Patting Japan on the Head:
American and British Coverage of the Russo-Japanese War
Christopher L. Bennett
Over the centuries of Western imperialism, as industrial European states gained in wealth, power and cultural influence over preindustrial or declining civilizations elsewhere, imperialist European societies became increasingly convinced of their cultural superiority. Their success was seen as a vindication of their way of life and a proof of the righteousness of Christianity. In essence, they came to feel they had succeeded because they were European. The scientific impulse to classify and delineate the world, to discern the basic nature of all things from observation, combined with this to produce Social Darwinism, an imagined taxonomy dividing Homo sapiens into Araces@ whose evolutionary levels corresponded to their sociopolitical strata. European superiority was thus essentialized as a law of nature.
The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 challenged this assumption. Russia was Caucasian and Christian, while Japan was Asian and pagan. Yet Japan had industrialized and modernized more successfully than Russia, and easily overpowered Russia in combat despite the latter=s far greater size and resources. This was a reversal of what Europeans had long assumed to be the natural order of things. Yet two bastions of Western imperialism, Great Britain and the United States, overtly favored the Japanese side in the war. Britain was allied with Japan and provided them with non-combat support; and while America was neutral in the war, it maintained a decades-long policy of friendship to Japan and showed more sympathy for their culture and cause than for Russia=s. Far from being upset at this reversal of ethnic fortunes, America and Britain celebrated it.
This paper will examine the factors underlying the American and British views of the Russo-Japanese war, using contemporary newspaper and magazine coverage as its sources. I shall begin by examining how British and American journalists portrayed the war, its causes and its combatants, and demonstrating that their sympathies fell strongly on the Japanese side. I shall then examine those sympathies more closely, exploring why America and Britain chose to favor a non-Christian, non-Caucasian state in this conflict. On deeper analysis, though, I will show that this support for Japan did not represent a rejection of racial prejudice and was in fact based on deeply Eurocentric cultural assumptions.
The Russo-Japanese War was unambiguously a contest between two imperialist powers vying for the same territory. Their conflict had been brewing for decades as both sought to expand their influence in East Asia. Japan sought control over Korea, and had gone to war with China in 1894 to wrest the peninsula from them. Russia had intervened to limit Japan=s gains from that war, and in 1900 had occupied Manchuria, which the Japanese saw as putting them just one step away from conquering Korea.[1] Negotiations between Japan and Russia failed to reconcile their conflicting interests, and on February 8, 1904 Japan launched its first offensive.
Though both states were driven by expansionist agendas, the Western press saw their motives quite differently. The Russo-Japanese War, a 1904 collection of war correspondence and photography compiled from Collier=s Magazine, asserts that this conflict Awas bound to come when those measures which Japan believed were necessary to her self-existence met the glacier-like progress of Russia eastward.... [T]he modernized Japan... saw in this alleged expansion for industrial development a menace to her integrity as a kingdom.@ It describes Russia as using a Apretext@ to fortify its Port Arthur stronghold on the Liaotung Peninsula and breaking its promises to return Manchuria to Chinese control after the turmoil of the Boxer Rebellion had settled. Conversely, it portrays Japan as working to assure Athe lasting peace of Eastern Asia@ and Athe territorial integrity of China and Korea.@[2] Only when these efforts failed did Japan turn to war, an action against its basic nature: AFor all the centuries of the nation=s existence the Japanese had known no acquisition of territory. The Russians have lived by this.@[3]
Harper=s Weekly concurred that Japan=s exertion of power was a benevolent response to Russian aggression and selfishness. AThere is now no likelihood that the Russians will withdraw voluntarily from [Manchuria].... Japan, on the other hand, has concurred with Great Britain and the United States... that the independence and territorial integrity of China must be maintained.@[4]
These views were echoed in British coverage. In the August 1904 Fortnightly Review, Alfred Stead cites proclamations of the Japanese Emperor justifying Japan=s previous war of aggression by saying A>we were constrained to take up arms against China for no other reason than our desire to secure for the Orient an enduring peace.=@ Stead concludes from these Imperial edicts that Ait is abundantly evident that Japan is for peace.... That the war [with Russia] was necessary to secure Japan=s very existence... only shows that there was no peaceful means by which the situation could be resolved.@[5]
