AHR Forum
Toward a Global Perspective of the Great War: Japan and
the Foundations of a Twentieth-Century World
FREDERICK R. DICKINSON
I believe that this war will have no secondary importance in the progress of world
culture.
Yoshino Sakuzo៮ , July 19181
SPONTANEOUS REVELRY ENVELOPED THE GLOBE on Tuesday, November 11, 1918. Even
before the 11 A.M. muting of guns along the Western Front, impromptu celebrations
advanced swiftly across land and sea. In vanquished Germany, crowds donned revolutionary red, in soldiers’ caps, painted sleeves, and children’s shoes.2 In Paris and
London, merriment reigned in honking horns, waving flags, and spontaneous song
and laughter.3 Word reached the American coast by 3 A.M. local time on November
11, as newsboys distributed extras in Times Square, and New Yorkers, awakened by
sirens and the searchlight from the Times Building, took to the streets with their own
whistles and noisemakers.4
Over eight thousand miles farther west, in Japan, a celebratory atmosphere first
enveloped the foreign community, with spontaneous commemorations on November
12 at the most important expatriate watering holes—the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo,
the United Club in Yokohama, and the Yamato Hotel in Kyoto.5 The British, American, French, Italian, and Belgian embassies in Tokyo flew Allied colors, prepared
I would like to thank Tobe Ryo៮ ichi and the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken, Kyoto) for their generous support of a year of research and writing during the 2011–2012
academic year. Preliminary drafts of this article were presented to the Nichibunken Seminar on Leadership in Modern Japan, the Nichibunken Evening Seminar, and the Kwansei Gakuin Seminar on U.S.Japan Relations. Special thanks go to the participants of these seminars and, especially, to Tobe Ryo៮ ichi,
Takii Kazuhiro, Shibayama Futoshi, Tosh Minohara, Kawada Minoru, Isomae Junichiro, Eiichiro
Azuma, and Robert Kane for their insightful suggestions for reflection and revision. I am also indebted
to Robert Schneider, the editors of the AHR , and six anonymous reviewers for their invaluable recommendations and guidance.
1 Yoshino Sakuzo
៮ , “Gurei kyo៮ no ‘kokusai do៮ meiron’ o yomu” (“Reading Lord Grey’s Discourse
on an ‘International Alliance’ ”), Chu៮ o៮ ko៮ ron 33, no. 7 (July 1918): 56–62, here 62.
2 “Revolutionary Frenzy,” The Times, November 11, 1918, 10.
3 “At Last: Paris on the Great Day,” The Times, November 12, 1918, 7; “Cheering Crowds,” ibid.,
10.
4 “Nation Rejoices at War’s End,” New York Times, November 12, 1918, 5.
5 “Kanki seru Yokohama kyoryu
៮ min” (“Rejoicing among Foreign Residents in Yokohama”), Asahi
shinbun, November 14, 1918, 5; “Kyo៮ to៮ gaijin no kyu៮ sen shukuga” (“Armistice Celebrations of Kyoto
Foreigners”), ibid.
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Toward a Global Perspective of the Great War
1155
special banquets, and drove flag-bedecked diplomatic vehicles around the city.6
While some expatriates grumbled at the delay in local commemorations, Japanese
subjects soon followed with a wave of tributes of their own. Three thousand students
from Keio៮ University, led by university president Kamata Eikichi and a marching
band, formed a candlelight procession from their Mita campus to Hibiya Park in
central Tokyo on the evening of November 15.7 The following day, Tokyo rice dealers, banks, and Mitsui Industries suspended operations in honor of peace.8 On the
evening of November 16, two thousand students from the Kanda School of Commerce and Industry marched in their own nighttime procession, from Kanda to the
Imperial Palace.9 On November 17, Waseda University students ran a commemorative relay through Tokyo.10 Japanese authorities in occupied Manchuria hosted
banquets along the South Manchuria Railway on November 16 and 17.11
By Thursday, November 21, Japanese celebrations reached a climax with a school
and business holiday, decorated streetcars and automobiles, fireworks, and the largest military parade in Japanese history—comprising more than 15,000 band members and arms bearers—winding its way past Allied embassies in Tokyo.12 By 2 P.M.
on November 21, some 2,500 dignitaries, including members of the Allied diplomatic
corps, assembled in Hibiya Park for the start of the official armistice celebration of
the nation’s capital. With Prime Minister Hara Takashi and the cabinet looking on,
Tokyo mayor Tajiri Inajiro៮ welcomed the dignitaries, and 50,000 observers, with a
rousing salute to the “indomitable perseverance” of the Allies that had secured a
“victory for humanity and justice.” Describing himself as a “true colleague” (ma no
ryo៮ yu៮ ) of the mayor, British ambassador Sir Conyngham Greene followed with an
enthusiastic endorsement of Tajiri’s tribute to Japan’s “brave soldiers,” to an army
that, Conyngham noted, had “fought energetically everywhere” and to a navy that
had “patrolled the world’s oceans.” After the Japanese national anthem, Mayor Tajiri led the crowd in three banzais for the Japanese emperor. Prime Minister Hara
pronounced three more banzais for the Allied leaders, and Tajiri offered three final
cheers for Allied soldiers.13 A subsequent banquet for the dignitaries adjourned by
“Kyu៮ sen iwai” (“Armistice Celebrations”), ibid.
“Yorokobi no tomoshibi” (“Candlelight of Joy”), Yomiuri shinbun, November 16, 1918, 5.
8 “Beikoku honjitsu kyu
៮ gyo៮ ” (“Rice Dealers Suspend Operations Today”), Asahi shinbun, November 16, 1918, 4; “Ginko៮ rinji kyu៮ gyo៮ ” (“Special Suspension of Bank Operations”), ibid.; “Mitsui no
kyu៮ sen shukuga” (“Mitsui Armistice Celebrations”), ibid.
9 “Nisen no akai cho
៮ shin no ayumi” (“Procession of Two Thousand Red Lanterns”), Yomiuri shinbun, November 17, 1918, 5.
10 “To
៮ kyo៮ isshu៮ kyo៮ so៮ ” (“Race around Tokyo”), Yomiuri shinbun, November 18, 1918, 5.
11 “Ryojun no shukugakai” (“Celebration in Port Arthur”), Asahi shinbun, November 19, 1918, 2;
“Kyu៮ sen no shukugakai” (“Armistice Celebration”), ibid.; “Tetsumine kyu៮ sen shukugakai” (“Armistice
Celebrations in Teiling”), ibid.
12 “Kenbutsu no daigunshu
៮ ” (“Large Crowd of Spectators”), Asahi shinbun, November 22, 1918, 5;
“Seigi wa heiwa o motaraseri to ko៮ sho៮ shite” (“Proclaiming the Arrival of Peace through Justice”), ibid.
Preeminent champion of democracy in Japan, Tokyo University professor Yoshino Sakuzo៮ , wrote in his
diary of class cancellations on this day; Yoshino Sakuzo៮ senshu៮ ( Selected Works of Yoshino Sakuzo៮ ), 14
vols. (Tokyo, 1996), 14: 168 (diary entry of November 21, 1918).
13 “Banzai no koe ni todoroku Hibiya no tenchi” (“Hibiya Resounds with Banzais”), Asahi shinbun,
November 22, 1918, 5.
6
7
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4 P.M., but the festivities continued for Tokyoites, as 60,000 merchants and employees
marched in a lantern parade through central Tokyo well into the evening.14
FOR THOSE ALREADY WEARY OF CENTENNIAL commemorations of the Great War, this
vision of a spontaneous global celebration of peace should, at the very least, accentuate the monumental significance of the 1914 –1918 years. It also hints at the
potential of non-Western perspectives for a new appreciation of the importance of
the conflict. Over the last hundred years, much has been debated about the war’s
causes and consequences, high policy and low, lived experience and constructed
memory. Historians have probed questions of gender, imagination, representation,
and emotion. One can speak of a scholarly consensus on the First World War as a
major twentieth-century benchmark, and of growing recognition of its global reach.
What more can we gain from further investigation? Two shifts have, in recent years,
ensured the continued vitality of World War I studies, shifts that echo trends in the
writing of history more generally. First is a geographic movement away from overwhelming attention to Europe. In highlighting developments far from the Western
Front, international and area studies scholars have decisively internationalized the
study of the Great War.15 Equally exciting have been the numerous cultural investigations that, by crossing not only national boundaries but the Entente–Central
Power divide, have come closest to what Jay Winter has described as a “transnational
history” of the war.16
If the future belongs to internationalization of the academy and increasing attention to transnational phenomena, in other words, the study of the Great War is
well positioned to nudge us forward. The war, in fact, offers us an excellent opportunity to refine our growing expectations for “global” and “transnational” history.
An examination of the political and cultural impact of the Great War in early-twentieth-century Japan suggests the utility of a global perspective of the conflict. A
global, rather than transnational, vision remains focused on the nation. A “perspective” differs from a genuine global history by highlighting one nation in particular.
As Pamela Crossley has astutely observed, methodologically, historians and writers
of global history share little in common. While the former painstakingly probe local
environments to contextualize specific historical phenomena, writers of global history rely on evidence accumulated by others to make sweeping reflections on the
whole.17 Historians may not be ideally suited for global history, but analyses of the
14 Otabe Yu
៮ ji, Nashimoto no miya Itsukohi no nikki (Diary of Princess Nashimoto Itsuko) (Tokyo,
2008), 189 (diary entry of November 21, 1918).
15 As Akira Iriye noted a quarter-century ago, the American Historical Association’s then-membership of 13,000 represented “diverse methodologies and specializations, many ethnic groups, nearly
all ages, and scores of countries.” This internationalization has increasingly influenced the study of the
Great War. Iriye, “The Internationalization of History,” American Historical Review 94, no. 1 (February
1989): 1–10, here 1.
16 By “transnational history,” Winter means an analysis of “multiple levels of historical experience
. . . both below and above the national level.” He distinguishes this from an “international” approach—
forever tied, he argues, to the nation and empire—and a “global” approach, which he describes as moving
beyond a focus on Europe, but not beyond a concern with the nation. Jay Winter, “Approaching the
History of the Great War: A User’s Guide,” in Winter, ed., The Legacy of the Great War: Ninety Years
On (Columbia, Mo., 2009), 1–17, here 6–7.
17 Pamela Kyle Crossley, What Is Global History? (Cambridge, 2008), 104 –105.
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FIGURE 1: Ogawa Jihei, “Japan Guaranteeing Peace with the Powers.” From To៮ kyo៮ Puck 15, no. 1 (January
1, 1922): 4 –5. Japan is depicted here in a popular early-twentieth-century graphic journal as guaranteeing the
postwar peace with Uncle Sam, John Bull, and France. The picture echoes an iconic image of the so-called
“Wedded Rocks” (Meoto iwa) near Futami Okitama Shrine in Mie Prefecture, joined by a heavy rope of rice
straw and representing the union of the mythical creators of the Japanese islands Izanagi and Izanami. Courtesy
of Kyoto International Manga Museum.
non-Western world are well placed to offer a global perspective that can enrich our
understanding of transnational phenomena. While highlighting a specific national
experience, a global perspective, like a transnational view, is sensitive to national
experiences as reflective of larger global processes. When trained upon the nonWestern world, analyses of global synergies can dramatically expand the parameters
of observed transnational developments. Transnational studies of the Great War
have, to date, generally highlighted cross-border trends within Europe. A study of
the impact of the war in Japan, by contrast, offers a full picture of its extraordinary
magnitude and global significance.
