America Teaches, Japan Learns

JUNE 1932

VOLUME 149

BY K. K. KAWAKAMI

THE villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.— The Merchant of Venice, Act III, Scene 1

EXACTLY seventy-seven years ago (I am writing on March 31) Commodore Perry, having successfully negotiated the first treaty of amity Japan had ever conceded to any Occidental nation, presented the Shogun with a sewing machine, a miniature locomotive, and a case or so of spirituous matters.

The composition of the gift was significant. Wittingly or unwittingly, the American sailor-diplomat acquainted the Japanese with the useful instruments of civilization and what has since become one of America’s greatest social evils, with which neither Congress nor the President nor even the Wickersham Commission knows how to deal. The pity was that the Japanese accepted with avidity not only the first, but the second as well. They thought both the whiskey and the sewing machine, the brandy and the locomotive, part of the culture the American Government had been so eager to bestow upon them.

They went further and evinced even a greater interest in the American men-of-war, — the ‘ Black Ships,’ they called them, — whose broadsides, Perry had plainly intimated, would be trained upon the defenseless city of Yedo, now Tokyo, if the Shogun refused to sign the proffered treaty.

As time passed, these new pupils of America became increasingly curious and inquisitive about the ways of the West. Their sons crossed the Pacific by the legion to drink at the fountainhead of that marvelous civilization which had produced the Liberty Bell and slavery, Lincoln and carpetbaggers, universities and night clubs, missionaries and racketeers, battleships and chewing tobacco, the church and the saloon. Born imitators, these enterprising sons of Nippon, alas! Her daughters, too, put into practice what they learned abroad, both good and bad. Their story of the seven decades which followed the advent of Commodore Perry in Yedo Bay is a story of emulation such as has been told of no other nation.

Copyright 1932, by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.

I

These thoughts come to our minds as we ponder the unfortunate Chinese situation created by Japan’s armed intervention in Manchuria and at Shanghai, and its repercussions in America and Europe. Has not Japan in this respect, as in many others, cut a leaf out of the American history of intervention? Is she not putting into execution an American theory in accordance with the accepted American form? Has not the Honorable J. Reuben Clark, one-time Undersecretary of State, told us that ‘ no nation has with more frequency than the American Government used its military forces for the purpose of occupying temporarily parts of foreign countries in order to secure adequate safety and protection for its citizens and their properties ’ ?

Secretary Stimson, who, according to that surprisingly staid book of contemporary history, Washington Merry-GoRound, got from his clergyman uncle ‘a certain humanitarian and idealistic slant on life,’ is too charitable if he thinks that Japan’s romantic General Staff, if not her stolid Foreign Office, before launching the Manchurian intervention, had not burned a lot of midnight oil scrutinizing 1,200,000 or so fascinating words spoken or read at the Senate hearings at Washington on Haiti and Santo Domingo in 1922; or that Admiral Shiozawa, before bombarding the Woosung forts and landing his sailors at Shanghai, had not scanned the pages of Professor Nearing’s Dollar Diplomacy. Such classics are not good for the eyes of Japanese militarists or navalists, but they read them even as school children evade parental vigilance to read the Arabian Nights, ' unabridged and privately printed.’

True enough, the employment of American military forces abroad has never created such a great hullabaloo all over the world as has the Japanese intervention. Is this because the American soldier and the American diplomat are more clever or humane than the Japanese? Maybe, or maybe not. One thing is certain, that the countries against which American military forces have been used are all so small in area and population and are militarily so insignificant that it has never been much of a job to subjugate them. The result is that the world at large has never been given a chance to be excited by any of these periodic American operations.

I suggest that, next time America has occasion to intervene in the Caribbean or in Central America, she hire a Japanese admiral and his bluejackets and see what they will do. I am sure that they will do just as neat a job as any of their valiant American predecessors have ever done. But Mukden and Shanghai, with 2,000,000 square miles of land and 400,000,000 inhabitants behind them, present a totally different problem. Let American marines challenge the Nineteenth Route army at Chapei with inexhaustible reserves behind it, or let them run into Manchuria’s bandit-soldiers, 200,000 strong, and they will know what a real intervention is like, while Geneva and Mr. Stimson will lift their hands in holy horror.

