It was not that the United States was uninterested in what happened in China. Far from it. American missionaries had long been present in the country. The prospect of China becoming a Christian country, however far-fetched, had always resonated widely in the United States. Before the opening of China’s new National Assembly in April, public appeals had been made to American Christians to pray for the new Republic. More to the point, there was money to be made in China, and American businesses, having conquered Europe, might now conquer Asia, with its almost unimaginable potential for the consumption of beer, cars, sewing machines or whatever else American factories might churn out in the future. As American businessman B. Atwood Robinson described the situation as he saw it in 1913:
Among the articles which are enjoying an increased demand, with every promise of a rapid and continued increase for many years, may be mentioned the following: clothing, boots and shoes, cotton and woolen goods, bicycles, clocks and watches, hats, caps, gloves, hosiery, haberdashery and underwear, phonographs, photographic and optical supplies, lamps, machinery, railway and electrical appliances, automobiles, hardware and building material … Now, therefore, is the time to secure a firm foothold and establish commercial relations that will gain for us the confidence and respect of the Chinese against the time of their great commercial activity.63
Whether driven by the desire to demonstrate principle, or to provide support to a fellow republic against the empires of the West, or to establish a friendly basis for a future commercial relationship – or all three – in May the United States became the first of the major powers to formally recognise the Republic of China, though it was a few weeks behind Brazil, whose flags fluttered briefly and bizarrely in the streets of Peking that spring. Britain, Japan, Russia and France did not recognise the Chinese Republic until October.
By then, however, the dream of a Chinese parliamentary democracy had been conclusively smashed by the reality of Yuan Shikai’s rule. Over the summer, a number of provinces declared their autonomy from Peking, and skirmishes broke out around the country’s arsenals. In Shanghai, one of the cities thought to be most sympathetic to the Kuomintang cause, sporadic fighting developed between government troops associated with Yuan Shikai and Kuomintang forces associated with Sun Yat-Sen. Foreign soldiers prepared to defend the city. Foreign journalists wrote breathless accounts of their exploits running between the lines, referring to the events grandly as the ‘second revolution’.64 But the second revolution never really got off the ground in many places; everywhere, it was crushed. In Shanghai, it barely dampened the city’s social life. Nor, looking back at the end of the year, did it greatly affect its trade. Cigarette imports were up despite an anti-smoking campaign, the British Foreign Office report on Shanghai’s trade noted, adding sagely that ‘the merchant, even in Shanghai, cannot expect as his birthright the safety of life and limb afforded by London, Paris or Berlin but that periodic danger is an incidence of life in China’.65
In September, forces loyal to Yuan Shikai entered Nanjing and, despite undertakings ahead of time, followed their conquest with ‘wanton murder, looting, rape … the unchecked amusements of the victorious soldiery’.66 The death of a small number of Japanese civilians and the destruction of Japanese property in the so-called ‘Nanking incident’ – to be repeated a hundred-thousandfold by Japanese forces in 1937 – led to demands for reprisals in Tokyo, and a flurry of concern in other capitals that Japan would intervene more directly in favour of the Kuomintang, some of whose leaders had been educated in Japan. But the Japanese government was restrained, even if the crowds in Tokyo were not.
The Kuomintang routed, in October Yuan Shikai forced the National Assembly, after several rounds of voting, to elect him to a five-year term as President, running until 1918. The Kuomintang party was banned the following month, and the National Assembly effectively shut down. Sun Yat-Sen fled to Japan. The message was clear: authority was to replace experimentation, order was to replace revolution.
The British Ambassador did not mince his words in his end of year report to London. ‘Sun and his fellow champions of the Southern cause are completely discredited’, he wrote, ‘there appear at the present moment to be no individuals of sufficiently striking personality to challenge seriously the position of the President’.67 Frank Goodnow, the American lawyer sent out to China with President Wilson’s blessing to help write a new republican constitution, wrote home in early 1914, frustrated: ‘Young China has lost control, the old ideas of Chinese absolutism are now in the ascendancy, the prospect of adopting a constitution on western lines has been set back for perhaps 25 years; indeed such a constitution may never be adopted’.68
But then, as the old China hands had always insisted, and as many businessmen in Shanghai agreed, what China needed was strong, not popular, government, and that was what it was getting. The North China Daily News declared the outlook to be brightening for China: ‘a movement has been made in the direction of centralising and consolidating authority, and that public opinion grows calmer and more reassured’.69 China has ‘immense recuperative power’, readers of the paper were promised. It would recover from political disturbance more rapidly than most.
