Japan at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919: A Centennial

Japan Review Vol.3 No.1 Summer 2019

Japan at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919: A Centennial Reection

Japan at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919:

A Centennial Reection*

Naoko Shimazu**

his year marks the centenary of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, and this

symposium is one of the events to commemorate the occasion in France. This short

piece revisits the Japanese peace conference policy in the light of its involvement in

the First world War.

During the First World War, Japan was engaged in three main military expeditions. First,

Japan declared war on Germany on 23 August 1914, which resulted in the joint expedition with

the local British force to occupy the German concessions on the Shandong Peninsula, to capture

Qingdao where the German East Asiatic Squadron, the largest concentration of German navy

outside of Europe, was based.

The Jiaozhou (Kiaochow) Bay by 1909 had become the second

largest commercial port in China after Tianjin. In this battle, Japan mobilised nearly 52,000 troops,

* This article is based on a presentation made by the author at the symposium Asia and Europe from

the Versailles Treaty to the Present: The Legacies of Post War-Endings and Peace-making between

Constraints and Forward Looking held by JIIA and FRS (Foundation for Strategic Research)on Jan. 28,

2019.

** Naoko Shimazu DPhil (Oxon), FRHist.S, is Professor of Humanities (History) and Associate Dean

of Faculty at Yale-NUS College, and Professor at the Asia Research Institute, National University of

Singapore.

Hew Strachan, The First World War, Vol.I: To Arms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 447.

Abstract

The military engagements during the First World War earned Japan a seat as a victor at

the Paris Peace Conference, as the fifth great power, after the United States (as the first

superpower), Britain, France, and Italy. At the peace conference, Japan made three peace

demands. The rst two were territorial in nature. The racial equality proposal

—

the third

Japanese peace term became the most hotly debated peace topic in Japanese public debate

during the peace conference in 1919. What is important to remember is that racial politics

played a significant part in some of the politico-military calculations made by the Allied

powers. The Japanese sensitivity to what they regarded as discriminatory treatment of Japan

and Japanese nationals surfaced as a formal peace term at the Paris Peace Conference,

and became known as the racial equality proposal. In reecting on the issues raised by the

Japanese at the Paris Peace Conference on its centenary, one is struck by the continuity in

terms of the issues that matter such as racial politics and immigration in international

relations today. Moreover, the continued relevance also of the nation-state as the basic unit

of international relations in the early twenty-rst century global affairs remains strong, in

spite of the rapid increase in many non-state actors. No doubt, we continue to deepen our

historical understanding of the Paris Peace Conference, hopefully, in ways which may not

have been imaginable hitherto.

Naoko Shimazu

Japan Review Vol.3 No.1 Summer 2019

Britain 870 troops, in addition to about 450 Indian troops.

Although it may have appeared like a

neat little manoeuvring to gain a foothold in China on the peninsula in proximity to Tianjin and

Beijing, the Japanese move backred later at the peace conference when Japan s successful claim

to have the German rights in Shandong transferred to Japan, caused a diplomatic furore with the

United States and China. This came as a complete surprise to the Japanese who expected the

transfer to be conferred without a question based on the secret agreements signed with Britain,

France, Italy and Russia before the Chinese entered war in August 1917. Ultimately China refused

to sign the treaty, and this whole episode ignites the May Fourth Movement in China. In the end,

Japan had agreed to return Shandong to China at the Washington Conferences of 1921–1922.

The second military expedition pertained to the Japanese occupation of the German islands

in Micronesia (Marshalls, Carolines, and Marianas) the north of the equator, which the Japanese

Second South Seas Squadron had managed to complete by 14 October 1914. The outbreak of the

war had set off a mini-scramble for German territories in the Pacic and in this New Zealand

had led the way by occupying Samoa by 30 August, followed by the Australian occupation of

German New Guinea and the Solomon Islands by 15 September. On the surface, the Japanese

conquest of the Micronesian Islands might have come across as a costly enterprise, which

primarily helped to boost Japan s fragile ego as the newest great power, a belated Japanese bid

for the late nineteenth-century Western scramble for the Pacic of the late 1890s. Nevertheless,

from the geopolitical point of view, the success of this naval expedition could be considered as the

most signicant gain by Japan during the war, because it helped to substantiate the geopolitical

imaginations of Japan s future as a significant Pacific power, in the way that Japan s previous

imperial wars had not been able to do. The occupation of the Micronesian Islands, given as class

C mandates at the Paris Peace Conference, had turned the Japanese presence in the Central

Pacic as a semi-permanent geopolitical reality. If one looks as the map of the Asia-Pacic, one can

see the Arc of the Japanese empire coming substantially down into the Central Pacic, stopping

just at the equator, above Papua New Guinea. It does not require a great leap of imagination to see

that the perimeter defence of Japan s wartime empire in the rst one hundred days after the Pearl

Harbor, followed that same Arc except that it was expanded by being pushed landwards into the

Southeast Asian territories of the British, French and Dutch colonial empires.