OVER THE LAST FIFTEEN YEARS, OUR KNOWLEDGE of the Great War and its effects
beyond Europe has expanded dramatically. Whether it be the stimulus of a national
community in Syria, dreams of East-West harmony in India, the impact on the Ottoman quest for sovereignty, or the effect upon national identity in China and Japan,
the war, it can confidently be concluded, marked a pivotal global “moment.”18 As
18 To borrow the proposition of Erez Manela; Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination
and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford, 2007). In addition to Manela, recent
coverage of the war beyond Europe includes Mustafa Aksakal, The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The
Ottoman Empire and the First World War (Cambridge, 2008); Frederick R. Dickinson, War and National
Reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914 –1919 (Cambridge, Mass., 1999); James L. Gelvin, Divided
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suggested by the term “moment,” however, most accounts of the effects of the war
beyond the Western world characterize the impact as either relatively brief or the
source of future hardship. According to Erez Manela, genuine hopes in China and
India for a new world order stimulated by U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points were dashed by the spring of 1919, marking “a watershed in the rise of
anticolonial nationalism.”19 James Gelvin, likewise, underscores the contentiousness
of nationalist sentiment in Syria following the withdrawal of Ottoman power and the
intrusion of French colonialism after the war.20 Current coverage of the Great War
outside of Western history, in other words, remains focused upon questions of nation
and nationalism and intimately tied to a narrative of renewed future conflict.21
Orthodox coverage of Japan largely echoes this tale of woe. Japan was, after all,
a principal instigator of the Second World War. Since V-J Day, investigations of
early-twentieth-century Japan have aimed primarily to explain this dramatic “departure” from global norms. While Japan scholars do not generally dwell upon the
First World War, their coverage of the 1914 through 1931 years accentuates the
diplomatic, political, and economic challenges that steered Japan to invasion in Manchuria and conflict with China and the United States.22 This historiography accentuates the particular challenge posed by war to a genuinely global perspective of the
twentieth century. Given the extraordinary and powerful legacy of two consecutive
world wars, historians have understandably organized their narratives less around
broad themes that illuminate global trends than around a tale of national pathologies
and a hierarchy of winners and losers that purport to explain the causes of war. The
early twentieth century was for many years an era of Anglo-American triumph and
German-Japanese defeat, and studies of the First and Second World Wars attempted
to confirm these apparent truths.23 Not surprisingly, this bias has accompanied the
Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (Berkeley, Calif., 1998); Xu Guoqi,
China and the Great War: China’s Pursuit of a New National Identity and Internationalization (Cambridge,
2005).
19 Erez Manela, “Imagining Woodrow Wilson in Asia: Dreams of East-West Harmony and the Revolt against Empire in 1919,” American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (December 2006): 1327–1351, here
1328.
20 Gelvin, Divided Loyalties.
21 This mirrors, it might be noted, the essential nation-centric aim of early analyses of the war in
Europe, which focused upon causes in an effort to affix national blame. For a useful synopsis of this
scholarship, and its recent reconsideration, see Keir A. Lieber, “The New History of World War I and
What It Means for International Relations Theory,” International Security 32, no. 2 (2007): 155–191.
22 From U.S.-Japan disputes over China (1915) and “racial equality” (1919 and 1924) to postwar
recession, a consumer culture of “decadence,” banking crises, the rise of Chinese nationalism, and worldwide depression. For wartime U.S.-Japan conflict over China, see Russell H. Fifield, Woodrow Wilson
and the Far East: The Diplomacy of the Shantung Question (1952; repr., Hamden, Conn., 1965). For the
failed effort to include a “racial equality” clause in the covenant of the League of Nations in 1919, see
Naoko Shimazu, Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (London, 1998). For
the 1924 U.S. Immigration Act, see Izumi Hirobe, Japanese Pride, American Prejudice: Modifying the
Exclusion Clause of the 1924 Immigration Act (Stanford, Calif., 2001). For the problem of Chinese nationalism, see Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie, eds., The Japanese Informal Empire
in China, 1895–1937 (Princeton, N.J., 1989). For the financial difficulties of interwar Japan, see Mark
Metzler, Lever of Empire: The International Gold Standard and the Crisis of Liberalism in Prewar Japan
(Berkeley, Calif., 2006).
23 The equivalent of William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York, 1960) for the
study of early-twentieth-century Japan was David Bergamini, Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy (New York,
1971). The persistence of a clear division of early-twentieth-century winners and losers is exemplified
by the reception of recent work on Britain and Japan. Niall Ferguson’s critique of World War I Britain
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geographic shift of World War I studies: the farther the move from the Anglo-American world, the more troubled national histories seem to become.24
Although expanded geographic coverage of the First World War has not necessarily furthered our understanding of global processes, studies of interwar European politics and diplomacy have long challenged the determinism of early postwar
historiography. Since the mid-1970s, numerous analyses have urged an accounting
of the interwar years on their own terms, rather than from the vantage point of the
calamitous 1939 invasion of Poland. In their construction of peace after 1919, European statesmen, these studies have argued, created new means of political organization and economic integration critical to long-term stability after the war.25 As
Zara Steiner has advised, “the 1920s must be seen within the context of the aftermath
of the Great War and not as the prologue to the 1930s and the outbreak of a new
European conflict.”26
While scholars of interwar European politics and diplomacy have disrupted the
linear narrative to disaster in the early twentieth century, more recent explorations
of culture in wartime and interwar Europe have directly challenged long-held assumptions of national difference. Frequently crossing not only national boundaries
but the Entente–Central Power divide, these studies have highlighted mobilization,
conscription, scarcity, slaughter, death, disease, recovery, and war memory as widely
shared experiences in the early twentieth century. At their best, these examinations
explain the widespread wartime diffusion of fundamental twentieth-century social,
political, and cultural structures and norms.27 How might we bring Japan into the
continuing discussion of the Great War in a way that not only will expand our geographic coverage but will accentuate the transnational effects of the war? Borrowing
(The Pity of War: Explaining World War I [New York, 1999]) was condemned as a revisionist tract, while
Herbert Bix’s description of Hirohito as a war criminal, responsible for most Japanese atrocities during
the Second World War (Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan [New York, 2000]), won a Pulitzer
Prize.
24 This critical vision of the non-Anglo-American world seems most prominent among Americanists
and Europeanists who have included coverage of non-Western societies in their analyses of the First
World War. See, for example, Manela, The Wilsonian Moment ; and Margaret Macmillan, Paris, 1919:
Six Months That Changed the World (New York, 2003). By contrast, area studies specialists can be more
generous in their assessment of non-Western societies. Xu Guoqi vigorously rejects the idea of China’s
experience in the Great War as a “failure,” stressing, rather, its positive effect on “the formation of a
new Chinese perception of self and the world”; Xu, China and the Great War, 279.
25 Among important early titles in this wave of revisionist scholarship were Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I
(Princeton, N.J., 1975); Walter A. McDougall, France’s Rhineland Diplomacy, 1914 –1924: The Last Bid
for a Balance of Power in Europe (Princeton, N.J., 1978); and Marc Trachtenberg, Reparation in World
Politics: France and European Economic Diplomacy, 1916–1923 (New York, 1980). For a survey of this
literature, see Jon Jacobson, “Is There a New International History of the 1920s?,” American Historical
Review 88, no. 3 (June 1983): 617–645, here 619–621.
26 Zara Steiner, The Lights That Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford, 2005),
602. Akira Iriye made a similar point much earlier in the context of American history and diplomacy:
“It would be wrong to judge the 1920s solely in the framework of what was to happen in the 1930s.”
Referring specifically to disarmament agreements of the 1920s, Iriye argues, “one needs to see these
arrangements for what they signified at that time, as a symbol of the new peace.” Iriye, The Cambridge
History of American Foreign Relations, vol. 3: The Globalizing of America, 1913–1945 (Cambridge, 1993),
79.
27 Among the most compelling of these studies, see Winter, The Legacy of the Great War ; Jay Winter
and Jean-Louis Robert, eds., Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914 –1919 (Cambridge, 1997);
and Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford, 2007).
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from specialists of interwar European politics and diplomacy, we might shift the
point of reference from Pearl Harbor to the First World War itself. Echoing historians of wartime and interwar culture, we might, likewise, pay attention to large,
underlying processes that are less important for thrusting nations into inevitable
conflict than for highlighting critical new features of the twentieth century.28
AMONG THE MORE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS of the new century is the degree to which
the Great War actually constituted a watershed in world history. Recent scholarship
on Europe has downplayed the notion of a conspicuous departure. Champions of a
“long nineteenth century” stress a prolonged transformation over a century preceding the war.29 Specialists of memory locate enduring traditional motifs across the
1918 divide.30 General studies of the twentieth century suggest the inseparability of
World Wars I and II—a “Second Thirty Years’ War.”31 Japan specialists likewise
have long given short shrift to the 1914 –1919 years. At a time when European scholars highlighted the First World War as the principal prelude to the Second, Japanese
historians located the roots of the second disaster much deeper in “feudal” Japan.32
Subsequent analyses chipped away at this long-term trajectory, but without moving
beyond the early twentieth century. Current orthodoxy identifies the Russo-Japanese
War (1904 –1905) as the crowning achievement of the Meiji Era (1868–1912), after
which Japan plunged into crisis and, from 1931, war.33 In this rendering, the First
World War serves little but to confirm adverse trends begun as far back as the RussoJapanese War.34
Viewed from the perspective of Japanese contemporaries, however, the First
World War marked a pivotal departure. Japan declared war in August 1914 and
played a critical supporting role for the Entente. It ejected German forces from
Qingdao, China, and German Micronesia, protected convoys of Australian and New
28 For an extended treatment of these issues, see Frederick R. Dickinson, World War I and the
Triumph of a New Japan, 1919–1930 (Cambridge, 2013).
29 See C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons
(Malden, Mass., 2004).
30 See Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History
(Cambridge, 1995); and Thomas W. Laqueur, “Names, Bodies, and the Anxiety of Erasure,” in Theodore
R. Schatzki and Wolfgang Natter, eds., The Social and Political Body (New York, 1996), 123–141.
31 See Anthony Shaw and Ian Westwell, eds., The World in Conflict, 1914 – 45 (London, 2000). This
perspective has a long history. See also P. M. H. Bell, The Origins of the Second World War in Europe
(London, 1986); Michael Howard, “A Thirty Years’ War? The Two World Wars in Historical Perspective,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 3 (1993): 171–184; and Eric Hobsbawm,
The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914 –1991 (New York, 1994), which in part I identifies the
period from the First through the Second World War as an “age of catastrophe.”
32 The classic presentation of this argument is Rekishigaku kenkyu
៮ kai, ed., Kindai Nihon no keisei
(The Formation of Modern Japan) (Tokyo, 1953). For a related argument in English, see John W. Dower,
ed., Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E. H. Norman (New York, 1975).
33 The Meiji Era marks the reign of the Meiji emperor. Andrew Gordon’s popular text on modern
Japan lumps the years 1905 to 1945 together in a section titled “Imperial Japan from Ascendance to
Ashes,” with a total of three pages dedicated to the First World War. Gordon, A Modern History of Japan:
From Tokugawa Times to the Present, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 2014).
34 There are, of course, some notable exceptions to this orthodox narrative. See, for example, Harry
Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton,
N.J., 2000). Following the long-time Marxist location of monopoly capitalism in Japan during the war,
Harootunian begins his story of Japanese intellectuals grappling with “modern life” squarely with the
move to an industrial economy after the First World War.
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FIGURE 2: “Chinto៮ kanraku” (“Fall of Qingdao”). From Ito៮ Chu៮ ta, Ashu៮ rajo៮ , 5 vols. (Tokyo, 1921–1922), 1:
84. One of early-twentieth-century Japan’s great architects and illustrators depicts the fall of German Qingdao
(left) to Japan (right). Japan holds the spoils, Jiaozhou Bay, Shandong Province, China. Courtesy of Kyoto
International Manga Museum.
Zealand troops from the Pacific to Aden, hunted German submarines in the Mediterranean, and provided desperately needed shipping, copper, munitions, and almost ¥640 million in loans to its allies.35 Japan’s war experience, of course, differed
markedly from that of the main belligerents. Most Japanese subjects had no direct
experience with hostilities. Japanese casualties numbered only slightly more than
2,000, and far from smarting, the Japanese economy boomed.36
Despite such amenable circumstances, the First World War sparked vibrant discussions in Tokyo. As in the capitals of Europe, most in 1914 Japan could not foresee
the ultimate consequences of a general conflict. But many shared a sense of the
monumental importance of European events. As the president of Japan’s majority
party declared on August 4, 1914, the turmoil marked “an unexpectedly large dis35 Major K. F. Baldwin, Office of the Chief of Staff, War Department, Military Intelligence Division,
“A Brief Account of Japan’s Part in the World War,” September 16, 1921, 6, Stanley K. Hornbeck Papers,
Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace Library & Archives, Stanford University, Stanford,
Calif. [hereafter Hornbeck Papers], box 255, “Japan: War Costs and Contributions” file.
