Prelude to War? The United States, Japan, and the Yap Crisis, 1918-22

Abstract

For a brief time between the close of the First World War and the Washington Conference, the tiny island of Yap, in the Carolines of the western Pacific, became the focus of international concern. It seemed an unlikely place to bring two powerful nations like Japan and the United States to war, but that possibility lingered throughout much of the debate over the island's future. Yap also suggested to a number of Americans in the Navy and State departments that war with Japan must entail a bloody island-hopping campaign across the Pacific. Recently available and rarely consulted Department of State archives and navy records shed light on a small but significant component of American-Japanese relations before World War II, namely the Wilson and Harding administrations' attempts to keep Yap out of the hands of the Japanese empire. The Yap dispute illustrates the poor state of American relations with Japan at the time, indicating to both Woodrow Wilson and Warren G. Harding that problems related to the naval race and the Anglo-Japanese alliance could escalate into a Pacific war.1