Moreover, our understanding of the significance of the Japanese occupation of Micronesia

is enhanced through adopting a global historical perspective. In Japanese historiography, the

Japanese occupation of the Micronesian islands is generally treated as a minor colonial issue

relative to the larger Taiwan, Korea and the Liaodong Peninsula, with the exception of naval

history. Recent scholarship has focused on Micronesia as part of Japan s League of Nations

diplomacy.

What may have appeared to be a symbolic expansion into the southern Pacic from

the Japanese perspective, came to assume much graver practical implications for the British

Dominions, and the defence of the British Empire in the post-1919 world.

According to the

Australian House of Representatives debate on the peace treaty in September 1919: Australia has

taken its frontiers northward to Rabaul, but the frontiers of Japan has been brought southward

Yamamuro Shin ichi, Fukugosenso to soryokusen no danso: Nihon ni totteno daiichiji sekai taisen (Kyoto:

Jinbun shoin, 2011), 57.

Bruce A. Elleman, Wilson and China: A Revised History of the Shandong Question (New York: M. E.

Sharpe, 2002) sheds new light on the complex issue of the Shandong Question, which questions the

orthodox interpretation of the wronged China view.

T matsu Haruo, Nihon teikoku to inin t chi: Nany gunt o meguru kokusai seiji, 1914-1947 (Nagoya:

Nagoya daigaku shuppankai, 2011).

For instance, Hew Strachan, The First World War, Vol.1: To Arms (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2001), 481-483.

Japan Review Vol.3 No.1 Summer 2019

Japan at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919: A Centennial Reection

3,000 miles to the equator, until their front door and our backdoor almost adjoin.

Arguably,

therefore, the signicance of the Japanese naval expansion southward was felt most keenly, not

by the Japanese themselves, but Australia and New Zealand whose heightened sense of threat

contributed to hardening the perception of Japan s new role as a Pacic power.

Ultimately, the

Japanese expansion into the Pacic during the First World War can be regarded as setting out a

preliminary blueprint for what later became the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

The third military expedition was politically and diplomatically the most fraught, on the

question of a joint Allied expedition to Siberia in 1918. Japan had been asked to send 7,000 troops

to make up the Allied intervention, and responded to it by mobilizing 73,000 troops. The Japanese

decision took place under a hawkish prime minister, General Terauchi, whose government falled

due to the Rice Riots of 1918, only to be replaced by the moderate, pro-Western prime minister,

Takashi Hara. (The Japanese navy also sent warships to the Mediterranean to defend Allied

shipping in 1917.) The Siberian troop deployment, like the Shandong occupation, became a thorn

in the Allied camp.

The military engagements above earned Japan a seat as a victor at the Paris Peace

Conference, as the fifth great power, after the United States (as the first superpower), Britain,

France, and Italy in that order of hierarchy of great powers. The story of Japan s participation at

the peace conference underlines difculties the Japanese faced in having to operate for the rst

time as a major power in a multilateral framework of international diplomacy.

At the peace conference, Japan made three peace demands. The first two were territorial

in nature, emanating from the military victories made against the former German concessions

and territories held in Shandong and the Central Pacic. The Japanese government had signed

a series of secret treaties in 1917 with the key states to secure these territories, and hence, was

taken aback when the question of the retrocession of Shandong to China was raised at the peace

conference. In some sense, the cost to Japan for obtaining Shandong at Paris, albeit temporarily,

was the racial equality proposal the third Japanese peace term, which became the most hotly

debated peace topic in Japanese public debate during the peace conference in 1919. The failure

of the racial equality proposal became symbolic of the failure or the weakness of Japanese peace

diplomacy, and incurred a substantial cost to the Foreign Ministry in terms of its reputation.

