Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars

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Imagistic historiography and the reinterpretation

of Japanese imperialism

Herbert P. Bix

To cite this article: Herbert P. Bix (1975) Imagistic historiography and the reinterpretation
of Japanese imperialism, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 7:3, 51-68, DOI:
10.1080/14672715.1975.10406383

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Imagistic Historiography and the Reinterpretation
of Japanese Imperialism
by Herbert P. Bix
Nearly all recent American approaches to the study of
modern Japanese history, economy and society have been
built on the explicit rejection of the Marxian tradition in
scholarship. In this field for the past quarter century a few
established authorities have shaped the issues to be researched
and debated, either in support of American foreign policy and
of capitalism, or in covert reaction against the untranslated
work and interpretations of Marxist scholars in Japan. It is not
my purpose, however, to survey the dismal state of the field or
to analyze its conservative coloration and narrow ideological
focus-a task which can best be done in conjunction with
analysis of the political economy of the profession: its
funding, its highly centralized decision-making structures, its
past and present personal and organizational ties with agencies
of the American and Japanese governments. I propose, instead,
to examine the premises, and shortcomings, of liberal
scholarship in the single sub-specialty of Japanese diplomatic
history, using the numerous publications of the prominent
Japanese diplomatic historian, Akira Iriye. In the process, I
hope to offer the ingredients for a more realistic interpretation
of Japanese imperialism.
Professor Iriye's principal writings are by now quite
well-known, even outside the Japan-China-U.S. relations field.
They include: After Imperialism (1965), Across the Pacific
(1967), Pacific Estrangement (1972), and, most recently, The
Cold War in Asia (1974).1 Aspects of his theory of diplomatic
history have also been carefully stated in articles such as "The
Legacy of Modern Japanese Diplomacy," "The Ideology of
Japanese Imperialism: Imperial Japan and China," and
"Imperialism in East Asia." A clear writer, possessed of
exceptional linguistic capabilities, Iriye has attempted and
largely achieved in little over a decade a reconstruction of
U.S.-Asian relations on what he calls a "multi-archival,
multi-lingual" basis. Such efforts have unquestionably
benefited students of American diplomatic history, and they
have also won him numerous admirers in Japan. Yet if his
contribution were limited only to advancing the technical level
of American scholarship on Asia, he would be less important
than he really is. What makes his work so interesting is that he
has approached the history of Japanese diplomacy and
Japanese-American relations with the high aim of devising
conceptual schemes within which entire past patterns of
international relations may be grasped, while at the same time
his theoretical frameworks have been formulated within a
specific (Harvard-East Asian) tradition of scholarship on Asia
directed against Marxist interpretations of diplomatic history.
Professor Iriye is the preeminent postwar Japanese interpreter
of Asian-American relations, the only one, moreover, with a
foot planted firmly in two academic worlds. He is also the
most important exponent of an approach to Asian diplomatic
history (and indeed, to history in general) which views
causality in terms of "ideas,'.' specifically in terms of the
images and stereotypes of "public opinion" in various nations.
I have termed this approach imagistic historiography. It
typifies many of the assumptions of liberal historiography in
general. For example, it focuses exclusively on relations
between geographically and legally defined units: the
nation-states. It denies the importance of class conflict below
the level of state policy-making as a force in international
relations; it insists on the predominance of "ideas" in shaping
the history of international relations and ignores the
possibility of examining whether or not social and economic
forces shape those ideas; it looks closely at international
relations as negotiated by ruling groups and great powers,
while slighting the role of small countries and the exploited
masses in shaping diplomacy; finally, it sanctions and even
applauds an international order based on the assertedly
peaceful and inevitable expansion of the Great Powers.
I.
There is no better place to begin a critique of this kind
of history and the basic premises which undergird it than with
Professor Iriye's central thesis, that "all international relations
are ... relations among ideas." This thesis was first advanced
in Across the Pacific-An Inner History of American-East
Asian Relations, where, in a concluding manifesto (pp,
325-329) celebrating the role of ideas in shaping foreign
policy, Iriye argued that
... Chinese, Americans, and Japanese will never be able to
escape the need for ideas.. .. Every policy and every
strategy are by definition dependent on antecedent events
and their evaluations through the medium of ideas . . . .
national security is an idea. By talking about the nation's
survival, one is talking not only of its physical existence but
also of what it stands for . . .
All international relations, in this sense, are relations
among ideas, among images people and nations have of
themselves and eacb other. The human mind must always
intervene between tbe world and a given policy. Tbe role of
ideas and their images, bouieuer, seems particularly
significant in American-Asian relations. To state the reasons
for this fact is to summarize this book.
Although this statement focuses on ideas and images, its
thrust is in perfect accord with the way in which liberal
ideology deals with international relations. The ultimate
reality which shapes international conflict is interdependent
5I
but essentially discrete units: the nation-states.r Like their
counterparts, the abstract "free individual" in the liberal-
democratic theory of society, nation-states define themselves
by engaging in complementary relations of exchange and
competition with other nation-states. By acting always to
protect and further their own "national interests"-as those
are defined by the goals of self-enrichment and adaptation to
the movements of the capitalist world market economy-they
are thought to mutually benefit one another; in the same
manner, liberal ideology sees individuals, each pursuing the
maximization of their private interests, as allegedly benefiting
society as a whole. Thus finite existences or beings such as
"states," "individuals" and independently powerful ideas or
images figure in liberal thought both as fundamental realities
and as causative forces in international politics; class interests,
class values and behavior, and class struggles do not.
Iriye's approach is this liberal one carried to an idealistic
extreme. His initial thesis on the conceptual nature of all
international relations singles out the undefined concept of the
image as the primary unit of analysis. He also implies that
ideas and images that "people and nations have of themselves
and each other" actually interact. Yet he does not analyze the
causes or the process of this purported interaction among
ideas. In the book from which this statement comes, he does
compile inventories of stereotyped expressions and of ideas
that resemble one another. But the initial mistake of operating
on the assumption that specific "ideas" and "images" do really
interact, is not without practical consequences. For Iriye goes
on to claim that particular isolated "images" guide thinking on
foreign policy and that they guide such thinking for both elites
and the general populace.
Moreover, Iriye implies that it is popular misperception
which creates dangerous or unrealistic "images" in the minds
of elite policy makers, ignoring the much more logical and
empirically based evidence that in fact public opinion on
foreign policy issues is created by elites to serve the policies
they wish to pursue. Iriye sees that people's emotions,
"prejudices and misconceptions ... inevitably found their way
into official policy," where they "served to magnify ...
differences or exaggerate areas of .agreement." And he also
emphasizes "the role of government in creating, controlling,
and manipulating public opinion." Yet he somehow manages
to ignore the whole question of interests and says nothing at
all about government's relationship with the communications
industry or about the fact that the latter, with rare exceptions,
even in times of peace and in a democratic setting, has seldom
needed prompting to employ its facilities solely in support of
the official views of foreign nations and political movements.
Both propositions, therefore, while true to some extent,
simply dismiss a more basic and important problem: namely,
the many ways in which the class structures, institutions and
values of monopoly capitalism create and manipulate
"opinion," both private and public, in the entire field of the
political.
Across the Pacific's concluding propositions are (a) that
"the cultural, psychological, emotional aspects" of foreign
relations are "the key to cross-cultural understanding.... ";
(b) that future American-East Asian relations are contingent
upon "genuine intellectual communication"; and (c) that such
relations sought to "transcend the past" by "develop ling] a
new vocabulary to facilitate mutual association." Iriye thus
effectively ignores the question of defining and analyzing
52
material interests and psychological self-definitions which lend
to politics the characteristic use of violence in pursuit of an
existence defined by those interests and self-definitions.
Rather than try to find out why the images that nations have
of one another are antagonistic and what conditions might
lead to the dominance, at different times, of different images,
Iriye is left with an abstract plea for decision-makers to
somehow integrate the right national images, stereotypes,
cliches, etc., into their decision-making. He fails, in short, to
comprehend the possibility that the different "images" and
"ideas" that shape foreign policy may be antagonistic because
the interests and self-definitions which give rise to them are
antagonistic; for one to really change or discard such "images"
or "ideas" is not simply an intellectual exercise but often
entails a traumatic threat to one's very conception of life
itself.
Having acquainted ourselves with Iriye's central
concerns, let us now move to the actual problems dealt with in
his historical writings. Since these constitute a reinterpretation
of the entire course of prewar Japanese imperialism, a full
critique of them must take the form of a series of
counter-perspectives on major problems at issue in the study
of Japanese imperialism. I shall start with a brief discussion of
After Imperialism and Across the Pacific, two early works
which help suggest how his ideas have evolved, then go on to a
wide-ranging, more detailed examination of his later works,
Pacific Estrangement and The Cold War in Asia.
II.
After Imperialism-The Search for a New Order in the
Far East 1921-1931 is orthodox diplomatic history which
relies heavily on the spoken and written record-without
making much distinction- between levels of rhetoric such as
private memos, public speeches, diaries. It is interesting
primarily for setting forth Iriye's first "systematic method" (p.
1) of analyzing East Asian diplomacy and, in the process, giving
a most extraordinary definition of imperialism in several
passages of the first chapter, titled "Introduction: The
American Initiative."
Against the notion that "foreign policies are autono-
mous and continuous" and that prewar Japanese expansion
was "a given factor, expressing the country's fixed interests
and causing other nations to respond in ways dictated by their
own considerations" (p. 2), Iriye offers this alternative
perspective for understanding foreign relations in the Far East
in the 1920s:
... no nation has complete freedom of action. It has only a
given number of alternatives, and this range of possible
action is often determined by extranational factors, such as
considerations of alliances and ententes, as well as what are
generally regarded as legitimate and plausible goals of
foreign policy. Japanese expansionism ... would take
different forms as conditions change in the concepts,
practices, and patterns of inter-national relations. Changes
in these variables, which constitute . . . the framework or
system of diplomacy, will often modify the content and
expression of policy. A country's foreign policy will be
fully understood only when it is related to such external
factors. Only then will it become possible to examine its
role in creating an environment, the way its freedom of
 action is in turn limited, and its decision whether to
continue to observe the existing rules of the game or to
seek an alternative scheme of international affairs. (p. 2)
This view of international relations one-sidedly con-
ceptualizes such activity as occurring essentially independent
of any material base in Japan's domestic society. By freeing
the study of foreign relations from the need to make
connections with the mundane world of economic happenings,
however, Iriye has a simpler task in his effort to construct "a
systematic method of analysis" of Far Eastern diplomacy. He
can now postulate periodic collisions between abstract
diplomatic concepts and patterns of international power
relations and the theoretically unlimited freedom of states to
choose to play the game according to the "existing rules," or
to change the frame of things and "seek an alternative scheme
of international affairs." For example,
A radical transformation in the framework of Far Eastern
diplomacy took place during World War I. The Washington
Conference 0921-1922) was an expression of the powers'
interest in redefining their mutual relations. Under the
American initiative, they took cognizance of the passing of
the old order and tried to bring about a new era of
"economic foreign policy" as a basis of reconciling and
promoting their interests. Their attempt was frustrated
from the beginning by an active anti-imperialist campaign
of Soviet diplomacy, trying to define yet another
alternative system of Sino-foreign relations. . . . The Peking
Tariff Conference, meeting between 1925 and 1926, was
the last occasion where the "Washington powers" tried,
unsuccessfully, to give concrete content to their definition
of a new order. By the time the conference wassuspended
and the Nationalist Northern Expedition began, in the
summer of 1926, the United States, Britain, and Japan had
come to realize the futility of basing their policies on the
framework of the Washington Conference.... Japan
adopted its own policy of unilateral action. It sought a new
era of Sino-Japanese coprcsperity as a guarantee for
protecting Japanese interests in China and Manchuria. The
Japanese initiative . . . was frustrated not only because the
Nationalists did not share the Japanese view of a new order,
but also because of Japan's lack of a clearly defined chain
of command. . ,.
... from 1928 to the eve of the Manchurian crisis in
1931. . .. the unifying factor was Nationalist China's
initiative in bringing treaty-revision negotiations to a
successful consummation so that an entirely new order of
international relations would arise in the Far East. All
countries . . . hastened to reorient their policies to repond
favorably to the Chinese challenge. Unfortunately, such
reorientation served to widen further the already deep
chasm between Japan's foreign policy and its military
thinking. The military . .. resolved to resort to force to
retain Manchuria as part of the Japanese defense system. (p.
