Italy was a marginal member of the great power system in 1890, but Japan wasn’t even in the club. For centuries it had been ruled by a decentralized feudal oligarchy consisting of territorial lords (daimyo) and an aristocratic caste of warriors (samurai). Hampered by the absence of natural resources and by a mountainous terrain that left only 20percent of its land suitable for cultivation, Japan lacked all of the customary prerequisites for economic development. Isolated from the rest of the world by a complex language with no close relatives and an intense consciousness of cultural uniqueness, the Japanese people remained inward-looking and resistant to foreign influences well into the second half of the nineteenth century. For all these reasons, Japan seemed destined to remain politically immature, economically back-ward, and militarily important in world power terms. Yet within two generations it had become a major player in the international politics of Far East.
The
cause of this transformation, effected by the Meiji Restoration from 1868
onward, was the determination of influential members of the Japanese elite to
avoid being dominated and colonized by the west, as seemed to be happening
elsewhere in Asia, even if the reform measures to be taken involved the
scrapping of the feudal order and the bitter opposition on the samurai clans. Japan
had to be modernized not because individual entrepreneurs wished it, but
because the state needed it. After the early opposition had been crushed,
modernization proceeded with a dirigisme and commitment which makes the efforts
of Colbert or Frederick the Great pale by comparison. A new constitution, based
upon the Prusso-German model, was established. The legal system was reformed. The
educational system was vastly expanded, so that the country achieved an
exceptionally high literacy rate. The calendar was changed. Dress was changed. A
modern banking system was evolved. Experts were brought in from Britain’s Royal
Navy to advise upon the creation of an up-to-date Japanese fleet, and from the
Prussian general staff to assist in the modernization of the army. Japanese
officers were sent to western military and naval academies; modern weapons were
purchased from abroad, although a native armaments industry was also established.
The state encouraged the creation of a railway network, telegraphs, and
shipping lines; it worked in conjunction with emerging Japanese entrepreneurs
to develop heavy industry, iron, steel, and shipbuilding, as well as to
modernize textile production. Government subsidies were employed to benefit
exporters, to especially of silk and textiles, soared. Behind all this lay the
impressive political commitment to realize the national slogan Fukoku kyohei
(rich country, with strong army). For the Japanese economic power and
military/naval power went hand in hand.
But
all this took time and the handicaps remained severe. Although the urban
population more than doubled between 1890 and 1913, numbers engaged on the land
remained about the same. Even on the eve of the First World War, over
three-fifth of the Japanese population was engaged in agriculture, forestry,
and fishing; and despite all the many improvements in farming techniques, the
mountainous countryside and the small size of most holdings prevented an
agricultural revolution on say, the British model. With such a bottom heavy
agricultural base, all comparisons of Japan’s industrial potential or of per
capita levels of industrialization were bound to show it at or close to the
lower end of the Great Power lists (see Tables 14 and 17 above). While its
pre-1914 industrial spurt can clearly be detected in the large rise of its
energy consumption from modern fuels and in the increase in its share of world
manufacturing production, it was still deficient in many other areas. Its iron
and steel output was small, and it relied heavily upon imports. In the same
way, although its shipbuilding industry was greatly expanded, it still some
ordered some warship elsewhere. It also was very short of capital, needing to
borrow increasing amounts from abroad but never having enough to invest in
industry, in infrastructure, and in the armed services. Economically, it had
performed miracles to become the only nonwestern state to go through an
industrial revolution in the age of high imperialism; yet still remained,
compared to Britain, the United States, and Germany, a industrial and financial
lightweight.
