Category Archives: Japan

by | 7 July 2024 · 8:27 am

Japan vs. Germany in the Pacific

From Geography and Japan’s Strategic Choices: From Seclusion to Internationalization, by Peter J. Woolley (Potomac Books, 2005), Kindle pp. 80-84:

The European war that began in August 1914 was more than European. Though it was the great European powers that immolated themselves in both victory and defeat, the war was fought around the globe and had immediate consequences for Asia and Japan.

The requirements of the European war were such that Britain, France, Germany, and Russia had to redeploy the troops maintaining their empires in Asia to the European theater of war. At the same time, they all wanted to defend those parts of their empires they could while depriving the enemy of his. Japan was Germany’s foe in this war and a very useful ally of Britain. The war was the final denouement of the tsarist regime in Russia and, when the Bolshevik Revolution had run its course, it would present Japan with a new, virulent, and formidable neighboring regime. Moreover, the successful Marxist revolution in Russia would embolden the nascent communist party in China just as the Bolshevik regime would aid and abet the Chinese revolutionaries who would one day make their own revolution and reshape Japan’s geopolitical reality. In the meanwhile, it was Japan that had an unprecedented opportunity to reshape the geopolitical contours of Asia.

Japan entered the war without hesitation on the side of Britain, sending an ultimatum to Germany on August 15 demanding that Germany withdraw all naval forces from Asian waters, disarm those not withdrawn, and turn over to Japan the whole of Germany’s Chinese territory. A week later, Japan blockaded the German-controlled port of Tsingtao and in early September Japan landed a force in order to assault the port from the rear. By November 7, 1914, Japan had taken the base at Tsingtao. At the same time, Japan also took over Germany’s other Pacific territories and bases, including the Marshall Islands, the Mariana Islands, Palau, and the Caroline Islands, prizes Japan kept as rewards for its participation in the war against Germany. The former German possessions gave Japan’s navy an orientation very different than it had before. Japan’s armed forces were arrayed across the Sea of Japan to China and the continent and, for the first time, had far-flung bases and possessions southward and eastward across the world’s largest ocean.

It is a common view of historians that Japan’s participation in the war was solely to further its territorial ambitions. A typical summary of the period opines that “the Japanese Empire was keen to make the most of the golden opportunity which Germany’s occupation with European events provided. . . . She proceeded to seize every Germany territory in the Pacific she could lay her hands on.” Doubtless this view comes from the Twenty-One Demands that Japan made on China—actually a series of memos that pressed the Chinese to give to Japan the same concessions they had given to Germany, plus several additional ones. The memos put Japan at odds with the United States, which was lamely arguing to restore China’s territorial integrity. In fact, the memoirs of Germany’s Kaiser, written after the war, support this view: “the rapid rise of Tsing-tao as a trading center aroused the envy of the Japanese. . . . Envy prompted England in 1914 to demand that Japan should take Tsing-tao. . . . Japan did this joyfully.”

Yet few history books note Japan’s contributions to the allied effort against Germany. All the great powers, most especially the United States, were apprehensive about Japan’s potential to become the dominant power not only in China but in the Pacific. Germany even briefly tried to pit the anxieties of the North American power against Japan in an effort to save Germany’s Pacific possessions. Britain too was ambivalent about Japan, first demanding that Japan enter the war immediately, then trying to limit the scope of Japan’s operations. But it must be said that Japan adhered to both the letter and spirit of the alliance it had made with Great Britain. In addition to joining the war immediately and taking Germany’s Asian bases, Japan served a number of other roles. First, Japan’s navy helped Britain drive German warships from the Pacific. The Japanese Imperial navy also allowed Britain, and later the United States, to minimize their forces in the Pacific, freeing those ships for duty in waters surrounding Europe. Further, Japan escorted convoys of troops and war materials from the British dominions in the Pacific to Europe—no small task in an era of mine and submarine warfare. Meanwhile, Japanese yards produced both ships of war and merchantmen for British allies. And beginning in 1917, Japan sent two flotillas of destroyers to the Mediterranean Sea to assist Britain in antisubmarine operations and escort troop transports. In the Mediterranean theater alone, the Imperial navy had thirty-two engagements with submarines and escorted a total of 788 allied ships.

One of the few who gave Japan its due was Winston Churchill, who served as Britain’s first lord of the admiralty and wrote a prodigious history of the war. To him Japan was “another island empire situated on the other side of the globe” and “a trustworthy friend.” Similarly, Lord Grey, who served as Britain’s foreign secretary, wrote that “Japan was for us for many, many years a fair, honorable, and loyal Ally.” Nonetheless, when the time came for postwar negotiations, Churchill and Grey were out of office and Britain had obligations to Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, who had all given Britain their firm support in the war.

The Australians and New Zealanders, chips off the Anglo block, were alarmed by Japan’s reach in the Pacific at the war’s end in 1918, and equally aware of Britain’s diminished naval strength. They insisted Japan give up any of the former German holdings south of the equator. Likewise, the United States apprehended Japan, its navy, and its extensive Pacific outposts as a maritime rival and a potential threat to free trade in Asia. As a result, Japan, the United States, Britain, and its oceanic dominions now found themselves in a peculiar geographical and political puzzle.

Japan was Britain’s ally, had built a formidable navy, and had acquired far-flung Pacific bases. Australia and New Zealand were dependable British dominions but strongly preferred to have their security guaranteed by the motherland rather than by Japan. The United States never had a peacetime alliance with Britain, but Britain valued U.S. friendship, and the two democratic, commercial, naval powers sat astride the Atlantic Ocean. Meanwhile, Japanese and American interests and possessions in the Pacific were not separated by any discernible boundary and the two powers viewed each other as rivals. The Americans also insisted on an “Open Door” trading policy in China but Japan clearly had gained the upper hand over the Europeans in that chaotic country.