But why should they be horrified? American interventions in Latin republics are exactly the same as the Japanese intervention in China both as to the principle invoked and as to the methods followed. If the American marines in Nicaragua or Santo Domingo failed to make their operations look like war, that was no fault of theirs, but the fault of Nicaragua or Santo Domingo for being so small and easy to conquer. By the same token, if the Japanese troops failed to keep their job in China from looking like war, neither were they to blame for it — the blame was on China for being so big and sprawling.

II

What, then, is the principle behind American interventions? Here is Mr. Coolidge’s answer: —

‘While it is well-established international law that we have no right to interfere in the purely domestic affairs of other nations in their dealings with their own citizens, it is equally well established that our Government has certain rights over and certain duties toward our own citizens and their property wherever they may be located. The person and property of a citizen are a part of the general domain of the nation, even when abroad. On the other hand, there is a distinct and binding obligation on the part of selfrespecting Governments to afford protection to the persons and property of their citizens wherever they may be. This is both because it has an interest in them and because it has an obligation toward them. It would seem to be perfectly obvious that if it is wrong to murder and pillage within the confines of the United States, it is equally wrong outside our borders. The fundamental laws of justice are universal in their application. These rights go with the citizen. Wherever he goes, these duties of our Government must follow him.’

These words were spoken in 1927, when the League of Nations was eight years old. A year later, when the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact was about to be concluded, Mr. Charles Evans Hughes, now Chief Justice, speaking at Princeton University, declared that ‘there is no disposition on our part to forgo our right to protect our nationals when their lives and property are imperiled because the sovereign power for the time being and in certain districts cannot be exercised and there is no government to afford protection.’ He said that ‘no President of the United States, and no Secretary of State, of any party, or of any political views, learning that the lives and property of our citizens were in immediate danger in such a case, would care to assume the personal responsibility of withholding the protection which he was in a position immediately to give. If he did, and the event accorded with the anticipation, he would be condemned throughout the land.’

League or no League, Peace Pact or no Peace Pact, the United States does not mean to surrender this right of intervention for self-defense or self-protection. One knows how easy it always is to conjure up a plea of self-defense, and Mr. Kellogg says that each nation has a right to determine for itself what constitutes self-defense. Mr. Root, pro-League and pro-World Court, says that ‘ the exercise of the right of self-protection may, and frequently does, extend in its effect beyond the limits of the territorial jurisdiction of the state exercising it. The strongest example probably would be the mobilization of an army by another power immediately across the frontier. Every act done by the other power may be within its own territory. Yet the country threatened by this state of affairs is justified in protecting itself by immediate war.’

Nor should it be assumed that this doctrine propounded by Messrs. Coolidge, Root, and Hughes is the patented monopoly of the ‘imperialistic’ Republicans, for the doctrine has also been faithfully adhered to by Democratic administrations. The Japanese generals and admirals, popping guns in Manchuria or on the Yangtze River, are but imitators of their American fellows trained in that doctrine. If imitation be the highest form of compliment, General Honjo and Admiral Shiozawa are deserving of plaudits from this side of the Pacific.

III

In 1910 the late Colonel Roosevelt blandly declared, ‘I took the Canal Zone and let the Congress debate, and while the debate goes on, the Canal does also.’

A little later Mr. Roosevelt, by way of amplification, said, ‘Unless I had acted exactly as I did act, there would now be no Panama Canal. It is folly to assert devotion to an end, and at the same time to condemn the only means by which the end can be achieved.’

The ‘Rough Rider’ President had the courage and honesty to admit what others would gloss over or whitewash. It can hardly be denied that the American Government caused the secession of Panama so that it could acquire the Canal Zone, and might also have at Panama City an administration more amenable to its wishes than the Government at Bogotá had been.

The historic case takes on a fresh interest at this time if we consider it along with what has happened in Manchuria. Panama seceded from Colombia under the ægis of American warships and American marines. Manchuria is now in the course of seceding from China under the protection of the Japanese military. In either case the driving force behind the secession is the same — America wanted to dig the Canal, and Japan wants to safeguard Port Arthur and Dairen and the South Manchuria Railway. Perhaps our superor pseudo-patriots would call me to the mat for drawing this sacrilegious comparison, for they believe that our Manchurian rights are a result of a holy crusade against Tsarist militarism, entailing an appalling sacrifice of a hundred thousand lives and a billion dollars. Furthermore, our going into Manchuria, because of our lack of raw material and our overpopulation at home, is a matter of life or death, while American expansion is more or less a matter of luxury. But this hard-luck story of the Japanese may well be dismissed as old propaganda stuff.