Similar biases are evident in coverage of the actual combat. Davis et al. emphasize the contrast between on the one hand Athe perfection of the Japanese field equipment, and... the almost microscopic exactness@ of their preparations, and on the other hand the weaknesses of the Russians: A...their equipment [was] ponderous and unwieldy, their knowledge of... [the combat zone] scant and inaccurate.@ They go so far as to describe the early fighting as Aan almost grotesque struggle between preparedness and unpreparedness, extreme mobility and clod-hopping heaviness, cleverness and stupidity.@[6]
But the Japanese were praised as much for their decency as their combat skills. Collier=s correspondent Frederick Palmer wrote: AThe headmen of the Korean villages tell me that the conduct of the individual private soldier has been exemplary.... We are passing through a Korea... conquered by kindness, fair treatment, and a nice skill in handling public and private opinion.@[7] Equally praised was the Japanese treatment of Russian casualties: AThe Japanese cared for the Russian wounded as they did for their own... and... gave to the dead Russians the same military honors that would have been accorded to their own men of similar rank.@[8] Davis et al. devote several pages of photographs to the Japanese care of Russian wounded and burial of Russian dead, while presenting no documentation of how Russians treated Japanese casualties.[9] Stead is critical of Russia in comparing the combatants= prisoner-of-war policies, stating Athat whereas the Japanese military authorities have furnished regular reports of the prisoners of war taken from the Russians, which was laid down as an international necessity, there has been practically nothing done on the Russian side in this way, thus causing a great deal of unnecessary anxiety and suffering amongst the families of soldiers in Japan.@[10]
Whatever the actual facts of Japanese and Russian conduct in the war, the American and British coverage was clearly partisan toward Japan. Why did these ethnically European, Christian societies show such affinity for an Asian state over Atheir own kind,@ in apparent contrast to the paradigm of racial hierarchy which dominated imperialist thought?
Certainly the racial issue was not ignored in Western coverage. An anonymous item in the periodical Century Illustrated commented on the paradox that Anotwithstanding the fact... that Russia=s antagonist is of utterly alien race, -- under the ban, in the popular mind, of >heathenism,= -- the sympathies of the people have gone to the >yellow man= and not to our >old friend= Russia.@[11] W. D. Howells in Harper=s Weekly expressed ambivalence even as late as the Portsmouth peace conference, observing that the Japanese Aseemed indefinitely remoter from us than these fellow Christians of ours...@ and that the Christianity and Acommunity of European civilization@ shared by Russia and America Amade it seem less comprehensible why we should prefer the Japanese to them in the war which has so justly gone against them.@[12]
Ethnic sentiments were more strongly expressed in France and Germany, with repeated warnings of the AYellow Peril@ of Asian imperialism. However, American and British journalists were skeptical of these warnings, attributing them to these Continental powers= political ties with Russia and strategic interests in Asia. The Times of London reported skeptically on Athe scare,@ commenting that Asome clever writers in the Press are using their ingenuity to represent Russia as the emancipator of the white races from the yellow peril, which of course is now centred in the Japanese.@ It goes on to note that Aif Japan emerges victorious from the campaign France will soon have to deal with her in connexion with her Indo-Chinese possessions.@[13] Stead expresses similar doubts about the German Emperor=s motives in decrying the AYellow Peril@: AAlthough this crusade is ostensibly to be directed against an Asiatic menace, in reality it resolves itself into a question of the safety of Kiao-chu and German concessions.@[14]
Economic and strategic interests also motivated British and American sympathies with Japan, for Japan=s actions seemed to coincide with their interests in the region. Harper=s states that Aour attempts to secure an >open door= in Manchuria and to obtain from China a desirable commercial treaty have met with sympathy and support on the part of the Japanese. Russia, also, has professed to approve of our Far Eastern policy,@ it goes on, citing a written promise to evacuate Russian troops from Manchuria. AWe need not say that the promise has been broken,@ it adds. AIt is clear, then, that our national interests in the Far East would be promoted by the triumph of Japan and seriously endangered by the success of Russia.@ The article adds the further point that England is America=s Abest customer@ for food exports, which French and Russian forces might seek to interrupt if England entered the war on Japan=s side.[15] Stead argues that AJapan will be the agency through which foreign countries will do business in the Far East,@ and that therefore the West had a vested interest in Japan=s success.[16]
But there was clearly more to Western regard for Japan than mere economic or strategic expediency. In the commentary of the period, there is a consistent theme of admiration for the rapid progress of Japanese civilization, alongside strong criticism of Russia=s perceived backwardness in both the technical and political spheres. Davis et al. point out that education and literacy rates in Japan are far higher than those in Russia, and continue:
Russia is the Christian nation which
has been slowest in development.