The Americans had some reason to be concerned about Japan’s new position in the northwest Pacific. Japan had been consolidating its control in southern Manchuria and Korea, had taken over Shantung, and had won most of its twenty-one demands from China. The Open Door policy, the idea that outside powers would compete on equal terms in China and respect its sovereignty, was seriously threatened by Japan’s increasingly advantageous position. Government in China was becoming ever more fragmented and corrupt.

The American government also had domestic pressures to deal with in regard to Asian policy. Navalists saw British power fading and Japanese power expanding. The trend seemed to be toward Japanese dominance in the Pacific. Likewise, American traders wanted the government to take a more aggressive stance that would give them some advantage—or at least, not put them at such a disadvantage in Asia in general and in China in particular. Christian missionaries were also keen to set to work on the vast populations now accessible to their gospel. But worst of all, and most outspoken, the racist Anti-Immigration League in California made barring Japanese immigrants from schools, jobs, and property the sine qua non of their agenda and, consequently, of California politics. The Californians now found allies in various anti-immigration societies in the eastern United States as well as in worker unions and even in recent European immigrants who feared the Asians would not only drive down wages but take their jobs. Thus, the nascent Japanese-American rivalry found expression even at the level of local politics.

Complicating matters further, the Western allies, including Japan, still had troops in Siberia. Their intervention there was a confused, fruitless, and embarrassing attempt to stave the Bolshevik Revolution, or rescue the Czech freedom fighters, or prop up an alternative government, or prevent the massive resources of Siberia from falling into somebody else’s hands, or something similar. Everyone, except perhaps the Japanese, was ready to leave Siberia but not so willing to leave first and allow Japan a free hand. Consequently, the peace conference at the palace Versailles was an infamous mess.

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by | 6 July 2024 · 5:45 am

Japan & Britain as Island Societies

From Geography and Japan’s Strategic Choices: From Seclusion to Internationalization, by Peter J. Woolley (Potomac Books, 2005), Kindle pp. 16-17:

The consequences of Japan’s relative position to Asia are at least as important as those that stem from its topography. Though classified as part of Asia, the archipelago stands off the Asian continent anywhere from a hundred to several hundred miles. This physical separation from Asia minimized influences from the continent on the Japanese population and allowed Japanese culture and politics to develop relatively independently. Indeed, this physical separation is the primary reason so many observers have emphasized the unique character of things Japanese.

Even so, Japan is not the only example of an island-nation removed from continental civilization. Great Britain is in a similar position, and it is worth comparing Japan’s placement off the northeast coast of continental Asia to that of Britain off the northwest coast of Europe. Both Britain and Japan had the geographical advantage of being insulated by the sea. For both continental Europeans and continental Asians, the difficulties of navigation made travel to and from the islands hazardous and limited for many centuries. Consequently, both Japan and Britain were at the periphery of continental politics for those centuries. The insulating sea made Britain and Japan naturally defensible. The sea also offered both of them an avenue to the rest of the world and made them both, eventually, trading and maritime nations.

The stark difference in this comparison is how far Japan was from the Asian continent as compared to how far Britain was from its neighbors. Japan and England were both insulated from their continental neighbors but Japan was more than insulated, it was also isolated by the seas that surrounded it. The English had the advantage of a natural defensive moat but could easily traverse the moat to communicate and trade with their cross-channel neighbors and, by the same token, were not immune to the political machinations of those neighbors. The core of the English population was physically oriented toward the continent: the great city of London grew up on the Thames River, which flowed into the Channel between England and France. But on the other side of the globe, travel from Japan to the mainland was a much more difficult affair because the distances were so much greater. Further, the Japanese population did not live facing the continent but on the side opposite, facing away (toward the Americas in fact): Japan’s great fertile plains were on the Pacific Ocean and on the Inland Sea, not the Sea of Japan. Thus, the island-bound English developed into international traders, explorers, and empire builders much sooner than did the island-bound Japanese.

The twin geographical influences of insulation and isolation have been greatly modified by modern modes of transportation and communication, but Japan’s history reflects the way it was both insulated from attack and isolated from cultural, economic, and political transactions.

It is interesting that two of Japan’s first three railway lines were built to connect to ports on the Japan Sea, facing Asia. The first railway connected Tokyo to the major port city of Yokohama, but the next two connected Sapporo to Otaru and Osaka to Tsuruga (including one segment by boat across Lake Biwa).

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by | 5 July 2024 · 5:27 am

Prudence of Tokugawa Isolation

From Geography and Japan’s Strategic Choices: From Seclusion to Internationalization, by Peter J. Woolley (Potomac Books, 2005), Kindle pp. 43-46:

Events outside Japan in the seventeenth century emphasized the prudence of the Tokugawa seclusion. This was the Age of Expansion—and not just for Europeans. In China, the Ming Dynasty was coming to an end at the hands of the Manchus, people the Ming once ruled. The Manchus gained control of Inner Mongolia before moving south and taking Manchuria and then Korea in 1637. They took the capital, Beijing, in 1644, prompting the Ming emperor to commit suicide. They spent the rest of the century subduing the remainder of China, defeating the last resistance in Taiwan in 1683. They would later add to their empire Outer Mongolia (1697) and Tibet (1720) to make the largest Chinese empire in history.

India had expanded to, then fallen victim to the expansion of others. The Mogul emperors had consolidated the vast subcontinent under their rule, adding the last big piece, Afghanistan, in 1581. By the end of the next century, however, the government had fallen into decline. Its infighting and inefficiency would eventually weaken and divide India to the point where the British could become the real rulers.

In Russia, Ivan the Terrible was creating an empire at the same time as Japan had been fighting its civil wars. Russians crossed the Ural Mountains into Asia and by 1584 had defeated the Tatars. They went on to colonize Siberia over the next several decades, reaching the Pacific Ocean by 1639, thereby becoming neighbors of Japan.

The Europeans continued to explore, conquer, and settle. In contrast to Tokugawa’s stable Japan, a chaotic Thirty Years’ War began in 1618 between Catholics and Protestants, which slowly engulfed the European continent. By its end, Germany was in ruins and hundreds of thousands were dead from disease, famine, and massacre. The Tokugawa strategy of seclusion then seemed like the wise choice. The only question was how long it could last.