A more obvious flaw in the analogy lies in the fact that Colombia is a small nation whose military prowess is negligible, while China is a vast country, whose chaotic condition has made it all the more unmanageable. The result is that while the amputation of Panama was accomplished quickly, and almost painlessly, the independence of Manchuria is a laborious process and requires a tortuous course. I wonder if our generals and statesmen who have had anything to do with the birth of the new Manchurian ‘Republic’ would ever be tempted to emulate Mr. Roosevelt and declare, ‘We took Manchuria.’ I hope not. I wish that they would rather be reasonably hypocritical, and take to heart these sage words from Señor Calderón, a Peruvian diplomat: —

‘Mr. Roosevelt cynically says, “I took Panama.” He believes in the efficacy of the “big stick” in the relations between the two Americas. He is scarcely a psychologist in these matters. It is far easier to get what one wants from these Latin democracies through flattering proposals, through courteous replies, through a delicate, nicely shaded diplomacy.’

IV

What America has done in Santo Domingo, in Haiti, in Nicaragua, in Cuba, in Hawaii, in Mexico, and in the Philippines, is a monotonous repetition of the same story with slight variation. In all these countries the motive behind her ‘gunboat diplomacy,’ if we are to believe Manuel Ugarte or Scott Nearing, is to give American capital new fields of investment or to secure new bases of operation for the American navy, or often both. In the case of Nicaragua there is one phase of American diplomacy which should particularly commend itself to the sympathetic consideration of our Foreign Office. Indeed, Japan is, apparently, already following the American example by hinting the need of revising the Washington Nine-Power Treaty, or, what is more true to form, by trying to slip out of it by the back door. Let us see how cleverly America slipped out of the most important of her obligations in Nicaragua.

In 1907 there was organized the Central American Court of Justice, a sort of arbitration tribunal. Its inception was a serious dispute between Nicaragua, which had agreed to let the United States build a canal through her territory, and the other Central American republics which were vitally affected by that project and were naturally opposed to it. The dispute had already caused revolutions within some of the affected states and hostilities between them. By the summer of 1907 a general war, involving all five of the republics, had become imminent. Then President Roosevelt invited to Washington delegates of the five states and caused them to sign an agreement creating the Central American Court of Justice, composed of five members, one from each nation, to which all international disagreements in Central America were to be submitted for final judgment. The United States was the first to hail this new tribunal as an inspiring example of international justice.

Right here it is essential to remember that the American Government, though indisputably the father of the above agreement, declined to be a signatory to it. By not signing the pact, America left herself free to invoke the Court when convenient, or to ignore, even destroy it should its decisions prove adverse to her. As a matter of fact, she did appeal to the Court at various times. In all respects but name the United States was a party to the agreement which had brought the Court into existence. Morally, at any rate, she was bound to respect the Court and its decisions. And yet, when a crucial moment came, the American Government caused Nicaragua to reject the most important judgment rendered by the Court and thus brought about the dissolution of that institution, America’s own child.

That decision related to the BryanChamorro Treaty of 1916, by which America acquired the right to build a trans-Nicaraguan canal, as well as the Great Corn and Little Corn islands and a naval base in the Gulf of Fonseca. The treaty caused much alarm in and among Costa Rica, Salvador, and Honduras. The naval-base provisions were particularly objectionable. Naturally the three states appealed to the Central American Court of Justice, contending that the treaty violated their rights. The contention was sustained by the Court, but the United States and her puppet, Nicaragua, refused to abide by the decision, which of course sounded the knell of the Court. This shows that when a vital interest is at stake America has no intention of permitting international courts and arbitrations to stand in her way. And that attitude is exactly what Japan seems to be emulating. Just as the United States set up puppet governments in Panama and in Nicaragua to secure canals, so Japan has assisted in the organization of a new government in Manchuria to hold there certain rights which she claims are essential to her existence, both political and economic.

One cannot but notice a striking similarity between the inception of the Manchurian ‘war’ (still called an ‘armed intervention’ by the Japanese) and that of the Spanish-American War. Both were occasioned by an explosion, but in neither case was the cause of the explosion clear. At Havana, in February 1898, the American battleship Maine was blown to pieces. ‘There was no evidence whatever that anyone connected with the exercise of Spanish authority in Cuba had had so much as guilty knowledge of the plans made to destroy the Maine.’ Yet the incident precipitated the war — ‘not because a vessel of the American Navy had been destroyed in a port of Spain, but because opinion leaped, upon the provocation of that tragic incident, from quiet inquiry to hot impatience with regard to all ugly Cuban business.’