And in Peking, at the heart of the ancient empire? An Australian, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald earlier in 1913, described his impressions of the city at the end of a day spent at the funeral of China’s Dowager Empress Longyu, the woman who had signed the abdication of the Qing dynasty two years earlier:
An impressive pathos steals into one’s consciousness as the hues of sunset soften into the twilight that quickly passes over this great old city in shadows of night that obscure palace and temple and pagoda and shrine. The memory of all that is passing gives a touch of melancholy to the deepening purple haze that lies above the horizon; and in some pessimistic moment one wonders whether China, with her great ancient past, now in her poverty and in her difficulties, and her struggles, will ever merge her early Eastern glory into both the splendours and the shadows of Western civilisation, and even Western Empires; but the melancholy passes with the night, and soon one feels the thrill of a new spring day; and the tinge of green is deeper upon the trees, the beauty of the early blossoms suffuses the grey old background with a delicate beauty, and one realises that this is the spring-time of the national life of this great old race. There are new buds that China’s destiny, which is mightier than wealth or armaments, may one day develop into gorgeous blooms that shall make her the best civilised splendour of the Orient.70
The former Emperor Puyi, now seven years old, still lived in the Forbidden City, perhaps unaware of all that had happened over the course of his short life. But now, the Qing mantle of power had passed. Yuan Shikai, its inheritor, was driven around the city in an automobile. China, a once and future great power, had begun to wake from her centuries-long slumber.
TOKYO
Rising Sun
In the late morning of 10 November 1913, the Imperial Japanese Navy put on the most impressive display of naval power the Far East had seen since the return of the Japanese fleet from the Battle of Tsushima in 1905. On that occasion, the display had been a celebration of Japan’s comprehensive defeat of the Russian Baltic fleet, an event which echoed around the world, upending the prevailing view that Europeans (and Americans) won wars – and everyone else lost them. On this occasion, eight years later, the display of Japanese naval might was intended to placate a nation burdened by high taxes for naval expenditure, to convince them of the case for further expansion planned in the years ahead – under Premier Yamamoto, himself a retired Admiral – and to showcase the super-dreadnought Kongo, one of the most powerful warships anywhere in the world, newly arrived from the shipyards of Vickers Ltd, Barrow-in-Furness, England.1
Having departed Tokyo’s Shimbashi railway station on a special train at seven that morning, Emperor Taisho – accompanied by the premier, foreign minister and other ministers – arrived on the coast at Yokosuka to be greeted by a hundred officers o
f the navy, all the primary schoolchildren of the town, and bunting, brass bands and waving flags.2 Later, from the deck of the battleship Katori the Emperor and his entourage watched the manoeuvres of twenty-eight large warships and twenty-seven destroyers. From various other points around Tokyo Bay, binoculars were trained on the sight of ships sailing abreast of each other at one point, then turning abruptly into a new formation, and finally sailing in a line past the Katori. No wonder some called Japan the England of the Far East, an island power which placed its navy at the heart of its national defence.
Premier-Admiral Yamamoto had reason to be proud of his stewardship of the Japanese navy. Only the German fleet – and the much smaller Austro-Hungarian navy – had grown faster than that of the Japanese over the last decade or so, from 187,000 tonnes in 1900 – just over half that of the United States and under a fifth that of Britain – to 700,000 tonnes now – two-thirds that of the US Navy and more than a quarter of the Royal Navy (still the benchmark of global maritime power).3 Indeed, it was the strength of the Japanese navy that made Japan an attractive ally for the British Empire, able to reassign Royal Navy vessels to competitive European waters as a consequence of the alliance in the Far East.
