The misfortune of success has never been better exemplified in the world's history than in the results which have followed from the White Man's attempt to arouse Japan to an appreciation of the blessings of European civilisation. Our fathers and grandfathers of the middle nineteenth century battered at the barred and picturesque doors of the land of the Mikado with a vague idea that there was plunder, trade or some other tangible benefit to be got from dragging the quaint Yellow Recluse out of his retirement. Without a foreboding, every civilised Power that had a fighting ship and the time to spare, took some part in urging Japan to awake and be modern. A great deal of gunpowder was burned before the little Asiatic nation stirred. Then she seemed in a flash to learn the whole lesson of our combative civilisation. Naval strategy; the forging of trade-marks; military organisation; appreciation of the value of cheap labour and of machinery in industry; aseptic surgery; resolute and cunning diplomacy—all these were suddenly added to the mental equipment of an Asiatic people, and all used in reprisal against Europe. To-day With a discipline impossible of achievement by a European race, the Japanese people pursued the methods of eclectic philosophy in their nation-making. They copied the best from the army systems of Germany and France: duplicated the British naval discipline: adopted what they thought most efficient of the industrial machinery of Europe and America, including a scientific tariff. Nothing that seemed likely to be of advantage was neglected. Even the question of religion was seriously considered, and these awakened people were at one time on the point of a simultaneous national adoption of some form of Christianity. But they were convinced on reflection that nothing of Europe's success in this world was due to religion; and, unconcerned for the moment with anything that was not of this world, decided to forbear from "scrapping" Shintoism and sending it to the rubbish heap where reposed the two-handled sword of the Sumarai. This miracle of the complete transformation of a race has been accomplished in half a century. Within the memory of some living people the Japanese were content with a secluded life on their hungry islands, where they painted dainty pictures, wove quaint and beautiful fabrics, cultivated children and flowers in a spirit of happy artistry, and pursued war among themselves as a sport, with enthusiasm certainly, but without any excessive cruelty, if consideration be given to Asiatic ideas of death and the Asiatic degree of sensitiveness to torture. They were without any ideas of foreign conquest. The world had no respect for Japan then. Specimens of Japanese painting and pottery were admired by a few connoisseurs in little corners of the world (such as Bond Street, London), and that was all. Now, Japan having learned the art of modern warfare, we know also that the Japanese are great artists, great philosophers, great poets. Of a sudden a nation has jumped from being naturally chosen as the most absurd and harmless vehicle for a Gilbert satire to that of being "the honoured ally" of Great Britain, in respect to whose susceptibilities that satire should be suppressed. But our belated respect for the artistry of the Japanese gives little, if any, explanation of the miracle of their sudden transformation. The Chinese are greater artists, greater philosophers, superior intellectually and physically. They heard at an even earlier date the same harsh summons from Europe to wake up. But it was neglected, and, whatever the outcome of the revolutionary movement now progressing, the Chinese are not yet a Power to be taken into present consideration as regards the Pacific Ocean or world-politics generally. The most patient search gives no certain guidance as to the causes of Japan's sudden advance to a position But the Japanese had, so far as can be ascertained, little advantage from cross-breeding. Probably they were originally a Tartar race. The primitive inhabitants of the islands were ancestors of the Hairy Ainus, who still survive in small numbers. Like the aboriginals of Australia, the Ainus were a primitive rather than a degraded type, closely allied to the ancestors of the European races. Probably the Tartar invaders who colonised Japan came by way of Corea. But after their advent there was no new element introduced to give the human race in Japan a fresh stimulus; and that original Tartar stock, though vigorous and warlike, has never proved elsewhere any great capacity for organisation. In the sixth century of the Christian Era, Chinese civilisation and the Buddhistic religion came to the Indiscriminate fighting between rival feudal lords, a constant strife between the Shoguns, representing the priestly power, and the Mikados, representing the civil power, make up the islands' history for century after century. Through it all there is no gleam of light on the evolution of the latent powers which were to come to maturity, as in an hour, during the nineteenth century. Japan appeared to be an average example of a semi-civilised country which would never evolve to a much higher state because of the undisciplined quarrelsomeness of its people. In the sixteenth century Europe first made the acquaintance of Japan. Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, British traders and explorers visited the Japan seems to have learned absolutely nothing from her first contact with European civilisation. She settled down to the old policy of rigorous exclusiveness, and to a renewal of her tribal and religious warfare, in the midst of which, like a strange flower in a rocky cleft, flourished a dainty Æstheticism. The nineteenth century thus dawned on Japan, a bitterly poor country, made poorer by the devotion of much of her energies to internal warfare and by the devotion of some of her scanty supply of good land to the cultivation of flowers instead of grain. The observer of the day could hardly have imagined more unpromising material for the making of the modern Japanese nation, organised with Spartan thoroughness for naval, military and industrial warfare. The United States in 1853 led the way in the successful attempt of White civilisation to open up trade relations with Japan. The method was rude; From the