4)
Clearly, the focus of this "analysis in terms of
initiatives" is solely on relations among a handful of states;
ignored completely are the socio-economic foundations of a
particular foreign policy and how it affects different classes
both at home and abroad. The model does not even allow the
historian or political analyst to question why the powers
operating in Asia before World War I formed this particular
structure of military alliances, commercial treaties, and secret
agreements in the first place, though the answer is plain
enough: they did so because they were preparing for possible
war in the West, because they wanted to regulate their recent
partition of the world's markets, and because they sought, at
the same time, to control the nationalist awakening of the
colonized and semi-colonized peoples of the underdeveloped
world. Yet the model ignores these matters and instead
conflates the goals of diplomacy into the great powers' desire
for international order simply for its own sake-as if stability
was an end in itself. Thus it is unnecessary to explain the
specific causes and conditions, either in Asia or the West,
which give rise to such systems of diplomacy, the intentions
they embody or the functions they perform, apart from the
obvious one of conciliating rivalries among member states.
A background statement on the alleged rise and fall of
the "diplomacy of imperialism" (pp. 4-6) immediately follows
the passage above and gives historical depth to the model. In a
Far East that was "until after World War II" a "land of
empires, not of nation-states," the unequal treaties functioned
to mediate relations among empires and thus to maintain order
and stability. Following the enormously influential liberal view
of this treaty system first adumbrated by John Fairbank in
1953 (and uncritically accepted by most academics ever since),
he points out that it originated with" [t] he Opium War and
the treaties of the 1840's" which
marked the effort of the Western nations to change the
situation and bring China into the "society of nations. " But
China did not become an equal member. . . . In the Far East
the "society of nations" meant a meeting place of
empires-abe Russian in the north, the Chinese in the
middle, and the European colonies in the south whose
affairs were directed from the West.
In the 1890s this early treaty system began to change
under the influence of great power foreign policies premised
exclusively on military considerations of national security. The
aim once again was to maintain the status quo in the Far East,
but the form chosen was "a series of alliances, ententes, and
agreements designed to affirm ... mutual spheres of influence
and to harmonize the interests of as many imperialists as
possible" (p, 6). This gave rise to the "diplomacy of
imperialism" which "was superimposed on the treaty system"
and lasted until World War I unleashed forces that did it
"irreparable damage." It "must be distinguished from
'imperialism' as such, which has been traced back to
antiquity" (p, 5).
This second passage suggests that Iriye has failed to
distinguish the multiple functions performed by different
treaty systems in different stages of the history of modern
imperialism. He has ignored a concrete examination of the
differences between the nineteenth century treaties and those
concluded around the time of the Russo-Japanese War. He sees
no essential difference between empires ancient and modern,
and he sees the dynamics of the world economic crisis as
irrelevant to the process of Japanese military expansion in
Manchuria.
The problem is, of course, one of initial perspective. In
After Imperialism the first phase of Far Eastern diplomacy is
hung, like a stocking, from the Washington Conference instead
of being situated firmly within the larger context of the
53
post-World War I attempts to rebuild a conservative world
order with the anti-Soviet, counter-revolutionary Versailles
system, of which it was but the East Asian analogue. Indeed,
the work of the Washington Conference was essentially a
continuation, in suitably changed form, of the old "diplomacy
of imperialism," which Iriye imagined had been exorcised by
World War I. Rather than simply a conservative, benevolent
attempt by American liberals "to re-establish order and
stability in the Far East" (p. 13), it was also a consciously
sought American victory in the ongoing struggle with a
strengthened Japanese and a weakened British imperialism for
ascendancy in China and the Pacific. In 1922 Japan was forced
to abrogate the Anglo-japanese military alliance, to participate
in the Nine-Power Treaty affirming the Open Door principles
in China, and (afterwards) to cancel the 1917 Lansing-Ishii
executive agreement pertaining to its "special position" in
Manchuria. Thus the decade began in the Far East with a white
Anglo-American roll-back of Japan's World War I gains:
Japan's diplomats were being made to suffer a sharp
diplomatic defeat at the same time that its armed forces were
incurring a costly military setback in the anti-Bolshevik
Siberian intervention.
The Washington treaty system can be considered a point
of departure for analyzing Japanese diplomacy in the 1920s
chiefly in a rhetorical sense. Before the conference even
convened, Japan's ruling class had begun to give priority to the
rationalization of the state structure and economy, both at
home and in the colonies, rather than meet clearly growing
popular demands for more democracy; and for the remainder
of the decade, that order of priorities, just as much as any
decisions taken at the Washington Conference, determined its
approach to the nationalist movements in Korea and China.
The long-run requirements of a subordinate capitalist economy
in Japan undergoing rationalization proved especially incom-
patible with the needs and aspirations of Chinese nationalism.
In addition, at a different level, a sense of crisis was spreading
through Japanese ruling circles, caused by the memory of the
massive Rice Riots of 1918, the ensuing upsurge of industrial
strikes and tenant disputes, and the rapid development of a
proletarian socialist movement. Reflecting that growing sense
of domestic crisis, key civilian and military leaders alike
tended to perceive nationalist agitation abroad as a form of
class conflict, best handled, as at home, by familiar police
methods.
Such a perspective was, of course, not confined just to
Japan's leaders. All the Washington powers sought to control
China's burgeoning nationalist movement, though none felt so
threatened by it as the Japanese, perhaps because of their
closeness to it. The Washington Conference system, as Eguchi
Bokuro noted, marked the end of one raison d'etre for
Japanese imperialism and the emergence of another. In China,
Japanese imperialism had advanced steadily from the
Russo-Japanese War to the outbreak of World War I under
conditions in which war was expected and being prepared for
in the West. In this period Britain valued Japan militarily for
its prospective naval role in defense of the British empire,
while strengthening Japan economically meant enlarging the
market for British capital and the products of British heavy
industry. A Japan connection seemed equally worthwhile for
Japan's other major ally, Czarist Russia, both for strategic
reasons and for the material advantages that were accruing
54
from their cooperative exploitation of Manchuria. With the
ending of World War I and the elimination of German naval
power, Britain lost its original reason for a Japanese military
alliance, Czarist Russia ceased to exist, and revolutionary
nationalist tendencies surfaced throughout the Third World.
Thereafter, as long as the United States, Britain and Japan
faced in common a hostile Soviet Union and a China seemingly
in the throes of a revolutionary upheaval, a new case could be
made for supporting Japan as a counter to both. That few at
this time joined Japan itself in making such a case-as attested
by its deepening isolation as the decade wore on-is further
evidence of the tremendous force of inter-imperialist rivalry
for hegemony and markets in China and the Pacific, which
even the much touted Five-Power (naval arms limitation)
Treaty of the Washington Conference failed to dampen.
Indeed, in the area of "practical disarmament" Japan's
commitment to the "spirit of the Washington Conference" was
as limited as in its China policy. The Five-Power Treaty
certainly did end the battleship construction race between the
United States, Britain and Japan. But the savings from the
three retrenchments in men and materiel carried out by the
army between 1922 and 1925 were applied to modernizing the
infantry's equipment and establishing new air and tank units.
Notwithstanding the disarmament mood of the times and the
popular disesteem experienced by uniformed staff officers
serving in or near large cities, internal militarism actually began
to spread through Japan's entire educational system by the
middle of the decade, as active duty officers were assigned to
middle and higher schools with the aim of "building a healthy
nation and at the same time forging tight cooperation with the
military services" (as War Minister General Ugaki Kazushige
put it).3
After Imperialism seriously underestimates the anti-
Chinese nature of the Washington system, downplays the
theme of cooperation and conflict between individual
imperialist powers and different warlord cliques, and obscures
Japan's highly reactionary role in Chinese politics during the
years 1922-26 when the Washington treaty structure was
relatively intact. For example, on the response of the
Washington powers to revolutionary nationalism before and
after 1925 (the year in which it began to develop with amazing
rapidity), Iriye argues that they "neither took determined
steps to check revolutionary influence in China nor yielded to
the Chinese demand for immediate treaty revision" (p. 45).
But that is not an accurate estimate of the full impact of
foreign interference in China's domestic affairs.
During the twenties China's representatives called
repeatedly for restoration of tariff autonomy, withdrawal of
foreign control over China's salt and customs revenues, ending
of free navigation by foreign warships in China's inland and
coastal waters, and abolition of extraterritoriality and of
foreign leaseholds and settlements on Chinese soil. Naturally,
the powers refused to oblige. How could they do otherwise
when the Chinese demands actually entailed abolition of the
entire institutional control structure which locked semi-
colonial China into the world capitalist economy, secured the
flow of profits from the foreign-owned mines, railways and
factories in which Chinese laborers toiled, and thus ultimately
made it possible for China to contribute its share (along with
the other colonies in Southeast Asia) to European capitalism's
recovery from the dislocations wrought by World War I.
 In demanding abolition of the entire treaty system, the
Chinese were also calling attention to the political fact that
international mechanisms of control pervaded the whole
context of their politics and at every turn shaped the options
open to the Chinese nationalist movement. Moreover, it should
not be forgotten that throughout the twenties imperialism was
having a cumulative impact on Chinese life and institutions,
driving China ever deeper into the web of financial and
economic dependence on the West. Once Chinese nationalism
split into a revolutionary left wing and a reformist,
counter-revolutionary right wing, the Washington powers lost
no time in revealing themselves as mortal enemies of the
former. Meanwhile, by doing nothing to dismantle the
treaty-system, they actually did everything to assist the forces
of counter-revolution.
The rise of revolutionary nationalism in China (and
Korea) during the late twenties may be seen today as a first
step in an ongoing process of redistribution of the world's
resources. At that time, too, the growing power of
revolutionary nationalism in the underdeveloped world
affected Japan most directly by worsening the terms of its
continued membership in the Western-dominated system of
world imperialism. Yet it also contributed to the overall
deepening of the crisis in world capitalism. Thus, if the Far
Eastern diplomacy of all the powers in the second half of the
decade is to be analyzed "systematically," one must take as
the central focus of analysis the effects of the gathering crisis
in world capitalism and world imperialism on all ruling classes
and all oppressed classes. The most After Imperialism can do is
reflect on the superficial manifestations of that dual crisis, as
illustrated by the subtitle of Iriye's book "the search for a new
order." By adhering to a traditional periodization, i.e., by
treating the twenties separately from the decades that frame it
on either side, Iriye loses sight of the more basic structural
developments of the decade and thereby of the ways in which
the determinants of American, British and Japanese Far
Eastern policies, if not the policies themselves, reflected not
only domestic and regional considerations, but global ones as
well.
Thus at the Peking Tariff Conference of 1925-26, the
failure of the representatives of the Washington powers to do
no more than grudgingly recognize China's right of tariff
autonomy is not fully understandable unless it is also shown
that a tariff war whose origins antedated World War I was then
still raging between the United States and the European
capitalist countries. Tariff wars, market wars, currency
manipulations, commerce itself-all coalesced with politics,
and so had a pronounced political significance ever since the
struggle for trade began in the sixteenth century. And of
course they continued to do so after the Bolshevik Revolution
and World War I, when world capitalism entered a new stage of
CriSIS.
But as the twenties passed into the thirties, the wars of
international capital escalated: fierce competition developed
among cartels and monopolies in the world arena and between
monopolies and small companies within nation-states. When
the Manchurian Incident came to a head-for in a sense it
actually "began" in 1905-it was right at a moment of
transition, from acute crisis to temporary disintegration, of the
world capitalist market system. Interestingly for the history of
Japanese imperialism in the 1930s, that crisis of system was
first felt most acutely overseas-in the Japanese settler
communities of semi-colonial South Manchuria, the only part
of Imperial Japan that ever came close to producing a
mass-based fascist movement from below 4-and by the
trans-national institutions of Japanese capitalism, the giant
Zaibatsu, whose economic decisions reflected general trends in
Japanese finance-monopoly capital.
III.
Iriye's second work, Across the Pacific, is within the
1960s' "end of ideology" framework. In this second study
Iriye devotes himself to an ostensibly far-ranging analysis of
"how policy-makers and thinking people in America, China,
and Japan ... have tried to define their respective realities"
and "[hl ow these realities are related to the three peoples'
historical experiences and 1:"0 the over-all international
system.... " (xvi) He begins with the stage-setting statement
that "The initial encounter was ideological" (p. 3) and
concludes with a call to "develop a new [non-ideological]
vocabulary to facilitate mutual association." Although the
object of analysis differs from After Imperialism and a much
wider range of issues is surveyed, Across the Pacific displays
many of the same conceptual weaknesses encountered in
Iriye's first work, including his deep belief in American
exceptionalism and his failure to differentiate the value of the
sources he employs. For that reason, and in the interests of
touching substantively on his more important later works, I
shall say only that the framework of this book precludes
discussing or examining the matter of antagonistic contra-
dictions within world imperialism or the Pacific War as a
genuine crisis of the global capitalist system.
