More than a ‘moment’: Woodrow Wilson and the foundations of twentieth century Japan

Abstract

AbstractWoodrow Wilson's name remains forever entwined with the Paris Peace Conference and efforts to transform geopolitics after 1918. Despite recent emphases on the power of this so-called ‘Wilsonian Moment,’ initiatives by the American president remain controversial, and his principal global legacy has come to be defined as the rise of nationalism in the developing world. In the historiography of modern Japan, Wilson and the Paris Conference have long been identified less as opportunities than as challenges, embodied unmistakably in Prince Konoe Fumimaro's 1918 condemnation of the conference and the proposed League of Nations as beneficial only to the USA and Britain. Reading back from 1931, historians of modern Japan have located in the Versailles settlement seeds of an epic new expansionary effort from the Manchurian Incident to the destruction of Imperial Japan. This paper, by contrast, analyzes the interwar years on their own terms and, in so doing, locates the structural foundations of a dramatic Japanese national departure. Wilson is more than a ‘moment’ in interwar Japan. Embraced at the very moment that a largely agricultural and regional nineteenth-century Japan becomes a twentieth-century industrial state and world power, it is potent enough to withstand the illiberal tide of the 1930s and 40s to blossom again after the Second World War.