Japan's "Special Interests" and the Washington Conference

Abstract

THE Washington Conference, opening its sessions on November 12, I92I, was America's answer, with British prodding, to the necessity of an understanding on naval armaments, but the conference inevitably extended to problems of the Pacific and the Far East. The major achievements at Washington were a far-reaching agreement on naval limitation, the Four-Power Treaty which replaced the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, the Nine-Power Treaty for the preservation of China's integrity, satisfactory settlement of the Yap Island controversy and the Shantung problem, and Japan's public pledge to withdraw from Siberia. This conference, the greatest diplomatic gathering ever held in the United States to that date, created a order of sea power in the Pacific and inaugurated the Shidehara period, a happy decade of peaceful adjustment between the United States and Japan. Notable as the accomplishments of the Washington Conference were, it failed to reconcile, or even thoroughly to probe, the basic clash between the Open Door and Japan's claim to special interests in China. T'he United States had expected to make it an occasion for reasserting and reinvigorating its traditional Far Eastern policy, which had been compromised by the LansingIshii Agreement during the First World War. (In this notoriously ambiguous document the United States had recognized Japan's special interests in China.) Japan was determined to obtain, in a multilateral treaty, another recognition of these interests and to reserve her freedom of action in Manchuria. In 1921, a year of war scare on both sides of the Pacific, peace called for compromise. Research into the Japanese archives, documents now available to the historian as the result of Japan's defeat in the Pacific War, clarifies the nature of this compromise and suggests a new interpretation of the NinePower Treaty. In considering Japan's stand at the Washington Conference, it is important to bear in mind always that Japan colored her interpretation of the Open Door by the light of the Rising Sun, that is, through the prisms of Nippon's economic existence and national defense. Although the Takashi Hara cabinet (i9i8-i921) had pronounced the nonintervention principle regarding