36 According to contemporary American sources, the Imperial Japanese Army suffered 414 dead,
1,441 wounded in the siege of Qingdao. Navy losses numbered 317 killed and 76 wounded. Army figures
from Major K. F. Baldwin, Office of the Chief of Staff, War Department, Military Intelligence Division,
“Memorandum for Colonel Graham,” September 16, 1921; navy figures from U.S. Secretary of the Navy
Edwin Denby to Secretary of State, September 23, 1921, Hornbeck Papers, box 255, “Japan: War Costs
and Contributions” file. Contemporary public sources in Japan pronounced Japanese casualties at
Qingdao at 550 dead and 1,500 wounded and made note of 1,500 casualties in Siberia. “Sekai senso៮ no
kessan” (“Accounting of the World War”), To៮ kyo៮ asahi shinbun, December 28, 1919, reprinted in Nakajima Kenzo៮ , comp., Shinbun shu៮ roku Taisho៮ shi, 15 vols. (Tokyo, 1978), 7: 449.
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turbance that threatens to become the largest war since Napoleon I.”37 Such a disturbance would affect Japan because, as Tokyo mayor Sakatani Yoshiro៮ observed,
international relations were “intimately entwined” through transportation, finance,
and the general economy.38 As the editors of the popular monthly Chu៮ o៮ ko៮ ron (Central Review) reminded its readers, imperial networks spanned the globe. Hostilities
could easily spread to European territories in Africa and Asia, and a German victory
could bring the Kaiser to areas of vital interest to Japan—China and Taiwan.39
The primary import of the “European War” for Japan, however, had less to do
with the scale of the conflict, global integration, or the geopolitics of empire than
with something more fundamental. As Sakatani observed, the present global standard was the product of four hundred years of European and American civilization.
A general European conflict meant war “in the heart of world civilization, in the
heart of world finance, in the heart of world transportation.” It was like succumbing
to an illness in the most precious organs, the heart and lungs.40 General war at the
center of world culture raised serious questions about established standards of civilization. As an editor of the popular monthly Taiyo៮ (Sun) noted in September 1914,
over the preceding forty years, people throughout the world had looked to Europe
as “a model of modern civilization.” But “the high level of civilized living that they
boasted for so long is quickly being demolished, without apology, in the face of the
bloodcurdling ferocity of war.”41
Long before the full physical effects of the Great War became apparent, in other
words, observers in Japan, as well as in Europe, anticipated the most fundamental
consequences of a general European conflagration. At the very least, such a conflict
would mark the end of European centrality in modern civilization. Given the importance of European models in the construction of the modern world, a general war
threatened profound repercussions across the globe, including in Japan. It is no
wonder that the British editor of the English-language daily Japan Chronicle observed that “by the end of July 1914 developments on the other side of the world,
perhaps for the first time in Japan’s history, eclipsed more local interests.”42
IN ASSESSING THE ULTIMATE IMPACT of the First World War, international historians
have focused upon the peace settlement and the principal protagonist at Paris, Woodrow Wilson. Whether condemning the punitive character of the Versailles Treaties
or the powers’ inability to enforce basic provisions, scholars underscore the struc37 Hara Keiichiro
៮ , ed., Hara Takashi nikki (Diary of Hara Takashi ), 6 vols. (Tokyo, 1981), 4: 25–26
(diary entry for August 4, 1914). For an in-depth look at Japanese reactions to the outbreak of war in
Europe, see Frederick R. Dickinson, “The View from Japan: War and Peace in Europe around 1914,”
in Holger Afflerbach and David Stevenson, eds., An Improbable War? The Outbreak of World War I and
European Political Culture before 1914 (New York, 2007), 303–319.
38 Sakatani Yoshiro
៮ shu៮ senso៮ to sono keizai kankei” (“Economic Aspects of the European
៮ , “O
War”), Taiyo៮ 20, no. 11 (September 1, 1914): 134 –138, here 134 –135.
39 “O
៮ shu៮ no tairan o ronzu” (“On the Great European Disturbance”), Chu៮ o៮ ko៮ ron, supplement (Fall
1914), 2–24, here 21–23.
40 Sakatani, “O
៮ shu៮ senso៮ to sono keizai kankei,” 135.
41 Asada Emura, “O
៮ shu៮ rekkyo៮ no ko៮ sen netsu” (“War Fever among the European Powers”), Taiyo៮
20, no. 11 (September 1, 1914): 18–36, here 18, 20.
42 A. Morgan Young, Japan under Taisho Tenno, 1912–1926 (London, 1928), 70.
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tural difficulties of the “Versailles system.”43 President Wilson’s reputation remains
mixed, at best.44 From a global perspective, however, the postwar world posed more
than the limited question of the structure of peace in Europe. It challenged the
accepted general standards of human society. In the context of massive destruction,
peace required more than a division of spoils: it demanded a new definition of civilization. Wilson offered this new definition in the form of the Fourteen Points, which
elevated multilateralism, transparency, democracy, and self-determination over bilateralism, secrecy, militarism, and colonialism.
Historians have long condemned the Fourteen Points as a product of American
idealism and ambition.45 But from a global perspective, Wilson’s initiative is a
glimpse less of American exceptionalism than of the special circumstances generated
by the Great War. The conflict raised serious questions about the viability of world
civilization and demanded a new framework for peace. As the most powerful extraEuropean belligerent, the United States came to define that framework. Wilson’s
ideas are less suggestive of American ambition than of the profound questions raised
by the war and of the dramatic shift of power away from Europe.46 The most important vision of Paris as viewed from Japan is a picture less of American ideals
raising tensions in Asia than of the power of a new model of civilization proposed
by the principal non-European actor.47 As Tokyo University professor Yoshino
Sakuzo៮ noted in 1917, Wilson’s ideas would “have an important bearing on the advance of civilization after the war.”48 For Seiyu៮ kai Party president Hara Takashi, it
was evident that “world affairs will completely change” with American belligerence.49
JAPANESE STATESMEN AND SUBJECTS were not merely astute observers of the decline
of European civilization and the rise of an alternate order after the Great War. They
eagerly participated in the construction of a new world. In the historiography of
modern Europe, the most tangible confirmation of the impact of World War I comes
in the attention to the monumental effort at reconstruction following the wartime
devastation.50 But the impulse to rebuild was not confined to territories physically
43 For the former argument, see Sally Marks, The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe,
1918–1933, 2nd ed. (New York, 2003). For the latter, see David Stevenson, Cataclysm: The First World
War as Political Tragedy (New York, 2004).
44 For a brief survey of the recent literature on Wilson, see Erez Manela, “Woodrow Who?,” Diplomatic History 35, no. 1 (January 2011): 75–80.
45 See John Morton Blum, Woodrow Wilson and the Politics of Morality (Boston, 1956), for Wilson
as idealist; and William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York, 1959), for
American hubris under Wilson.
46 Eminent scholar of Woodrow Wilson John Milton Cooper Jr. has similarly downplayed the place
of “idealism” in the twenty-eighth president’s policies. See Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow
Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, Mass., 1983); and Cooper, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography
(New York, 2009).
47 This is the perspective of both Noriko Kawamura, Turbulence in the Pacific: Japanese-U.S. Relations during World War I (Westport, Conn., 2000); and Manela, The Wilsonian Moment.
48 Kosen Gakujin (pseudonym), “Beikoku sansen no bunmeiteki igi” (“The Cultural Significance of
American Belligerence”), Chu៮ o៮ ko៮ ron 32, no. 5 (May 1917): 92–95, here 95.
49 Hara, Hara Takashi nikki, 4: 291 (diary entry of June 2, 1917).
50 Reflecting the relative severity of economic dislocations over physical destruction, most scholarship on postwar reconstruction in Europe focuses on economic issues, such as currency stabilization,
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leveled by artillery.51 If the Great War invited a new definition of civilization, the
necessity to retool naturally reached well beyond areas of physical destruction. We
may fully understand the transformative power of the war when we recognize the
enormous reconstruction efforts generated far from the flattened fields of Flanders.
At the very moment that European statesmen plunged into the massive effort of
physical reconstruction, policymakers in Tokyo began repositioning Japan in the
vastly altered circumstances of the postwar world. Returning from an eight-month
Euro-American tour in 1919, former foreign minister Goto៮ Shinpei called for a cabinet-level research institution like the then-ubiquitous European Ministries of Reconstruction.52 According to Goto៮ , “the great world change” of the last five years had
spread throughout society, the economy, and politics: “All aspects of life must be
granted the opportunity of reform.”53 The Hara cabinet (1918–1921) did not ultimately create the Japanese equivalent of a European Ministry of Reconstruction, but
it did begin a decade of reform that mirrored many of the rebuilding efforts in Europe. As Prime Minister Kato៮ Takaaki declared in May 1925, “The Japanese people
. . . must come together in a grand resolution and effort to build the foundations for
a New Japan.”54
Japan specialists have long identified the nineteenth century as a striking era of
nation-building, when Japan became the first non-Western polity to transform from
a feudal society into a modern state and economic “powerhouse.”55 The extraordinary scope of Japan’s reconstruction after 1918 can be gleaned from the way Japanese contemporaries understood it to be equivalent to the earlier nation-building
project. Indeed, to the extent that Japan faced a new definition of civilization after
1917, it was reliving the experience of the founders of modern Japan. Just as the
arrival of U.S. naval officer Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853 had introduced
Japanese subjects to the age of empires, the First World War presented Tokyo a new
vision of the modern world.
If the founders of modern Japan sought sweeping change in the body politic, most
Japanese subjects likewise spied opportunity in the latter half of the First World War.
Many, in fact, drew explicit parallels with the first major transformation of state. As
Seiyu៮ kai Party president Hara Takashi remarked in June 1917, “for the first time in
fifty years since the renovation [ishin], it is time for national renewal [kokka
sasshin].”56 Politician and pundit Tagawa Daikichiro៮ described the Paris Peace Conreparations, restoration of trade and transportation networks, and excess capacity. For a useful synopsis
of these issues, see Derek H. Aldcroft, The European Economy, 1914 –2000, 4th ed. (New York, 2001),
chaps. 1–3.
51 Indeed, increasingly popular analyses of cultural reconstruction have highlighted the critical enterprise of rebuilding beyond Europe. They remain, however, generally focused upon countries that
contributed substantial human resources to the war. Ana Carden-Coyne, Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism, and the First World War (Oxford, 2009), for example, details the physical and cultural
reconstruction of bodies in Europe, the United States, and Australia.
52 Reflecting the new imperial reign of Taisho
៮ , Goto៮ proposed an institution called the State Committee for Taisho៮ Renovation. Goto៮ Fumio shi danwa dai ikkai sokkiroku (First Record of Goto៮ Fumio’s
Reflections) (Tokyo, 1963), 51–53.
53 Quoted in Arima Manabu, “Kokusaika” no naka no teikoku Nihon (“Imperial Japan in the Context
of ‘Internationalization’ ”) (Tokyo, 1999), 237–238.
54 Kato
៮ Takaaki, “Meika no sakebi” (“Celebrity Appeal”), King 1, no. 5 (May 1925): 1.