The 250 years between the founding of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1603 and the first American attempt to force Japan to abandon its seclusion in 1853 were not years of stagnation in or outside Japan. In Japan there was political stability but also long-term trends toward urbanization and bureaucratization. A middle class of merchants emerged: people who accumulated wealth but did not necessarily control land. Nor did they have the same obligations and restrictions as the government and ruling class.

To be sure, there was more change taking place outside Japan than there was within. Much of this change would impinge sooner or later on Japan’s foreign policy as well as its domestic harmony. While most writers focus on the technological changes of the era, social, political, and intellectual changes were just as important. If Europe’s seventeenth century was the Age of Expansion, its eighteenth century was the Age of Enlightenment, which laid the foundations not only of modern science but of democratic conceptions of government as well. Notions such as the divine right of kings, raison d’état, and the innate superiority of a ruling class were on their way out. While Japan remained secluded in the fifth reign of its Tokugawa Shogunate, the English philosopher John Locke was publishing his Second Treatise on Civil Government, emphasizing the triune values of individual liberty, the sanctity of property, and equality under the law. Montesquieu’s treatise advocating a separation of government’s basic functions into separate institutions, De L’Esprit des lois, followed in 1748. Jean Jacques Rousseau’s appeal to the “general will” of the people in Le Contrat Social followed in 1762. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations argued the advantages of free trade in 1776. And James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay produced The Federalist Papers in 1787 and 1788. These works presaged an Age of Revolution. But in Japan none of this would be discussed: the most influential philosophers were Kamo no Mabuchi, Motoori Norinaga, and Hirata Atsutane.

A small school of Japanese writers began both to lead a return to ancient Japanese literature and to critique Chinese influences on Japan—influences they deemed to be impure blots and accretions on Japanese culture. Thus, one curious effect of Japan’s self-imposed seclusion was that the Chinese became the foreigners. The philosophers advocated the revival of Shinto, an indigenous animistic religion in which many things, living and inanimate, had kami, or spirits. Hundreds of native folk tales were attached to Shintoism, many supporting the notion that Japan was the center of creation and the emperor was divinely appointed.

Shinto had been gradually eclipsed by Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, each of which made its way to Japan through Chinese and Korean missionaries as early as the sixth century. Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769) was, not coincidentally, the son of a Shinto priest and was most influential in attracting attention to and reverence for classic Japanese literature—literature that included Shinto mythology. Mabuchi was succeeded in his endeavor by a disciple, Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801). Motoori’s quest was to discover the true Japanese culture, now overlaid with so many foreign influences. He saw in Japan’s distant past an ideal society ruled by the descendents of Shinto deities— the emperors. His works and speeches became very popular. But his writing had more than nostalgic undertones. Demanding new reverence for the emperor was a subtle criticism of the Shogunate that ruled in the emperor’s name. And criticizing Confucianism was tantamount to criticizing the political leadership which not only had been schooled in Confucian thought but was— Motoori implied—subservient to China. And though the Shogun gave Motoori official honors, it was Motoori’s own disciple, Hirata, who drew the ultimate conclusion: that all gods were born in Japan and none outside, thus Japan and the Japanese were a category of creation all by themselves, one that was perfect and pure—when free from the corrupting influences of outsiders.

Hirata, born the same year that the Americans produced their Declaration of Independence, became the leader of a full-blown Shinto revivalist movement. That movement was subtly critical of the government, for which Hirata spent the last two years of his life under house arrest. Though he died before the opening of Japan, his disciples were later appointed to important posts in the government, bringing with them their ideas of Japanese cultural purity to the strategic conversation.

Perhaps fundamentalist ideas such as Shinto revivalism were also the result of the strange political climate in Japan. While politically stable and peaceful, social volatility threatened. Peace and stability had brought overpopulation and a recurring threat of famine, since trade was so severely restricted. This allowed merchant and artisan guilds, or kumi to monopolize a particular distribution, trade, or manufacture. The leaders of the kumi were rich and getting richer, and this naturally caused resentment in both the aristocratic class and the underclass. Women were feeling the brunt of a more and more regulated society under an increasingly fearful, conservative government: their dress, civic participation, businesses, and even leisure arts were more and more carefully proscribed. Meanwhile, the police were easily corrupted and the highest officials were profligate in their spending and increasingly arbitrary in their enforcement of laws. All of these consequences and benefits of seclusion would be starkly outlined when Japan was confronted by the need to reevaluate its strategy of seclusion.

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by | 13 May 2024 · 5:38 am

Chinese in Colonial Vietnam

From The Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam, by Tran Khanh (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1993), pp. 21-25:

Two major factors converged to cause an upsurge in Chinese migration to Vietnam in the second half of the nineteenth century. A push factor was the political upheavals in China, which led to its people seeking better conditions overseas. A pull factor was French colonization and the policy of the colonial government to recruit Chinese labour for Vietnam.

After the Treaty of Nanking in AD 1842 forced the Manchu court in Beijing to cede Hong Kong to the British and open five treaty ports to Western powers, it was no longer possible for the Chinese authority to control the movement of their nationals in and out of the country. At that time, the Chinese Government had officially banned travelling beyond the shores of China. Thus China became an increasingly stable source of manpower for labour-hungry Western colonies in Southeast Asia and Latin America. By AD 1860, articles within the Treaty of Peking signed between China and both Britain and France literally compelled the Manchu authorities to recognize the right of Chinese workers to seek a livelihood abroad under contracts they themselves could freely enter into. Dovetailing with this relaxation of laws on emigration was the political turmoil of the times which contributed to the urge to leave. During AD 1850-61 there was a large-scale uprising in the form of the Taiping Revolution. Added to that were the intermittent wars fought with Western powers. The majority of migrants in this exodus were the usual land-deprived peasants and impoverished city dwellers. But there was also a sizeable number of small and middle-scale business­ men, intellectuals, and military personnel.