IV.
A lengthy introductory chapter lays out most of the
major themes of Pacific Estrangement. In the period between
the Civil War and the 1890s, it begins, while American
pioneers filled in the western frontier and expanded their
activities to East Asia, the American intelligentsia (intellec-
tuals, journalists, and politicians) developed as many ways of
conceptualizing expansion as other Americans had of
practicing it. Yet throughout the period, Iriye argues, the
dominant strain of American expansionist thought was always
idealistic, emphasizing the peaceful expansion of trade and
shipping; and on the other hand, philosophically it was naive
and racist insofar as it assumed an expansionist destiny for
Americans but was "unable to envision the possibility of the
expansion of Asians toward the United States" (p. 17).
Turning for comparison to early Meiji Japan, Iriye finds
that despite the sharp divergence in their economic and
cultural structures, in the realm of ideas about foreign policy
at least, late-starting Japan and advanced America operated in
the same historical time-scale: a "concern with expansionism
that paralleled the growth of expansionism in other parts of
the world" was an important "undercurrent" of Japanese
thought in the Meiji era. Even to say that is to understate the
matter. Expansionist thinking was, he believes, so important
an undercurrent as to justify his striking thesis that "The speed
with which the Japanese absorbed Western concepts and
methods of overseas expansion was the key to their successful
self-transformation" (18).
In addition, he calls attention to the fact that in Japan,
55
just as in the United States, moves toward expansion were
built on an "indigenous tradition" which expressed itself
either in a "militant, frankly imperialistic" approach or in calls
for the pursuit of "peaceful economic expansionism." We
know that the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny denoted
America's "indigenous tradition"; but of what did Japan's
consist? The answer is not at all clear. Japanese writers in the
1870s, we are told, called for overseas expansion, pointing "to
the record of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when
Japanese merchants, warriors, and adventurers ventured out to
Southeast Asia and even beyond." And "After the 'closing of
the country,' there had been no physical reaching out to
foreign lands, but the idea of overseas settlement and
colonization never died out" (18). Thereafter virtual silence:
hardly another word on Japan's "indigenous tradition" of
expansion.
The reader is thus left with the curious impression that
the "indigenous tradition," or at least the part that would
serve as a basis for twentieth century Japanese imperialism,
was a simple entity, gestated in a period of relative domestic
peace. The term "indigenous tradition," however, is really a
euphemism for a particular interpretation of Japanese
expansionism before the modern epoch. And the chief effect
of Iriye's abridgement, and hence reduction of it to the idea of
colonization and overseas adventuring, is to conceal the many
other complex valuations of past expansion that comprise it.
Specifically, without knowledge of the traditional Japanese
view of Korea one can hardly hope to understand the
historical sources from which grew the ideology which
justified a very different kind of modern Japanese continental
expansIOn.
During the long Tokugawa period (1600-1868), Japanese
feelings of respect for Korean culture and Korean intellectuals
coexisted with stronger, underlying feelings of contempt
toward Korea. Scholars such as Fujiwara Seika and Hayashi
Razan, who regarded Korean intellectuals as bearers of
Neo-Confucian learning and culture, represented the first view,
while Kumazawa Banzan, Yamaga Soko and Arai Hakuseki
represented the second view which saw Korea as a smaller,
weaker barbarian neighbor that always stood in awe of Japan.
Such divergent views of Korea can be traced back to the very
origins of state formation in archaic Japan, sometime between
the late fourth and early seventh centuries A.D. It seems quite
likely that Korea's status for later Japanese history was
determined initially during that first period of Japanese
unification. The beginning of the period witnessed the
formation of the Yamato kingdom by certain Wa tribes, who
had long availed themselves of a military power base in the
Korean kingdom of Kudara, and the struggle of the southern
Koreans to free themselves from a tribute-bearing relationship
to Yamato. Its end was marked by the completion of Japan's
national unification (by the third dynastic line of the Yamato
kingdom) and Japan's separation from further direct
involvement in Korean affairs. With the emergence of imperial
Japan in the seventh century, the ruling strata simultaneously
participated in a tribute-bearing relationship to the Sui
(598-618) and T'ang (618-907) empires and attempted to
pursue a "big power" policy toward the more culturally
advanced kingdoms of Korea. Interestingly, the rising Japanese
consciousness of belonging to an imperial state on a level with
China correlated on the one hand with the rise of anti-Korean
feeling on the part of the nobility and, on the other, with
56
domestic repression in the form of the enslavement of the
aborigines (the Emishi and the Hayato) and the introduction
of the Be-Torno system of unfree workers organized in
hereditary associations whose sole purpose was to serve the
nobility and the regal authority.f
The second occasion of Japanese aggression against
Korea-Toyotomi Hideyoshi's seven-year (1592-97) campaign
of conquest-also occurred at an historical juncture when the
country was engaged in unification; and, in this case too,
foreign expansion was accompanied by domestic class
repression. But Hideyoshi's war of the late sixteenth century
was particularly crucial for the later history of Japanese
expansion because it refocused earlier views of Korea's
inferiority to Japan and ultimately left a stronger legacy of
Japanese condescension toward Korea. During the Tokugawa
period, scholars of national learning (kokugakusha) kept alive
the idea that the Japanese emperors had once ruled Korea, a
country inferior to the land of the gods; and when the Western
challenge to Japan's own security came in the mid-nineteenth
century, this particular tradition lent depth to the call for the
renewal of the conquest of Korea issued by figures like
Hashimoto Sanai and Yoshida Sh6in. 6
This Korean background, so essential for situating the
full-blown expansionist ideology of the modern period, is what
Iriye fails to provide. In other words, even within his own
categories he fails to push his analysis to its logical scope.
Obviously, if the vague "idea of overseas settlement and
colonization never died out," neither did the concrete and
historically continuous one of subjugating Korea.
One is forced to ask at this point, however, which
tradition of imperialism predominated in a given period of the
Meiji era: a peaceful economic one or a militaristic, territorial
one? Iriye argues simply that Japanese writers on the subject
were concerned with "the overall expansion of the country
after the pattern of the West" or "economic strengthening
through trade and migration," and not with "territorial
imperialism." He thus leaves the former tradition continually
in the ascendant, the status of the latter indeterminate, and
the relationship between the two completely unexplored. But
it is hard to say on what historical grounds such a thesis is
justified. In fact, it would seem to do violence to reality.
In the modern epoch of the world capitalist market,
peaceful economic expansion can no more be separated
sharply from imperialistic expansion than periods of peace can
be separated from periods of war. The dichotomy between the
two is unrealistic because the one grows out of the other and
each can only be understood in reference to the other. Just as
in the modern epoch war is a continuation of the politics of
conflict brought on by what at one time was peaceful
competition, so are the patterns of peaceful economic
expansion shaped by the wars that take place. Indeed,
so-called peaceful economic expansion has usually signified
nothing but a continuation of capitalist aggression by other
means. Of course, if the organic relationship between peaceful
and militaristic expansion is first recognized and highlighted,
then the effort to differentiate the various forms that
expansionist policy assumes in different periods of inter-
national relations can become a source of clarity rather than,
as in Iriye, obfuscation.
Iriye also asserts, mistakenly, that late nineteenth
century Japanese expansion "was not confined to Asia" but
was "global" (pp. 19-20). But unless global is meant as a
synonym for Asia-Pacific, it is clear that Meiji Japan's
expansion was indeed confined to the Asia-Pacific region.
Another observation, also made cursorily, is that the language
of economic expansion placed a high value on war and
struggle. Businessmen were likened to samurai warriors while
commercial expansion and overseas settlement were preached
through a martial rhetoric of valor, bravery and "soldierly
determination" to wage "peacetime war" against foreign
economic competitors (pp, 20-22). In itself this observation is
neither novel nor particularly suggestive of anything about
Japan. The current political style in Ford's America features
an all-out "war" against "brutal inflation, public enemy No.
1"; and one has only to glance at a glossy business magazine to
see how battle imagery figures in discussions of international
commerce.
If made the occasion for a digression on the mentality
behind Japanese militarism, however, the motif of war might
have been well worth exploring. The frequency with which
presurrender Japanese called for war, or called on the military,
or sought a peacetime equivalent for war as solutions to
problems in their national life and foreign relations certainly
implied something more than a positive view of bloodletting.
Makino Shinken, Prime Minister Saionji's education minister,
told a meeting of local officials in April 1906 that "war raises
a country and peace prostrates it, meaning that all firm
conceptions and enterprises are begotten of war and that in
time of peace evil habits are generated." 7 A second successful
war had just ended and the older generation was starting to
worry about what it imagined was a slight diminution in the
patriotic ardor of university youth. In the "Taisho
democracy" period a common slogan was "war is the father of
creation and the mother of culture." That such "wise
dictums" were perennial favorites of all social groups from late
Meiji through early Showa suggests the extraordinary
centrality of war imagery and its associated values in all
periods of prewar Japanese history. How does one account for
it?
Was the fondness for war and for martial rhetoric merely
an aspect of the rise of expansionist thought? Komatsu Shigeo
suggested otherwise in an essay noting that the formation of
the emperor system and the notorious dualistic structure of
Japanese capitalism had much to do with the rise of popular
belief in the superiority of war, in the rewards that could be
gained from it, and in the soldier as the paradigmatic figure
who could rectify society's contradictions, especially the
growing gap between rich and poor. 8 For the common people
of prewar Japan, particularly the peasants and petite
bourgeoisie, the ultimate content of their militarism, the
source that it fed on, was the concrete social reality of having
their living standards sacrificed for the sake of a militarily and
economically powerful Japan. Many were resentful of having
to live in an atmosphere of total sacrifice to the state, while
their political and economic leaders (epitomized by the hated
hambatsu [ruling cliques] and the magnates of big business)
went right on enjoying a visibly high, Europeanized standard
of living and denying them political rights. That their
resentment and hatred, in turn, left them open to the logic of
militarism, or more precisely, to viewing the military as a
redemptive force in Japanese life, was perhaps a logical
development. But to talk of the consciousness of militarism as
connoting a somewhat psychological response on the part of
many groups to a harsh social reality is also to move the whole
discussion onto the chilly socio-economic plane where the idea
of expansion per se is easily deflated and reduced to its social
components, yet at the same time revealed, paradoxically, in a
greater fullness; and that Iriye cannot do because his analytical
framework does not allow such discussion of the roots of
imagery, as chapters two and three of Pacific Estrangement
make perfectly clear.
These chapters explore the responses of Japanese and
American writers and of public opinion to such events as the
Sino-] apanese War (1894-95), the Hawaiian immigration crisis
(1897), the American annexation of Hawaii and the
Philippines (1898-99), the scramble for concessions in China,
and the American enunciation of the Open Door doctrine
(1899, 1900). Of value is their reminder of a
striking parallel between American expansionist thinking on
the eve of the Spanish-American War and Japanese opinion
prior to the Sino-Japanese' War. Both exhibited concern
with the need to extend national interests commercially
and peacefully, and both showed awareness of racial and
cultural diversity. (p. 35)
And after both countries had acquired colonial empires, Iriye
notes the change that occurred in their rhetoric of expansion:
Strikingly similar ideas were thus developing in Japan and
the United States. Each country's expansionism manifested
self-consciousness about civilization and race. There was a
premonition of a coming struggle for power in Asia and the
Pacific, areas visualized in the two countries as primary
targets for expansion. (p. 49)
Unfortunately, these observations are set in the midst of
a discussion which focuses on a search for neat correlations
and thematic symmetry rather than on an attempt to explain
causes. Chapters two and three explain the ideological
similarities simply as a result of the simultaneous rise of
competing, U.S. and Japanese, territorial empires in the
Pacific. But to discuss Japanese and American expansionist
thought as though both sprang simply from a clash of rival
empires is to ignore the significant and obvious class interests
reflected in and served by their respective literatures, and also
the similarity of social 'and economic dynamics behind their
almost simultaneous emergence as imperialist powers. When
Iriye talks, for example, of the Sino-Japanese War and Japan's
acquisition of colonies, it quickly becomes apparent that for
him imperialism is, at most, an idea whose legacy is cultural
and ideological, not a term that connotes the evolving
structural characteristics of an entire epoch. Iriye's imperialism
is, in short, a distinct, free-floating realm of thought that can
be discussed apart from socio-economic and class systems, not
a complex system of global international relations, economic
oppression and political reaction which must be adumbrated
first before ideology is discussed.