55 See Gordon, A Modern History of Japan, 93.
56 Hara, Hara Takashi nikki, 4: 291 (diary entry of June 2, 1917).
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ference as a global version of the Meiji Renovation, bringing together the world
community in the same way that Meiji had unified Japan’s independent feudal domains.57 Although the actual meaning of “renovation” in 1919 differed with each
proponent, the import of these varied suggestions was clear. As the bi-weekly Nihon
oyobi Nihonjin (Japan and the Japanese) reported in September 1919, “today’s keyword is to reform [kaizo៮ ] everything.”58
In echoing their mid-nineteenth-century predecessors’ zeal for reform, Japanese
policymakers and opinion leaders after the First World War pursued a strikingly
similar strategy. Just as modern Japan’s founders began their epic transformation by
condemning the “evil customs” of the past, the campaign to construct a New Japan
in the 1920s stood upon a vociferous denunciation of recent history.59 The arrival
of Perry had persuaded many that “life has been dark and closed.”60 Likewise, Yoshino Sakuzo៮ declared in 1919 that peace had arrived, “with the general awakening
of public sentiment from the old aggressive militarism.”61 Tokyo University religious
scholar Anesaki Masaharu applauded “the dawn of a global grand stage.” “The cock
is crowing. The eastern horizon is turning crimson,” he proclaimed. “Those who look
back now to last night’s dreams cannot but become stragglers in the world [sekai no
rakugosha].”62
Like its nineteenth-century predecessor, the interwar vision of passing darkness
was accompanied by clamorous appeals for a new opening to the world. Anesaki
urged his countrymen to abandon “the tendency toward a closed country [sakokuteki
keiko៮ ]” exemplified by weapons, self-sufficiency, and economic autonomy and
awaken to “the grand spirit of promoting an open country [kaikoku]” following world
trends.63 Kenseikai Party president Kato៮ Takaaki called for an augmentation of Japan’s international status “by incorporating the best of world civilization in politics,
industry, wisdom and morality, technology, thought, and custom.”64 And prince and
future prime minister Konoe Fumimaro identified as one lesson of the Paris Peace
57 Tagawa Daikichiro
៮ , “Sekai no dai-ichi ishin” (“The First Global Renovation”), Kokusai renmei
2, no. 11 (November 1921): 7–16, here 9, 12.
58 “Hisshi hekicho
៮ ” (“Editorial Notes”), Nihon oyobi Nihonjin, no. 765 (September 15, 1919): 102.
59 This was the terminology of the 1868 Charter Oath. Translation in Wm. Theodore de Bary, ed.,
Sources of Japanese Tradition, 2 vols. (New York, 1964), 2: 137. In some cases, the architects of a New
Japan borrowed wholesale the language of the Meiji Renovation. In 1922, the Ministry of Education
urged the Japanese to “sweep away the evil customs” of the past. Quoted in Sheldon Garon, “Rethinking
Modernization and Modernity in Japanese History: A Focus on State-Society Relations,” Journal of
Asian Studies 53, no. 2 (May 1994): 346–366, here 356.
60 This was the 1867 observation of Fukuzawa Yukichi, soon to become one of nineteenth-century
Japan’s most celebrated interpreters of the West. Quoted in Edward Seidensticker, Low City, High City:
Tokyo from Edo to Earthquake (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 35.
61 Yoshino Sakuzo
៮ , “Teikokushugi yori kokusai minshu៮ shugi e” (“From Imperialism to Interna៮ ta Masao, ed., Shiryo៮ Taisho៮
tional Democracy”), Rokugo៮ zasshi, June/July 1919, reprinted in O
demokurashii ronso៮ shu៮ , 2 vols. (Tokyo, 1971), 1: 176–200, here 199–200.
62 Anesaki Masaharu, “Taisen no ketchaku to sengo no shin kyokumen” (“Settlement of the Great
War and the New Postwar Era”), March 1917, quoted in Seki Shizuo, Taisho៮ gaiko៮ : Jinbutsu ni miru gaiko៮
senryakuron (Kyoto, 2001), 97.
63 Ibid.
64 Kato
៮ Takaaki, “Genka no naichi gaiko៮ ” (“Current Internal Diplomacy”), Kensei 2, no. 4 (June
10, 1919): 1–13, here 13. From a speech of April 12, 1919.
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that “Japanese must now, all the more, nurture knowledge and a general grasp of
the world.”65
Historians who have noted the impact of the Great War in Japan have stressed
the defensiveness of the nation’s response.66 But if, like its nineteenth-century predecessor, reconstruction in the 1920s began with a thunderous denunciation of the
past and clamorous appeals for a new “opening,” it was, most importantly, sustained
by a buoyantly hopeful vision for the future. According to the Dawn Society, formed
by Yoshino Sakuzo៮ and like-minded intellectuals in 1918 to promote the new global
trends, the Great War had been “a war for liberalism, progressivism, and democracy
[minponshugi] against autocracy, conservatism, and militarism. With this shining victory and peace, the peoples of the world have hope, for the first time, for a truly
civilized way of life.”67 Popular pundit Murofuse Ko៮ shin confirmed that feverish
appeals for democracy (minponshugi ) in Japan had destroyed the legitimacy of militarism and “demonstrated the extraordinary power of the demands of historical
evolution.”68
Japan specialists typically locate the essential spirit of nineteenth-century reform
in an 1868 proclamation by the emperor known as the Charter Oath. Likewise, the
zeal for change following the Great War was embodied in the Imperial Rescript on
the Establishment of Peace of January 1920:
The course of events has completely changed and remains in the process of transformation.
It is time to follow a path of great effort and flexibility. You subjects should pursue this deeply,
and officials of the land should faithfully follow this by attempting to realize, in accordance
with the international situation, a League of Nations peace.69
Mirroring the Charter Oath, this rescript includes the three components of an epic
departure. “Complete” change (itten) implies escape from an unpleasant past. “Flexibility” (junno៮ no michi ) “in accordance with the international situation” (sekai no
taikei ni yori motte) echoes the early Meiji command for knowledge to be “sought
throughout the world.”70 And the charge to realize “a League of Nations peace”
(renmei heiwa) accentuates the centrality of the new definition of civilization articulated at Paris. Just as the Charter Oath marked the official start of a new national
trajectory, the Imperial Rescript on the Establishment of Peace was post-Versailles
65 Konoe Fumimaro, Sengo O
៮ bei kenbunroku (Postwar Observations of the West ) (Tokyo, 1981), 46.
This passage is dated June 1919 in a volume that was originally published in 1920.
66 Japanese generals, we are told, struggled to establish a new scale of preparedness befitting an age
of total war. Policymakers and pundits brooded over how to confront the likely escalation of international economic competition in an era of peace. And following the rejection at the Paris Peace Conference of Japan’s proposed “racial equality” clause in the covenant of the League of Nations, “race
became a factor of heightened concern” for Japanese diplomats. See, respectively, Michael A. Barnhart,
Japan Prepares for Total War: The Search for Economic Security, 1919–1941 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1987); Suetake
Yoshiya, Taisho៮ ki no seiji ko៮ zo៮ (Political Structure in the Taisho៮ Era) (Tokyo, 1998); and Hasegawa
Yu៮ ichi, ed., Taisho៮ ki Nihon no Amerika ninshiki (Japanese Perceptions of America in the Taisho៮ Era)
(Tokyo, 2001), 1.
67 In a declaration of December 4, 1918. Quoted in Ito
៮ Takashi, Taisho៮ ki ‘kakushin’ ha no seiritsu
(Formation of “Reformist” Groups in the Taisho៮ Era) (Tokyo, 1978), 67.
68 Murofuse Ko
៮ shin, “Gunkokuka yori minponka e” (“From Militarization to Democratization”),
Chu៮ o៮ ko៮ ron 33, no. 7 (July 1918): 63–69, here 69.
69 “Heiwa kokufuku no taisho
៮ happu” (“Taisho៮ Promulgation on the Establishment of Peace”),
៮ saka Asahi shinbun, January 14, 1920, reprinted in Nakajima, Shinbun shu៮ roku Taisho៮ shi, 8: 24.
O
70 Quoted in de Bary, Sources of Japanese Tradition, 2: 137.
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Japan’s clearest statement of a conspicuous new departure. Like the Meiji Renovation, the new interwar posture envisioned change throughout society. As Nihon
oyobi Nihonjin noted in September 1920, “a wind is blowing. The leaves are falling
. . . Some kind of great change [taihen] is in the air.”71
THE REFORMIST ZEAL THAT SWEPT the world after 1918 rested upon much more than
fanciful hopes or empty rhetoric. Historians of the twentieth century highlight deep
structural changes that underlay a new world after the Great War.72 And Japan
specialists have detailed the new national infrastructure that supported a modern
Japanese state in the nineteenth century.73 Historians of Japan are much less likely
to speak of any structural foundations of a new order after 1918. But Japan’s earlytwentieth-century enterprise in reconstruction, like its nineteenth-century predecessor, rested upon a striking transformation in three principal areas: economics, politics, and foreign policy. Over the course of the Great War, Japan transformed from
an agrarian to an industrial polity, became a mass consumer society, and catapulted
to the rank of a world power. As historians of Europe and the United States have
long said about their respective countries, the First World War thrust Japan into the
twentieth century.
Fueled by incessant Allied requests for war assistance and matériel and by new
commercial opportunities opened by the withdrawal of European power from the
Asia-Pacific, the Japanese economy grew by 5.21 percent between 1913 and 1922.
This rate was significantly higher than the international standard and signaled a rapid
socioeconomic transformation.74 Between 1910–1914 and 1920–1924, Japanese exports expanded threefold, producing the first balance-of-payments surplus in Japanese history by 1916. By 1920–1924, manufactured goods accounted for more than
90 percent of Japanese exports.75 By the end of the war, Japan had undergone a
critical transition in the movement from a preindustrial to an industrial economy—
from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates.76 By 1925, Japan’s
overall population reached 60.74 million, ranking it fifth in the world behind China,
the U.S., Russia, and Germany.77
“Hisshi hekicho៮ ” (“Editorial Notes”), Nihon oyobi Nihonjin, no. 791 (September 15, 1920): 106.
The United States, for example, replaced Western Europe as the principal locus of world industry,
finance, and trade after the war, following a near-tripling of manufacturing production between 1914
and 1919, from $23 billion to $60 billion. In 1913, the combined production of Germany, Britain, France,
and Belgium substantially outpaced that of the U.S. By the late 1920s, the U.S. surpassed the total output
of these countries by nearly half. From 1914 to 1919, the U.S. changed from the world’s greatest debtor
to its greatest creditor nation. See Jeffrey A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth
Century (New York, 2007), 132.
73 In particular, a centralized system of prefectures and a national system of taxation, education,
conscription, communication, and transport. See especially Marius B. Jansen and Gilbert Rozman, eds.,
Japan in Transition, from Tokugawa to Meiji (Princeton, N.J., 1986).
74 According to the O
៮ kawa Kazushi project. O
៮ kawa Kazushi, Takamatsu Nobukiyo, and Yamamoto
Yu៮ zo៮ , Kokumin shotoku (National Income) (Tokyo, 1974), cited in Takemura Tamio, Taisho៮ bunka
teikoku no yu៮ topia (Tokyo, 2004), 13.
75 W. G. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, 1894 –1945 (Oxford, 1987), 126, table 2.
76 Britain underwent this transition at the end of the eighteenth century. See Hayami Akira and
Kojima Miyoko, Taisho៮ demogurafi: Rekishi jinko៮ gaku de mita hazama no jidai (Taisho៮ Demography:
Interim Age from the Perspective of Historical Demography) (Tokyo, 2004), 226–233.