France colonized six provinces of southern Vietnam (Nam Ky), which constituted Cochinchina, in AD 1867 and established protectorates in cen­tral and northern Vietnam by AD 1884. The two protectorates were named Annam and Tonkin, respectively. From the start, the French colonial admin­istration took measures to regulate Chinese immigration with a mixture of control and encouragement. In AD 1874 a special Immigration Bureau was established in Saigon which allowed Chinese immigrants into the country but only if they belonged to dialect groups already existing in the country and if the groups would provide sponsorship for their own kind.  The Bureau was very active, and as early as AD 1897 it had a department that could arbitrarily decide on the suitability of a Chinese immigrant for work; this aroused such an angry protest from the Chinese community that the administration was forced to close it down. After this, streams of Chinese immigrants could cross freely into Vietnam, and they congregated mainly in big cities.

The French colonial administration allowed the Chinese to deal freely in rice, opium, and alcohol. Other legal rights included the right to own land, to travel without restriction within the Indochinese Federation, to establish commercial organizations, to return to China for a visit, and to transfer their wealth out of the country. Such favourable conditions continued to attract Chinese migrants as in the days of the Nguyen dynasty. Within a ten-year span, the number of Chinese in Cochinchina shot up from 44,000 in 1873 to 56,000 in 1889, concentrating mainly in big cities. Cholon in the year 1889 had a population of nearly 16,000 Chinese; Saigon, over 7,000; and Gia Dinh, nearly 3,000. In Tonkin and Annam, the Chinese migrants also gathered in Haiphong, Hanoi, Danang, and the Quang Ninh province, which bordered China. The Chines here were involved mostly in commerce and service.

Chinese immigrants during the period of late nineteenth and early twen­tieth centuries also consisted of labourers contracted by the French to work in Vietnam. They were sent to excavate mines, specifically in Quang Ninh province, to build the railway linking Vietnam to the southern provinces of China or to tap rubber in plantations. By the 1920s, Chinese workers accounted for 7 per cent of the total number of miners and 17 per cent of the total number of industrial workers in Vietnam. The influx of Chinese labourers contributed not only to the country’s manpower but also to the emergence of a working class in Vietnam.

This rapid influx of Chinese migrants continued up till the middle of the twentieth century. Data published during the period AD 1912-22 give their number as 158,000. Between 1923 and 1933, nearly 600,000 arrived from China. Another set of data estimates the number to be 1.2 million between 1923 and 1951, which was a record at any given period of time during the whole history of Chinese emigration. But the traffic was prone to ebb and flow. The figures were high in the years 1925-30, 1936-38, and 1946-48, correlating with the security situation in China. China was ex­periencing civil wars during the periods 1924-27 and 1946-49. The years 1936-38 saw the beginnings of Japanese military encroachment on China. Going by official statistics, the figure for the Chinese population in Vietnam in the years just before the French left in 1954 would range from 600,000 to 750,000. Variations of this figure for different years are shown in Table 1, estimated to be 2 per cent of Vietnam’s population.

The distribution of population also shows Chinese preference for urban centres and the southern part of the country. Before 1945, some 90 per cent of the Chinese community were residing in Cochinchina, where they made up 7 per cent of the population. The proportions of Chinese in Tonkin and Annam were minimal, 0.5 per cent and 0.2 per cent, respectively. Table 2 illustrates the urban characteristic of the Chinese population in Vietnam.

In 1952 the Chinese population in Saigon-Cholon constituted about 34 per cent of the total population of the city. Their proportions in Hanoi and Haiphong were 4 per cent and 15 per cent, respectively. Besides these three big cities, the Chinese were also found in sizeable numbers in other cities of the South. As mentioned earlier, the border province of Quang Ning in the North also had concentrations of Chinese, as in Cam Pha, Ti  Yen, Quang Ha, and Mong Cai. With towns where large numbers of Chinese reside, they would also gather in particular quarters or streets. For example, in Sai­gon, they are to be found in districts 5, 6, 10, and 11. District 5 is Cholon, where before 1975, 80 per cent of the residents were Chinese. In Hanoi, they were gathered at the Hang Buom and Ma May quarters.

With the division of the country into two halves in 1954, complete in­tegrated statistics were not available for the whole of Vietnam. The South became the Republic of Vietnam (ROV) while the North was the Demo­cratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and it was not till 1976 that they were united under the name of the Social Republic of Vietnam (SRV). By Tsai Maw Kuey’s data, the Chinese population in the ROV in 1968 reached 1,035,000. The French magazine Le Monde puts it at 1,200,000 in the ROV and 208,000 in the DRV in 1970. Wu Yuan-Li and Wu Chun-Hsi’s figures are 2 million for the South and 175,000 for the North at the collapse of the ROV. According to official figures for 1976, the year of reunification, the Chinese population in Vietnam was 1,236,000, which was about 2.6 per cent of the total population. Summing up these various estimates, it can be concluded that the Chinese population in Vietnam in the middle of the 1970s was around 1,500,000, of which 85 per cent lived in the South. The Chinese community made up 3 per cent of the total population of Vietnam.

The problems of estimating the Chinese population in Vietnam contin­ued after 1975 because of large-scale population movement caused by political changes. When the Saigon regime collapsed in April 1975, some 150,000 people left the country, among whom were high-ranking government and military officials of the old regime as well as Chinese businessmen. Shortly after, beginning in 1978, another exodus of Chinese residents took place, with 230,000 leaving for China and another 220,000 leaving for Southeast Asia by boat. This was the result of the socialist transformation of private capitalist industry and trade in the newly liberated South and tense relations with China. The latter arose because of differences over Cambodia, and Beijing exploited the issue of the Chinese community in Vietnam to complicate matters. From a population of 1,236,000, the ethnic Chinese population shrank to 935,000 on 1 October 1979. By the time of the cen­sus in April 1989, the Chinese population had increased to 961,702 but its proportion of the total population had dropped to 1.5 percent. The distribution of this community across Vietnam is given in Table 3. In some areas, the proportion of ethnic Chinese had dropped very significantly. For example, before 1978, ethnic Chinese residents in Quang Ninh province numbered about 160,000, or 22 per cent, of the provincial population. This was about 60-80 per cent of the total ethnic Chinese population in North Vietnam. In the 1980s, Quang Ninh’s ethnic Chinese population dropped to 5,000, or 0.6 per cent, of the provincial population.

