by comparison with other movements of the kind elsewhere is insignificant—but from the international difficulties it has produced, from its association in people’s minds with national expansion, and from fear of the dimensions it may assume in the future. Into the many considerations involved in Japanese emigration it is unnecessary to enter, the question being too wide to be discussed with advantage within the limits of these pages. A few remarks on the subject may, however, not be out of place.
The movement is usually held to be due to an excess of population. This, at least, is the view held by many writers. The increase of population in Japan has certainly been rapid. In 1872 the population was thirty-three millions. In 1916 it had risen to nearly fifty-six millions. Assuming the rate of increase to be maintained, the total population ten years hence should be well over sixty millions. In the course of sixty years, therefore, the population will have very nearly doubled itself. Striking as these figures are, the inference to be drawn from them is not necessarily that Japan is no longer able to support her people in their present numbers, and that some further outlet for her surplus population is, therefore, a necessity. While the rapid increase of population in a country may serve as a stimulus to emigration, it is not the sole or even the governing factor in the question. That other influences count for much is shown by what has taken place in Germany. Fifty years ago German statesmen had good ground for anxiety in the growing statistics of German emigration to the United States. Before the end of the century the movement was arrested, and soon afterwards ceased altogether. The two chief causes of this change were the increase of wealth and industrial development. Japanese emigration to certain countries may before long, for the same reasons, show a similar decline. The industrial development of Japan has kept pace with her progress in other respects. Her financial position has also changed. Instead of being a debtor to the world, as she was before the Great War, she has now become to an appreciable extent its creditor. Although, moreover, parts of Japan may be overcrowded, there still remain large areas in the northern islands, and in her newly acquired territories on the mainland, which are still sparsely populated. The pressure of increasing population alone does not seem likely to affect emigration in any marked degree in the near future. A cause more powerful, and in its operation more constant, may be found in the natural energy and enterprise of the people, stimulated, perhaps, by their release from the enforced isolation of the past. This supposition is supported by the wide distribution of Japanese emigration, and by the varied nature of the pursuits in which Japanese emigrants engage abroad. Though, as has already been observed, the Japanese have not, as yet, disclosed any special aptitude for colonization of the pioneering type, they are to be met with to-day in South America and elsewhere as workers on the land, and traders; in Australasia as pearl-fishers; in China, the Straits Settlements and Java, as well as in India and Australia, as traders and shopkeepers; in Manchuria as agricultural labourers and farmers, the Korean immigrants there having since the annexation of Korea become Japanese subjects; on the coasts of the northern and southern Pacific as fishermen; in America and Canada as traders, farmers, shopkeepers, market-gardeners and labourers; and in the Malay States as planters.
In its inception, it may be added, Japanese emigration took the form of indentured labour. The first labour emigrants went to Hawaii—not then annexed to America—under conditions regulated by the Japanese and Hawaiian Governments; and it was the surreptitious entry of many of these labourers into California from Hawaii that first aroused American hostility. The development of this branch of emigration—encouraged by agencies established for the purpose, but still subject, as before, to a certain measure of official supervision—would seem to be a mere question of supply and demand. The future of other emigration will depend on the degree of opposition, or competition, it encounters. So far, however, as the United States and Canada are concerned, the hostility it has evoked, and the willingness of the Japanese Government to co-operate in its restriction, suggest that the number of emigrants to those countries will gradually decline.
