On the morning of May 27, 1905, a small Japanese fleet met the Russian Baltic Fleet as it steamed into the Straits of Tsushima. Seven months earlier, the tsar had ordered the fleet to leave its base at Kronstadt. Now, halfway around the world, it was exhausted, demoralized, and in desperate need of supplies. The Russians made a last, desperate dash for Vladivostok. They never made it. By the following morning, the Japanese had destroyed six Russian battleships and captured the other two, and they had not lost a single ship. Five thousand Russian sailors were taken prisoner.
At the peace conference at Portsmouth, the Japanese won the Liaotung Peninsula, the South Manchurian Railroad Company’s rights in Manchuria, South Sakhalin, and recognition for Japan’s paramount interests in Korea. No longer would Russia trouble the Japanese in Korea. That November, the Korean Empire became a Japanese protectorate.
The Russo-Japanese War was a psychological shock for the colonized peoples of the world. Lord Curzon, the British Viceroy in India, observed that the reverberations of Japanese victory had “gone like a thunderclap through the whispering galleries of the East.” Sun Yat-sen, traveling down the Suez Canal during the war, was asked whether he was Japanese; the Arab had observed vast armies of Russian soldiers being shipped back fo Russia from the Far East, which seemed a sure sign of Russia’s defeat. “The joy of this Arab,” wrote Sun, “as a member of the great Asiatic race, seemed to know no bounds.”
In South Africa, a young lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi wrote that “so far and wide have the roots of Japanese victory spread that we cannot now visualize all the fruit it will put forth.” A Hunanese schoolboy named Mao Zedong memorized a Japanese song taught by his music teacher, a former student in Japan:
The sparrow sings, the nightingale dances,
And the green fields are lovely in the spring.
The pomegranate flowers crimson, the willows green-leafed,
And there is a new picture.
Jawaharlal Nehru, reading the news in provincial India, found it stirred up his enthusiasm. “I waited eagerly for the papers for fresh news daily,” although he found Japanese history rather hard to follow and preferred “the knightly tales of old Japan and the pleasant prose of Lafcadio Hearn.” He began dreaming of Indian freedom, and his own role in freeing Asia from European domination. “I dreamt of brave deeds, of how, sword in hand, I would fight for India and help in freeing her.”
Of course, by the time Nehru heard the news from Tsushima, he was with his mother and sister on the train from Dover to Harrow. It happened to be just before Derby Day, and he and his family went to see the race. Still, the news put him in “high good humour.” Lord Curzon’s dyspepsia notwithstanding, the young Nehru would not be alone in his enthusiasm, whether at Harrow or at Epsom Downs.
Pankaj Mishra describes the Battle of Tsushima as the first act in The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia. “For the first time since the Middle Ages, a non-European country had vanquished a European power in a major war,” he wrote, and now Japan threatened Europe in a way that no colonized people ever had. It was not an uncommon sentiment at the time. As the Illustrated London News put it, “Europe has not recovered from the shock of finding out that the Japanese are a great people.”
The irony is that whatever succor their Chinese or Indian subjects might have felt, the English were as happy with the Japanese victory as any colonized people. “Every Englishman will join in the joy which is felt in the land of his allies,” wrote the North China Herald, the paper of British merchants in the Shanghai concession. In London, it was the greatest victory since the Battle of Trafalgar. “In the hundred years gone by since Nelson decided the destinies of Europe,” wrote The Times, “no such action has been fought at sea as that which begun on Saturday in the Straits of Tsushima, and no such victory has been won.”
Japan had been Britain’s treaty ally since 1902, whereas Russia threatened Britain’s interests in South Asia and the Far East. Britain shared the general sentiment that Japan had raised Asia to the level of Europe, but this was no bad thing: Henry Wilson, a pro-Japanese journalist, observed that “The era of inequality between the races is over. Henceforth white and yellow man must meet on an equal footing.” The Times wrote that Japan had proven itself to European powers “judged by every standard of modern civilization,” and their victory confirmed the wisdom of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance:
We can conceive no surer way of averting the danger of racial antagonism, if it in reality exists, than an alliance between the two Island Empires of the West and the East based on a community of peaceful interests, on joint responsibilities of mutual defence, and on kindred ideals of patriotism, progress, and freedom.
Even before the war, the British had seen Japan as Britain’s mirror image, a plucky island nation bringing the light of liberalism to the benighted peoples of the Far East. The North China Herald had welcomed the alliance as the coming together of “the Englands of the West and the East,” and a guarantee of “peace and the open door for all.” The Times’ correspondent in Tokyo wrote that Japan was fighting as “the champion of ideals which Anglo-Saxons, all the world over, hold in reverence.”