One is led to the conclusion after reading this work that
Japan acquired a colonial empire and moved into Korea
because of its intoxication with an idea. "Efforts were made,"
he writes elsewhere, "to obtain concessions and spheres of
influence in China not because Japan was ready to make use of
them, but because they were considered to be symbols of
Japan's imperialist status." 9 Typically, Iriye's policy makers
are jugglers of symbols rather than cool and calculating
manipulators of power. In Pacific Estrangement he writes,
57
 Certainly the [Sino-japanese] war cannot be dissociated
from Meiji japan's preoccupation with the Korean
peninsula, whether with its presumed importance for
japanese security or with penetrating its political and
economic life in order to entrench japanese influence. It is
wrong, however, to consider Korea in isolation. In the
history of japanese expansion, the value of Korea was never
highly estimated. Even in 1894 that kingdom was
considered vital to the national interest primarily in
noneconomic terms. (p. 44)
Why then did the oligarchs secure economic concessions from
the Korean government after the start of the war? Because, he
tells us (in "Imperialism in East Asia," p. 13 7), citing Foreign
Minister Mutsu Munemitsu's own explanation, they wanted to
assuage Japanese public opinion with tangible material
benefits, even though "they might bring no substantial benefit
at all." In fact, he concludes (again relying just on what
Minister Mutsu wrote), the Japanese leaders felt "uncertainty"
as to whether military action in the Korean peninsula would
really further the "national consensus" that had already been
established on the desirability of "economic expansion." 10 As
for the long-term consequences of the war, he stresses only
that it helped set the United States and Japan on a course of
eventual estrangement, neglecting to give equal emphasis to
the fact that the war also ended the traditional myopia of the
Chinese ruling class regarding modernization, thereby prompt-
ing it to look for solutions to China's problems in the same
nationalist directions as Japan. The Sino-Japanese estrange-
ment must also be dated from 1895.
This approach, by glossing over both the. economic and
political meaning of the Sino-Japanese War, blocks comprehen-
sion of the subsequent unfolding of Japanese expansionism.
For one thing, a global perspective requires that the war be
situated in an international context, not solely in the
framework of the emerging Japanese-American conflict of
interest, though that is certainly important. The Sino-Japanese
bourgeoisie did not exercise direct political power, and the
Meiji government had not yet begun to function as a major
entrepreneur. Yet to acknowledge these facts is not to
confront the economic argument directly. To do that, it is
necessary to interpret Japan's successful transition to an
imperialist foreign policy as a process of accelerated industrial
development as well, so that the description of the one is
implied in the description of the other. Rather than denying
"premeditation" and economic necessity on Japan's part in
"seeking to expand on the Asian continent," it is necessary to
develop a multi-layered explanation which illustrates how the
two analytically distinct processes of internal capitalist
development and external imperialist expansion supplemented
one another and how both were accelerated by foreign wars in
the same period of history.
One recent attempt to move in that direction by
Nakamura Masanori centers on a detailed examination of four
economic factors that supplemented Japan's weak economic
foundations for modern imperialism. 11 These were state capital
as a supplement to under-developed private monopoly capital;
the parasitic landlord system as a supplement to the low rate
of domestic capital accumulation; the privately owned
Japanese textile industry and its role in facilitating government
importation of foreign-made weapons and warships; and
Japanese railway construction in the Korean peninsula where,
as a result of its total reliance on American capital and
equipment, Japan's conversion to imperialism was also a
process of deepening dependency ties with Western
imperialism.

''!"F~r~\. ..'" (~L·I-~·",.:;./

War occurred right at the end of the nineteenth century, when
the confrontation between emergent European power blocs
had begun to develop on a global scale. It was under
conditions of great power conflict and disunity that the Meiji :"):. ".io£
regime was given its first major opportunity to become a ....
.1'" ~~.\~
. _ ..
'-.
practicing imperialist power. Thereafter inter-imperialist

SOldler.~'
conflict and European preparations for war in the West always

*
·0······ nt
remained ideal preconditions for its further advance. Secondly,
the Sino-] apanese War should also be seen as the end result of . . . L.. ' S •.
wrlt_... ,...!
a sustained, twelve-year-long Japanese policy of seeking to Line . from rietnam
colonize Korea. That policy can be dated fairly accurately -An illustrated coll~ction of lettfS and diaries
from 1882-the year the oligarchs commenced a program of -from . .he Vietnam War .
simultaneous military expansion and economic retrenchment -with uestions and activiti.
at home, while forcing Korea to accept Japanese military -relat e naidilemPl8S to
advisers, after earlier having forced it to accept an unequal
treaty. But here a problem arises which deserves close attention.
Any analysis which emphasizes the tendency of the
oligarchs before 1894 to view Korea primarily in strategic-
geopolitical rather than strictly economic terms and to place a
high value on the prestige aspects of securing concessions in
China obviously contains a certain amount of truth. For when
the war occurred Japanese capitalism was indeed far from
completing a transition to modern imperialism in the Leninist
sense: both private monopoly capital and heavy industry in
the private sphere were under-developed, the Japanese
58
 Taking the first factor, state capital, much can be said
(and has been said) concerning its role in facilitating Japan's
overseas expansion. To cite one example: from the start of the
Meiji period the state assumed exclusive control over all
military manufacturing in the various han and shogunal
domains. Thereafter, under the patronage of a powerful state
monopoly, military industry was fully mechanized and came
to possess, in addition, a greater scale and an overwhelmingly
higher level of technological competence than could be found
in any other branch of Japanese industry. Demand for the
products of this sector increased over the course of the Meiji
period, with the greatest growth occurring in the decade
between the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, when
shipyards, arsenals and their branches were expanded in
Tokyo, Osaka, Yokosuka, Kure, Sasebo and Maizuru. The
militaristic orientation which such state-owned military
industry gave to Japanese capitalism has been expressed as
"the inverted contradiction between a low level of general
[civilian] production and superiority of production facilities
in military arsenals." Quantitatively, as Nakamura points out,
the growth of military industries meant a sharp increase in the
estimated weight of state capital in the total industrial
composition of Japanese capitalism: from 30 percent in 1897
to 51 percent in 1907, the year that Japan's railways were
nationalized. Here was one concrete way in which state
monopoly capital supplemented a weak private finance capital
in the period of Japan's transition to imperialism. But it was
not only in the realm of arsenals that the war-stimulated
development of Japanese capitalism necessitated a greater
national commitment to military expansion in the decade after
1894. Plans for the construction of the country's first
large-scale integrated iron works had been in the offing since
1880 but were only officially adopted in response to the
demands for military expansion after 1895. By the time the
Yawata Iron and Steel Works began operations in 1901, it too
was subordinated to military purposes, most of its finished
products were committed to meeting army and navy rather
than civilian demand, and it had obtained a contract (1899)
for the purchase of China's Hanyehping iron ore.
Nakamura's second factor, the parasitic landlord system,
amounted, in brief, to a system of agricultural, financial and
monetary policies and legislation all supporting large landlords
at the expense of tenant cultivators. Such a system made
possible the stabilized acquisition of tenant fees by the
landlord class. Preferential tax policies such as the 1899
revision of the income tax law then came into play
encouraging the transfer of landlord capital from agriculture to
industry and banking. By the end of the nineteenth century,
agriculture in Japan was weI! along to completing a division of
labor with industry and being fitted into the reproductive
structure of Japanese capitalism. By 1902 over half the
industrial working class consisted of the daughters of the
tenant and small-holder cultivator class whose low wages
supplemented the incomes of their parents. Needless to say, in
the course of forming this structure-the p-ried of the 1890s
and the first decade of this century-landlords constituted
themselves as a self-conscious class and became powerful
supporters of the Meiji government within the Diet.
The appearance Japan projected of a nation making an
outward military thrust for overtly strategic, geo-political
reasons, before having entered the monopoly capitalist stage, is
thus quite misleading. For Japan's military advance in Korea
and China, and the passage of Japanese capitalism to a higher
stage of development, occurred concurrently, in the same
period, one supplementing the other. The uniqueness of late
nineteenth and early twentieth century Japanese imperialism
resided in the temporary combination of these interlocking,
mutually reinforcing economic processes, which were also
processes of class formation. It seems doubtful whether any
analysis limited just to foreign policy documents and the
images of entities exemplified in them could even allow one to
grasp the most important economic factors operating in the
period of Japan's transition to imperialism. But to say any of
these things still leaves us with an inadequate and partial
understanding of prewar Japanese imperialism.
The Modern Emperor System
The repressive nature of the power exercised by the
modern Japanese state; the network of institutions which
invested certain groups and individuals with the right to use
the special language of state power, and from which state
ideology was promulgated; even the atmosphere of social life
produced by the state-controlled public educational system-
all of these things also gave a special coloration to Japanese
imperialism, setting it slightly apart from that of other nations.
If one subsumes them for convenience' sake under the rubric
of emperor system ttenno sei), this can be a useful tool for
analyzing phenomena in the realms of politics and culture.
There is, however, an enormous deception inherent in the use
of such a term, since an emperor system (implying also an
emperor-centered body of religious beliefs) existed at least
since the seventh century A.D., when Prince Shotoku
purportedly gave theoretical legitimacy to the imperial line
and Empress Suiko assumed the Chinese imperial title of
tenno. It is one thing to cite the "continuity" of that
traditional "emperor system," in which all emperors enjoyed
(and continue to enjoy) a special power in Japanese life, even
though the meanings attached to their persons have changed
throughout Japanese history, or even to cite it as an institution
that played an important but essentially "passive" role in
legitimizing the rule of real power holders. But it should not
be confused with that other phenomenon, the "modern
emperor system," which came into existence only gradually
during the two decades following the overthrow of the
Tokugawa shogunate in 1867/68. The emergence of the
modern emperor system seemed to coincide with the creation
of a centralized political state and the completion of the Meiji
Restoration in 1889-90, though it would perhaps be more
accurate to speak of it as the unfinished or embryonic
end-product of the Meiji Restoration. To be sure, the modern
emperor system was culturally and linguistically connected to
the emperor systems of antiquity and medieval times. And in
that sense it did indeed reflect the continued vitality of rural
communitarian ideals and of the Japanese people's belief in
the importance of blood kinship ties. 12 It also reflected the
people's a priori acceptance of traditional moral virtues such as
loyalty, filial piety, diligence and frugality. Yet it is
problematic whether those subjective aspects of past emperor
systems really furthered Japan's modernization or were even
beneficial in integrating and unifying Japanese society, as
Robert Bellah has argued. 13
The modern emperor system was basically a new
political construct, predicated on different material founda-
59
tions from past emperor systems and designed to ensure the
unquestioning acceptance of policies promulgated by bureau-
crats in the name of "His Majesty the Emperor and the
Imperial Government." It served an historically reactionary
function not because it was devised initially in order to
facilitate national unity from above, by utilizing the exiled
tenno and the Kyoto court, but because it was finally enacted
in order to check the growth of democratic sentiment from
below, as expressed in the Freedom and People's Rights
Movement of the 1870s and '80s, even though it could not do
this effectively without the aid of war. In other words, not
traditional values alone but that plus victorious war gave unity
to Japanese society and made a particular system of class rule,
the modern emperor system, viable.
The Sino-Japanese War
Japan's wartime expansion onto the Asian continent
thus reflected the dynamics of developing Japanese capitalism.
Late nineteenth and early twentieth century Japanese
imperialism was related to the specific economic development
of important sectors of Japanese industry, to the integration
of the agricultural sector into the emerging capitalist economic
institutions and priorities, and to the emergence of the modern
emperor system during the period of turmoil accompanying
Japan's first industrial revolution. Now, to complete our
discussion, we need to consider the sense in which the
Sino-] apanese War was also politically necessary.
As the architects and leaders of the Restorationist state,
the oligarchs had long been preoccupied with the need to
complete the institutional framework for their continued
exercise of absolute power. Following the "political crisis of
1881," in which the relatively liberal Okuma Shigenobu was
temporarily purged from their ranks and outside opposition
demobilized by an imperial rescript promising a national
assembly in eight years' time, they moved to meet that need
by perfecting the principle of monarchical absolutism.