Mentally, she is just out of the Dark Ages, equipped with the mechanical
progress of modern times. Japan is the
pagan nation which has been foremost in adopting the worldly essentials of a
civilization which is Christian in its origin.
Russia is a union of nomadic races, but lately ushered into feudalism,
which have, in turn, conquered many other races. Japan has had a stable, organized government
longer than England, and the Japanese were a free people when the Saxons were
the serfs of the Normans.[17]
Stead calls Japan Athis new first-class nation arisen in the midst of the older nations,@ a world power which has ascended with uncanny speed from its feudal past.[18] His article praising Japan is immediately followed by an anti-Russian piece by R. de Marmande, a French writer who speaks with disdain about the Franco-Russian alliance, claiming that the French are increasingly seeing the folly of Aintimate association with so completely foreign and retrogressive a Government.@ He specifies Tsarism as the problem: AWhilst such a canker corrupts and degrades the Russian nation, there can be no question of a coalition with free and constitutional Governments. The one diseased member would infect the whole flock.@ De Marmande says very little about the war, and purports that the French are largely uninterested in Japan -- contrasting the strong AYellow Peril@ rhetoric cited elsewhere.[19] His contempt for Russia exists independently of the conflict. Similar criticisms of Russia=s political system are found in The Century, which states that, despite past U.S.-Russia friendship, AAmericans have learned to look with loathing upon an administrative system which permits such tyrannical practices as are typified in Siberia. Americans... detest secret and cruel suppression.... Now and again an image haunts our minds of that frightful shape of Kipling=s imagination -- >the bear that walks like a man.=@[20]
Kipling=s feral image of Russia is also seen in an editorial cartoon by W. A. Rogers on the cover of the February 27, 1904 Harper=s Weekly. The cartoon represents Russia as a crowned and robed bear, a snarling beast in imperial guise. Japan is represented by a figure that, although child-sized, wears a modern, Western-style uniform and is not distinctly Asian at all. Another Rogers cover two weeks later shows the same Japanese figure battling a burly 17th-century Muscovite clad in furs -- not as feral, but hardly an image of modernity. (See Plates 1 and 2.)
In these cartoons, America is presented as a peacemaker, urging England, France and Germany not to let their alliances with these warring powers drag them down into further conflict. Yet if America was so peace-loving, why did they sympathize so strongly with Japan, the clear aggressor in the war? Why did they perceive a war of territorial conquest as an admirable act of self-preservation? Here we see a reflection of the basic ideology of imperialist states. America and the British Empire were built on expansion and territorial aggression. To them, Japan=s expansionism showed it to be a strong, dynamic, vigorous state, a society which, like them, was moving forward assertively and claiming the fruits of machismo. To a large extent, Western imperialists admired the Japanese because they were winners, and looked down on Russia because they were so sorely and easily beaten, and so far behind in the race toward modernization.