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by | 11 May 2024 · 5:08 am

Chinese Under Vietnamese Dynasties

From The Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam, by Tran Khanh (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1993), pp. 17-20:

When Vietnam became independent of its Chinese colonial masters in AD 938 and power was consolidated by the Ly dynasty (AD 1009-1225), the issue of the ethnic Chinese as a resident community of foreign nationals and how they are to be treated arose. Thus began a form of assimilation policy. During the reign of the Ly’s and the the subsequent Tran dynasty (AD 1226-1400), the us of ethnic Chinese scholars and officials in leading administra­tive position was advocated. But this applied to only those Chinese who had chosen to settle permanently in Vietnam. Those who retained their migrant status could not even travel without permission from the local authorities.

During the Later Le dynasty (AD 1428-1592) and under the rule of the Trinh lords in the north up till AD 1788, assimilation and surveillance of the Chinese community intensified. The Chinese had to abide by Vietnamese laws, conform with Vietnamese customs and traditions, even to the extent of dressing the Vietnamese way. Chinese immigrants were not free to travel within Dai Viet (Great Viet, the name of the country then), particularly in the vicinity of Thang Long, the country’s capital. The more stringent Vietnamese  attitude towards the Chinese community was because the Le’s reign came as a result of having defeated the occupied force of China’s Ming dynasty. The Chinese army had earlier entered Vietnam on the pretext of helping the then Tran emperor to quell a rebellion. They stayed on for twenty years (AD  1407-1427).

This was how assimilation gradually proceeded over the centuries. However, as mentioned above, new waves of migrants in the later part of the seventeenth century strengthened the identity of the Chinese community. It was not just a question of numbers. A new factor had also emerged to raise the socio-economic status of the Chinese. That was the growing importance of international commerce as more Western powers started to make their appearances in this part of the world in the seventeenth century. To understand the extent of Chinese participation in this important trade, let us look at some of these trading centres.

As mentioned earlier, small Chinatowns started to emerge in almost every main city and in various important economic centres in Vietnam around this time. Examples would include Pho Hien, Hoi An (then known by foreigners as Faifo), Phien Tran (today’s Gia Dinh), Tran Bien (today’s Bien Hoa), Cholon, and Ha Tien. Pho Hien, located in the centre of the Red River plain in the north, came into being in the thirteenth century. Due to the thriving business in the beginning of the seventeenth century, more Chinese, Japanese, and Europeans were attracted to this town. The Dutch East India Company sent a trade representative there in AD 1637. The English East India Company also established an office there in AD 1672. Unlike the European and the Japanese, Chinese merchants not only traded, but also par­ticipated in the production of black incense, alum sugar, sedge mat, Chinese medicinal herbs.

The old town of Hoi An, 26 km north of Danang, was reputedly the most busy trading port of Vietnam from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Its rise was mainly owing to foreign merchants, especially Chinese and Japanese, who controlled the external trade since native Vietnamese were not active in the seafaring business. European traders who called at this port in the seventeenth century related that Hoi An town had two special quarters: one Chinese and other Japanese, with each ruled by a Vietnamese governor.

According to Le Qui Don, a renowned historian of that time,  commerce and handicraft were the two main livelihoods of Hoi An’s Chinese residents. They bought brass utensils transported there by European vessels and resold them in their own quarters. The seven-month long trading season began approximately  with each new year and the natives would bring their prod­ucts here for sale, things such as raw and processed silk, various kinds of wood and spices, and rice. Vessels from China arrived loaded with porcelain, paper, tea, silver bars, arms, sulphur, saltpeter, lead, and lead oxide. According to another source of history, the amount of gold extracted in South Vietnam was mainly for export. Chinese merchants from Hoi An bought over this volume to export. Gold, which was reserved entirely for export, was monopolized by the Chinese merchants of the town. Historic documents stated that by the eighteenth century (AD 1714), Chinese merchants of Hoi An established the Sea Trading Association. This was probably the first in stance of institution-building by the Chinese migrants. There were in AD 1768 nearly 6,000 Chinese, most of whom were engaged in trading.

Chinese-dominated trading centres have their ups and downs, a result of political changes within Vietnam and the Chinese community’s relationship with the ruling powers of the time. This relationship and the status of the community was sometimes a function of state-to-state relations between China and Vietnam. Cholon, which is today still famous as a hub of Chi­nese economic activities, was one such example. It began as a small settlement of villages 5 km. from Saigon, born of the Tay Son rebellion, which began in the early 1760s and ended with its leaders taking over the whole country in AD 1788. In order to escape the ravages of the Tay Son uprising, in AD 1778 a group of Chinese moved from their settlement in Tran Bien (today’s Bien Hoa), northeast of Saigon, to a place that came to be known as Cholon (today’s districts 5 and 6 of Ho Chi Minh City), southwest of Saigon. This land was given to them by Le Van Duyet, the lord of that area and who was opposed to the Tay Son rebels. In AD 1792, during the reign of Tay Son, there was a massacre of the Chinese in Cholon.

There were explanations to account for the Tay Son period, both dur­ing their uprising and when they were in power, this being a difficult time for the ethnic Chinese. The latter were on the wrong side since they were generally supportive of the Nguyen lords, the corrupt ruling order which the Tay Son leaders were seeking to overthrow. The Nguyen lords, and the imperial court at Hue that they controlled, had allowed Chinese migrants into the country and to prosper in their business. This effete regime was also heavily steeped in Confucianism and patterned on the Chinese imperial court, influences which the Tay Son leaders sought to remove. Furthermore, the Tay Son rebellion took its roots from widespread peasant discontent and the Chinese, a distinctive urban elite, were therefore a natural target. Finally, the Nguyen lords called on the assistance of the Qing emperor in China to help fight the rebels, and in AD  1788 an army from China invaded. It was defeated, however, but it must have added to anti-Chinese feelings within the Tay Son movement.