Every one of these words written by Woodrow Wilson may, with slight change, be applied to the incident at Mukden which set a spark to the inflammable material of animosity and hatred which had been accumulating for years. On the night of September 18 last, at a point near Mukden, the tracks of the South Manchuria Railway were torn up by a mysterious explosion. The Japanese railway guards who hurried to the scene saw a band of Chinese soldiers scurrying toward their barracks near by. Shots were exchanged, and, before night had lifted, the ‘war’ was on. The Japanese moved swiftly and within a few days occupied all the strategic towns along their railways and extended their operations against the bandits and the regulars, 200,000 strong, in certain areas contiguous to the railway zone.

In the Cuban war America had gone the Japanese one better by occupying the Philippines, many thousands of miles away from the scene of the explosion — a country where she had no established interests, material or otherwise. To our militarists the American seizure of the Philippines was a master stroke of military strategy and diplomacy combined. They even think that America’s real objective in the Spanish War was not Cuba but the Philippines, which she had long coveted as the base of operations necessary to extend her interest and influence in the Far East, especially in China. Had not even Commodore Perry recommended to his Government occupation of certain Japanese islands for the same purpose? When the Filipinos resisted, America subjugated them with guns and ‘water cure’ as well as Bibles and schoolhouses.

And as for Cuba, the United States fought the Spanish War to put an end to the ‘insufferable condition’ which Spanish misrule had foisted upon the island. That is precisely what the Japanese have been saying about Manchuria and its rapacious war lords. In the settlement which followed the establishment of the Cuban Republic, the United States imposed a treaty upon the new state giving America the right to intervene for the preservation of the republic’s independence and for the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty. There are also other provisions restricting Cuba’s liberty to enter into treaties with other powers tending to impair her independence, and for the contracting of debts. The United States thus holds a special position in Cuba that has justified her in intervening on various occasions for the maintenance of law and order. Again this American precedent is now being faithfully followed by the Japanese in liquidating the Manchurian situation.

V

We have seen that Mr. Bryan foisted upon the Nicaraguan Government, set up to do America’s bidding, a treaty which he knew other Central American states would not approve. We have also seen that Mr. Wilson was virtually responsible for the dissolution of the Central American Court of Justice when the Court had the temerity to hand down a decision distasteful to America. This shows that the Republican Party has no exclusive claim to the halo of ‘imperialism.’ It is indeed the irony of fate that two of the most serious military interventions undertaken by the United States took place under the idealistic Wilson administration. Perhaps it is well to recall them at this time in connection with the Manchurian situation.

In 1914 the Mexican authorities arrested American sailors loading gasoline on an American warship in a forbidden military zone at Tampico. Although the men were immediately released and an apology was forthcoming from the Mexican General in charge, the American Admiral gave him a twenty-four-hour ultimatum demanding punishment of the officer who made the arrest and a 24-gun salute to the American flag. General Huerta, the Mexican President, refused to punish the officer unless it was proved by an investigating committee that he had violated international law, and proposed to submit the question to the arbitration of The Hague. The proposal was rejected by the United States. A few days afterward another minor interference, this time with an American mail orderly, occurred in Vera Cruz, and President Wilson invoked this and the Tampico incident as a reason for asking Congress to approve the use of ‘ the armed forces of the United States in such ways and to such an extent as may be necessary to obtain from General Huerta and his adherents the fullest recognition of the rights and dignity of the United States.’

The next day a German steamer with a cargo of arms for the Mexican Government arrived at Vera Cruz, whereupon Mr. Wilson ordered Admiral Mayo to ‘take Vera Cruz at once.’ President Wilson was not justified in international law in taking this summary action, but relations between the two countries had reached the point where the rights and dignity of the United States were being set at naught, and drastic action became necessary to teach Mexico a lesson.

Again, in 1916, President Wilson launched an armed expedition across the Mexican border. For some time Mexico had been in a state of anarchy, jeopardizing American lives and property. President Wilson lost patience and sent a large army under General Pershing across the border. When the Mexican Government protested, Secretary Lansing replied: —

‘For three years the Mexican Republic has been torn with civil strife. The lives of Americans and other aliens have been sacrificed, vast properties developed by American capital and enterprise have been destroyed or rendered non-productive, bandits have been permitted to roam at will and to seize, without punishment or effective attempt at punishment, the property of Americans, while the lives of citizens of the United States who ventured to remain in Mexico or to return there to protect their interests have been taken, in some cases barbarously taken, and the murderers have neither been apprehended nor brought to justice.’