But this leads us to the real reason why Britain and America favored Japan: because it reminded them of themselves. If we dig deeper, we see that it is not Japan itself that is admired so much as the degree to which Japan has transformed itself into a Western-style state. There is a considerable paternalism in this appreciation, the pride of parents in the wayward child they have enlightened. Howells writes that Awe must not forget that we were ourselves the instrument of opening the Japanese Empire to the world, and so made ourselves sponsors for the infant political and military genius which has flourished into such a sudden and magnificent maturity.@ The panegyric effect of these words is somewhat diluted in the next paragraph, wherein Howells refers to Athe plucky little Japs, whom we ourslves liberated to international self-consciousness.@[21] The Century more blatantly cites the American role Ain the modernization and reformation of the once imprisoned nation.@[22] The strengths the West admires in Japan are Western strengths; even the morals the West admires in Japan are assumed to be Western morals. The Century commends Japan=s diplomacy as Acomparatively open and trustworthy -- more >Christian= than Christian Russia=s.@[23] We have already seen Collier=s= praise toward Japan for Aadopting the worldly essentials of a civilization which is Christian in its origin.@ Progress is defined as Westernization, moral superiority as Christianity. The Japanese are the favorite among Asians because they have made themselves the least Asian.
Without the trappings of the West, Asians are still looked down upon, as can be seen vividly in Collier=s= depiction of the Koreans. The startlingly different portrayals herein of the Japanese and Koreans is symbolized by a photo of AA Korean coolie[24] carrying medical supplies.@ The hunched, raggedly-dressed figure, weighted under a load larger than he is and gazing uneasily at the camera, is alongside two Japanese soldiers in crisp, Western-style military gear, walking tall, conversing gaily and completely ignoring the laborer. (See Plate 3.) The very people whose homeland is being fought over are portrayed as Astaring dumbly at the invaders without much curiosity and with no desire to make resistance.@[25] The Anoncommittal Koreans@ are credited with Apuzzled thoughts@ and depicted as quaintly comical, pidgin-speaking figures.[26] Howells similarly dismisses them: A[I]t does not appear that the Koreans have any greater wish to be eaten by the Japanese than the Manchurians had to be eaten by Russia; but we may safely leave those unreasonable populations out of the count.@[27] The Koreans have the most at stake in this conflict, yet they are denied agency or even opinions. The Koreans lead traditional, agricultural lives rather than adopting Western industrialism; thus they are looked upon with contempt -- or worse. Another photo portrays the elegant figure of the U.S. Minister to Korea, described as Abeing one of the few persons who has a really intelligent comprehension of the Korean tongue.@[28] This suggests one of two inferences: that no Korean is really intelligent, or that no Korean is a person.
But signs of this racism are evident even in Collier=s= sympathetic portrayal of the Japanese. For all their Westernization, they are still Alittle, inscrutable soldiers@[29] -- Ainscrutable@ being a favorite, almost reflexive epithet for the Japanese in too many sources to bother listing. AThe Japanese soldier,@ the book later asserts, Alike most Orientals, can work hard and thrive on food that would scarcely keep a Russian, much less an Englishman, alive.@[30] Certainly this is just what the exploiters of underfed Asian laborers would prefer to believe about them. At the very least it embodies the idea of an essential difference between the races. Davis et al. do protest the worst prejudices: AIn fact, at the battle of the Yalu [River] the behavior of the Mikado=s soldiers quite contradicted the prophecies of many sceptical observers of Japanese civilization, that as soon as the army was... in hand-to-hand conflict with the enemy, the veneer of European civilization would quickly drop off, and the Japanese soldier would become again the barbarian.@ At least the authors are convinced that Japan=s Westernization is more than a veneer. But they do not seem to challenge the assumption that the Japanese were innately barbarians.