In AD 1802 the Tay Son dynasty was toppled by Nguyen Anh, one of the last Nguyen lords. Nguyen Anh then established the Nguyen dynasty, declared himself Emperor Gia Long, and reverted to a Confucian orthodoxy patterned after the Qing court in China. Chinese business activities flourished under the Nguyens. By the time the French acquired South Vietnam as a colony of Cochinchina in AD 1867, Cholon had 500 tiled houses, two man-made canals, and five bridges under construction, including one of iron. The quay along the Arroyo Chinois was covered with warehouses and shipyards. In the centre of the town was placed a fountain of Chinese design, and the streets were lit by lamps using coconut oil.

The Nguyen rulers used Chinese merchants in the collection of taxes, encouraged them to set up shipyards to build boats and ships, allowed them to buy houses, acquire land, and foorm their own social and economic organizations. Historical records show that in some economic sectors, the Chinese were even more favored than the Vietnamese. They could, for example, build ships of any capacity while the Vietnamese were allowed to build only small ships. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Nguyen court exempted new Chinese immigrants from all taxes in the first three years after their arrival. Such preferential treatment for the Chinese community helped them to expand their economic power. It also encouraged further immigration by the Chinese.

What was the motivation of the Nguyen court for encouraging the Chinese? First, the increasing wealth of the Chinese community served the interest of Vietnam’s ruling class. Officials got financial spinoffs from Chi­nese businesses. The Chinese also brought useful handicraft skills. There were also common strategic interests at that time as Asian countries were starting to experience the encroachment of Western imperial powers. For Vietnam, a bigger and stronger China next door may be useful to fend off Western powers.

Besides commerce, the Chinese in Vietnam were also actively involved in investment and mining. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Chinese operated 124 mines in the North on lease. They recruited their own miners, mostly new arrivals from China. Materials extracted from these mines, such as iron and coal, were generally for export with a small propor­tion reserved as tax payment to the Vietnamese authorities. Despite measures by local authorities to restrict Chinese miners, their numbers rose to 700-800 at times. It was a general tendency then for successful Chinese mine formen to return to China or revert to trading after having reaped huge profits from mining. Even though Chinese mining entrepreneurs paid taxes to the royal court and also reinvested part of their earnings, the overall participation of the Chinese in mining represented a loss rather than a gain of capital for Vietnam. Chinese leasing of mines was subsequently prohibited by law when the French colonized the country.

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by | 9 April 2024 · 9:44 am

Kellogg-Briand Delusions, 1927

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 468-470:

At the same time as Hitler was planning a future world war, the world’s major powers were gathering in the Clock Room (Salon de l’Horloge) inside the French Foreign Office on the Quai d’Orsay, Paris, on 27 August, for an elaborate ceremony to sign the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy. The pact had evolved from negotiations begun in 1927 by Frank Kellogg, the US Secretary of State, and Aristide Briand, the French Foreign Minister. On 6 April 1927, Briand announced his country’s intention to enter into a bilateral agreement with the USA, stipulating that neither country would resort to war with each other, and that any dispute between them would be settled by peaceful means. Two months later, Briand submitted to the American government a draft of the proposed treaty. The American reply came in December 1927. Kellogg suggested the proposed Franco-American agreement should be expanded into a multilateral treaty to be signed by other countries, to which Briand readily agreed. In recognition of their joint diplomatic efforts, the agreement became known as the Kellogg–Briand Pact, and was greatly welcomed by the public.

At the signature ceremony in Paris, Briand gave an inspiring speech, saying at one point: ‘Can the world present a nobler lesson than the spectacle of this assemblage, where Germany appears for the signature of a pact against war, of its own free will, and without reserve, among the other signatories, its former enemies?’ Briand also spoke in glowing terms of Stresemann: ‘One can believe me particularly happy, to render homage to the highness of mind and to the courage of this eminent politician who, during more than three years, has not hesitated to assume full responsibility in the work of European co-operation for the maintenance of peace.’

The main text of the Kellogg–Briand Pact consisted of two brief articles. Under Article 1, the signatories condemned the ‘recourse to war for the solution of international controversies’, and further promised to ‘renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their relationship with one another’. Article 2 required the contracting parties to solve all disputes or conflicts by peaceful means. The original 15 signatories were the United Kingdom, Germany, USA, France, Italy, Japan, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Poland, and South Africa. Eventually, a further 47 nations followed suit. Elements of the pact were later incorporated into the League of Nations charter.

The Kellogg–Briand agreement, which was seen at the time as a milestone in international relations, gave the public around the world the false illusion that perpetual peace had arrived, but did not limit in any way the right of a nation to self-defence against the attack of any other nation, or alter the military obligations arising from the Covenant of the League of Nations or already agreed binding treaties. The pact contained no legal mechanism for enforcement and was, for some, a ‘worthless piece of paper’, which proved completely ineffective as a means of preventing war. It did provide, however, a legal basis for the concept of a ‘crime against peace’, the crime for which the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Tokyo Tribunal tried and executed the senior leaders judged responsible for starting the Second World War.

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by | 3 February 2024 · 5:55 am

Japan’s No. 1 Problem in 1946

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 102-104:

Amidst the rubble of the cities, one of the saddest sights was that of orphaned children with white boxes hanging around their necks. The boxes contained the ashes of their relatives. In some cities, more than a quarter of the population was homeless – with a mass influx returning home from the front. More than five million Japanese were repatriated in the eighteen months after the war. Around 80 per cent were soldiers and the rest were colonists and their families from the empire Japan had conquered but had now lost. They were seldom welcomed back with open arms. Soldiers, in particular, were widely despised – and this in a country where propaganda, and long tradition, had conditioned its people to hold officers and men from the Imperial Army as the fount of all honour. ‘We were not invincible, as we had been told by our superiors,’ one officer recalled wearily, many years later. ‘The big shock was coming home and being shunned. People did not look us in the face.’ Army and people together were not ‘a hundred million hearts beating as one’, as the military mantra went. The people now regarded soldiers not as returning heroes but as discredited failures, and treated them as pariahs. But it was not only that the military had failed lamentably in its mission and left the country starving and ruined: since the defeat, the public had also been inundated with information about the atrocities Japanese soldiers had committed in China, the Philippines, Korea, Indonesia, and South-East Asia. Japan had been dishonoured in the eyes of its own people, for which the Japanese blamed their own soldiers.