The immediate results of Japan’s success in the Russo-Japanese war were, as we have seen, the establishment of a protectorate over Korea and the negotiation of a Treaty with China, confirming certain provisions of the Treaty of Portsmouth concerning the transfer to her of the Russian lease of Port Arthur and of the southern portion of the Manchurian railway. Anxious to devote herself to the task of consolidating her new position in the Far East, Japan during the next few years was as busily engaged in negotiating treaties and agreements with other Powers as she had been in the fifteen years of treaty-making which followed the signature of Perry’s Treaty. In 1907 she concluded an arrangement for safeguarding peace in the Far East with France; a similar Agreement with Russia (in the form of a Convention), which, however, included a mutual pledge to respect the territorial integrity and the rights of each accruing from arrangements in force between it and China; a Commercial Treaty, a Fisheries Treaty and a Consular Protocol with the same country; an Agreement with China regarding the Simmintun, Mukden and Kirin Railway; and a fresh Treaty with Korea, which placed all administrative authority in the peninsula in the hands of the Japanese Resident-General. The following year witnessed the negotiation of an Arbitration Treaty with the United States, as well as an exchange of Notes between the same two Governments for the declared purpose of preserving the independence and territorial integrity of China. Two other arrangements testified to her treaty-making activity. One of these was another railway Agreement, made in 1907, with China. On this occasion the railway in question was the line now connecting Mukden with the port of Antung. It was presumably this fresh railway Agreement which induced the American Government to submit to other Powers interested in the Far East in the autumn of the same year a proposal for the neutralization of Manchurian railways. Far from being accepted by Russia and Japan—the two Powers chiefly concerned—the proposal only resulted in the conclusion in the following year of an Agreement by which each undertook to maintain, by joint action, if necessary, the existing status quo in Manchuria.
The other, of a very different character, was a Treaty with Korea annexing that country to Japan, which was signed at Seoul in August, 1910, by the Japanese Resident-General and the Korean Minister-Resident. The annexation of a country by Treaty in the absence of prior hostilities was an unusual procedure for which no precedent existed. No less remarkable than the method adopted was the fact that Article 8 of the instrument recorded with unconscious irony the consent of the Sovereign of the annexed State to the loss of its independence. This independence Japan had on several occasions announced her intention to respect in engagements entered into with other Powers—with China, with Russia and with Great Britain, as well as with Korea herself. Her annexation of Korea, being for this reason unexpected, met with much unfavourable criticism abroad. The course, however, that she had adopted at the outset of her wars with China and Russia of making free use of Korean territory showed that she was not disposed to let the wishes, or convenience, of the Korean people stand in the way of military operations. The protectorate she had already established over Korea in 1905, and her assumption of the control of administration in that country two years later, were also ominous indications of what might happen later. Some justification of the final act of annexation, singular as the method employed may have been, is to be found in the fact that the chronic disturbances in Korea, for which Japan was by no means solely responsible, had led to two wars, and that there was some blunt truth in the statement in the preamble to the Treaty, which declared one of the objects of annexation to be the preservation of peace in the Far East. It may even be said that an unprejudiced observer of the condition of affairs in Korea in the years previous to the establishment of the protectorate would have no hesitation in holding the view that Japanese administration of that country is preferable, even in the interests of the Koreans themselves, to the shocking misgovernment of the past.
The signature of the Treaty of Annexation was accompanied by a Declaration on the part of the Japanese Government announcing certain arrangements designed to lessen any irritation which the abrupt and arbitrary annulment of Korea’s treaties with other countries might occasion. These concessions to foreign feeling included matters relating to jurisdiction, Customs, tonnage duties and the coasting trade. Four years later the foreign settlements in Korea were abolished with the consent of the Powers concerned.
Her Revised Treaties with foreign Powers, which came into operation in 1899 for a term of twelve years, gave Japan the right to denounce them at the end of that period—in other words, to announce her intention to terminate them by giving the twelve months’ notice required. This notice was given by Japan to all the Treaty Powers in July, 1910. The liberty to conclude new treaties when the term of notice expired involved a point of essential importance, the recovery of tariff autonomy—the right, that is to say, to control her own tariff. Negotiations for the conclusion of new treaties were at once set on foot, the first to be concluded being that with the United States, which was signed in February of the following year; the second, the Treaty with Great Britain, which followed a few months later. The new treaties came into force in July of the same year, the period of operation being twelve years. The first public recognition of the increasing importance of Japan in the Far East occurred, as we have seen, when she was included in the list of Powers consulted by the American Government in 1899 in regard to the observance of the principle of the “open door” and “equal opportunity” in China. By her success in the Russo-Japanese war six years later she established her claim to be regarded as a leading Power in the Far East. Her position, nevertheless, was inferior in one respect to that of the Western States, for she had not the entire control of her tariff. With the conclusion of the new treaties, by which this last disability was removed, she took rank on a footing of complete equality with the great Powers of the world.