Chapter v

the Japanese Peril

The ambitions of the Mikado—The Shin Nippon in Western America—Pacific invasion—Japanese and Americans.

Facing the United States in the mysterious Orient is an extensive empire which is sending its legions of pacific invaders into the New World. Anticipating the Japanese victories, the German Emperor warned a somnolent Europe of the terrible Yellow Peril; the peril of hordes like those of Genghis Khan, which would destroy the treasures of Western civilisation. This danger, after the defeat of Russia and the formation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance, has been felt in America from Vancouver and California down to Chili.

To dominate the Pacific is the ambition both of the North American Republic and the Asiatic Monarchy.

Before ruling America the Japanese, exposed to the hostility of the Californians, will fight in the North the great battle which will decide their fate. The Monroe doctrine, which liberated Latin America from the tutelage of the Holy Alliance, is perhaps destined to protect it also against the menace of the East. The Anglo-Saxons will not tolerate the foundation of Japanese colonies on the southern coasts of America, and to prevent them they are overcoming the obstacle of the Isthmus: are digging a canal, fortifying it, and increasing their navy. The United States understand that their future will baffle Japan, and by the acquisition of the Philippines they have become an Asiatic power. They defend the integrity of China, negotiate peace between Russia and Japan, demand the neutrality of the Manchurian railway, and claim a financial share in the Chinese loans and undertakings of material civilisation. The policy of Mr. Taft tends to ensure the American control of the Chinese finances.

The industry of North America needs outlets in Asia, because South America is still a commercial fief of Europe. On the other hand, the Japanese population is increasing at such an excessive rate that emigration is a necessary phenomenon for that country; a people of mariners hemmed in by the ocean naturally looks for fruitful adventures by sea. Moreover, the State stimulates emigration; socialism is causing it anxiety, and the dense population of proletariats is producing implacable caste antagonisms. Anarchists, brilliant propagandists of European doctrines, are spreading their convictions among the multitude which vegetates upon a poverty-stricken soil. Industrialism, and the general transformation of the nation, renders the protest of the disinherited still more bitter.

This current of emigration is neither chaotic nor fruitless. Even more than the German the Japanese is an emissary of imperialistic design. He does not become absorbed into the nation in which he lives; he does not become naturalised under the protection of hospitable laws; he preserves his worship of the Mikado, his national traditions, and his noble devotion to the dead.

Japan aspires to political domination and economic hegemony in Korea and Northern China. The Japanese have annexed Korea, and flying the Imperial standard upon this peninsula they have become a continental power. They have received from ancient China lessons in wisdom, artists and philosophers, and to-day the initiate seeks to rule the initiator. Japan is transforming China and teaching her the methods of the West; the philosophy of Heidelberg, the arts of Paris. In Manchuria, despite the ambitions of the United States, she pretends to supremacy for her industries and her banks.

"Asia for the Asiatics" is the Japanese cry, as "America for the Americans" is that of the people of the States.

Neither of these peoples respects the autonomy of foreign nations. The United States are conquering Asia economically, and the Japanese, the defenders of Oriental integrity, are slowly invading the Far West of America. The Philippines for the United States and Hawaii for Japan are the advance posts of commercial expansion on the one hand and imperialism on the other.

We are then face to face with a struggle of races, a clash of irreconcilable interests. In the proud northern democracy we note an uneasiness which reveals itself by the jealous exclusion of the Japanese from the life of the West, and by immovable racial prejudices. The American General Homer Lee, in a pessimistic book, The Valor of Ignorance, states that a heterogeneous nation in which foreigners constitute half the population can never conquer Japan. He foresees that the island empire, having eliminated its two rivals, Russia and China, by successive wars, will vanquish the United States and occupy vast territories in the American North-West. Only alliance with England, "to-day allied with the destinies of Japan," could save the Republic from subjection to her Oriental rivals.

Such prophecies, however, do not assume a general character. While waiting for the future war the struggle for the Pacific between the two powers concerned remains acute. The Japanese emigrants halt at Hawaii, assimilate American methods, and resume their exodus toward the Californian Eldorado. In the islands they are electors; they prevail by force of numbers; they change their professions or industries with remarkable adaptability, and then return to Japan, or remain, and retain their national feeling inviolate. In California they follow humble callings; they are secretly preparing themselves for conquest. Numberless legions thus arrive from the Orient; they are proud, adventurous, speculative; they aspire to economic supremacy.