Strictly speaking, however, foreign policy decision-making was not made in the Foreign Ministry

at the time as it had been taken over by a transcendental body called the Diplomatic Advisory

Council, in which the Foreign Ministry ofcials played a relatively minor role.

What is important to remember is that racial politics played a significant part in some of

the politico-military calculations made by the Allied powers. Japan as the only non-white great

power on the Allied side, was distrusted in particular by the United States. Racial tensions

particularly between Japan and the United States reached its peak in 1913 with the passing of the

Californian Alien Land Law. In fact, the tension was such that President Wilson had discussed

with the cabinet the mobilisation of the eet in the Pacic in preparation for a possible conict

against Japan.

Although Britain had to contend with anti-Japanese sentiment expressed by its

Dominions, especially Australia, it did not overshadow the British military decisions vis-à-vis the

Japanese during the First World War. In fact, Britain was often put in an awkward position having

to appease the stringent anti-Japanese sentiment held by the Americans which derived not only

Between the wars, Chapter 1, http://static.awm.gov.au/images/collection/pdf/RCDIG1070314--1-.

PDF, accessed 5 January 2014.

Neville Meaney, Australia and World Crisis, 1914-1923: A History of Australian Defence and Foreign

Policy 1901-23: Volume 2 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009).

Naoko Shimazu, Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (London: Routledge,

1998), 76. This book still stands as the most comprehensive treatment of Japan s participation at the

Paris Peace Conference, and in particular, the racial equality proposal, to date.

Naoko Shimazu

Japan Review Vol.3 No.1 Summer 2019

from their distrust of the Japanese, but also from their support of the newly found Young China.

Moreover, the highly expansionist Twenty-One Demands of 1915 which attempted to turn China

into a semi-colony of Japan, had exacerbated the bad will which had already existed between

Japan and the United States. Therefore, even with regards to the Siberian intervention, the

American opposition to the Japanese troop deployment which had been pressed by both Britain

and France, was not only due to geopolitical concerns, namely that the Japanese troops might use

this as a pretext to station troops in the region east of Lake Baikal. But, I have argued elsewhere

that the American government was principally concerned about the effects of Japanese troop

deployment on American domestic opinion seeing that it had been deeply sensitised with

the anti-Japanese immigration policy as well as by the Twenty-One Demands of 1915 against

China.

Sir William Wiseman summed up the underlying American sentiment: The American

hatred of all yellow races is thinly, if at all, disguised. Any thought of the yellows being brought

in to redress the balance of the whites is repugnant to them, especially when it may involve the

consequent loss of commercial advantages in the new and lucrative mark of East Russia.

In fact,

the Japanese sensitivity to what they regarded as discriminatory treatment of Japan and Japanese

nationals surfaced as a formal peace term at the Paris Peace Conference, and became known as

the racial equality proposal as mentioned above.

In reflecting on the issues raised by the Japanese at the Paris Peace Conference on its

centenary, one is struck by the continuity in terms of the issues that matter in international

relations today. Particularly, the relevance of issues such as racial politics, and immigration, is

striking, to say the least. Moreover, the continued relevance also of the nation-state as the basic

unit of international relations in the early twenty-first century global affairs remains strong, in

spite of the rapid increase in many non-state actors. In any case, the centennial years have given

rise to a swathe of new scholarship and the dominant trend can be dened as the global turn.

And, in these new globally-led narratives, the Japanese participation as one of the great powers

plays a prominent role in anchoring the globality of the war itself. And, with this global turn, we

begin to see exciting new historical insights unravelling in the centenary of the peace conference,

such as Japan s involvement in the Catholic network of informal diplomacy.

No doubt, we

continue to deepen our historical understanding of the Paris Peace Conference, hopefully, in ways

which may not have been imaginable hitherto.

There is a notable new research on the topic of the Twenty-One Demands of 1915 by Naraoka Sochi,

Taika niju-ikkajo yokyu to wa nani dattanoka: Daiichiji sekai taisen to nicchu tairitsu no genten (Nagoya:

Nagoya daigaku shuppankai, 2015).

As quoted in Shimazu, Japan, 109.

Patrick Houlihan s unpublished paper The Other Admiral Yamamoto: Catholic Globalism at the Paris

Peace Conference of 1919, presented at an international conference on The Paris Peace Conference

and the Challenge of a New World Order, German Historical Institute, Paris, June 2019.