77 If Japan’s imperial territories are counted, the population stood at 85.4 million. Ibid., 238–239.
71
72
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The wartime rise of an industrial economy supported an equally dramatic transition to a mass consumer society. Rapid industrial expansion during the war first
sparked remarkable urban growth. The 1910–1920 years mark the most volatile decade of movement between agricultural and non-agricultural labor in the history of
modern Japan.78 Japan’s farm population dropped by 2 million during the war, and
Tokyo’s population grew by 300,000, to 1.01 million, between 1908 and 1920.79 Osaka
became the industrial capital of Japan, with a population of 2 million by 1925—the
sixth-largest city in the world at the time.80 Postwar Japan was home to a new urban
middle class. The percentage of companies with more than 100 employees expanded
from 46 percent to 53 percent between 1914 and 1922.81 Between 1912 and 1926, per
capita GNP expanded by 33 percent and per capita expenditures rose by 40 percent.82
Women made up an increasing proportion of the new urban middle class, constituting, in the early 1920s, 10 percent of the workforce in Tokyo’s central business
district, Marunouchi.83 Nurturing this new postwar middle class was a rapid expansion of education. The number of higher and trade schools for men in Japan almost
doubled between 1918 and 1930, from 104 to 194.84 Between 1918 and 1930, the
number of higher schools for girls more than doubled, from 420 to 975. Among
universities, private institutions such as Keio៮ , Waseda, Do៮ shisha, Chu៮ o៮ , and Meiji
received official recognition as universities for the first time. The total number of
officially sanctioned universities leapt from 5 in 1918 to 46 by 1930.85
Catering to Japan’s new postwar middle class was a new mass consumer culture,
sustained by rapid growth in the national media. Eric Weitz has argued that Weimar
Germany witnessed the greatest transformation of media culture since Johannes
Gutenberg invented the movable-type printing press.86 Interwar Japan experienced
a similar revolution. From 1905 to 1924, the circulation of Japanese dailies expanded
fourfold.87 And numerous new general publications, boasting such arresting titles as
Transformation (Kaizo៮ ), Us (Warera), and Liberation (Kaiho៮ ), sprouted after the war
to engage the new debate over reform. As in Germany and elsewhere, new forms
of communication invigorated interwar Japanese culture. National radio broadcasts
began in Japan in 1925, and between 1926 and 1932, the government-sponsored
broadcaster, NHK, increased its branch stations from three to nineteen. Over the
same period, the number of radio receivers rose from 361,066 to more than 1.4
78 During this time, 2.9 million laborers left the agricultural workforce and 3.566 million entered
the non-agricultural sector, representing a ratio of 82.7 percent of former agricultural laborers in the
number of new entrants in industrial labor. Numbers from table 14.6 of Mataji Umemura, “Population
៮ hkawa and Miyohei Shinohara with Larry Meissner, eds., Patterns of
and Labor Force,” in Kazushi O
Japanese Economic Development: A Quantitative Appraisal (New Haven, Conn., 1979), 241–249, here 246.
79 Nakamura Takafusa, Economic Growth in Prewar Japan, trans. Robert A. Feldman (New Haven,
Conn., 1983), 125, 147.
80 Imai Seiichi, Taisho
៮ demokurashii (Taisho៮ Democracy) (Tokyo, 1974), 456.
81 Saraki Yoshihisa, Taisho
៮ jidai o tazunete mita: Heisei Nihon no genkei (Visiting the Taisho៮ Era:
Origins of Heisei Japan) (Tokyo, 2002), 72–73.
82 Hayami and Kojima, Taisho
៮ demogurafi, 45.
83 Imai, Taisho
៮ demokurashii, 457.
84 From table titled “Zai gakushasu
៮ to gakko៮ su៮ no suii” (“Changes in Numbers of Scholars and
Schools”) in Arima, “Kokusaika” no naka no teikoku Nihon, 161.
85 Ibid., 160–161.
86 Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, N.J., 2009), 247.
87 From 1.63 to 6.25 million. See Sharon H. Nolte, Liberalism in Modern Japan: Ishibashi Tanzan
and His Teachers, 1905–1960 (Berkeley, Calif., 1987), 19.
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million. By 1932, 25.7 percent of all metropolitan households owned a radio.88 As
in the U.S., Japan’s first journals devoted to matters cinematic appeared in the early
1910s.89 And as in the U.S., rapid urbanization had Japanese moviegoers flocking to
the theaters in record numbers during the war. By 1926, the paying public for films
in Japan came to 153.7 million.90
The war, finally, catapulted Japan from a regional to a world power. By vanquishing German forces in China and German Micronesia, negotiating a comprehensive series of rights in China (the notorious “Twenty-One Demands”), and dispatching 70,000 troops to participate in an Allied intervention in Siberia, Japan
expanded its political, military, and economic reach for the first time to China
proper, Russia, and the South Pacific. Japanese troops withdrew from Shandong
Province and Russia by 1922. But added to the economic boom, these wartime gains
highlight a dramatic increase in Japanese might relative to those who had dominated
East Asian diplomacy since the nineteenth century—Britain, France, Russia, and
Germany. The shift of power was not simply a regional concern. The most remarkable wartime geopolitical change for Japan was a new global presence. Japanese
textiles made their way to India as Imperial Navy destroyers steamed to the Mediterranean. But Japan’s new presence involved, most importantly, a new level of
international clout. The degree to which belligerents from both sides scrambled for
Japanese aid during the war is remarkable—from Britain’s initial August 1914 request for Japan to join the war, to British and American appeals for Japanese convoy
aid, to French demands for Japanese troops in Europe, to German and Austrian
overtures for a separate peace.91 The presence of Japanese representatives among
the exalted assembly of delegates from five victor nations at the Paris Peace Conference marked the most powerful demonstration of Japan’s debut as a world power.
As Prime Minister Hara Takashi proudly proclaimed, at Paris, “as one of five great
powers, the empire [Japan] contributed to the recovery of world peace. With this,
the empire’s status has gained all the more authority, and her responsibility to the
world has become increasingly weighty.”92
Gregory J. Kasza, The State and the Mass Media in Japan, 1918–1945 (Berkeley, Calif., 1988), 88.
Initially introduced in 1896, the main technical innovations and infrastructure for film were in
place in Japan by the early 1900s. The first permanent structure in Japan built exclusively for viewing
films appeared in 1903—the Electric Theater (denkikan) in Asakusa. Significantly, this came several
years before the U.S. and Britain moved away from makeshift storefront nickelodeons. In the U.S.,
Motion Picture Story Magazine debuted in 1911. Japan’s first motion picture magazine, Film Record,
appeared in 1913. Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry (Princeton, N.J., 1982), 26, 36.
90 Official figures from the Japanese Home Ministry, cited in Kasza, The State and the Mass Media
in Japan, 54.
91 For British appeals, see Peter Lowe, Great Britain and Japan, 1911–15: A Study of British Far
Eastern Policy (London, 1969), chaps. 6–8. For German and Austrian overtures, see Frank Iklé, “Japanese-German Peace Negotiations during World War I,” American Historical Review 71, no. 1 (October
1965): 62–76. As for France, Paris in 1915 made informal requests for up to 500,000 Japanese troops
to be dispatched to the Balkan Peninsula. Payson Jackson Treat, Japan, America and the Great War
(Boston, 1918), 8. As late as August 1918, the U.S. State Department, at the urging of the navy, requested
that Japan send battle cruisers to aid in the protection of U.S. troop transports to Europe. Secretary
of the Navy Edwin Denby to Secretary of State Charles E. Hughes, September 23, 1921, Hornbeck
Papers, box 255, “Japan: War Costs and Contributions” file.
92 Hara Takashi, “Hara shusho
៮ no tsu៮ cho៮ ” (“Prime Minister Hara’s Ultimatum”) (January 1920),
cited in Kawada Minoru, Hara Takashi: Tenkanki no ko៮ so៮ (Tokyo, 1995), 150.
88
89
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FIGURE 3: Yoshimura Jiro៮ , “Hatsu ho៮ so៮ ” (“First Broadcast”). From “Meiji, Taisho៮ , Sho៮ wa o៮ emaki,” King 7,
no. 1, supplement (1931). This image of a family gathered around one of interwar Japan’s greatest new pastimes, the radio, was chosen as one of three important events of 1925 for display in a full-color roundup of
modern Japanese history produced by the popular journal King in 1931. Courtesy of Kyoto International Manga
Museum.
PEERING BACK FROM THE CALAMITY of the Pacific War, Japan specialists rarely view
the Paris Peace Conference as evidence of a Japanese structural transformation.
Rather, they echo the dark narrative of the new reformers of the 1930s, whose path
to war was built upon a general condemnation of the first post–World War I de-
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FIGURE 4: Shimokawa Hekoten, “Taiheiyo៮ kaigi no yondai kyo៮ koku no shusho៮ ” (“Prime Ministers of the Four
Great Powers at the Pacific Conference”). From To៮ kyo៮ Puck 14, no. 10 (October 1, 1921): cover. Although
Japanese prime minister Hara Takashi did not attend the Washington Naval Conference, a popular Japanese
graphic journal places him at the center of an assembly of leading statesmen at the conference, including
(clockwise from left) the British prime minister, David Lloyd George; the French prime minister, Aristide
Briand; and the U.S. secretary of state, Charles Evans Hughes. Courtesy of Kyoto International Manga Museum.
cade.93 But the economic, political, and diplomatic changes that swept Japan during
the First World War did not just support a “New Japan.” They constituted a critical
pillar of the new postwar global order. Throughout the 1920s, Japan played a vital
93 The orthodox narrative argues that the Allied refusal to include a Japan-proposed “racial equality” clause in the League of Nations covenant “undermined the idealistic claims of the Western powers
that principles of equality and self-determination should anchor the postwar international order” and
“fueled strong Japanese anger at the hypocrisy of the Western governments.” See Gordon, A Modern
History of Japan, 174.
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role in laying the foundations of a new twentieth-century civilization—democracy,
internationalism, arms control, and a culture of peace.
Specialists of Europe have long noted the extraordinary political consequences
of the 1914 –1918 years, in particular the implosion of four key dynastic regimes—
Imperial Russia, Imperial Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. Imperial Japan did not self-destruct in 1918. But backed by a rapidly
industrializing economy, an urban middle class, and a mass consumer culture, Japan
underwent a political transformation equivalent to the revolution of 1868. Just as the
feudal dynasty gave way to a modern monarchy in the mid-nineteenth century, political power moved from the nation’s non-elected founders to political party cabinets
in the 1920s.
Like examinations of the Weimar Republic, assessments of this interwar transfer
of power have long stressed ultimate calamity (World War II) over fundamental
change.94 If we focus, however, less upon national peculiarities and more upon
broad, transnational processes, the degree to which the Great War fueled mass society and representative politics across the globe becomes clear.95 Like the vision of
a modern nation-state embodied by the steamship commanded by Commodore
Perry, the implosion of all prominent autocratic belligerents of the war energized
political reform in Japan by demonstrating the power of democracy. When the final
months of hostilities ushered in Japan’s first true party cabinet, contemporaries were
clear about its significance. As the editors of Chu៮ o៮ ko៮ ron declared in October 1918,
“the wave of world thought has, in an entirely unexpected interval, remarkably advanced the power of political parties.”96 As Minseito៮ Party head Hamaguchi Osachi
proclaimed in June 1927, advanced modern states enjoyed an “extraordinary power
of leadership” through institutions derived “from magnanimous and capable people
fostered through respect for individual freedom and creativity.”97
Following a brief return to oligarchic rule from 1922 to 1924, Japan for the first
time entered an era of party politics: for eight years, two main political parties traded
the reins of power. Looking back from the perspective of Pearl Harbor, historians
have accentuated contemporary criticism of party rule. But peering forward from the
Great War, contemporaries stressed nothing if not dramatic political change. As the
៮ saka mainichi shinbun, Sugiyama Kan, demanager of internal affairs at the daily O
clared in 1929, the end of transcendental cabinets and the beginning of responsible
94 The scholarship has highlighted the growth of representative government—“Taisho
៮ democracy”—during the reign of the Taisho៮ emperor (1912–1926). Shinobu Seizaburo៮ originally coined the
phrase “Taisho៮ democracy” to describe an era of lofty ideals ultimately destroyed by “feudal” elements
from within. See Shinobu, Taisho៮ demokurashiishi (A History of Taisho៮ Democracy), 3 vols. (Tokyo, 1954).
Recent studies dwell less upon the “feudal,” more upon the “contradictions” of interwar politics. According to Elise Tipton, the liberal political, social, and cultural movements of Taisho៮ democracy were
“complex, contradictory and multivalent”; Tipton, Modern Japan: A Social and Political History, 2nd ed.
(New York, 2008), 113.
95 It is safe to say that reconsideration of the myriad possibilities of the Weimar Republic has advanced more quickly than that of interwar Japan. Eric Weitz, for example, laments the “tragedy” of
seeing Weimar “only as a prelude to the Third Reich” and presents a forceful vision of Weimar as a
“rich, exciting moment”; Weimar Germany, 5.
96 Editors, “Hara naikaku o mukau” (“Welcoming the Hara Cabinet”), Chu
៮ o៮ ko៮ ron 33, no. 10 (October 1918): 1.
97 From an address given at the inaugural convocation of the Minseito
៮ Party, June 1, 1927. Hamaguchi Osachi, “Tadashiki o funde osorezu” (“Be Unafraid to Speak the Truth”), reprinted in Kawada
Minoru, ed., Hamaguchi Osachi shu៮ (Tokyo, 2000), 26.