In California, that country of gold and adventure, the problem of Japanese immigration is becoming more complex. M. Louis Aubert explains that in this State the Japanese constitute a necessary defence against the tyranny of the trades unions.[1] They accept an absurd wage and furnish the financial oligarchy with useful arms and sober stomachs. When the associations of working men demand increased salaries and threaten the greedy plutocrats with strikes or socialistic demands, the Japanese passively submit to the iron law of capitalism. If the interests of the race demand their expulsion from California, the interests of the capitalist class demand their retention. The instinct of the democracy which supports the civilising mission of the white man, "the white man's burden," is stronger than its utilitarian egoism. The immigrant is accused of immodesty or servility. The energy, frugality, self-respect, triumphant patience, and hostile isolation of the Japanese in Hawaii and California cause the Americans much uneasiness.

Repulsed in the north, the conquering Japanese take refuge on the long coast-line of South America. They do not renounce California and its admirable soil, but they prefer to forget the disdain of the North, to compromise with that haughty democracy, and prepare in silence for the future conflict.

They are, as a race, transformed; they have forsaken their own history in the midst of the millennial and ecstatic Orient, and this renovation has resulted in an intense ambition of expansion. The Japan which apes Europe does not overlook the teachings of Anglo-Saxon imperialism. Its statesmen, disciples of Disraeli and Chamberlain, wish to found an immense empire under the tutelage of the Asiatic England, insular and proud as the United Kingdom itself. Count Okuma stated that South America was comprised in the sphere of influence to which the Japanese Empire may legitimately pretend. Is not this the very language of the conquerors of Europe, for whom such "spheres of influence" pave the way for protectorates, tutelage, or annexation? "Western America," write the Japanese journals, "is a favourable ground for Japanese emigration. Persevering emigrants might there build up a new Japan, Shin Nippon." It is the identical object of the Germans in Southern Brazil; the creation of a Transatlantic Deutschtum.

The Japanese emigrate to Canada, there to establish a base for the invasion of the United States; they do the same in Mexico, and settle even in Chili; but Peru is the favourite soil of these imperialistic adventurers. To a statesman here is a Shin Nippon whose future is assured, a new Hawaii. Its climate resembles that of Japan. "In Peru, as in the greater part of South America, the government is weak, and if energy be displayed it cannot refuse to accept Japanese immigrants," writes a journal of Tokio. "In this hospitable country the Japanese could receive education in the public schools, acquire lands, and exploit mines." It is necessary, says an Osaka news-sheet, that these immigrants should not return to Japan after amassing a fortune; they must remain in Peru and there create a Shin Nippon.[2] The Japanese immigrants are reminded that already there are 60,000 Chinese in the sugar plantations of Peru, and that this republic is one of the richest on the Pacific coast. A minute explanation is given of the agricultural products which can be raised in Mexico, Chili, and Peru, and what are the privileges granted to immigrants in these countries; but these comprehensive statements do not trouble American statesmen. The very date of the first Japanese exodus toward the Eldorado of the conquistadors has become the classic anniversary of the commencement of a new era; "the thirty-second of the Meijie," of the regeneration of the Empire. According to recent statistics 6,000 Japanese are at work in Peru, in the plantations of sugar-cane, the rubber-forests, or the cotton-fields; following the tracks of the Chinese, they fill the lesser callings and defeat the mulattos and half-breeds in the economic struggle. New fleets of steamers carry these persistent legions under the Imperial flag. The State protects the navigation companies which run between Japan and South America, and although the commerce thus favoured is more profitable to Peru and Chili than to Japan, the far-sighted Mikado encourages relations which are not particularly favourable to-day, but which permit of the development of Japanese influence all along the Pacific coast, and the creation of centres of Japanese population and influence in Mexico, Peru, and Chili.[3] The Japanese vessels discharge their human freight at Callao and Valparaiso. The soil, which lacks Chinese serfs, is thus fertilised by Japanese immigrants, and the agricultural oligarchy of Chili and Peru is satisfied. Brazil itself attracts these emigrants, replacing the fertile Italian invasion by these sober workers of a hostile race, and is preparing the way for the establishment on Brazilian soil of two groups of identical tendencies, but inimical: one Japanese, the other German.