To back up this note President Wilson called for an army of ‘not less than 50,000 men.’ The South American republics offered their good offices for mediation, but Mr. Wilson insisted that the dispute was one to be adjusted between the parties concerned, and them only, permitting no interposition of any third party. How similar the American contention to the Japanese argument on the Manchurian imbroglio! America rejected Huerta’s proposal to invoke the arbitration of The Hague. So does Japan reject China’s similar proposal. America rejected all proffered mediations by third parties. So does Japan insist upon ‘direct negotiations’ with China.

VI

Japan now threatens to follow about the only American example she has so far hesitated to emulate, and that is to get away from the orbit of the League of Nations. Entangled by the League, she now fully understands and sympathizes with the isolationist policy of America. She knows that what scares Washington away from Geneva is not ‘European entanglement,’ but ‘Iberian entanglement.’ America fears, and rightly, that once she is in the League the Iberian republics would miss no opportunity to air before the whole world their multitudinous grievances against her. More than once they have made it plain before the League that the Monroe Doctrine is America’s private idea, which they are under no obligation to recognize. Even now they are scolding Japan at Geneva with an eye upon Washington and its Latin American policy, rather than upon Tokyo and its Chinese venture. They have made Japan the scapegoat for the sins of the North American eagle.

Tokyo and Washington, then, are in the same boat, and Tokyo is dismayed by Washington’s apparent lack of heart. Perhaps America would rather see Japan commit herself to the mercy of the waves! But Washington is in for disillusionment if it fancies that Japan will seek her resting place in Davy Jones’s locker. Quite a few of her leaders, not excepting even her militarists, still keep their heads. And, what is equally important, she still has friends among the big powers of Europe, who are willing to ‘play ball’ with her. These powers have a certain sympathy for Japan, for they too have settlements, railways, mines, as well as missionaries and mission schools, to protect in China. They are frankly realistic and hard-boiled. They have no pretensions to altruism. Admonish Japan they do, in public, for they must consider the ‘face’ of the small nations who look upon Geneva as a debating society where they may ‘lecture’ the big powers to their hearts’ content. They must also appear to dance to the flute of the American Government, which holds the purse strings of Europe. Privately, however, these big powers feel that Japan is fighting for them as much as for herself.

Take Shanghai, for example. For some years before the Japanese intervention the foreign community there had increasingly been apprehensive as to its ability to hold its own in the face of growing Nationalist onslaughts against the foreign settlement and its extraterritorial jurisdiction. Many had been alarmed, and professed an intention to liquidate their interests and go home rather than submit to native rule. Now the Japanese started just the thing the foreign community at Shanghai had hoped might be started somehow. Whatever may be the unhappy effects of this intervention upon Japan herself and her own interests in China, the other Great Powers, including America, will reap a material benefit in that the intervention will defer to the distant future the abolition of extraterritoriality and the rendition of the foreign settlements. Unwittingly Japan has made herself the cat’s-paw of the interested powers. That is why the big powers of Europe, while publicly scolding her, have been privately patting her on the back.

Meanwhile the American Government, idealistic, liberal, and altruistic, stands before the whole world as the greatest and sincerest guardian of China. That, however, does not mean that it will decline to share in whatever benefits may be conferred upon the other nations as a result of the Japanese misadventure. Once America denounced the ‘opium war’ and the British nation which started it, but she accepted with alacrity the benefits of the famous Nanking Treaty, the child of that (to her) unholy war. In 1901 Japan asked America, as well as Great Britain and Germany, to help her in checking the Russian absorption of Manchuria. ‘Nothing doing’ was America’s reply, except that she would continue writing notes of protest to the Tsar. So the Mikado fought the Tsar single-handed, and forced open the Manchurian doors slammed and bolted by Russia. Of course the United States availed herself of the benefits of the new open door, with the result that her Manchurian trade has increased from almost nothing to something like twenty-eight million dollars a year.

Now America refuses to recognize the new régime in Manchuria because she thinks it a puppet of Tokyo. But, recognition or no recognition, America will be among the first to claim advantage of a Manchuria regenerated by the abolition of its time-honored war lords and banditry and the establishment of a sound currency and credit system. And who shall say that such a Manchuria will never appear?

After all, idealism, like honesty, is the best policy!