But in the immediate aftermath of defeat questions of honour took second place. For at least the next two years food remained the biggest issue for most Japanese. Much of Japan had gone hungry long before the surrender. Shortages had been acute since the fortunes of war had turned in favour of the Western Allies and by the end of 1944 the majority of Japanese were malnourished. South Korea and Formosa (Taiwan) had been colonies since before the First World War and had produced large amounts of food for the home market. But the sinking of Japanese ships in the Pacific meant that these supplies were not getting through. American bombing of the cities had also disrupted food distribution, and 1945 saw the worst harvest since 1910. At the end of autumn 1945 the country was almost entirely out of rice. Thousands had starved to death and officials warned that ten million people now faced imminent starvation. They were exaggerating, but their panic prompted swift action from the occupying army.

MacArthur’s first, decent, instinct was to alleviate hunger and avoid famine. He cut through red tape, ordered the seizure of 3.5 million tons of food that the US Army had stockpiled for emergencies and had it shipped to Japan. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the House Appropriations Committee were indignant and demanded an explanation, but he responded with customary arrogance.

Among my more vivid earliest memories of Japan in the early 1950s was the sight of former Japanese soldiers, dressed all in white except for their green field hats, often missing a limb, begging in pedestrian underpasses or other unobtrusive places with lots of passing foot-traffic.

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by | 2 February 2024 · 6:05 am

Japan’s Abdication Crisis, 1946

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 95-96:

Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni was the first member of the Japanese imperial family to break ranks and say it publicly. On 27 February 1946 he told a journalist from the New York Times that Emperor Hirohito should abdicate in favour of his son and a regent be nominated until Crown Prince Akihito, then aged twelve, came of age. Higashikuni, the Emperor’s uncle by marriage, was one of the few members of Japan’s ruling circle in the 1930s to have opposed war in Asia and to have warned against embarking on a route bound to result in conflict with the United States. After Pearl Harbor he had continually sought ways to bring about peace. Following Japan’s surrender in August 1945, he became Prime Minister, charged with overseeing the cessation of hostilities and reassuring the people that the Japanese empire was secure, despite the defeat. After two months he retired voluntarily, but he remained one of the most influential members of the government. Now he admitted that in Tokyo court circles the idea of abdication had been discussed for months; just a few days earlier he had told the Emperor in a private audience that he should stand down. He had said the same thing at a Cabinet meeting. Hirohito, he declared, bore ‘moral responsibility’ for the nation’s defeat, ‘to the dead and to his bereaved subjects’.

These unprecedented comments caused a sensation. Japan was a strictly hierarchical society. The imperial family and leading aristocrats seldom spoke out of turn or manifested any sign of disloyalty. A few days later the Emperor’s youngest brother, Prince Misaka, declared that Hirohito should accept responsibility for defeat and graciously volunteered himself as the regent. Another brother, Takametsu [sic, Takamatsu], was also suggested. Despite hunger and extreme hardship being uppermost in most Japanese minds, much of the country was talking about the possible abdication. The censored press, however, barely mentioned the issue, although there was a huge stir when one of Japan’s foremost poets, Miyoshi Tatsuji, published an essay urging the Emperor to step down as he had been ‘extremely negligent in the performance of his duties…[and] was responsible for betraying the loyal soldiers who had laid down their lives for him in battle.’

But the most powerful man in the country had decided against abdication. General Douglas MacArthur, the proconsul in charge of America’s occupation of Japan, was insistent on Hirohito staying on the throne – and whatever MacArthur wanted in postwar Japan he got. America would remake Japan from the top down and turn it from semi-feudal despotism into a model twentieth-century democracy rooted in Western precepts of freedom. The Americans would impose democracy by fiat on Japan, whether the Japanese wanted and liked it or not, but they would do so using imperial institutions, including the existing civil service. They adopted as their principal ally and functionary in the task an Emperor who just weeks earlier had been regarded by his people, and by himself, as a descendant of the gods. Despite such obvious ironies, the creation of the new Japan was a remarkable achievement – practical, efficient, bloodless – and of lasting importance in re-ordering not just Japan but, by example, much of the Asian continent.

At the beginning of 1946 neither princes nor poets would have dared to question Emperor Hirohito’s right to rule, despite the humiliation of total defeat. But early in the New Year, the Emperor issued a statement proclaiming himself human. It was the first stage of a process that turned Hirohito from an absolute ruler, literally worshipped by his people, into a constitutional monarch.

This chapter is perhaps the weakest in the book. Many small typos indicate it was neither written nor proofread very carefully, or that he relied only on occupation-era English language reports. For instance, it spells Daiichi [第一 ‘No. 1’] Bank as ‘Daichi’ Bank, Prince Takamatsu [高松] as ‘Takematsu’; Atsugi [厚木] Naval Air Base as ‘Atsugii’.

But the most egregious error in his account of the war in northern China was relying on outdated (and false) Chinese Nationalist sources that blamed Japan for destroying the Yellow River dikes that flooded huge areas and killed millions of people, but allowed the Chinese Nationalists time to withdraw their armies and capital deeper into the interior.

Disasterhistory.org offers a more up-to-date corrective.

Many people drowned in the flooding; far more would succumb to illness or hunger in the difficult months and years that followed. To the east, however, the river’s diversion halted the invading Japanese, who abandoned their westward march. The vital railroad junction at Zhengzhou was held for the time. The city of Hankou, China’s provisional political center after the fall of Nanjing, won a temporary breathing spell.

