Japan's Total Empire. Louise Young
The Portsmouth Peace Treaty of 1905 transferred to Japan all Russian rights and interests in South Manchuria, originally signed over by China in 1898. These comprised 1) the balance of the twenty-five-year leasehold over the Liaodong Peninsula, which under Japanese rule became the Kwantung Leased Territory and included the port of Dalian and the naval base of Lüshun; 2) the southern spur of the Russian-built Chinese Eastern Railway, which ran from Changchun to Lüshun and which the Japanese renamed Mantetsu (the South Manchurian Railway); and 3) the so-called railway zone, which included a land corridor on either side of the railway track and the railway towns adjacent to important stations. As the result of the Portsmouth Peace Treaty, the Kwantung Leased Territory and the Japanese sections of the railway towns became effective colonial possessions, administered as part of Japan's growing formal empire. The rest of Manchuria, however, remained under Chinese government jurisdiction; Japanese influence was informal and their control indirect. Under these circumstances, the expansion of Japanese interests relied on using a combination of threat and bribery to extract ever more concessions from the local Chinese leadership. Equally important, such negotiations were never simply between Japan and China, but were embroiled in the multilateral intricacies of China diplomacy.
The diplomacy of imperialism turned, in China, on a complex interplay between Chinese domestic politics and European rivalries, punctuated in the early twentieth century by American and Japanese entries onto the imperialist playing field, the Russian and Chinese revolutions, and World War I. From the establishment of the unequal treaty system in the mid nineteenth century to the “carve up of China” into spheres of interest in the late 1890s, European powers had joined together to wrest from China concessions of collective benefit.6 But behind the front of unity, commercial competition was cutthroat: Europeans suspiciously scrutinized every move their rivals made.
Imperialist pressures heightened the domestic political crisis, leading in 1911 to the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of the Chinese Republic. Yet the end of imperial rule brought neither a halt to foreign aggression nor an abatement of political unrest. Far from it: both internal and external pressures intensified in the wake of the revolution. As Chinese leaders came and went and the seat of government jumped from city to city, the country descended into military and political chaos. Between 1915 and 1922, rivalries between local warlord armies erupted into ten separate civil wars and turned China's political map into a constantly shifting power grid. Onto this kaleidoscopic political landscape Japanese cast increasingly calculating eyes. To an officialdom newly attuned to the importance of export expansion, logic decreed China—with the commercial opportunities offered by an already mythically prodigious market—to be the next frontier.7 Their position in Korea was secured by annexation in 1910; maneuvering against Western rivals for a piece of China now occupied the attention of foreign policy makers.
Having learned from the experience of the Triple Intervention that diplomatic isolation spelled disaster, policy makers developed tactics for exploiting European rivalries to gain cover for Japanese expansion. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902 was the first successful application of this strategy. The British were interested in halting Russian expansion in China; by guaranteeing French neutrality, the alliance encouraged Japan to do the job for them. The policy of playing pawn to British interests in Asia served Japan well. Not only was the alliance essential to victory against Russia, but it allowed Japan to occupy German holdings in Asia during World War I. While this conflict withdrew European power from China, Japan moved in to press the Twenty-one Demands on the Chinese government, gaining an extension of Japanese rights in the Northeast, the transfer of German interests in Shandong, and other concessions to what Japanese were now calling their “special relationship” with China. When the war ended, opportunities for unilateral action closed up, of course, but in the new arrangements set forth at the Washington Conference of 1922, Japan joined its rivals to present a recast united imperialist front to China. Looking back, the empire had progressed far since the days of the Triple Intervention. The inexperienced protégé of Great Britain had learned to ride the winds of Europe's political storms, and its special relationship with China was now secured in the legal embrace of the diplomacy of imperialism.8
As China diplomacy preoccupied Japanese foreign policy makers, the development of a growing array of colonial possessions was absorbing the attention of a new group of colonial administrators. Building up the apparatus of colonial rule in Taiwan (1895), Karafuto (1905), the Kwantung Leased Territory (1905), Korea (protectorate 1905, annexed 1910), and the equatorial Pacific Islands known as Nan´y
In order to make colonialism pay, Japanese authorities organized financial institutions such as the Banks of Taiwan and Korea, charging them to take control of the monetary system and to finance colonial trade and investment. To facilitate the exploitation of what were, at the time of annexation, overwhelmingly agricultural economies, Japan set up semipublic companies such as Mantetsu (the South Manchurian Railway) and the Oriental Development Company. These restructured the landholding arrangements and oversaw the transfer of large blocks of land into Japanese hands. They promoted the commercialization of agriculture and steered production toward such profitable export crops as sugarcane in Taiwan, rice in Korea, and soybeans in the Kwantung Leased Territory.
Standing between the political and economic apparatus of the colonial state on one hand, and native society on the other, were the agents of enforcement—the colonial policemen. These factotums of Japanese administration performed a. wide variety of tasks. In addition to their ordinary policing duties, they collected taxes, mobilized labor for road construction, oversaw land purchases, enforced tenant agreements, and taught school. To carry out all these functions, Japan built up enormous colonial police forces. In Korea and Taiwan, for example, the police operated through four levels of administration. At the base of this structure the colonial state maintained 2,599 police substations in Korea in 1926 and 1,510 in Taiwan in 1931. The total forces numbered 18,463 (40 percent native) and 11,166 (20 percent native), respectively.10
Such were the institutions Japanese developed to rule their formal empire in the early twentieth century, and which shaped and schooled the first generation of colonial elite. Adjusting this experience colonizing Asia to fit with the imagined Asia of the past, Japanese discourse on colonialism sharpened the definition of the imperial project and its local colorations. When Japanese spoke now of “Japan and Asia” distinct images of Taiwan, Korea, China, and Manchuria leapt to mind. To the abstract notion of “empire” were now attached concrete details: a police station in Seoul, a colonial currency in Taiwan, the pyramids of soybean cake stacked on the Dalian wharves. Empire had smells and sounds; it could be touched and tasted.
In their first articulations of an imperial mission, Japanese had used various metaphors to describe their new relationship with Asia: as head of an East Asian family of nations, as victor in an international struggle for survival, as vigilant defender against the threat of a peninsular dagger that pointed at Japan. Whether expressed in Confucian, Social Darwinist, or geopolitical terms, early Meiji calls for the expansion of Japanese interests in Asia represented prescriptions for future behavior, not descriptions of existing relationships. However, colonial experience gradually transformed moralistic imperatives of Confucian tutelage into the crisp bureaucratic professionalism of the science of colonial management; older goals of enlightenment (kaika) made way for the new teleology of progress (hattatsu).
In the international jungle