Ordinances establishing a cabinet and Privy Council, so-called
verbal commands of the emperor making the oligarchs
"Cenro," creation of a Peerage and a Supreme War Council,
and finally the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution (1889)
and the Imperial Rescript on Education (1890) enabled them
to broaden the base of power within the state structure to
include a relatively independent military, a severely restricted
bourgeois parliamentary element, and the traditional groupings
around the throne. Simultaneously, these same measures
created an expansible sphere of imperial advisory responsibili-
ties which legitimized both their own continued leadership and
the relative autonomy of the military high command. At the
same time, by defining the emperor as the holder of all
political and military power, as well as the living embodiment
of all spiritual authority, the last two measures went furthest
toward fragmenting power within the state structure. In short,
the oligarchs initially contrived an absolutism without an
absolute ruler and then, at the last moment, brought forth a
ruler whose real authority, if he chose to exercise it, exceeded
even their own. By the time the first Diet convened in 1890
they had succeeded in shifting the locus of power to the
emperor-the integrative center point of the new emperor
system. But since the oligarchs alone monopolized his personal
trust, their system of monarchical absolutism enabled them to
continue leading the nation. Thus the Meiji Restoration finally
ground to a halt with the Japanese nation thrust beneath the
60
formal, theoretical despotism of an individual who would not
exercise his authority but delegated it instead to those whom
he trusted.
But if the oligarchs enjoyed the emperor's trust, theirs
was still by no means a harmonious rule over the Japanese
nation. A quarter-century after the start of the Meiji
Restoration, none of their institutional measures had resulted
in what they viewed as a proper relationship of the people to
their state, or, for that matter, of military to civilian authority.
Nor was their rule at all popular. The Sat-Cho oligarchs
frowned on attempts to rationalize patriotism with democratic
sentiments. If the public expression of patriotism did not take
the semi-religious form of a display of feeling for the emperor,
the only other suitable form it could take, for them, was an
exhortation to the people to endure hardship and privation.
Their unpopular rule and denial of temporal happiness to the
people required an adequate justification, particularly in the
new era of limited parliamentary government.
Japan's unexpected victory in the Sino-Japanese War,
following fast upon the first revision of the unequal treaties,
helped furnish just such a justification. It not only proved the
efficacy of the oligarchs' costly military expansion policies (in
terms of territorial acquisitions and war plunder) but also
advanced the integration of the modern emperor system.
Victory over China brought the Japanese intelligentsia into the
modern emperor system as active ideological supporters,
forging both a new capability and a new point of departure for
its further development. Neither "peaceful expansion" nor the
crude emperor-worship propaganda of the 1890 Education
Rescript had been able to do this as effectively. Coming when
it did, sparing the oligarchs a fourth year in which their power
would have suffered assault in the Diet, the war met their
political need for a national unifying experience which would
give meaning and content to the entire institutional system
they had labored so long to forge.
Consider now Iriye's description in Pacific Estrangement
of what happened on the level of ideas as the United States
and Japan moved almost simultaneously into the same areas of
the world. Iriye singles out Tokutomi Soho, writer and
publisher, and Ukita Kazutami, the Anglophile Waseda
University political scientist and essayist, as ideologues who
represented majoritarian, middle-of-the-road opinion at the
time of the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars respective-
ly. Of Tokutomi he writes (p. 43, 45-46):
Like so many others {on the eve of the 1894 war], he
talked of expansion, but he was thinking of peaceful
expansion in all directions, and not primarily of forceful
conquest on the Asian continent. ... He advocated the
taking of the Liaotung Peninsula primarily for security
reasons . . . but he was actually much more interested in
Taiwan. He regarded the island as essential for Japan's
expansion, whereas Manchuria was important as a shield
against Russia: 'it is the fundamental principle ofJapanese
expansionism to defend the north and develop in the
south. r ,
And he concludes (p, 48), "When the Japanese, sharing the
expansionist thinking of Tokutomi ... and others, visualized
postwar expansion, they set their eye as much on the islands
and territories of the Pacific as on the Asian continent."
We shall return later to the suggestion above, and hinted
at again and again in Pacific Estrangement, that the initial
island thrust of Japanese overseas expansion was rational, the
wave of the future, even though the birth of the
Japanese-American conflict lay along that line, while the later
continental thrust was not. For the moment we need only
note that Iriye is seeking to establish (a) that Tokutomi and
his friends espoused a peaceful, moderate imperialism, and (b)
that they fixed the attention of their countrymen on the goal
of peaceful expansion along a southern, Pacific and potentially
global line. Such a reading of Tokutomi is possible, but it can
also be argued that he sought to focus attention on both
northern and southern expansion, and that promotion of
peaceful expansion was only one aspect of his role as
propagandist for the imperial idea, and a misleading one at
that. It is not irrelevant to note that Tokutomi first gained
journalistic recognition in his early twenties as an idealistic
advocate of social reform, "people's rights" and the so-called
"commoner society"; that by the time he was thirty-two years
of age, shortly before the outbreak of Sino-Japanese
hostilities, he had publicly rejected his earlier reformist views
and was on his way to becoming one of the favorite
propagandists of the oligarchs, a writer known primarily for
his advocacy of war and national expansion; that in 1895
when the Ito Hirobumi government yielded to the Triple
Intervention (six days after signing the Treaty of Shimonoseki)
and agreed to return China's Liaotung Peninsula, Tokutomi
confessed that he immediately became "spiritually a different
person," a man forever after "baptized to the gospel of
power"; that he joined the Okuma-Matsukata cabinet in July
1897 as its press secretary, left the government when that
cabinet fell, and went on to become one of the "brains" of the
Yamagata Aritomo-Katsura Taro military clique.i'" One
wonders: is the rational, peacefully inclined Tokutomi of
Iriye's account, or for that matter the "culturally alienated"
Tokutomi of Kenneth Pyle's book,15 a more truthful measure
of the public man than that taken by his own contemporaries
and former colleagues, who saw him basically as an intellectual
opportunist who drifted with whatever major "trend of the
times" appeared to him to be in the ascendant? Here, as in his
earlier treatment of pre-Meiji expansionist sentiment, Iriye
ignores information that is essential even within his own
assumed framework of the dynamics of ideas.
One might also ask whether it is not possible to discern
in Tokutomi's writings a reflection of Japan's socio-economic
situation in the late nineteenth century. Iriye appears not to
think so, but Inoue Kiyoshi, who does, writes that Tokutomi's
heiminshugi {commoner-ism], pacifism and productionism
were originally established on the social class foundation of
the petty bourgeois wealthy landlords of Higo, his paternal
home. This rich landlord-farmer class developed along with
capitalism and became embourgeoisified parasitic landlords
or else were counted among the members of the industrial
capitalist class. On the occasion of the Sino-japanese War,
having become closely dependent on the imperial
bureaucrats and the military, this class . . . passionately
pursued an imperialist policy. The "evolution" of Sobo 's
thought was a most typical reflection of the "evolution" of
the class that he belonged to. 16
If Tokutomi Soho's justifications for empire can be related to
the rise of the parasitic (and absentee) landlord class in the
period of the late 1880s and '90s, cannot Ukita Kazutami's
way of thinking about the same problem be related to the
concern, a few years later, of the nascent industrial
bourgeoisie, in league with landlord interests in the Diet, to
curb the increasingly costly militaristic expansionism of the
oligarchs? Again Iriye provides insufficient historical and
biographical data for an answer. In his account Ukita was a
man who sought an ethical justification for imperialism, and
his book, Imperialism and Education, represented the "middle
position" between "imperialistic expansion and more peaceful,
economic expansion" (p, 78). Yet the little that Iriye selects
to tell us about Ukita's views is quite revealing. Ukita was a
Social Darwinist who believed that "imperialism is the only
way to maintain the nation's independence" (p. 79);
apparently he did not see any injustice in conquering other
countries and races that lacked the will to maintain their own
independence. To conquer the weak was to "advance world
civilization as a whole" (p. 79): As for Japanese imperialism, it
must take an economic and peaceful form and be limited only
by the spiritual and educational level of attainment of the
Japanese people. Hence the importance of a new type of
education that would enable the Japanese to meet their new
responsibilities as an imperial people. Summing up Ukita's
views, Iriye writes (p. 80):
Pragmatism and efficiency ought to be the guiding
principles of japanese education. Individual students must
learn to develop their personal morality, integrity, and
perseverance so as to equip themselves for the peaceful
competition of imperialism. Only if they develop
"internationalized, spiritual, autonomous, and self-reliant
morality" will they be able to guide Asia's hundreds of
millions along the path of modernization and to go out to
live in the South Seas and to the American continents.
We thus have a picture of the views of Ukita Kazutami,
ethical imperialist and representative of moderate opinion on
the question of expansion, advocating domestic reform in the
interests of a more effective imperialism. Just how ethical was
he? As Iriye points out, Korea was an exception for Ukita
because Japan had to have "a preponderant economic and
political position in the peninsula" (p. 79). But Iriye passes
too lightly over all the Japanese writers he introduces, forcing
the reader to supplement him at essential points. Consider, for
example, this passage from Ukita's article "Japan's Foreign
Policy," published in February 1904 in [idai sbicbo (Trend of
the Times):
japan's future interest lies increasingly in making sure of
China's security and the independence of Korea; at the
same time it lies in promoting education and reform in
China and Korea. Then we should throw in our real power
and capital and once we have achieved very close political
and economic relations with them, we ought to be able to
obtain the same result and profit as if we had annexed
them, while avoiding the unprofitable duty and responsi-
bility of annexing another country's territory. This is what
my ethical imperialism means. 17
In short, an "ethical imperialist" of the Ukita stripe might
oppose the oligarchs' forceful military solutions, but the
precepts of his social Darwinism made him share with them a
common vision of Korea and China subjugated to Japanese
power and capital. By equating "moderate" simply with what
is most prevalent, in this case the most influential variety of
61
ideological extremism of that age, Iriye has illustrated neatly a
characteristic blindness of liberal scholarship.
Another question that can neither be raised nor
answered in the terms of Iriye's study is what concrete
interests were served by Ukita's hypocritical cant, i.e., was
there a socio-economic basis for his views? Here Horio
Teruhisa's essay is useful. 18 Horio writes that from around the
turn of the century Keio and Waseda University ideologues
began to develop a critique of both the oligarchs' "aggressive,
political imperialism," which they felt was hindering both
business growth and progress in constitutional development.
What the private university groups wanted was an empire on
both the English and American models; overseas expansion
centering on trade and emigration; the promotion rather than
the sacrifice of business and industry in the service of the
empire; and (to counter the growth of socialism) the
inculcation of "spontaneous" loyalty to the state, i.e., a
peacetime patriotism rather than the artificial hothouse variety
nurtured for so long by the oligarchs.
Ukita Kazutami, it appears, spoke on behalf of the
Japanese businessman of the late Meiji; the views which he
developed in Imperialism and Education (1901) and Ethical
Imperialism (1909), and which he described alternately as
ethical or business imperialism, amounted in practice to the
promotion of domestic monopoly capitalism and profit-
making. It is therefore totally misleading to conclude, as Iriye
does (p, 230), that "the development of ... peaceful
expansionism ... defined the way Americans looked at their
action in East Asia [and] had its counterpart in Japan's own
peaceful expansionism, inspired by an image of the United
States as an expanding nation." But in fact Iriye does just that
by interpreting the internal debate on types of imperialism
which Uk ita, Tokutomi, and scores of others participated in in
the '90s and the first decade of this century solely from the
external perspective of Japanese-American relations. Such an
approach has the effect of conjuring away the contradictions
in late Meiji society and economy which the domestic rule and
the foreign policies of the oligarchs and their chosen successors
generated in the first place, and which the different political
outlooks on expansionism primarily reflected. The ideological
propaganda of imperialism resulted fully as much from
conflicts over Japanese domestic policy as from any supposed
need on the part of the Japanese to take the United States,
"physically and imaginatively, as a model and object of their
expansion as well as a point of reference ... to comprehend
what their country was doing in the years following the
Sino-] apanese War" (p. viii).
