Magic lines across america
The prospect of an economy sliding into depression, combined with widespread hostility to the London Naval Treaty of 1930 – which renewed Japan’s disparity with the west – meant that the attack elicited little public opprobrium.Įighteen months later, on 9 February 1932, a former finance minister was gunned down by a student member of the ultranationalist Ketsumeidan (‘League of Blood’). His attacker was a member of the ultranationalist Aikokusha (‘Society of Patriots’) party, one of a rash of such groups that sprung up in 1920s Japan. His health would never recover, and he died eight months later. On 14 November 1930, Prime Minister Osachi Hamaguchi was shot and seriously wounded as he entered Tokyo’s main railway station. Moreover, the young Emperor Hirohito refrained from using the supreme powers given to him by the Meiji Constitution to push back against the military. Factions in the armed forces and the press took advantage of popular discontent to push their nationalist and anti-capitalist agendas. The Great Depression undermined Japan’s democratic constitution. However, Japan’s democratic institutions, which had worked well since the overthrow of the Tokugawa feudal dictatorship in 1868, and its later replacement by the Meiji Constitution – an ill-defined mix of constitutional and absolute monarchy – were ultimately undone in the early 1930s. In spite of these setbacks, Japanese mainstream politicians continued to support the global postwar settlement, whose twin pillars were the League of Nations and the Washington Naval Treaty. In response to the Washington Naval Treaty, Kametaro Mitsukawa, an influential nationalist intellectual, claimed the western powers were “plotting to subjugate Asia completely by the end of the 20th century”.
![magic lines across america magic lines across america](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/2CDANDF/the-granite-monthly-a-magazine-of-literature-history-and-state-progress-rland-streetlempster-n-h-portland-maine-or-east-from-literary-celebrities-your-chime-in-the-amies-enchanted-mehaunted-me-and-enhanced-my-life-i-never-thoughtwhen-i-read-it-that-i-would-ever-go-over-the-andeson-muleback-but-the-poem-was-one-of-the-seedthoughts-that-led-me-to-wish-to-go-i-have-been-tosouth-america-three-times-and-my-history-ofliberty-in-the-andean-republics-owes-its-originin-part-to-the-suggestive-and-magic-lines-of-yourpoe-nihezek-ia-h-bu-tier-u-lto-rtk-i-have-read-with-much-interes-2CDANDF.jpg)
The outcome, which limited the US and Britain to 525,000 tons each while Japan was restricted to 315,000 tons (a ratio of 5:5:3), did little to convince Japanese ultranationalists that the Anglo-Saxon countries were playing fair.
![magic lines across america magic lines across america](https://gcaptain.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/2021-04-07T141122Z_1827671125_RC22RM9BX0PB_RTRMADP_3_CARNIVAL-RESULTS.jpg)
The aim was to create a multilateral arms limitation treaty by restricting the building of battleships – the weapons of mass destruction of their day. Greater insults to Japan’s national dignity soon followed at the Washington Naval Conference, which began in November 1921. As for Germany’s southern Pacific empire, Japan was strongarmed into sharing the spoils with Britain and Australia. Having seized Germany’s Kiautschou Bay concession, a valuable 213-square-mile territory on China’s eastern seaboard, Japan was forced to hand it back to China. Japan’s second demand – for the permanent transfer of Germany’s imperial assets in Asia – was only slightly more successful. However, the western powers quashed the demand for a racial clause in the Versailles treaty – a decision that would feed into Japan’s ultranationalist narrative in years to come. So strong was the feeling of racial conspiracy that Duke Aritomo Yamagata, the statesman who had modernised the Japanese army after the overthrow of the shogunate in 1868, warned that it was “extremely important… to take steps to prevent the establishment of a white alliance against the yellow people”. Racist treatment of Japanese businessmen was also seen as endemic in Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai and other western imperial outposts.
#Magic lines across america series#
This demand stemmed from the passage of a series of anti-Japanese race laws in the US, culminating in the California Alien Land Law of 1913, which banned immigrant farmers from owning land. Firstly, it wanted a clause on racial equality inserted into the Treaty of Versailles. Japan entered the negotiations with two principle aims. Nevertheless, the Asian country still felt like an outsider. In January 1919, when the great powers met for the Paris Peace Conference that marked the settlement of the First World War, Japan joined the top table alongside the United States, Britain, France and Italy.
![magic lines across america magic lines across america](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6c/Winx_Club_CGI_logo.png)
The Stimson Doctrine that followed – the US government’s policy of refusing to recognise states created by force – was essentially a letter to the Japanese government telling it to keep its hands off China – a country that had, until the 1820s, been Asia’s greatest power, but was now riven by civil war and threatened by Japanese and Soviet plans to dismember it. On 22 September 1931, the US secretary of state, Henry Stimson, cabled the League of Nations: “It is apparent that the Japanese military have initiated a widely extended movement of aggression only after careful preparation…” Unbeknown to the world, what would come to be called the ‘ Mukden Incident’ would lead inexorably towards Pearl Harbor. The Japanese army’s Manchurian ruse fooled nobody. Chinese prisoners are held captive by Japanese soldiers during the war over Manchuria in 1931.