If Japan bloodied Russia’s nose in the process, that was all the better. Wilson wrote that “it cannot be denied by thinking men that [Japan], rather than Russia, represents civilized ideas, the freedom of human thought, democratic institutions, education and enlightenment – in a word, all that we understand by progress. It is Russia who stands for barbarism and reaction …” Britain hoped that Japan would protect liberal interests in the Far East, and accordingly British interests in the Pacific: ending Russia’s southward drive into China, and opening the door to foreign commerce in China outside European spheres of influence. Perhaps Japan would bring about the “Japanising of China,” and hence “the uplifting of this Empire by the spread of Western enlightenment and civilisation.”
As Lord Curzon’s observation makes clear, however, the settlers in the empire and its dominions were never so inclined to respect the Japanese. Although the British Columbia press praised the “inspired” patriotism and welcomed the renewal of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, some worried that the emergence of Japan as a world power would mean “the dominance of the yellow races in Asia” and a menace to Australia and the Pacific.
Two weeks before Tsushima, delegates from local labor organizations in San Francisco founded the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League, dedicating themselves to ending Asian immigration into California. The American Federation of Labor had already issued a resolution opposing all Asian immigration. In the British Empire, the “great white walls” the Dominions had raised against Chinese and Indian labor were now threatened by the Japanese. Lord Curzon wrote that “when challenged about the place of India in the Empire, [the Indian] replies that the Empire is nothing to him, since it cannot insure for the Indian his rights as a British subject in Australia, or British Columbia, or the Transvaal.” Curzon observed that this phase in colonial opinion was not likely to be either “fortuitous or transient,” but was likely, as time passed, “to stiffen into harder forms.”
On October 11, 1906, the day after the ratification of the Treaty of Portsmouth in Tokyo, the San Francisco school board decreed that ethnic Japanese students were to be forced into a segregated school, so that white children “should not be placed in any position where their youthful impressions may be affected by association with pupils of the Mongoloid race.” The New York Sun’s correspondent in Tokyo told his editors that “the exclusion of Japanese children from the public schools of California cuts this child-loving nation to the quick.” In Japan, some broadsheets urged the Japanese navy to make a detour to California to rescue the Japanese of San Francisco: “It will be easy work to awaken the United States from her dream of obstinacy when one of our great Admirals appears suddenly on the other side of the Pacific.”
President Roosevelt was disgusted by the San Francisco segregation order. He sent a cabinet member to San Francisco to persuade the school board to reverse itself. They ignored the message, and sent back the messenger. In his annual message to Congress, Roosevelt condemned the segregation order as a “wicked absurdity” enacted by a “small body of wrongdoers.” The Japanese had “won in a single generation the right to stand abreast of the foremost and most enlightened peoples of Europe and America; they have won on their own merits and by their own exertions the right to treatment on a basis of full and frank equality.” After months of pleading, Roosevelt persuaded San Francisco to reverse its segregation order, but only in exchange for concrete steps to end Japanese immigration. Roosevelt signed an immediate executive order barring Japanese aliens in Hawaii from migrating to the mainland.
In 1907, the Asiatic Exclusion League sponsored a mass demonstration in Vancouver that ended in a race riot. In the aftermath, the federal opposition leader Robert Borden joined local leaders in defending the rioters, as British Columbia was and must remain “a White Man’s province.” In 1907 and 1908, Canada, Australia, and the United States all came to “Gentlemen’s Agreements” with Japan, barring almost all further immigration. Although Japanese subjects had the right of free entry into Canada under the Anglo-Japanese Treaty, Japan agreed to use administrative measures to limit further immigration to Canada. They would refuse passports to all manual laborers requesting permission to travel to the United States. The rising tide of Asian migration was stopped, and “full and frank equality” postponed.
The Anglo-Japanese Alliance eventually withered away, but not before one final victory. On August 15, 1914, the Japanese demanded that the Germans relinquish their base in Tsingtao, “the root of the German influence which forms a constant menace to the peace of the Far East.” Germany was no more inclined to respect Japan’s demand than Russia had been: “They can tell this to a Russian but not to a German,” one German in Tsingtao wrote in his diary. Wilhelm II said that “it would shame me more to surrender Tsingtao to the Japanese than Berlin to the Russians.” Although the Kaiser would not live to see the surrender of Berlin, Germany would ultimately have to do both.
On November 7, the German garrison asked the Allies for terms. Only the German and Japanese chiefs of staff and a Japanese naval officer signed the terms of surrender; the British were neither consulted nor asked to put their name to the document. A week after the surrender, a representative of the emperor handed the British troops at Tsingtao a parchment expressing the emperor’s pleasure at their participation in the battle, along with a consignment of cigarettes bearing the emperor’s chrysanthemum crest. The British got the cigarettes and the Japanese got the peninsula.
During the Russo-Japanese War itself, however, one young German believed that Japan was the country’s natural ally. “For national reasons, I had already taken sides, and in our little discussions at once sided with the Japanese,” he wrote, two decades later, from his cell in Landsberg Prison. “In a defeat of the Russians,” wrote Adolf Hitler, “I saw the defeat of Austrian Slavdom.”
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