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FIGURE 5: Mikami Tomoharu, “Fusen jii undo៮ ” (“Demonstration for Universal Suffrage”). From “Meiji,
Taisho៮ , Sho៮ wa o៮ emaki,” King 7, no. 1, supplement (1931). This image of a large demonstration for universal
suffrage in Tokyo, March 23, 1923, was chosen as one of two important events of 1923 for display in a full-color
roundup of modern Japanese history produced by the popular journal King in 1931. Courtesy of Kyoto International Manga Museum.
government was “a monumental advance in constitutional government [kensei no
ichidai shinpo].”98 When the party cabinet of Kato៮ Takaaki obtained parliamentary
approval for universal male suffrage in March 1925, the Lower House erupted in a
hail of banzais, louder, according to the daily Jiji shinpo៮ , than anything that had ever
been heard within parliamentary walls.99
As with the widening parameters of representative government, historians have
long located a heightened appreciation for international organization and cooperation among the new sensibilities of the post–First World War years.100 Given the
history of the Second World War, the durability of such organizations has remained
suspect.101 But Japan’s experience reveals how powerful the global attraction to internationalism was after 1918. Anchored in a newly industrialized economy and ur98 Sugiyama Kan, “Hamaguchi naikaku e no gyo
៮ bo៮ ” (“Hopes for the Hamaguchi Cabinet”), Chu៮ o៮
ko៮ ron 44, no. 8 (August 1929): 103–106, here 103.
99 “Kato
៮ shusho៮ do៮ agesareru” (“Prime Minister Kato៮ Hailed”), Jiji shinpo៮ , March 3, 1926, reprinted
in Nakajima, Shinbun shu៮ roku Taisho៮ shi, 13: 95.
100 See, for example, Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore, 1997), chaps.
2, 3.
101 Even Zara Steiner, who insists upon viewing interwar European history on its own terms, stresses
the “weaknesses” of interwar “experiments in internationalism”; The Lights That Failed, vii.
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ban middle class and led by a new political elite, Japan embarked upon a dramatic
new national trajectory after the war. If a central component of the reform agenda
in 1868 had been a striking new vision of Japan’s place in the world, such was also
the case in the 1920s. Like the glimpse of active international intercourse presented
by the intrusion of Western power in nineteenth-century Asia, after all, the obliteration of a continent demanded a serious reconsideration of priorities in 1919. As
the 1920 Imperial Rescript on the Establishment of Peace noted, world trends had
“completely changed.” At Paris, “a new agreement on perpetual peace was made,
establishing the framework for a League of Nations. We truly rejoice at this from
the heart.”102
Prince Konoe Fumimaro typically makes a first appearance in the general narrative of modern Japanese history as an early critic of this new postwar internationalism. On the eve of his departure for Paris with the Japanese delegation, Konoe
argued in Nihon oyobi Nihonjin that the conference and the proposed League of
Nations would serve the interests only of the world’s greatest economies, Britain and
the United States.103 After attending six months of talks in Paris, however, the prince
published a volume of his observations that was as complimentary of the new trends
as it was guarded. The conference, Konoe noted, had confirmed his initial sense that
power would continue to prevail in international relations. But it was too early to
declare the end of idealism. Woodrow Wilson’s notion of self-determination had
become the central spirit of the conference, and the idea of a League of Nations
alone would ensure that the American president’s name would “shine brightly in the
history of mankind for eternity.” The peace conference, Konoe concluded, truly represented a “watershed” in international politics.104
Coming from a man who would eventually lead Japan to war with China in the
name of battling Anglo-American imperialism in Asia, this celebration of Wilson in
1919 is surprising. But this spirit lay at the foundation of an unmistakable new trajectory for Japanese foreign affairs through the decade. Just as the Anglo-Japanese
alliance had symbolized Japan’s international posture in the age of imperialism,
membership in the League of Nations and participation in a remarkable series of
international conventions—including the Versailles Treaty, the League of Nations
Covenant, the Five-Power Treaty, the Nine-Power Treaty, the Four-Power Treaty,
the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the London Naval Treaty—defined the core of Japan’s
international posture after 1918. As Konoe noted, “secret, professional diplomacy
has finally become a relic, and the age of open, people’s diplomacy is clearly on its
way.”105 As the journal of the Japanese League of Nations Association remarked in
“Heiwa kokufuku no taisho៮ happu,” 24.
Oka Yoshitake, Konoe Fumimaro: A Political Biography, trans. Shumpei Okamoto and Patricia
Murray (Tokyo, 1983), 10–13.
104 Konoe, Sengo O
៮ bei kenbunroku, 36–37. This passage is dated June 1919. Sho៮ ji Jun’ichiro៮ similarly
notes Konoe’s positive appraisal of Wilson, but he describes it as a reflection not of the age but of the
flexibility inherent in Konoe’s attitude toward the U.S. See Sho៮ ji Jun’ichiro៮ , “Konoe Fumimaro no
tai-Beikan” (“Konoe Fumimaro’s Perspective of America”), in Hasegawa, Taisho៮ ki Nihon no Amerika
ninshiki, 3–39, here 16–21.
105 Konoe, Sengo O
៮ bei kenbunroku, 37.
102
103
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November 1922, “those who will compile the history [of this age] will probably title
the diplomacy following the European War ‘the Age of Conference Diplomacy.’ ”106
Like representative government and internationalism, arms control came to dominate discussions in the post-Versailles world. Historians of Europe have, in recent
years, increasingly praised the accomplishments of interwar disarmament.107 By contrast, accounts of arms control in interwar Japan continue to privilege calamity over
opportunity.108 Like the founders of the Meiji state, however, the architects of interwar Japan faced a dramatic new definition of national power in 1919. Military
strength had, in the nineteenth century, defined a “mature civilization,” and Meiji
leaders had eagerly promoted national “wealth and strength” (fukoku kyo៮ hei ). By
contrast, as Kenseikai Party orator Ozaki Yukio observed in November 1920, the
prewar attempt to maintain stability through armed might had brought nothing but
“unimaginable misery” (so៮ zo៮ dekinai hodo no sanjo៮ ).109
Viewed from the vantage point of the First World War, Japan’s commitment to
disarmament is nothing if not striking. The January 1920 Imperial Rescript on the
Establishment of Peace described the global “shock” (sho៮ do៮ ) of the Great War and
called upon Japanese subjects “to realize, in accordance with the international situation, a League of Nations peace [renmei heiwa].”110 Soon after, a young Crown
Prince Hirohito wrote in an essay for his private tutor that, “witnessing the tragic
aftermath of war, the people of all nations long for peace and international conciliation.”111 More than six months before an American invitation to assemble in
Washington, D.C., to discuss arms control, the quest for control gained traction in
Tokyo.112 After having consistently promoted naval expansion, the daily Jiji shinpo៮
106 “Kaigi gaiko
៮ no ryu៮ ko៮ ” (“Popularity of Conference Diplomacy”), Kokusai chishiki 2, no. 11 (November 1922): 112–113, here 112.
107 As Richard Shuster argues, the post–World War I disarmament of Germany was “a monumental
endeavor on a scale never experienced before in history”; Shuster, German Disarmament after World War
I: The Diplomacy of International Arms Inspection, 1920–1931 (New York, 2006), 8. Similarly, Alan Sharp
praises “the men who had, effectively, deprived Germany of its material capability to make war in the
early 1920s”; Sharp, “Mission Accomplished? Britain and the Disarmament of Germany, 1918–1923,”
in Keith Hamilton and Edward Johnson, eds., Arms and Disarmament in Diplomacy (London, 2008),
73–90, here 87.
108 According to Asada Sadao, the July 1921 American invitation to deliberate naval ratios in Washington came to Japan as “a ‘bolt from the sky,’ ” and led to “a sense of crisis” that “gripped the nation”;
Asada, “Between the Old Diplomacy and the New, 1918–1922: The Washington System and the Origins
of Japanese-American Rapprochement,” Diplomatic History 30, no. 2 (April 2006): 211–230, here 214.
Even more dramatic is Somura Yasunobu’s assessment, which long ago identified the Washington Conference as Japan’s “entry into the grave”; Somura, “Washinton kaigi no hito ko៮ satsu” (“An Investigation
of the Washington Conference”), in Nihon kokusai seiji gakkai, ed., Nihon gaiko៮ shi kenkyu៮ : Taisho៮ jidai
(Tokyo, 1958), 118–129, here 118. Oka Yoshitake’s description of the “great shock” of Washington
confirms this mainstream vision of crisis; Oka, Tenkanki no Taisho៮ (Taisho៮ as Turning Point ) (Tokyo,
1969), 170. A powerful exception to this tale of tragedy is Roger Dingman, Power in the Pacific: The
Origins of Naval Arms Limitation, 1914 –1922 (Chicago, 1976).
109 Ozaki Yukio, “Kokka no sonbo
៮ to kokusai renmei” (“The Survival of the Nation and the League
of Nations”), Kokusai renmei 1, no. 2 (February 1921): 2–32, here 2, 5.
110 “Heiwa kokufuku no taisho
៮ happu,” 24.
111 Ko
៮ taishi denka, “Heiwa seiritsu no sho៮ choku o haidoku shite, shokan o nobu” (“Impression upon
Reading the Promulgation of the Establishment of Peace”), in Ito៮ Takashi and Yoshihiro Hirose, eds.,
Makino Nobuaki nikki (Tokyo, 1990), 22 (diary entry of August. 17, 1921).
112 Contemporary observer Tagawa Daikichiro
៮ noted that the momentum for disarmament in Tokyo
went back much farther than Britain’s imperial conference of June 1921, which many in Tokyo assumed
was the immediate spark for the Washington Conference. See Tagawa, “Sekai no dai-ichi ishin,” 12.
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made an abrupt about-face on the first day of the New Year.113 In Upper House
deliberations in the same month, Kenseikai Party president Kato៮ Takaaki demanded
a withdrawal of troops from Siberia.114 A resolution on disarmament by the Kenseikai’s Ozaki Yukio was rejected by the Lower House on February 10.115 But Ozaki
embarked upon a national speaking tour on disarmament that garnered widespread
Japanese public support and international attention.116 The momentum escalated in
September when he joined fellow parliamentarian Shimada Saburo៮ and Tokyo University professor Yoshino Sakuzo៮ to found the Fraternity for Disarmament. Serious
peace movements were appearing across the globe, declared the new fraternity. Although Japan had not necessarily been a peace-loving country, there was a substantial new “humanistic” element in the nation. It was time, proclaimed founding
member Kamei Rokuro៮ , to eliminate Japanese “aggression” and prepare for a “New
Japan.”117
Japanese delegates joined deliberations in Washington in November 1921, and
by February 1922 had made commitments that would scrap ten planned capital ships
from the Imperial Japanese Navy.118 One month later, the Japanese Parliament
unanimously passed a resolution demanding a halving of the Imperial Army’s standing division strength. By 1925, the Kenseikai cabinet of Kato៮ Takaaki had pared the
army by four divisions. Japanese delegates joined their American and British counterparts for further naval talks in Geneva (1927) and London (1930), and the
Minseito៮ cabinet of Hamaguchi Osachi obtained parliamentary and Privy Council
approval of the London Naval Treaty by October 1930. Reflecting the striking new
priorities, defense expenditures dropped from 65.4 percent to just 30.4 percent of
the national budget between 1922 and 1932.119 Japanese contemporaries clearly understood the significance of this interwar departure on armaments. The Washington
Conference, declared legal scholar Hayashi Mutsutake, marked “the arrival of a new
113 Imai, Taisho
៮ demokurashii, 340. As is well known, consistently liberal journals such as the To៮ yo៮
keizai shinpo៮ were early supporters of drastic solutions at Washington. In addition to arms control, the
Shinpo៮ urged that Japan “be prepared to abandon everything” (issai o sutsuru) at the conference—
including Japan’s newly acquired interests in Shandong Province and the South Pacific. See Editorial,
“Issai o sutsuru no kakugo: Taiheiyo៮ kaigi ni taisuru waga taido” (“Prepare to Abandon Everything: Our
Attitude toward the Pacific Conference”), To៮ yo៮ keizai shinpo៮ , July 23, 1921, reprinted in Matsuo Takayoshi, ed., Ishibashi Tanzan hyo៮ ronshu៮ (Tokyo, 1991), 94 –100. By October 1921, Ozaki Yukio reported
៮ saka Asahi, and O
៮ saka Mainichi—all supported
that most of Japan’s major dailies—Jiji shinpo៮ , Yomiuri, O
disarmament; Ozaki, “Gunbi shukusho៮ kaigi ni saishi Nihon kokumin no kakusei o unagasu” (“Hoping
for an Awakening of the Japanese People on the Occasion of the Disarmament Conference”), Kokusai
renmei 1, no. 7 (October 1921): 1–5, here 2. “Saikin Nihon no heiwa undo៮ ” (“Recent Developments in
Japan’s Peace Movement”), ibid., 60–71, here 66.