Moreover, the basic "disagreement" between a peaceful,
idealistic viewpoint on expansion and a chauvinist, imperial-
istic one was, to a significant degree, contained by the modern
emperor system, which provided the cultural and ideological
matrix within which the individual debaters thought, felt and
experienced the world. And since the modern emperor system
was synonymous with a view of state power as absolute and
sacred, even the "peaceful, idealistic" type of expansionist
thought rested, in the last analysis, on an irrational
foundation. Interestingly, Kenneth Pyle spoke to this very
point when he observed, parenthetically, of Tokutomi that
"Although expressions of reverence for the Emperor were
relatively sparse in Tokutomi's writings, there was nonetheless
a marked reluctance to criticize the imperial institution. His
reluctance was particularly noteworthy in view of his
62
condemnation of traditional Japan, which was otherwise so
thoroughgoing." 19
Moving on from the ideologues of expansion and how
they viewed the world to how Japanese and Americans viewed
the new stage of conflict in their relations after the
Russo-Japanese War (chapters five and six), one encounters an
interesting narrative. Viewing the crisis that developed in
U.S.-Japanese relations from 1905 onwards in the context of
Japanese expansion, Iriye is able to argue that
Studies of the immigration dispute ... have tended to
concentrate on the American side of the crisis and view it in
terms of local prejudice and national politics. Historians
still consider it primarily a case ofAmerican race prejudice
and a minor irritant in japanese-American relations {when
in fact they should be aware that japanese in America]
were much more part of the phenomenon of japanese
expansion than mere victims of American persecution. . . .
(p. 138)
Proceeding from this perspective, he argues (p. 157) that the
perception of Japan as a "military camp" and its peaceful
immigrants as a "vanguard of military conquest" lay behind
the nationwide anti-] apanese war hysteria of 1906-7.
However interesting such revisions are, however, they do
not obviate the need to probe more deeply, beyond the
parameters of a mere clash of stereotypes. The immigration
dispute which erupted in October, 1906, when the San
Francisco Board of Education ordered all ninety-three
Japanese and Korean pupils to withdraw from the public
school system and join the city's Oriental school, certainly cut
to the heart of Japan's popular image of itself as an expanding
race. But the emergence of that dispute also correlated with a
key turning point in black-white relations. Anti-Japanese race
prejudice arose as a major issue in United States domestic
politics almost at the very moment when the institutions of
white supremacy had been nearly consolidated throughout the
South and their premises widely accepted in all other sections
of the country. The racism through which the American
conflict with Japan manifested itself, once Japan blurred the
"color line" in inter-imperialist relations by becoming a great
regional power, had a functional significance for certain
American social institutions and racial theories for which there
was no Japanese counterpart. And to some extent Iriye is
dimly aware of this, for he does note that during the 1906-7
war hysteria "not a few" Americans all across the country
"expressed concern with Japanese collusion with American
blacks" (p, 159).
On the other hand, at a later period, it is possible to see
the U.S.-Japanese racial conflict in connection with an even
broader trend: what E. H. Carr long ago called the emerging
"link between 'economic nationalism' and the socialization of
the nation.... " This link expressed itself in the steps taken by
all the major industrial countries after 1919 to close their
national frontiers to large-scale immigration. Writing in 1945,
Carr was able to see that what needed explaining was not the
evolution of racism but of nationalism. "The middle-class
governments of the 19th century," he wrote,
concerned with the importance of cheap and abundant
labour to swell the tide of production and profits, had been
under no political compulsion to give prior consideration to
the wage-levels and standards of living of their own
 workers; and for fifty years the exclusion of the foreign
worker had been the hopeless dream of all labour
organizations (it had even preoccupied Marx's First
International). Now the prohibition was imposed, almost
without opposition; and one of the most effective and
necessary safety-valves of the 19th-century international
order, the avenue of escape opened to the enterprising and
the discontented, was closed with a snap. No single measure
did more to render a renewal of the clash between nations
inevitable. No single measure more clearly exhibited the
inherent drive of .tbe new and powerful labour interests
towards policies of exclusive nationalism. 20
Toward the end of Pacific Estrangement, in chapters
seven and eight, "The Role of China" and "The United States
and Japan in the World Arena" respectively, one encounters
another Iriye thesis in need of careful scrutiny and
modification. This is the thesis that the Japanese-American
antagonism, which had led to a belief in eventual
confrontation in both countries by as early as 1907-8, can be
explained ultimately in its own terms, without reference to the
policies that either power pursued vis-a-vis China. For, in
Iriye's view, the conflict of the two expanding empires over
China was not real but imaginary. However, since the full
implications of this China thesis do not appear in Pacific
Estrangement but in The Cold War in Asia, we shall turn, after
a brief resume, to that work.
What interested Iriye in Pacific Estrangement, and in
essays on the ideology of Japanese imperialism published prior
to that book, were the changing perceptions and the
psychological and intellectual impressions that nations form of
one another in the process of transforming themselves into
empires. But in analyzing these he blurred the qualitative
differences between expansionism and imperialism. Borrowing
Franz Schurmann's Schumpeterian definition, one can say that
expansionism occurs slowly, "incrementally," and is thus
"accretion" of land, military bases and productive facilities.
Imperialism, by contrast, "is conscious ideology, a set of ideas
designed to implement actions." As "a vision and a doctrine,"
imperialism has "a total, world-wide quality. It envisages the
organization of the world from the top down.... " 21
In Iriye's view, however, expansionism is an inherent,
rational characteristic of all societies, while imperialism is
merely a "particularistic type of expansion," or, in other
words, the desire for expansion carried to an irrational
extreme. The chief difficulty with these assumptions is that
they conceal value judgments and encourage the illusion that
"expansionism" is the more abstract and objective, hence less
value-laden term. In his words, "there is nothing extraordinary
about expansion; all peoples undertake it, and 'American
expansionism' has no more meaning than 'American
experience' or 'American history' " (p. 2). Thus from the start
of Pacific Estrangement, instead of advancing the reader's
understanding of the difference between expansion and
imperialism in order to illumine the phenomenon of empire,
he transforms the two words into a fact/value dichotomy. At
the same time, in the execution of his approach he has shown
little sensitivity to the ambiguous, contradictory implications
of expansionism. Thus in one essay he speaks of expansionism
as an "aspect" of the modernization process, though the two
largest empires in the Asian world before the modern era, the
Ottoman and the Chinese, "expanded" without "moderniza-
tion." After they had confronted the military might of
European imperialism, however, neither expanded the size of
their territorial units. Territorial contraction, to the point of
imperial and dynastic extinction in the Ottoman case, and
political fragmentation and contraction in the Chinese case,
was necessary before either Turks or Chinese could even begin
the process of sustained "modernization." And, again, after
modernization began in these countries, no territorial
expansion occurred.
One unfortunate outgrowth of this successful emptying
of "expansion" of all content and its transformation into a
vacuous abstraction, is that Iriye all too frequently glosses over
the real history of imperialism when writing the history of
"expansionism." In spite of this he does come up with
interesting insights. To cite one-example (p. 16):
Historians of Western imperialism usually forget that Asians
were also expanding [in the second half of the nineteenth
century] . . . . The Chinese, in particular, had a long record
of migration overseas, and by the end of the nineteenth
century their small communities were thriving in Southeast
Asia, Hawaii, and the West coast of the United States. To
be sure, there was no ideological underpinning comparable
to the rhetoric of American expansionism. Chinese
universalism was more selfsufficient than American ...
Also the bulk of Chinese emigrants to Hawaii and America
were contract laborers. ... The fact remains that the
Chinese, even at this time, were just as mobile as
Westerners, and their presence in distant lands was as
conspicuous as the enclaves of Westerners in Asia. If the
latter phenomenon is called expansionism, then the former
suggests Chinese expansion. . ,. When one speaks of the
"decline" of China in the nineteenth century, one's view
should be balanced by the "rise" of these overseas Chinese
communities.
Before assessing the "rise" of "thriving" overseas Chinese
communities, however, consider two facts that were omitted
from this discussion of "Chinese expansionism": First,
"demand for Chinese labour to develop colonies for the white
man was reviving," in V. G. Kiernan's words,
from the late eighteenth century, well before the
suppression of African slave-trading gave it a further
stimulus. . .. Many thousands were recruited in the ports,
by fair means or foul, and shipped off to the West Indies,
the South Seas, Peru, Malaya, as "indentured labour" under
contract for a term of years. This "coolie trade" flourished
for decades, and was known among practitioners as the "pig
trade." "Pig-dealing" by the firm of Syme, Muir &
Company caused a riot at Amoy in 1852. On the emigrant
ships riots were fairly common, and a traveller crossing the
Pacific in a liner with eleven hundred Chinese homeward
bound from America saw hoses and steampipes trained on
their quarters all the time in case of trouble. 22
Second, the large-scale Chinese overseas migration in the
second half of the nineteenth century was a product of China's
defeat in war at the hands of Britain and France in 1860. Only
after the great powers had forced the Ch'ing regime, by treaty,
to allow Chinese to leave their own land did the mass overseas
exodus ensue as a virtual slave trade. "The price paid to the
63
recruiter," writes Han Suyin, another sociologically imagina-
tive historian,
was forty silver dollars: ten dollars was given to the laborer
recruiter, thirty paid for his transport. His sale for labor in
the Dutch East Indies brought the contractor there one
hundred dollars. The man signed a 'contract' (which he
often could not read) with his thumb mark, stating that he
would work for three years for the sum of one hundred and
eighty dollars, or sixty dollars per year. To redeem himself
at the end of three years he would have to repay one
hundred dollars to the plantation master. He was dependent
for food on a canteen run by his employers where prices
were high. He could not leave the plantation. Opium dens
were kept on the plantations, and there he spent more
money. As a result he soon owed much more than a
hundred dollars, and at the end of three years would sign
another three years' contract. The system followed in
Malaya by the British was along the same lines and by the
1900s the pig-runners were British and Portuguese
merchants but the people who did the press-ganging for
them were Chinese gangsters in Shanghai, Canton, and
other ports. 23
Thus Iriye's suggestive analogy between Western and
Chinese "expansionism" in the end omits the most significant
structural elements beneath its imagistic surface. The complex
"blood relationship" between imperialist war, the subsequent
economic system of peaceful and legitimate overseas Chinese
emigration, which concealed the most inhumane exploitation
and oppression, and the opium trade (which also expanded)
simply dissolve in his conceptual framework.
It may be objected that too much is being made of an
author's avoidance of a strict definition of a word, expansion,
in order to use it metaphorically-in this case to investigate
symmetries between types of Japanese and American
expansionist thought. Iriye's metaphorical approach has, it is
true, enabled him to pen up for analysis a whole world of
Japanese writings on imperialism which were previously
unknown to a Western audience. But, if he has used the term
metaphorically with occasional good results, he has also used it
analytically, even attempted to give it conceptual rigor, with
much less fortunate results. If his historian's intent was to
develop a conceptual framework that would take "account of,
but ... not be controlled by, the subjectivism of the
participants in the drama," 24 the paradoxical and
unintended result has been to enact a subjectivist deception
himself. Thus in Pacific Estrangement, rather than showing
how different conditions governed the unfolding of different
types of expansion, or how the same conditions were justified
with different explanations, he has differentiated a wide
variety of qualifying adjectives of expansionism in the
abstract, speaking at one time or other of economic,
territorial, ideological, idealistic, liberal, peaceful, universal-
istic, continental, imperialistic and non-imperialistic expan-
sionism. Such discriminations not only fail to reveal the
self-deceptions to which human beings are prone but may have
concealed (perhaps even from himself) the subjectivity and
conservative bias inherent in his own categorizing approach.
His varieties of expansion, being actually different embodi-
ments of values (i.e., grounds for action, of which Iriye either
approved or disapproved), therefore tell us very little about
64
either imperialism as policy or expansionism as process, as the
equating of nineteenth century Chinese expansion with its
American counterpart clearly illustrates.
v.