Strategically, breaking the dikes may have bought the Nationalist army time to withdraw and regroup, bogging down Japanese tanks and mobile artillery in fields of mud as Chinese forces secured their defenses around Zhengzhou. By preventing the Japanese from taking the railway junction, some scholars argue, the river’s diversion postponed the seizure of Wuhan by several months, giving the Nationalist government time to relocate its capital to southwest China in the city of Chongqing. But the Japanese simply redirected their advance from a north–south land attack along the railways to an amphibious assault along the Yangzi River that combined naval and infantry forces. Wuhan fell in October 1938, after the Nationalist central government had withdrawn into China’s interior.

…

Like the numerous scorched-earth tactics that the Nationalists employed during the Sino-Japanese War, the breaking of the Yellow River dikes was undertaken in an atmosphere of high-level desperation and panic that grew from the Japanese war of terror. On the other hand, the Nationalist regime showed a willingness to sacrifice people along with resources to keep them out of Japanese hands. The breaking of the Yellow River dikes was the prime example of this tendency. In the eyes of Nationalist leaders, not unlike other modern regimes of the twentieth-century world, “saving the nation” could justify unlimited sacrifice on the part of the civilian population.

Throughout the war, the Nationalist government refused to take responsibility for the disasters caused by the Yellow River’s intentional diversion. Instead, the Nationalists claimed that Japanese bombing of the dikes had caused the floods, presenting the disaster as another example of Japanese atrocities against Chinese civilians. Chinese newspaper reports published in the summer of 1938 followed the official version of events. The Japanese denied these accusations, framing the flood as proof of China’s disregard for human life. When the disaster’s true causes eventually came to light after 1945, the Nationalist regime changed the narrative and presented the flood as evidence of sacrifices made by China’s people to save the nation during the War of Resistance.

…

On shifting representations of the flood disaster see especially, Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley, “From ‘Nourish the People’ to ‘Sacrifice for the Nation’: Changing Responses to Disaster in Late Imperial and Modern China,” The Journal of Asian Studies 73:2 (2014), 447–469.

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by | 28 November 2023 · 11:27 am

Hiroshima Castle

From Castles in Japan, by Morton S. Schmorleitz (Tuttle, 2011), Kindle Loc. ~1850ff:

In 1589 Mori Terumoto began what would be an eight-year project: he built a castle on an island in the delta of the Ota River, calling this part of his domain “Hiroshima,” which means “wide island.” At the beginning of the 17th century, the Mori fief was given to the Asano Clan, who held the castle until 1871. During the Restoration all of the buildings were torn down except the keep.

The castle is noted for the fact that the Emperor Meiji resided there for seven months during the war with China (1894-95). When Japan became involved in the war of 1904-5 with Russia, the castle was used as a troop garrison.

At 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, Hiroshima Castle, along with a large portion of the city, was completely demolished in the historic first atomic attack. Reconstruction of the castle donjon was begun in 1958. It is built on the original foundation and is an exact replica of the former keep in exterior appearance. The structure is five stories, 117 feet high, and is in the style of the early Momoyama period. The donjon houses a museum and a lookout.

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by | 26 November 2023 · 3:30 pm

Hagi Castle in Choshu Domain

From Castles in Japan, by Morton S. Schmorleitz (Tuttle, 2011), Kindle Loc. ~1800ff:

Hagi Castle was built between 1604 and 1606 by the Mori Clan, lords of Choshu fief. Before the battle of Sekigahara, the Mori fief was the second largest in all Japan, but after that epic struggle, in which the Mori were on the losing side, their fief was reduced to about one-fourth its original size. Even with this reduction it was still one of the 10 largest in the country. The castle was laid out so that the five-story donjon was situated at the edge of the inner moat. It measured, on the ground floor, 65 feet east to west and 53½ feet north to south. The top floor was 20½ feet by 17½ feet, and the total height was about 47 feet. Fourteen generations of Moris lived in a mansion on the castle grounds, which were practically on an island, with a bay on one side and a river and moat on the others. An observation tower was placed on a hill behind the castle overlooking the sea.

Choshu fief was a hotbed of anti-Tokugawa feeling after Sekigahara. Children were put to bed at night with their feet toward Edo as a form of insult to the shogunate, and they were told never to forget the defeat of their ancestors at Sekigahara. Dislike for the Tokugawas also may have stemmed from Tokugawa disrespect of the Imperial House; the Mori Clan claimed direct lineage to the imperial family and therefore had strong feelings of loyalty toward the emperor.

Hagi was the birthplace of Yoshida Shoin, the imperial patriot who advocated the overthrow of shogunate rule and a return of power to the emperor. At his school in Hagi he preached this philosophy until his death at the hands of the shogunate a few years before the Restoration took place. Many of Shoin’s pupils became leaders of the Restoration era.

The leaders of Choshu were also resentful of the shogun’s relations with foreign countries, and in 1863 their shore batteries fired on an American ship off the Choshu coast and effectively blocked the Shimonoseki Straits to foreign shipping. The following year a combined force of Dutch, American, British, and French warships put an end to the harassment, and Choshu agreed to pay an indemnity. After this incident the Choshu leaders came to friendly terms with the foreigners.

During the revolt against the shogunate, Choshu, along with most of the clans in western Japan, firmly supported the imperial cause. To show their complete loyalty to the emperor, the Choshu leaders were the first to tear down their castle (1874). The samurai were now without employment, but the head of the Mori Clan encouraged them to become peaceful farmers and raise fruit. This enterprise is still carried on today by their descendants.

Only the stone walls of the inner court and the inner moat of the castle remain. The base of the donjon can also be seen, and the huge stones used for pillar supports are still imbedded within the foundation. Steep stone steps running the entire length of several of the inner walls, overlooking the moat, provided a means of rapid troop deployment when immediate defense was imperative.

It is interesting to note that time has not touched Hagi as heavily as it has most other castle towns, and some descendants of samurai families still reside at their ancestral home sites behind old walls in the samurai quarters of the town.

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