114 Shu
៮ giin and sangiin, eds., Gikai seido hyakunenshi: Teikoku gikaishi (One Hundred Years of the
Parliamentary System: A History of the Parliament ), 2 vols. (Tokyo, 1990), 2: 801.
115 Ibid., 819.
116 Imai, Taisho
៮ demokurashii, 340. According to the journal of the Japanese League of Nations
Association, Ozaki’s campaign “transformed” public sentiment (jinshin o isshin shita) in Japan and
showed the world that Japan had a serious peace movement. “Saikin Nihon no heiwa undo៮ ,” 62. By
Ozaki’s own account, he made 70 addresses related to disarmament between January and July 1921, to
a total of 100,000 people. Out of 100,000 surveys distributed on postcards at these talks, 30,000 were
returned, 93 percent of which endorsed the disarmament agenda. Ozaki, “Gunbi shukusho៮ kaigi ni saishi
Nihon kokumin no kakusei o unagasu,” 1.
117 “Saikin Nihon no heiwa undo,” 66.
118 David C. Evans and Mark R. Peattie, Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics, and Technology in the Imperial
Japanese Navy, 1887–1941 (Annapolis, Md., 1997), 197.
119 See Nakamura, Economic Growth in Prewar Japan, 39, table 1.22.
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age of peace.”120 According to the bi-weekly Nihon oyobi Nihonjin, the assembly
spurred a “monumental change” in Japanese attitudes.121 Responding to the March
1922 resolution to halve army strength, Yoshino Sakuzo៮ remarked that he could not
have dreamed that leaders of a majority party would so directly challenge military
authority.122 Plenipotentiary Wakatsuki’s return from London in June 1930 was met
with an “explosive welcome” at the Kobe docks, complete with roaring crowd, jazz
band, and fireworks. “What a historic sight,” declared the daily Tokyo asahi.123
Treatments of the cultural impact of the Great War generally highlight the emotional trauma of wartime destruction.124 Spared such trauma, Japan accentuates the
degree to which the principal cultural departure of World War I lay not necessarily
in a culture of loss but in a new, forward-looking ethos of peace. Echoing American
studies of the cultural flowering of the 1920s, Japan specialists have generally highlighted the interwar years as an era of leisure.125 But just as historians of the nineteenth century have spoken of a culture of Western fads, fashions, and gadgets that
accompanied Japan’s dramatic nineteenth-century transformation, one might view
interwar Japan as something more than a random assortment of reforms or a cult
of pleasure.126 Just as the founders of modern Japan were inspired by Commodore
Perry and his European counterparts to systematically chase symbols of Western
“civilization and enlightenment,” architects of the New Japan responded to the ruin
of the Somme with a concerted effort to embrace a new culture of peace. As elder
statesman Saionji Kinmochi declared in September 1919, it was time for Japan to
invest wholeheartedly in the arts, industry, and commerce, to become an active contributor to the new global “peace project” (heiwateki jigyo៮ ).127
Historians typically describe Crown Prince Hirohito’s six-month sojourn in Europe in 1921 as a blissful time of personal exposure to the world and new confidence
120 Hayashi Mutsutake, “Washinton kaigi shokan” (“Impressions of the Washington Conference”),
Kokusai renmei 3, no. 4 (April 1922): 20–24, here 21, 24. Hayashi was a trustee of the Japanese League
of Nations Association.
121 “Seikai sho
៮ soku” (“News of the World”), Nihon oyobi Nihonjin, no. 830 (March 1, 1922): 137.
122 Quoted in Imai, Taisho
៮ demokurashii, 351.
123 “Wakatsuki zenken ikko
៮ , Ko៮ be ni kaeru” (“The Party of Plenipotentiary Wakatsuki Returns to
Ko៮ be”), Tokyo asahi shinbun, June 18, 1930, reprinted in Uchikawa Yoshimi and Matsuo Takayoshi,
comps., Sho៮ wa nyu៮ su jiten, 8 vols. (Tokyo, 1986–1989), 2: 745.
124 See Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1975); and Winter, Sites of Memory,
Sites of Mourning.
125 In fact, although studies of the “Jazz Age” in the U.S. and Europe generally recognize the important temporal parameters of the war for such new cultural fixtures as jazz, radio, Hollywood film,
and the “flapper,” the same cannot be said of the historiography of modern Japan. Aficionados of earlytwentieth-century Japanese culture have long identified the Great Kanto៮ Earthquake of 1923, not the
First World War, as the principal watershed in the transition from “Meiji” to “Taisho៮ ” culture. See
Masao Maruyama, “Patterns of Individuation and the Case of Japan: A Conceptual Scheme,” in Marius
B. Jansen, ed., Changing Japanese Attitudes toward Modernization (Princeton, N.J., 1965), 489–531, here
517–522. See also Edward Seidensticker’s analysis of Tokyo culture, divided into two volumes covering
before and after the earthquake, respectively: Seidensticker, Low City, High City; Seidensticker, Tokyo
Rising: The City since the Great Earthquake (Cambridge, Mass., 1991). The most recent English-language
analysis of Taisho៮ culture, likewise, begins its coverage conspicuously in 1923. See Miriam Silverberg,
Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Berkeley, Calif., 2007).
126 The passion for such culture was embodied in the official slogan, “Civilization and Englightenment” (bunmei kaika).
127 Ritsumeikan daigaku Saionji Kinmochi den hensan iinkai, ed., Saionji Kinmochi den (Biography
of Saionji Kinmochi ), 6 vols. (Tokyo, 1993), 3: 323.
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FIGURE 6: Crown Prince Hirohito’s tour of Europe, 1921. This commemorative postcard marked the first tour
of Europe by a Japanese crown prince. Author’s personal collection.
for the future monarch.128 More significantly, the voyage marked the most powerful
expression of a new official sponsorship of peace. At every stop along the tour, Hirohito made reference to the most fundamental principle of civilization after the war.
At the threshold of Europe, Malta, he acknowledged the tragic losses of war by
visiting the graves of seventy-seven Japanese sailors who had died hunting German
U-boats in the Mediterranean.129 In Edinburgh, he told the Boy Scouts that he hoped
Japan would organize a similar group to help maintain “world peace.”130 In both
London and Paris, Hirohito visited the most sacred monuments to wartime sacrifice:
the Cenotaph at Whitehall, the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior at Westminster Abbey, and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe.131 In Italy, he
enjoyed an audience with Pope Benedict XV, who had attempted unsuccessfully to
mediate peace in 1916 and 1917.132 As he readied to depart France, Hirohito named
visits to Reims and other World War I battlefields as having left the deepest impression. “How do those who glorify war,” he demanded, “view places such as
128 Ito
៮ Yukio titles his chapter on Hirohito’s European tour “Awakening to a New World.” Ito៮ Yukio,
Sho៮ wa tenno៮ den (Biography of the Sho៮ wa Emperor ) (Tokyo, 2011), chap. 4.
129 Hatano Sumio et al., eds., Jiju
៮ bukancho៮ Nara Takeji nikki kaiso៮ roku (Memoir of Chief Aidede-Camp Nara Takeji), 4 vols. (Tokyo, 2000), 1: 105–106 (diary entry of April 25, 1921).
130 “Naporeon shiyo
៮ no tsukue nite gosho៮ mei” (“Signing on a Desk Used by Napoleon”), To៮ kyo៮ Asahi
shinbun, May 23, 1921, reprinted in Nakajima, Shinbun shu៮ roku Taisho៮ shi, 9: 195.
131 “Jokun to gorekiho
៮ ” (“Imperial Tour and Honors”), To៮ kyo៮ asahi shinbun, May 11, 1921, 2;
“Gaisenmonka no eirei ni keiken naru kinenhin o” (“Respectful Mementos to the Spirit of the Departed
at the Arc”), To៮ kyo៮ asahi shinbun, June 4, 1921, evening edition, 1.
132 Ben-Ami Shillony, “Emperors and Christianity,” in Shillony, ed., The Emperors of Modern Japan
(Leiden, 2008), 163–183, here 168–169.
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these?”133 As one official perceptively observed upon the prince’s return to Tokyo,
the royal had expressed a keen desire for world peace during his tour and had “made
no mention of [the Meiji slogan] rich country, strong army.”134
The dramatic Japanese turn to representative government, internationalism, and
arms reductions after the war rested most fundamentally upon the association of
these reforms with peace. As the vice chair of the Lower House, Koizumi Matajiro៮ ,
noted of democratic reform in 1927, “our object is to reform the present . . . and to
construct a society of mutual coexistence and peace.”135 Prime Minister Hara
Takashi in 1920 described participation in the new “conference diplomacy” as part
of Japan’s new “responsibility to the world” exemplified by her original contribution
at Paris to “the recovery of world peace.”136 And the return of Japan’s delegates from
the Washington Naval Conference was marked by great fanfare with the inaugural
ceremony and the first sounding of the peace bell at a massive Peace Exposition,
which animated Ueno Park in Tokyo for four months between March and June
1922.137
If contemporaries viewed the principal initiatives of national reconstruction in
interwar Japan as anchored fundamentally in a new culture of peace, they understood the fixtures of the new postwar leisure culture in similar terms. The preeminent
symbol of interwar culture, the Japanese flapper, or “modern girl” (moga), was much
more than a “militant” defying accepted class, gender, and cultural norms.138 Like
the latter-nineteenth-century samurai who shed their topknot for a Western-style
“close-cropped head” (zangiri atama), she represented a complete transformation of
national culture. The natural instinct of women, after all, as the Japanese Christian
Women’s Reform Society’s Moriya Azuma explained in 1923, was to preserve
peace.139 According to Japanese UNESCO representative Ayusawa Fukuko, women
during wartime were detached from the scene of battle and enjoyed a freedom unknown to men. They were mothers of the nation, had a natural inclination to preserve
life, were the guardians of education, and could help eliminate exaltation of war,
133 “Haru no miya iyoiyo Itari e” (“Crown Prince Finally to Italy”), To
៮ kyo៮ nichinichi shinbun, July
9, 1921, reprinted in Nakajima, Shinbun shu៮ roku Taisho៮ shi, 9: 239. Descriptions of the crown prince’s
visits to World War I battlefields pervaded the print media during and immediately following his sojourn.
Diplomat Sawada Setsuzo៮ , who accompanied the prince across Europe, identified a visit to the “Trench
of Bayonets” at Verdun, led by the “Savior of Verdun,” French general Philippe Pétain, as one of his
most memorable stops during the trip. Sawada Setsuzo៮ , “Washinton kaigi to sono go” (“The Washington
Conference and After”), Kokusai renmei 2, no. 5 (May 1, 1922): 1–8, here 6.
134 “Rikugun no yarikuchi ni hinan takai” (“Loud Criticism of Army Methods”), Yomiuri shinbun,
September 6, 1921, reprinted in Nakajima, Shinbun shu៮ roku Taisho៮ shi, 9: 306.
135 Koizumi Matajiro
៮ , Fusen undo៮ hisshi (Secret History of the Movement for Universal Suffrage) (Tokyo, 1927), 152.
136 Hara Takashi, “Hara shusho
៮ no tsu៮ cho៮ ” (“Prime Minister Hara’s Ultimatum”) (January 1920),
cited in Kawada, Hara Takashi, 150.
137 “Umi ni zenken kaeru hi, heiwa no kane hibiki hajimu” (“On the Day of the Plenipotentiary’s
Return from Abroad, the Peace Bell Begins to Sound”), Yomiuri shinbun, March 11, 1922, reprinted in
Nakajima, Shinbun shu៮ roku Taisho៮ shi, 10: 107.