In Cold War in Asia the same subjectivist fallacy
reoccurs-this time as a result of viewing East Asian diplomatic
history through a prism of successive visions of "international
order." Taking them in the sequence in which they are
introduced, we have first the present-day "Asia-Pacific
international order," symbolized by the Nixon-Chou En-lai
Joint Communique of February 23, 1972; the Tanaka-Chou
Joint Statement of September 29, 1972; and the Paris
Agreements of January 27, 1973, ending direct U.S. ground
troop involvement in the American-created state in south
Vietnam. The present "fluid, multipolar" order was preceded
by and grew out of America's unsuccessful effort to impose its
own concept of international order on Asia: the "modified
Yalta system." Obviously, the "modified Yalta system" grew
out of the "Yalta system," a euphemism for the U.S.-Soviet
attempt to divide the Asia-Pacific region into "two spheres of
predominance, with certain grey areas in between ... (p. 96)"
The "Yalta system," in turn, was a product of the
Anglo-American and Soviet reactions to Japan's attempt to
impose its own vision of a "new order in East Asia." Japan's
"New Order," in turn, grew out of the failure of "economic
diplomacy" in the 1920s-an "interregnum" during which the
powers tried but failed to establish a new order of cooperation
in Asian international relations to replace the "imperialist
order" which had lasted for nearly seventy years, from its
inception in the 1840s through World War I. This whole cycle
of power frameworks and their corresponding rhetoric is thus
supposed to have originated in the two decades after 1840,
when the Chinese traditional order was forced by Western
gunboats to accommodate the European system of inter-
national relations (the "treaty port order"). Nowhere does
Iriye differentiate or adequately define his terms "vision,"
"order," "system," "framework."
An approach to the conflicts of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries which was outlined embryonically in After
Imperialism has now been elaborated further in order to
accommodate the Pacific War and that transitional stage in the
history of postwar imperialism known as the Cold War. Before
examining the historical arguments embraced by this protean
conceptual framework, let us comment generally on its
limitations as a model or theory of international relations.
Like Pacific Estrangement, Cold War in Asia belongs to the
mainstream "modernization" school of postwar historiography
on Japan. This American school of ideological "social science"
has been concerned ever since the late 1950s with presenting
Japan as a model of successful "modernization" along
capitalist lines. Recently, strains in U.S.-Japan relations have
led many practitioners of this school to attempt to reduce the
objective roots of conflict between the two countries to a
non-material, psychological level of explanation, wherein,
hopefully, the resulting historical consciousness will enable
"peacefully oriented and internationally-minded individuals"
to sit down together and talk out the difficulties besetting
U.S.-Japan relations. Akira Iriye's work may be seen as one
example of this sort of thinking. Whatever their authors'
intentions, these works ultimately assist the forces of
militarism and self-deception by over-emphasizing abstract
international systems and, more importantly, by denying the
reader any criteria for confronting the problem of war
responsibility, as well as responsibility for the more subtle
devices of repression, exploitation and aggrandizement
overseas. Ruling groups and individuals and the interests they
represent, which were or still are instrumental in initiating
wars, are thus automatically exculpated. Such works represent
history from the viewpoint of rulers and great powers,
eliminating entirely the perspective of those who are ruled,
exploited and victimized. In reading Cold War in Asia one
finds that Japan's idea of a new order, like America's, is not
itself to blame for war; wrong are only the means which they
(Japan in the 1930s, the United States in Vietnam) used to
implement their visions. Thus Japanese and American
militarism can be and are criticized by Iriye, while at the same
time the idea of an Asia-Pacific international system in which a
few nations dominate economically and, through their
monopoly of force, act to conciliate international conflicts
and maintain peace is emphatically endorsed. While armed
aggression is censured, economic expansion and domination of
weak countries are presented as rational and hopeful models
for peace.
Although the supersession of one vision of international
order by another occurs in Iriye's model only through war and
upheaval, which would seem to eliminate any historical
grounds for believing that international order could be
achieved in any other way, he ends the book with a laudible
but illogical hope that a "stable regional order," "a shared
vision of peaceful international order in the Asia-Pacific
region," will emerge in the 1970s as a "prerequisite" to the
eventual achievement of stability. This inconsistency is related
to Iriye's preference for confining analysis to ideas about
stability-visions of order which are nothing more than the
gilded expressions of great power raison d'etat, which he then
treats as the actual agents of historical change. We can
illustrate this point by looking at how he views the first
Sino-] apanese War, the Manchurian Incident, the second
Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War.
Of the first Sino-Japanese War, he writes (p, 12) that
China's defeat and Japan's expropriation of Chinese territory
revealed the fact of China's weakness for all to see, while also
giving rise to the first generation of Chinese nationalists:
"These two factors combined to destabilize conditions in East
Asia and led the powers to restructure the treaty system to
make it conform to the demands of the new age." The
imperialist powers, being unwilling, either individually or
collectively, to seek hegemony over China, created instead a
new equilibrium among themselves predicated on dealing with
Chinese regional authorities and provincial officials. But the
Chinese people, their nationalistic opinion aroused, rose up
and "threatened" the "stability of the new framework of
Chinese foreign relations.... " (p. 13)
This cart-before-the-horse way of looking at the
diplomacy of imperialism, and the rapid structural changes it
underwent at the turn of the century, turns the destroyers of
stability into the seekers of stability. It would be more
accurate to argue that the treaty port system helped
exacerbate the instability already endemic in nineteenth
century Chinese politics and society. China's defeat in 1895
and the violent scramble for concessions which ensued
increased the strains and class antagonisms in Chinese society,
and the new forms of foreign hegemonic control worked out
by the powers after 1899-1900 and gratuitously bestowed on
China made matters doubly worse. As for foreign preference
for dealing with regional officials, that thesis ignores the fact
that foreigners had perceived the greater advantages to be had
in dealing with China's regional authorities, rather than with a
highly xenophobic central government, ever since Li
Hung-chang negotiated the Chefoo Convention with the
English in 1876.
In After Imperialism (1965), Iriye claimed that
The Manchurian cnsts was much more than the
machinations of a few japanese army insurgents. . . . It
cannot be said, however, that the crisis marked an abrupt
break in international relations in the Far East. In the
context of China's diplomatic initiative, military action in
Manchuria was japan's negative response to the Chinese
idea of a new order. (p. 300)
In "The Ideology of Japanese Imperialism: Imperial Japan and
China" (1967), however, he observed that
japan's renewed military expansionism of the 1930s
represented a revolt against the ideology of economic
foreign policy. Instead of an assumption of economic
interdependence among nations and the coming of a new
era in international relations, the exponents of forceful
expansion sought to restore considerations of national
security to the central position in japanese policy. 2S
Now in Cold War in Asia (1974) he continues to view the
Manchurian Incident as a sharp break with 1920s-style
"economic diplomacy" and a revival of militaristic expansion
growing out of the world economic crisis. But that
interpretation leads him to emphasize (p. 23) that
Because the system [of Asian international relations} was
weak and unstable, japan sought to establish a new order;
for the same reason, there was only feeble resistance to the
japanese initiative. Thus beginning with the Mukden
incident of September 18, 1931, a premeditated attack on
the Chinese city, the japanese army successfully and
speedily proceeded to conquer the whole of Manchuria.
Within five months a puppet state ofManchukuo came into
existence. . . . Although the initial japanese attack was on
Chinese sovereignty ... the Manchurian crisis did not
develop into a war between these two countries. The
Chinese leadership was unprepared to struggle with japan
singlehanded, and turned to the League and the other
powers for help.
To view the Manchurian Incident as an armed attack against
Chinese sovereignty and a territorial expropriation which
nevertheless "did not develop into a war" with China is
superficially correct yet seriously misleading on a number of
counts. True, neither the KMT nor the CCP fought Japan in
Manchuria during the period of the Incident. Bu t the latter did
at least eventually promulgate a symbolic declaration of war
against Japan, and once Tokyo had proclaimed the
establishment of Manchukuo on March 1, 1932,26 and it had
become clear that the Kwantung Army was preparing to turn
the region into a fortress for counter-revolution against the
Chinese revolution, the Communist Party quickly assumed
leadership of the "anti-Manchukuo, anti-Japan" armed
65
struggle. Further, to say that "the Chinese leadership was
unprepared to struggle with Japan singlehanded" ignores the
far more significant fact that in Manchuria the Chinese people
themselves rose up and fought Japan for the first time without
any national leadership or direction. Lastly, to see Japan
acting in Manchuria "to establish [or "define"] a new order in
East Asia" simply "because the [international] system was
weak and unstable" at the time is to ignore the crucial factors
precipitating the invasion. The Manchurian Incident, as Fujii
Tadatoshii pointed out a few years ago,27 should also be
analyzed as a Japanese peremptory first strike against a
threatening revolution in semi-colonial China; as a seizure of
territory to prepare for war against dreaded communism and
the Soviet Union; as a short war designed to create a future
economic capability for waging protracted war; as a major
move in Japan's long struggle with the United States for
control of the region; and as a war to protect Japan's overseas
investments, over half of which were in south Manchuria and
the South Manchurian Railway Company.
It can also be seen (though usually it is not in Western
accounts) as a pacification war launched in order to end the
crisis in the Korean peninsula and secure effective rule there.
The idea that aggressive action in Manchuria was essential for
Korean control developed throughout the 1920s and was
shared by the main perpetrators of the conspiracy, Ishihara
Kanji and Itagaki Seijiro , as well as by the chief of staff of
Japan's Korean Army. On the other hand, to situate the
Manchurian Incident in a purely international context is
hardly satisfactory either. For its instigators also saw
themselves as social reformers and their actions as part of a
larger reformist scheme to resolve Japan's domestic crisis. The
new state of Manchukuo was designed to avert the
Bolshevization of the region, yet also to be a pilot project of
state or national socialism which would someday be "brought
home" to Japan. But however one views the incident, there
can be no doubt that Japan's thrust into Manchuria was a
stimulus to further warfare with China.
What followed-the outbreak of the second Sino-Japan-
ese War (July 1937), Japan's "southern advance" (September
1940) and the start of the Pacific War (December 1941)-is
susceptible to many historical interpretations. An America-
centered view would deemphasize China as the geographical
and political locus of conflict, stressing instead the Pacific
where most American action against Japan took place, whereas
a Chinese or an Asian perspective would hardly look at it that
way. Iriye's procedure is, first, not to look at the war in China
too closely; second, not to connect these escalations, so that
the southern advance and the start of the Pacific War are not
seen as being essentially extensions and developments of
Japan's prolonged colonial war in China; and third, after
analytically isolating Japan's movement into Southeast Asia as
the direct cause of its war with the United States, to stop and
fix the historical character of the ensuing U.Sc-j apan war on
the basis of its precipitating cause alone. As a result, not only
is it impossible to gain a human perspective on the war (no
casualty figures are cited), but the war's real nature is also
misconstrued. For that can only be grasped by watching how
it expanded, by its own dynamic, from a bi-national war into a
war with the peoples of Asia, one which moreover was
continued as such by the United States after Japan's defeat.
By finding and emphasizing the unselfish ideas of order and
stability at the back of one of history's most destructive wars
66
of conquest, Iriye manages to redeem the irredeemable. He
writes (pp, 58-59):
So war came between japan and the United States. It was a
war for redefinition of international order in the
Asia-Pacific region. The regional international system, long
sustained by the unequal treaties as well as the
Anglo-japanese alliance, the Washington Conference, and
other agreements, had broken down in the 1930s because
of japanese aggression, itself aiming at establishing a new
order. The war in Europe had brought about instability in
the Southwestern Pacific, and japan threatened to step into
it. The United States, by its decision not to tolerate this,
was itself assuming a role as a stabilizer in that part of the
world. japan and the United States were the only two
powers that could define a new status quo by force. The
history of international relations in the Asia-Pacific region
since the Opium War had culminated in the Pacific War, or
the Great East Asian War as the japanese called it.
Whichever name one adopted, it graphically expressed the
nature of the struggle.
"A war'for redefinition of international order," a
culmination of "the history of international relations in the
Asia-Pacific region," whose real nature is expressed by either
of the official names bestowed upon it-that is surely one of
the purest of ivory tower perspectives on record. We should
reject such an argument not because we disapprove of it on
moral grounds alone, but also because it is historically
incorrect, indeed supra-historical, simplistic and one-sided.
Iriye supports his interpretation by arguing that Japan moved
into Southeast Asia primarily "to redefine the status quo in
the Southern Pacific." What he ignores are the narrow options
available to Japan as long as its total war with China
continued. Though he does not say so, the China War, as
Fujiwara Akira so eloquently pointed out in his article "On
the Pacific War," 28 was more costly in men and materiel than
any Japan had experienced up to then. After four years of
fighting in China, Japan's war production was at an impasse: in
order to simultaneously sustain the fighting in China, cut off
supplies to the Kuomintang, prepare for war with the USSR
and continue with an open-ended ship-building program
against the United States, the raw materials of Southeast Asia
were absolutely indispensable. Moreover, the military side of
the war began to change during late 1939 and 1940 as Chinese
armies attempted to take the offensive against Japan (in the
Nanning and Ichang operations) and Japanese forces for the
first time began to suffer heavy losses. In Professor Fujiwara's
words: "As long as the Sino-Japanese War continued, the
southern advance was inevitable." 29
In addition, during the final stage of U.S.-Japanese
negotiations (November 1941), the point at issue was Japan's
troop withdrawal from China, something which Japan's leaders
could not bring themselves to do because to desist from such
aggression was tantamount to admitting defeat in the
Sino-Japanese War, which would then have raised the fearful
prospect of military-led revolution at home. Japan's Pacific
War was a direct outgrowth of both its distorted China policy,
predicated ultimately on a perverted popular and official
consciousness regarding China and Korea, and the lack of any
domestic conditions which might have checked aggression in
China.