Japanese spies have been captured in Ecuador and Mexico. At the centennial fêtes of Mexico and the Argentine in 1910 a Japanese cruiser and an ambassador of the Mikado brought fraternal messages from the Orient. Uneasy on account of the North American peril, certain writers of the Latin American democracies entertain a certain amount of confidence in the sympathies of Japan; perhaps they even count upon an alliance with the Empire of the Rising Sun. But we cannot see, with the brilliant Argentine writer Manuel Ugarte, that Latin diplomacy must henceforth count upon Japan, because the hostility between that nation and the United States might be successfully exploited at the proper moment. In the commercial battles for the domination of the Pacific Japan does not support the autonomy of Latin America; her statesmen and publicists consider that Peru, Chili, and Mexico are spheres of Japanese expansion. We have cited conclusive opinions on this subject, and they contradict the optimism of the Argentine sociologist. Apart from the emigrants and the companies which encourage them the projects and designs of Count Okuma, leader of the Japanese imperialists, are manifested in the nationalist Press, which sometimes betrays more than it intends. To-day, in the face of the unanimous opinion of these journals, we cannot deny that Japan has ambitious designs upon America. The future war will be born of the clash of two doctrines, of two imperialisms, of the ideal of Okuma and the Monroe doctrine. Victorious, the Japanese would invade Western America and convert the Pacific into a vast closed sea, closed to foreign ambitions, mare nostrum, peopled by Japanese colonies.[4]

The Japanese hegemony would not be a mere change of tutelage for the nations of America. In spite of essential differences the Latins oversea have certain common ties with the people of the States: a long-established religion, Christianity, and a coherent, European, occidental civilisation. Perhaps there is some obscure fraternity between the Japanese and the American Indians, between the yellow men of Nippon and the copper-coloured Quechuas, a disciplined and sober people. But the ruling race, the dominant type of Spanish origin, which imposes the civilisation of the white man upon America, is hostile to the entire invading East.

The geography of the Oriental Empire in no sense recalls that of America; there are neither wide plains, nor mighty rivers, nor fertile and luxurious forests. Narrow horizons, gentle hills, minute islands, closed seas, and the strange flora of the harmonious insular landscape: lotuses, cryptomera, bamboos, chrysanthemums, dwarf trees. Beliefs, manners, and customs all differ radically from the American. "The Europeans," writes Lafcadio Hearn, "build with a view to duration, the Japanese with a view to instability." A keen sentiment of all that is fugitive in life, of the anguish caused by the incessant flux and mobility of things, causes men to love ephemeral apparitions. Buddhism speaks of the fluidity of life. Japanese art strives to fix passing impressions; the dew, the pale light of the moon, the fleeting tints of twilight, the provisional temples, the small houses of wood, the rice-paper shoji, on which the very shadows of those within are vague and momentary. There is nothing persevering in Japanese life; the inhabitant is a nomad and nature is variable. Impassive Buddhas, seated on their blue lotus flowers, contemplate the irresistible current of appearances. Mobility, and a religious sense of becoming: these would be elements of dissolution in a divided America.

Powerful and traditional, the Japanese civilisation would weigh too heavily upon the Latin democracies, mixed as they are. Bushido, the cult of honour and fidelity to one's ancestors, is the basis of an intense nationalism; the contempt for death, the pride of an insular people, the subjection of the individual to the family and the native land, and the asceticism of the samurai, constitute so formidable a superiority that in the conflict between half-breed America and stoic Japan the former would lose both its autonomy and its traditions.

[1] Louis Aubert, Americains et Japonais, Paris, 1908, pp. 151 et seq.

[2] M. Aubert cites these and other extracts.

[3] The Peruvian imports into Japan were £101,000 in 1909; the Japanese imports into Peru only £4,400. There is a commercial treaty between Chili and Japan.

[4] Perhaps the emigration of Orientals towards the two Americas will be arrested, for there is a Chinese Far West which is slowly becoming peopled. Japan aspires to assure herself of the domination of Manchuria, and is sending colonists to Korea, the annexed peninsula. The excess of the population of China and Japan tends naturally to occupy territories in which everything is favourable—climate, religion, and race.