138 For this characterization, see Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, 51–72. The title of this section of Silverberg’s book (part II, chap. 1) is “The Modern Girl as Militant (Movement on the Streets).”
For a similar depiction of the “femme moderne” in interwar France, see Mary Louise Roberts, “Samson
and Delilah Revisited: The Politics of Women’s Fashion in 1920s France,” American Historical Review
98, no. 3 (June 1993): 657–684.
139 Moriya Azuma, “Kokusai heiwa to fujin” (“International Peace and Women”), Kokusai chishiki
3, no. 4 (April 1923): 80–82, here 80.
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FIGURE 7: “Heiwa to៮ ” (“Peace Tower”). The Peace Tower of the Great Peace Exposition in Ueno Park, Tokyo,
March–June 1922, is pictured in this commemorative postcard with the latest in transportation technology, two
biplanes. Author’s personal collection.
militarism, and heroism.140 Although Margaret Sanger was prohibited from giving
public talks on birth control in Japan, her visit in March 1922 underscored the effect
of the modern girl’s new freedoms on Japan’s pre–World War I definition of national
power. “The vitality of a nation depends not on the ebb and flow of population but
on the quality of its citizens,” declared the editors of the journal of the Japanese
League of Nations Association. If Japanese authorities could, following world
trends, quit viewing population expansion as a “given,” Japan, too, might move beyond a policy of “militarism and aggression.”141
The Sho៮ wa emperor (Hirohito) remains forever associated with a militarism that
ultimately claimed more than 23 million lives in the Asia-Pacific region.142 But he
ascended the throne in December 1926 with the unmistakable rise of Japan’s interwar culture of peace. The name chosen for his reign, Sho៮ wa (enlightened harmony), came from a passage in the Confucian classic Shu៮ jı̂ng, well in keeping with
the spirit of the post-Versailles world: “enlightenment of the people, harmony
among nations.”143 And the public greeted the new emperor with a renewed hope
140 Ayusawa Fukuko, “Fujin mondai no yuku michi” (“Future of the Women’s Problem”), Kokusai
chishiki 3, no. 5 (May 1923): 44 – 48, here 46– 47.
141 “Jinko
៮ mondai to Nihon” (“The Population Problem and Japan”), Kokusai renmei 2, no. 5 (May
1922): title page.
142 In particular, see Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan.
143 Elder statesman Saionji Kinmochi applauded the inclusion in the reign name of the character wa,
newly significant in such terms as peace (heiwa) and harmony (cho៮ wa). Wakatsuki Reijiro៮ , Meiji, Taisho៮ ,
Sho៮ wa seikai hisshi—kofu៮ an kaikoroku (Secret History of the Politics of Meiji, Taisho៮ , and Sho៮ wa: Memoir
of Old Breeze Hermitage) (Tokyo, 1983), 284 –285.
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for peace. According to the daily To៮ kyo៮ nichinichi, two swans had alighted in the
Imperial Palace courtyard a day after Hirohito’s birth and in the sacred inner chamber of the palace four days later. “The symbol of peace on the lawn of the palace
garden, joyful for the birth of the prince,” declared the Nichinichi. “Our emperor
was thus born under the auspicious sign of peace.”144
Two mythical swans could not, of course, prevent a disastrous Japanese turn to
belligerence after 1931. But to accentuate, therefore, a feeble Japanese attachment
to the new standards of a twentieth-century world overlooks the extraordinary Japanese enterprise of national reconstruction after the First World War. When former
finance minister and Minseito៮ Party leader Hamaguchi Osachi assumed the premiership in July 1929 pledging “fair and open politics” and contributions “to world
peace and human welfare through cooperation with the League of Nations,” the
London Times hailed the “bold leap for Japanese democracy.”145 And when Hamaguchi proclaimed “a new era of civilization” in a radio broadcast to the world in
October 1930, the vitality of Japan’s new peace culture was beyond doubt.146 The
principal champion of that culture, Hamaguchi’s Minseito៮ , had won a landslide victory in the second universal male suffrage election of February 1930. And with ratification of the London Naval Treaty on October 2, Hamaguchi became the first
Japanese political party leader capable of unifying the Imperial Army, Navy, Parliament, and Privy Council under his command.147 What he could not ultimately
control was a campaign of violence against the new peace culture. That campaign
began with a bullet in Hamaguchi’s abdomen in November 1930 and was followed
by a series of assassinations, attempted coups, and independent military actions—the
March Incident (March 1931), the Manchurian Incident (September 1931), the October Incident (October 1931), the Blood Pledge Corps Incident (February–March
1932), and the May 15 Incident (1932)—that would decisively alter the trajectory of
interwar Japan.148 It would not, however, destroy the essential elements of the new
twentieth-century world that Japan had helped to construct in more than a decade
of concentrated effort following the First World War.
A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR offers more than a roundup of the
war’s effects beyond Europe. It provides, more importantly, coverage of developments from the vantage point of 1914, not 1939. It pays attention, as a result, to large
processes that cross not only borders but continents, even battle lines. It preserves,
144 “Arata ni aogu, seijo
៮ heika” (“Looking Up Anew: The Emperor”), To៮ kyo៮ nichinichi shinbun,
December 25, 1926, reprinted in Nakajima, Shinbun shu៮ roku Taisho៮ shi, 14: 455.
145 “Minponshugi e no kakan naru yakushin” (“Bold Ambition toward Democracy”), To
៮ kyo៮ nichinichi
shinbun, July 4, 1929, reprinted in Meiji Taisho៮ Sho៮ wa shinbun kenkyu៮ kai, ed., Shinbun shu៮ sei Sho៮ wa
hennenshi, 128 vols. (Tokyo, 1979), 4-nen, 3: 28.
146 The broadcast was an unprecedented live joint appearance by the American, British, and Japanese
heads of state marking the final ratification of the London Naval Treaty. “Sankakoku shuno៮ no enzetsu
៮ saka mainichi shinbun, October 28,
naiyo៮ ” (“Contents of the Speeches of the Three Heads of State”), O
1930, reprinted in Uchikawa and Matsuo, Sho៮ wa nyu៮ su jiten, 2: 780.
147 Kawada Minoru, Gekido
៮ Sho៮ wa to Hamaguchi Osachi (Turbulent Sho៮ wa and Hamaguchi Osachi )
(Tokyo, 2004), 197.
148 Hamaguchi was shot at Tokyo Station by a member of the ultranationalist group Aikokusha (Patriotic Society) and died from his wounds nine months later. The classic study of this turbulent age is
Hugh Byas, Government by Assassination (New York, 1942).
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in turn, a sense of contingency about a subsequent catastrophe (the Second World
War), whose scale of destruction commonly makes discussions of a slippery slope
hard to resist. From the vantage point of modern Japan, the Great War is more than
a global “moment.” It is a major twentieth-century watershed. Like much of the rest
of the industrialized world, Japan underwent a vast long-term transformation from
the latter nineteenth century. From the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, however,
contemporaries understood the monumental significance of a general war in Europe.
Like the arrival of Commodore Perry in 1853, such a war raised fundamental questions about the viability of established conceptions of “civilization.”
The effects of the Great War were global not because the conflict directly involved multiple parties across the globe, but rather because flames engulfed the heart
of what even those far from the center of hostilities had come to believe was the core
of world civilization. The task of reconstruction fell upon not just those in areas
leveled by mortars. It absorbed, rather, all who had a substantial stake in European
civilization. From the expressions of Japanese contemporaries during the war, it is
clear how great that stake was for early-twentieth-century Japan. By the end of hostilities, many in Japan were convinced of the importance of a second national renovation (ishin)—a reconstruction of the nation on a par with its original transformation from feudal polity to nation-state. Like their nineteenth-century
counterparts, the architects of a New Japan after 1918 loudly denounced the past,
clamorously appealed for an “opening” of Japan, and offered a buoyantly hopeful
vision for the future. As in 1868, they sanctified the new nation-building enterprise
with a striking proclamation by the emperor.
Reconstruction in interwar Japan involved much more than lofty phrases and
imperial proclamations. It rested upon dramatic subterranean processes that catapulted Japan from an agrarian to an industrial polity, from an era of high culture
to mass society, and from a regional to a world power. From these foundations, the
New Japan played a pivotal role in the decisive shift from nineteenth-century conceptions of civilization to a twentieth-century world: from elite to democratic politics, from national to increasingly multinational concerns, from unyielding faith in
arms to arms control, and from brinksmanship to overtures for peace. Although the
transition to war in the 1930s remains outside the empirical bounds of this study,
evidence from the 1920s hints at a dramatic alternative to the conventional narrative
of these years. The systematic campaign of violence that swept Japan from November
1930 to May 1932 might not have been a response to the weakness of the New Japan.
It might have been, in fact, a reaction to its incredible strengths. Indeed, plotters of
the Manchurian Incident declared just days after a Privy Council deliberative committee approved the London Naval Treaty that “it is obvious that the party politicians’ sword, which was used against the navy, will soon be used to reduce the size
of the army. Hence, we who constitute the mainstay of the army must . . . arouse
ourselves and wash out the bowels of the completely decadent politicians.”149 From
the vantage point of the 1920s, in other words, the campaign of violence begun with
149 From the statement of purpose of the Cherry Blossom Society (Sakurakai ), formed by field grade
៮ uchi Tsutomu, Fashizumu
officers in the Army General Staff just days after the Privy Council decision. O
e no michi (Road to Fascism) (Tokyo, 1967), 297, cited in Mikiso Hane, Modern Japan: A Historical Survey,
2nd ed. (Boulder, Colo., 1992), 248.
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the assassination of Hamaguchi Osachi seems less a reflection of general distress
than the desperate act of a minority unable to challenge the wartime and interwar
transformation of Japan by legal means.
The tale of a robust New Japan intimately engaged in the construction of a new
global order in the 1920s likewise offers tantalizing hints about the more general
collapse of that order in the 1930s. Namely, it suggests an alternative to the usual
stress upon the structural weakness of the Versailles system or upon the rise of
Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany. Of particular significance in the calamity that became
the Second World War was the fact that the first power to systematically challenge
liberal internationalism was the third-largest naval power, and one that had been as
intimately involved in building the interwar peace structure as the United States,
Britain, and France.150 Indeed, even after the Manchurian Incident, no less an authority on Asian affairs than Owen Lattimore considered Japan the “chief protagonist” of Western civilization in Northeast Asia.151 The assault by this insider on the
structures of peace that it had consistently nurtured through September 1931
shocked League of Nations leaders, emboldened revisionists in Berlin and Rome,
and ultimately triggered a calamity worse than the First World War itself. As with
Verdun and the Somme, however, the obliteration of Dresden and Hiroshima
brought renewed confirmation of the new priorities of the twentieth century across
the globe after 1945. Post-1945 affirmation of these priorities in Japan, as well, not
only highlights the continuing global relevance of democratic politics, internationalism, disarmament, and cultures of peace. It accentuates the pivotal place of the
First World War, and of immediate post-Versailles Japan, in the original establishment of these global norms. It hints, in turn, at the essential role of World War I
in spurring a long-term shift in the global center of gravity from Europe to the AsiaPacific.
150 By virtue of its naval power, Japan played a much more critical role in interwar arms control
negotiations than either Germany or Italy. And, like Germany and Italy, Japan enjoyed a leadership role
in the League of Nations as a permanent member of the ruling League Council. As Christopher Thorne
has noted, the League bent over backward to accommodate Japan in the aftermath of the Manchurian
Incident. Thorne, The Limits of Foreign Policy: The West, the League and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1931–
1933 (New York, 1972).
151 Owen Lattimore, Manchuria, Cradle of Conflict (New York, 1932), vii. Quoted in Thorne, The
Limits of Foreign Policy, 16.
Frederick R. Dickinson is Professor of History and Co-Director of the Lauder
Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of War and National
Reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914 –1919 (Harvard University Asia Center, 1999); Taisho tenno៮ (Taisho Emperor ) (Mineruva shobo៮ , 2009); and World
War I and the Triumph of a New Japan, 1919–1930 (Cambridge University Press,
2013). He is currently working on a global history of modern Japan.
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