Finally, it is misleading to cite, as Iriye does, from the
 official war aims (broadcast to the Japanese people on
December 8, 1941, in the form of an Imperial Rescript
declaring war on the United States and Britain) just that
passage which shows an idealistic ambience: "action in the
southern areas ... is only intended for the purpose of ejecting
the oppressive rule of Britain and the United States, thereby to
restore Asia to its natural state and to cooperate together for
mutual welfare and happiness." Of course it is true that
Japan's imperialism had an idealistic, anti-Western coloration;
but it is also true that the most meaningful justification for
war with Britain and America, as far as the Japanese people
were concerned, was the "self-existence and self-defense"
argument: "The situation being such as it is, Our Empire for
its very existence and self-defense has no other recourse but to
appeal to arms and to crush every obstacle in its path." A
critical historian like Fujiwara Akira does not accept the
leaders' interpretation at face value but asks: whose
self-existence and self-defense were actually at stake? Can it
not be argued more correctly that the Anglo-American-Dutch
economic blockade "did not threaten the life and property of
the Japanese people but did make it impossible to obtain
essential war supplies to continue aggression in China"? 30 And
that long before war came with the U.S. and Britain, Japan's
leaders had been deeply worried about the domestic
consequences of a Japanese defeat in the stalemated Chinese
war? As far as Japan is concerned, one may not be able to say
that anyone cause by itself started the Pacific War, but one
can say with reasonable certainty that the desire of the
Japanese rulers of the 193 Os to preserve the existing emperor
system-and to preserve thereby their own privileged status as
a ruling class-had a great deal to do with their final escalation.
And where Japan's final leap into all-out war is concerned, it is
insufficient to argue merely that it was a consequence of
wrong foreign policy axioms; one must also demonstrate, by
going beyond the confines of conventional diplomatic history,
why it was also a consequence of seriously distorted property,
class and power relationships; and that not only in Japan.
VI.
To continue to examine how Cold War in Asia treats the
Korean and Vietnamese wars would not be very rewarding.
lriye's framework defines, accommodates, and resolves the
role of wars and conflict in "necessarily vague" international
systems of relations, but it is too abstract to illuminate their
~enesis or adequately grasp their nature. Extensive discussions
of values, visions of power, perceptions and misperceptions
one will find; official professions of foreign policy goals
.ensitively analyzed, sometimes with more seriousness than
:hey deserve. His desire always "to avoid dogmatism and to
examine as much documentary evidence as possible" readily
evokes admiration. 3 1 Not so his deprecation of "monistic and
.implistic interpretations of modern Japanese diplomacy, as
vell as of modern Japanese history in general ... proffered by
vlarxist historians," 32 since examination of his own works
.onvinces one of far more egregious errors of simplification.
"ascinated by human consciousness of historical deeds and
rvents, believing that "all international relations ... are
'elations among ideas, among images people and nations have
of themselves and each other," he has written the meta-history
of U.S.-Asian relations.
Surely one lesson to be learned from the study of that
meta-history is how much it idealizes a distorted view of the
past and how little it can help us in understanding the
problems of Japanese and American imperialism, either past or
present. If useful interpretations of diplomatic history are to
be written-that is, historical analysis which does not serve the
cause of rationalizing the oppressive status quo and does not
exculpate criminal rulers and governments-then it cannot
limit itself solely to explaining vague systems of international
relations but must grapple with what historians working in the
broad Marxist tradition have always considered essential: class
interest and class conflict, class consciousness, economic and
social forces, ideas and the social function they perform in the
society of their origin. And if conceptual frameworks are not
to become, as they invariably' do in Iriye's work, sources of
verbal confusion and deception, then they will have to be
elaborated in conjunction with detailed empirical analysis of
the events they are to explain. But this would require an
historian who is not in shallow revolt against Marxist concepts
and does not share the Japan field's foolish anti-Marxist bias.
Notes
1. Akira Iriye, After Imperialism, The Searcb for a New Order
in the Far East 1921-1931 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1965); Across the Pacific, An Inner History of American-East Asian
Relations (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967, paperback);
Pacific Estrangement, Japanese and American Expansion, 1897-1911
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972); The Cold War in
Asia, A Historical Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
1974).
2. See Theotonio Dos Santos, "The Contradictions of
Contemporary Imperialism," Social Praxis, Vol. 1/3, 1973, p. 213.
3. See Rekishigaku kenkyiikai (e d.), Taibeiy o senso (The
Pacific War, edited by the Historical Association), Vol. I Mansbii jihen
1905-1932 (The Manchurian Incident 1905-1932) (Tokyo: Aoki
Shoten, 1971), p. 83. Volume I of this five-volume study is useful in
situating the Washington Conference system, as is Eguchi Bokuro's
splendid overview of The Age of Imperialism (Teikokushugi no jidai)
(Tokyo: Iwanami Zensho 268, 1969), pp. 161-67.
4. See on this Okabe Makio's excellent article, "Shokuminchi
fuashizumu undo no seiritsu to tenkai-Manshli seinen remmei to
Manshii kyowato" (The Formation and Development of Fascist
Movements in Colonial Areas-The Manchurian Youth League and The
Manchurian Concordia Party) in Rekishigaku kenkyu, No. 406 (March
1974).
5. On this subject see the two suggestive articles by Ishimoda
Tadashi, "Nihon kodai ni okeru kokusai ishiki ni tsuite-kodai kizoku
no baai" (On International Consciousness in Japanese Antiquity) in
Shiso, No. 454 (April 1962), pp. 418-25; and "Kodai ni okeru
'teikokushugi' ni tsuite" (On 'Imperialism' in Antiquity) in Rekishi
bybron, No. 265 (August 1972), pp. 43-55.
6. See Yazawa Kosuke, "'Edo jidai' ni okeru Nihonjin no
Chosenkan ni tsuite" (On the Japanese View of Korea in the 'Edo
Period') in Chosen shi kenkyiika» ronbunsbii (Bulletin of the Society
for Korean Historical Science), 'Meiji byakunen' to Chosen (The Meiji
Centenary and Korea) (June 1969), pp. 14-39.
7. The Japan Weekly Mail, May 5, 1906, p. 454.
8. Komatsu Shigeo, "Nihon gunkokushugi to ippan kokumin
no ishiki" (Japanese Militarism and People's Consciousness) in Sbiso,
No. 410 (August 1958) and No. 411 (September 1958), pp. 105-20.
9. Akira Iriye, "Imperialism in East Asia," in James B. Crowley
(ed.), Modern East Asia: Essays in Interpretation (New York: Harcourt,
Brace & World, 1970), p. 142.
10. Pacific Estrangement, p. 44.
11. Nakamura Masanori, "Nihon teikokushugi seiritsushi joron,"
in Sbiso No. 574 (April 1972), pp. 1-22.
67
 12. On this point see the interesting discussion by Togoro
Shigeki, Takao Toshikazu and Maruyama Kazuo in Togoro Shigeki
(ed.), Tenno sei to Nihon shukyo (The Emperor System and Japanese
JOURNAL of
Religion) (Tokyo: Dento to Gendaisha, 1973), pp. 7-46.
13. See Robert Bellah, Beyond Belief, Essays on Religion in a
Post-Traditional World (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 140-41.
CONTEMPORARY ASIA
14. Inoue Kiyoshi, Nihon teikokushugi no keisei (The
Formation of Japanese Imperialism) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1968),
pp. 154-55. KOREA-A Special Issue
15. Kenneth B. Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan-
Problems of Cultural Identity, 1885-1895 (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford
University Press, 1969). June 1975 marks the 25th anniversary of the out-
16. Inoue Kiyoshi, Nibon teikokushugi no keisei, p. 157. break of the Korean War, a conflict which uncannily
17. Quoted in Inoue Kiyoshi, p. 167. prefigured the later American war in Vietnam. To
18. Horio Teruhisa, "Taisei saitogo no kokoromi to 'teikoku '
commemorate this occasion, the Journal of Con-
ideorogii no keisei-vshakaishugi e no taio 0 kijiku toshire" (The Effort
to Reintegrate the Meiji Regime and the Formation of 'Empire' temporary Asia has issued, as Vol. 5, no. 2, a special
Ideology-In the Face of the Growth of Socialism) in Nihon Seiji Gaku issue on Korea. Principal contents are:
Nemp o 1968, Nihon no shakaisbugi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1968),
pp.139-90. Ellen Brun and Jacques Hersh
19. Kenneth B. Pyle, pp. 132-33.
20. Edward Hallett Carr, Nationalism and After (London:
Aspects of Korean Socialism
Macmillan, 1968; first published in 1945), pp. 22-23. Cheryl Payer
21. Franz Schurmann, The Logic of World Power-An Inquiry Debt Trap-South Korea's Economic "Miracle"
into tbe Origins, Currents, and Contradictions of World Politics (New J. Gittings: Talks, Bombs and Germs-
York: Pantheon Books, 1974), p. 6.
Another Look at the Korean War
22. V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind-Black Man,
Yellow Man, and White Man in an Age of Empire (Boston: Little, J. Halliday
Brown and Company, 1969), p. 163. People's Struggle and Bourgeois Scholarship
23. Han Suyin, The Crippled Tree (London, 1965), pp. 169-70. W. Burchett
24. The Cold War in Asia, p. 5.
25. "The Ideology of Japanese Imperialism: Imperial Japan and The Struggle for Korea's National Rights
China," in Grant K. Goodman (ed.), Imperial Japan and Asia-A
Reassessment. Occasional Papers of the East Asian Institute, Columbia For a copy of this invaluable collection of new
University, 1967, p. 40. The essay ends with the characteristic assertion assessments of the Korean situation, send $3.30 to
that: "Japanese imperialism was ill served by ideas. That was the the Stockholm address or to:
tragedy of Japanese imperialism, for when it was confronted with
JCA, c/o Malcolm Caldwell, SOAS, Malet St.,
alternative ideas abroad, it could display no ideology capable of
meeting the challenge." (p. 45) London WC1 E 7HP
26. It is worth noting that the date chosen, March 1, was JCA, c/o Stephen Resnick, Economics Dept.,
fraught with symbolic importance for the Japanese army since it was UMASS, Amherst, Ma. 01002
the anniversary of the highly embarrassing March 1, 1919, Korean
independence movement.
27. See Fujii Tadatoshi's editorial preface, "Naze 'Manshii jihen' Annual Subscription Rates:
o toriageruka-sono sensa no seikaku" (Why take up the Manchurian Individual $12
Incident'-On the Character of that War) in the special Inaugural issue
of the quarterly journal Gendai shi (Contemporary History) (November
Institutions/Libraries $20
1972), pp. 5-15. The issue is entitled "Gendai shi ni okeru 'Manshii Individual (Third World Resident) $ 8
jihen' no irni vsenso to minshu 0 kangaeru" (The Meaning of the Libraries/Institutions (Third World) $15
Manchurian Incident in Contemporary History-Considerations on War
Payment must accompany order. Price for current
and the People).
28. Fujiwara Akira, "Taiheiyo sensa shiron" (On the Pacific volume only.
War), in Gendai rekishigaku no kadai (Themes in Contemporary
Historiography), Vol. II (Tokyo: Aoki Shoren, 1971), pp. 64-65. A Editors: Malcolm Caldwell, Jon Fast, and Peter
brilliant article. Limqueco
29. Ibid., p. 65.
30. Ibid., p. 66.
31. The Cold War in Asia, p. x. Business Address: Journal of Contemporary Asia,
32. Akira Iriye, "The Legacy of Modern Japanese Diplomacy" Post Office Box 49010, Stockholm 49, Sweden.
in Journal of Social and Political Ideas in Japan, Vol. III, No.2 (August Postgiro #: 85 1055-3.
1965), p. 26.

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