The weaponry of the Kongo – eight fourteen-inch guns, sixteen six-inch guns and eight twenty-one inch torpedo tubes – was well advertised in the local papers.4 So was the fact that, although this first ship in its class had been built in England, a sister ship, the Kirishima, would be launched at the Mitsubishi dockyard in Nagasaki in December and a third ship, the Haruna, at the Kawasaki yard in Kobe shortly thereafter. New ships meant new jobs, not just new taxes – an important political consideration these days. The Kongo notwithstanding, nine out of every ten new ships in the Japanese navy were built at home – an extraordinary feat and a reminder that, while Japan was still essentially an agricultural country, the country was adopting the industrial technologies of the West in record time.5 Japan’s first major steel works had only opened in 1901.
The only disappointment of the morning was that an American-built Curtiss hydroplane flown by Sub-Lieutenant Fujise got lost in fog, passing once over the Katori at a height of a hundred metres, but not taking its full part in the day’s events. The requisite impression of Japan’s power and modernity was made nonetheless. ‘Majestic and inspiring’, wrote a reporter for the Japan Times sent to cover the event.6 ‘The grandeur of the spectacle’, he continued, ‘was even increased in brilliancy in the evening as the warships were placed under the glamor of powerful electric illumination’, glinting off the dark waters of the bay of Tokyo. A country which had been all but sealed off from the rest of the world fifty years previously was now the Far East’s leading naval power, and an empire in her own right. ‘From Karafuto and the Kuriles in the north to Taiwan and Pescadores in the south, Korea and all Japan’, ran a school song of the time, ‘the nation our taikun [commander] rules, and the fifty million countrymen over whom waves the flag of the rising sun’.7
Japan was now a force to be reckoned with – a country that could not be ignored, whose interests were to be made to count in the world.
The best time to visit Tokyo, noted Chamberlain and Mason in the 1913 edition of their Handbook for Travellers in Japan, was in April. For a few weeks the most populous city in east Asia would be transformed into a ‘garden of blossom’, an explosion of cherry petals signalling the arrival of spring and covering the city’s public parks – the Ueno park most famously – in a dream-like canopy of pink.8 ‘Not the Bois [de Boulogne, in Paris], Cascine [in Florence], or the Tiergarten [in Berlin] can vie with Uyéno on this blossom Sunday’, American visitor Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore had written in the 1890s:
Czars and Kaisers may well envy this Oriental ruler, whose subjects gather by the thousands, not to throw bombs and riot for bread or the division of property, but to fall in love with cherry-trees, and write poems in their praise … Tattered beggars gaze entranced at the fairy trees, and princes and ministers of state go to visit the famous groves.9
So much that was picturesque about Tokyo had faded over the last fifty years, as old Edo, the pleasure capital of the feudal daimyo lords and the samurai warrior class, became modern Tokyo, the political centre of a centralised, bureaucratic state. But cherry trees planted along the city’s new avenues and its parks brought a flush of beauty to the city nonetheless. When Tokyo’s mayor, Ozaki Yukio, visited the United States in 1912, his gift to the capital of the American Republic from the capital of the Japanese Empire was, naturally enough, several thousand cherry trees, following through on a suggestion Scidmore made some years earlier that Washington DC be beautified in the same way as Tokyo. Perhaps Americans would thereby come to see Japan not only as powerful, but as elegantly civilised and aesthetically refined. Perhaps as the cherry trees blossomed, so too would the relationship between the two rising powers of the Pacific.
