Search

Even though Japan fought on the side of the United States and the Allies in World War I, Western nations had been wary of the growth of Japanese power since the end of the nineteenth century. Between 1894 and 1910, Japan defeated both China and Russia in military conflicts and annexed the Korean peninsula. US leaders knew that Japan contained few natural resources and would likely look to expand its borders. In addition, during the 1920s, there was a powerful peace and disarmament movement in the United States that sought to avoid American involvement in another global conflict. However, when US secretary of state Charles Evans Hughes announced an international conference to address both the size of national navies and outside involvement in China and the Pacific region, the Japanese nationalist writer Kiyoshi Kawakami voiced his hesitations and concerns regarding the potential agreements that might result. His letter revealed the potent Western racism against the Japanese and other Asian peoples as well as Japan’s own justifications for its later actions during the 1930s and 1940s.

The Tokugawa shogunate was established by Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1603. After nearly 150 years of civil war, Ieyasu defeated all of his major rivals, consolidated central power, and began to take legal and administrative steps to ensure that power would remain in the hands of his family. To this end, disruptive influences like Toyotomi Hideyori, the son of Ieyasu’s predecessor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi , were eliminated. Legal codes like the Buke shohatto , a series of laws governing the samurai warrior houses, were also enacted in order to ensure the continued loyalty of the various feudal lords, or daimyos, to the Tokugawa family. Other elements in Japanese society proved harder to control, however.

Before the arrival of the Spanish galleon San Felipe in 1596, the ruling Japanese Lords, Oda Nobunaga and his successor Toyotomi Hideyoshi, had for the most part befriended the Catholic missionaries in Japan. The first Catholics to arrive in Japan in 1549 were the Jesuits, a Portuguese order. They inaugurated what is now known as the Christian Century in Japan (1549-1650). Nobunaga hoped to unify all the regions of Japan under his control and believed the Jesuits would serve as allies against the Buddhists, who opposed him. He also believed his relationship with the missionaries would facilitate trade with the Portuguese.

On September 8, 1951, delegates from the United States, Japan, and forty-six other nations met in San Francisco and signed the Treaty of Peace with Japan. World War II had ended in August, 1945, after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, Cold War concerns and fears of renewed Japanese aggression against developing nations delayed the writing of the official peace treaty.

The Japanese government faced a crisis of monumental proportions in 1940. The major Western powers—the United States and Great Britain—demanded that Japan abandon its claims on and occupation of China. The Americans and the British also insisted that Japan withdraw from French Indochina, a colony that the Japanese had seized from the Vichy government in France. Failure to comply, the Western governments announced, would result in the adoption of severe economic sanctions against the Japanese. At this point, control of the Japanese government lay in the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy. A surrender of the holdings that it had already taken in China and a withdrawal from French Indochina would be in complete contravention of the military’s long-range plans for expansion.

On November 25, 1936, Adolf Hitler announced that he had signed an anti-Comintern Pact with Japan. Foreign correspondent William L. Shirer, then in Berlin, recalled that Hitler claimed that the two countries had banded together to defend Western civilization. Meanwhile, Joseph Stalin’s Comintern (Communist International) was aiding Communist activities throughout the world, especially in those countries that seemed on the brink of revolution. Exploiting Western fears of Communist subversion, Hitler deflected attention away from his own aggressive actions at home and abroad, and by suggesting that he was helping to isolate the Soviet Union as a rogue nation, Hitler sought to obscure his efforts to promulgate German hegemony in Europe. The success of his efforts was at least partly dependent on whether he could convince the British that it was in their best interests to cooperate with Germany.

On December 29, 1934, the Japanese government formally renounced the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922. This action, which occurred after the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931 and the international reaction condemning it, was a further step along the road to Japan’s participation in World War II.

On September 18, 1931, the Japanese Kwantung Army stationed in Manchuria in northeastern China, acting without the knowledge or consent of its home government in Tokyo, blew up a section of a Japanese-owned railway just north of the city of Mukden (now known as Shenyang). Claiming that the act had been the work of local extremists, the military leadership then used this event in the months that followed as an excuse for assuming control of the region. A puppet regime was established, and in March of 1932, the area was renamed Manchukuo.

On February 24, 1933, Yōsuke Matsuoka, the chief Japanese delegate to the League of Nations, read a long and impassioned plea to the General Assembly in Geneva. He implored the League not to give sanction to its own Lytton Commission report, which criticized Japan’s actions in the so-called Mukden incident of 1931 and its subsequent actions in relation to the establishment of the Japanese puppet regime in Manchukuo in 1932. When the League ignored his plea and voted to sustain the report, Matsuoka turned on his heel, summoned his Japanese colleagues to follow, and stalked dramatically out of the meeting hall. In so doing, he visibly dramatized Japan’s eventual official withdrawal from the League and, some historians have argued, the beginning of World War II.

A general ban on Christianity in Japan was first introduced in 1587 by Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598), the de facto military ruler of Japan. Hideyoshi, and the early Tokugawa shoguns, suspected that Portuguese traders and missionaries were using conversions to Christianity as a means to extend their sphere of influence in the country. Restrictions sporadically continued and became more severe under the Tokugawa shogunate. By 1639 the Portuguese were permanently banned from Japan. A limited number of Chinese, Korean, and Dutch traders, restricted to the Nagasaki area, were the only foreigners allowed to reside in the country.