Peace of Shimonoseki in 1895 the progress of Japan has been marvellous. In 1900 she appeared as one of the civilised Powers which invaded The conditions created by the Anglo-Japanese treaty of 1902 developed naturally to the Battle of Mukden, the culminating point of a campaign in which for the first time for many years the Yellow Race vanquished the White Race in war. That Battle of Mukden not only established Japan's position in the world. It made the warlike awakening of Mukden brought that disdain out of its slumber. The battle was therefore an event of history more important than any since the fall of Constantinople. For very many years the European hegemony had been unquestioned. True, as late as 1795, Napoleon is credited with having believed that the power of the Grand Turk might be revived and an Ottoman suzerainty of Europe secured. But it was only a dream; more than half a century before that the doom of the Turk, who had been the most serious Now in the twentieth century at Mukden the White Race supremacy was again challenged. It was a long-dormant though not a new issue which was thus raised. From the times beyond which the memory of man does not stretch, Asia had repeatedly threatened Europe. The struggle of the Persian Empire to smother the Greek republics is the first of the invasions which has been accurately recorded by historians; but probably it had been preceded by many others. The waves of war that followed were many. The last was the Ottoman invasion in the fourteenth century, which brought the banners of Asia right up to the walls of Vienna, swept the Levant of Christian ships, and threatened even the Adriatic; and which has left the Turk still in the possession of Constantinople. But by the beginning of the eighteenth century the fear of the Turks gaining the mastery of Europe had practically disappeared, and after then the Europeans treated the coloured races as subject to them, and their territories as liable to partition whenever the method of division among rival White nations could be agreed upon. Mukden made a new situation. The European Powers were prompt to recognise the fact. Doubt even came to Great Britain whether the part she had played as foster-mother to this Asiatic infant of wonderful growth had been a wise one. A peace was practically forced upon Japan, a peace which secured for her at the moment nothing in the way of indemnity, but little in the way of territorial rights, and not even the positive elimination of her enemy from the Asiatic coast. True, she has since won Corea on the basis of that peace and has made secure certain suzerain rights in Manchuria, but this harvest had to be garnered by resolute diplomacy and by maintaining a naval and military expenditure after the war which called for an extreme degree of self-abnegation from her people. If the present position of affairs could be accepted as permanent, there would be no "problem of the Pacific." That ocean would be Japan's home-water. Holding her rugged islands with a veteran army and navy; so established on the mainland of Asia as to be able to make a flank movement on China; she is the one "Power in being" of the Pacific littoral. But as already stated, the verdict of the war with Russia cannot be taken as final. And soon the United States will come into the Pacific with overwhelming force on the completion of the Panama Canal—an event which is already foreshadowed in a modification of the Anglo-Japanese treaty to relieve Great Britain of the possible responsibility of going Whether the Japanese cleverness and progressiveness will last or not, the nation has to be credited with them now as a live asset. But apart from the national character the nation possesses little of "natural capital." There is practically no store of precious metals; a poor supply of the useful minerals; small area of good land; and the local fisheries have been exploited with such energy for many generations that they cannot possibly be expanded in productivity now. The statesmen of New Japan have certainly won some overseas Empire as an addition to the resources available for a sound fabric of national greatness. But what has been won is quite insufficient to weigh in the scale against the "natural capital" of almost any of Japan's rivals in the Pacific. For want of territory to colonise under her own flag, Japan has lost many subjects to alien flags. Japanese settlements of some strength exist on the Pacific coast of America, in the Hawaiian Islands, and in parts of China. There is little doubt that Japanese If she were to put aside dreams of conquest and Empire, has Japan a sound future in the Pacific as a thriving minor manufacturing and trading power? I must say that it seems to me doubtful. The nation has drunk of the wine of life and could hardly settle down to a humdrum existence. No peaceable policy could allow of a great prosperity, for the reasons of natural poverty already stated. It would be a life of drudgery without the present dream of glory. To study the Japanese emigrant away from his own country is to understand that he has not the patience for such a life. In British Columbia, in California, in Hawaii, the same conclusion is come The position of Japan in the Pacific seems to me, then, that she cannot reasonably expect to win in a struggle for its mastery: and yet that she will inevitably be forced to enter into that struggle. A recent report in a Tokio paper stated: "At a secret session of the Budget Commission on February 3, Baron Saito, Minister of Marine, declared that the irreducible minimum of naval expansion was eight battleships of the super-Dreadnought class, and eight armoured cruisers of the same class, which must be completed by 1920, construction being begun in 1913. The cost is estimated at £35,000,000." And the paper (Asahi Shimbun) went on to hint at the United States as the Power which had to be confronted. That is only one of very many indications of Japanese national feeling. She has gone too far on the path to greatness to be able to retire safely into obscurity. She must "see it through." Feats of strength far nearer to the miraculous than those which marked her astonishing victory over Russia would be necessary to give Japan the slightest chance of success in the next struggle for the hegemony of the Pacific. |