Tokyo’s recent history had been a roller coaster. Just before the Meiji restoration in 1868 the population of Edo – its name under the shogunate – had stood at over one million, making it the largest city in the world, larger even than London, the great metropolis of the West. The Emperor lived at Kyoto, and the life of Edo revolved around shogun and samurai, bakufu and daimyo, tea house and temple, market and geisha parlour. For some time after the shogun had abdicated, the population of Edo had fallen. The daimyo lords and their retainers left the city, gutting its economic life. Edo became a shadow of its former self, buildings left abandoned. Even though it was renamed Tokyo (‘capital of the East’) in 1868, and even though the city was chosen to host the new national Yasakuni shrine – celebrating those fallen both fighting for the Meiji Restoration and against it – it was not clear what exact role Edo would play in the country’s political life for several years after the restoration. The Emperor himself preferred to process around Japan rather than live permanently in Tokyo, where a new palace built in the grounds of the old shogun’s castle was only finally opened in the late 1880s. In 1872, 1876, 1878, 1880, 1881 and 1885 the Emperor Meiji was away on one of his so-called ‘Great Circuits’, showing himself to his people, and forging Japan into a nation united in worship of the office of the Emperor, rather than divided between the local loyalties of individual clans or regions. Tokyo wondered whether the Emperor’s eye might not fall on some other city on one of these long trips. It took until 1890 for Tokyo’s population to surpass that of Edo before the Meiji Restoration. In the 1860s it had been possible to buy land cheaply in downtown Tokyo at less than thirty yen an acre at one point – thirty years later such purchasers were rich men.10
By 1913 the city had far outstripped the shogun’s capital, reaching two million, and then hurtling past it. The population of Tokyo was now clearly ahead of Osaka and Kyoto – its traditional rivals within Japan – and was indeed larger than any other city in Asia, equivalent to St Petersburg, capital of the Russian Empire. ‘Now is the age of cities’, said Japanese intellectual Yokoi Tokiyoshi in 1907, ‘for those who have learning and seek honor to those who want to make money or to sell their labor – everyone and his brother is setting out for the cities, as if gripped by a kind of fever’.11 The proportion of the Japanese population living in cities doubled between 1888 and 1913 – though it still remained far below the level in England, Germany or the United States.12 And as elsewhere in the world, the city in Japan became associated with modernity, a meeting place for disruptive influences, a symbol of commercialisation, a place where money was worshipped before beauty, and success was prized over honour. The village remained the mythological locus of the Japanese people, but it was in the city that the modern nation was being built. Tens of thousands of new immigrants to Tokyo every year, fresh from the Japanese countryside, found themselves thrust into another world – into the centre of the dynamic, modern country which Japan was becoming, faster than anyone had expected, least of all the Japanese themselves.
The changes in the city were remarkable. ‘The yashiki, or Daimyo’s mansions, have been p
ulled down to make room for public buildings, better adapted to modern needs’, wrote Chamberlain and Mason, ‘everywhere overhead is a network of telegraph, telephone and electric light wires’. The palanquin sedan chairs of old had disappeared, replaced by rickshaws and, increasingly, electric trams and petrol-driven automobiles. Where once there had been ‘drunken samurai returning from orgies in brothels or taverns ready to use their terrible swords’, noted the diplomat Joseph Henry Longford, the streets of nocturnal Tokyo were now as ‘populous, noisy and safe as Piccadilly’.13 Where once the city had been dark at night, it was now lit up. Where once there had only been narrow lanes of wooden single-storey houses, there were now, in some parts of the city at least, wide avenues of brick buildings which would not look out of place in the suburbs of Stockholm or Melbourne. (In Marunouchi, the redevelopment of an old parade ground by the Mitsubishi company was popularly known as Iccho Rondon, ‘One Block London’.14)
As recently as the 1880s there had been no foreign hotels in Tokyo, and most foreigners lodged in Yokohama. Visitors to the capital city would be entertained in the specially built Rokumeikan (literally, ‘Deer Cry Pavilion’) in a style that the Japanese considered the height of Western sophistication, but which foreigners found a gaudy, second-rate imitation of the West. (Pierre Loti, dancing to Johann Strauss’s waltz The Blue Danube with the fifteen-year-old daughter of an army officer, described the place as rather like a ‘casino in some seaside resort’.15) By 1913 the Rokumeikan was no longer needed as an official house of entertainment, and had instead been converted into a private club for the Japanese aristocracy. Some foreigners lived permanently in Tokyo. Visitors would be put up at the Imperial Hotel, a grand hotel much like any other in a major world metropolis. A new railway station was under construction in Marunouchi, modelled on Amsterdam Centraal station in the Netherlands.16 Tokyo even had its own twelve-storey skyscraper, the Ryounkaku – or ‘Cloud Surpassing Pavilion’ – in the Asakusa district of the city, the whole thing lit up at night like a Christmas tree, with Japan’s first elevator taking visitors as far as the eighth floor. ‘To compare Tokio of the present day with Yedo as it was’, Longford concluded, ‘would be like comparing London of the days of Charles II with London as we now daily see it’.17 It was to compare two different eras, two different worlds, he wrote.
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