Two
further factors, however, aided Japan’s rise to Great Power status and help to
explain why it surpassed, for example, Italy. The first was geographical
isolation. The nearby continental shore was held by nothing more threatening
than the decaying Chinese Empire. And while China, Manchuria, and (even more
alarming) Korea might fall into the hands of another Great Power, geography had
placed Japan far closer to those lands than any one of the other imperialists
states-as Russia was to find to its discomfort when it tried to supply an army
along six thousand miles of railway in 1904-1905, and as the British and American
navies were to discover several decades later as they wrestled with logistical
problems involved in the relief of the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Malaya. Assuming
a steady Japanese growth in East Asia, it would only be by the most extreme
endeavors that any other major state could prevent Japan from becoming the
predominant power there in the course of time.
The
second factor was moral. It seems indisputable that the strong Japanese sense
of cultural uniqueness, the traditions of emperor worship and veneration of the
state, the samurai ethos of military honor and valor, the emphasis upon discipline
and fortitude, produced a political culture at once fiercely patriotic an
unlikely to be deterred by sacrifices and reinforced the Japanese impulses to
expand into Greater Asia, for strategical security as well as market and raw
materials. This was reflected in the successful military and naval campaigning
against China in 1894, when those two countries quarreled over their claims in
Korea. On land and sea, the better-equipped Japanese forces seemed driven by a
will to succeed. At the end of that war, the threats of the triple intervention
by Russia, France, and Germany compelled an embittered Japanese government to
withdraw its claims to Port Arthur and Liaotung Peninsula, but that merely
increased Tokyo’s determination to try again later. Few, if any, in the
government dissented from Baron Hayashi’s grim conclusion.
If new warships are considered necessary we must, at any cost, build
them: if the organization of our army is inadequate we must start rectifying it
from now; if need be, our entire military system must be changed…
At
present Japan must keep calm and sit tight, so as to lull suspicious nurtured
against her; during this time the foundations of national power must be
consolidated; and we must watch and wait for the opportunity in the Orient that
will surely come one day. When this day arrives, Japan will decide her own fate…
Its
time for revenge came ten years later, when its Korean and Manchurian ambitions
clashed with those of czarist Russia. While naval experts were impressed by
Admiral Togo’s fleet when it destroyed the Russian ships at the decisive battle
of Tsushima, it was the general bearing of Japanese society which struck other
observers. The surprise strike at Port Arthur (a habit begun in the 1894 China
conflict, and revived in 1941) was applauded in the West, as was enthusiasm of
Japanese nationalist opinion for an outright victory, whatever the cost. More
remarkable still seemed the performance of Japan’s officers and men in the land
battles around Port Arthur and Mukden, where ten of thousands of soldiers were
lost as they charged across minefields, over barbed wire, and through a hail of
machine-gun fire before conquering the Russian trenches. The samurai spirit, it
seemed, could secure battlefield victories with the bayonet even in the age of
mass industrialized warfare. If, as all the contemporary military experts
concluded, morale and discipline were still vital prerequisites of national
power, Japan was rich in those resources.
Even
then, however, Japan was not a full-fledged Great Power. Japan had been fortunate
to have fought an even more backward China and czarist Russia which was
military top-heavy and disadvantaged by the immense distance between St.
Petersburg and the Far East. Further more, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902
had allowed it to fight on its home ground without interference from third
powers. Its navy had relied upon British-built battleships, its army upon Krupp
guns. Most important of all, it had found the immense costs of the war
impossible to finance from its own resources and yet had been able to rely upon
loans floated in the United states and Britain. As it turned out, Japan was
close to bankruptcy by the end of 1905, when the peace negotiations with Russia
got under way. That may not have been able to rely upon loans floated in the
United States and Britain. As it turned out, Japan was close to bankruptcy by
the end of 1905, when the peace negotiations with Russia got under way. The may
not have been obvious to the Tokyo public, Japan’s armed forces glorified and
admired, its economy able to recover, and its status as a Great Power(albeit a regional
one) admitted in the Far East without considering its response; but whether it
could expand further without provoking reaction from the more established Great
Powers was not all clear.
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
ISBN-10: 0679720197
ISBN-13: 978-0679720195
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
ISBN-10: 0679720197
ISBN-13: 978-0679720195
2012年撮影
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