It is clear that Western respect for Japan=s power was accompanied by fear of that same power, of what the Abarbarian@ might do with the might of civilization. Stead writes that Athe older nations... are full of suspicion and... fear as to what may happen as a result of Japan=s coming to her full strength. They watch her very much as Jason watched the sprouting of the warriors from the dragon=s teeth, and fear the worst, knowing so little of this new force that they have been instrumental in bringing into being.@[31] An Indian observer, covering the 1910 Japan-British Exhibition which celebrated this new, victorious world power and the older empire to whom it was closely tied, asserted that Japan=s Asuccesses in the late Russo-Japanese War have made her at once the subject of admiration as well as jealousy to the rest of the civilised world. Asiatics look upon her with feelings of pride, joy and hope; the Europeans and Americans with those of admiration, distrust and fear.@[32] Belief in the AYellow Peril@ appears not to have been confined to France and Germany after all. A postwar cartoon from the New York American, reprinted in Harper=s, is telling: A Japanese soldier straddles Korea, resting his hands on his rifle and gazing thoughtfully eastward. The sun, bearing a caricatured Asian face (presumably a Arising sun,@ though it is on the western horizon), casts his long shadow across Japan, the Philippines and the Pacific to the shores of the United States. The caption reads simply, AAnd now?@ (See Plate 4.) The image is prophetic, but in the context of its time it makes clear the West=s ambivalence about a non-Western power as strong and imperialistic as their own.
For centuries, industrialization gave Europe a marked advantage over the rest of the world, allowing them to grow convinced that technical superiority and racial superiority went hand-in-hand. But by the start of the twentieth century, a non-Western power was catching up and challenging these assumptions. Westerners were faced with a paradox -- a state which embodied their cherished ideals of progress, enlightenment and expansion yet belonging to an alien race and religion. Thus their coverage of the Russo-Japanese War illustrates a complex ambivalence, a tension between essentialist definitions of superiority based on race and functional definitions based on cultural norms and progress. Westerners were able to resolve this paradox as long as Japanese advancement proceeded along Western lines and validated the West as the exemplar of civilization. But the habitual belief in racial hierarchy lingered, as prejudice tends to do, and increasingly poisoned relations between East and West -- as was proven by the savage American racism against the Japanese in World War II.
[1]Esthus, Raymond A. Double Eagle and Rising Sun: The Russians and Japanese at Portsmouth in 1905 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1988), 1-3.
[2]Davis, Richard Harding et al. The Russo-Japanese War: A Photographic and Descriptive Review of the Great Conflict in the Far East (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1904), 9.
[3]Ibid., 11.
[4]AOur Relation to the Far Eastern Imbroglio,@ Harper=s Weekly vol. 48 no. 2455 (Jan. 9, 1904), 44-5.
[5]Stead, Alfred. AJapan=s Aspirations and Internationalism,@ Fortnightly Review vol. 82 (Aug. 1904), 309-10.
[6]Davis, 25.
[7]Ibid., 61.
[8]Ibid., 95.
[9]Ibid., 39, 101-03.
[10]Stead, 313.
[11]AAmerican Sentiment Concerning Russia and Japan,@ Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine vol. 68 (new series) no. 5 (Sept. 1904), 815.
[12]Howells, W. D. AThe Peacemakers at Portsmouth,@ Harper=s Weekly (Aug. 26, 1905), 1244.
[13]ARussia and the Yellow Peril.@ The Times (London), Feb. 18, 1904.
[14]Stead, 308.
[15]A...Far Eastern Imbroglio,@ 44-5. For similar sentiments, see AAdmiral Bowles for Japan.@ New York Times, Feb. 10, 1904.
[16]Stead, 311.
[17]Davis, 11.
[18]Stead, 307.
[19]de Marmande, R. AFrench Public Opinion and the Russo-Japanese War,@ Fortnightly Review vol. 82 (Aug. 1904), 320, 321n, 322.
[20]AAmerican Sentiment,@ 816.
[21]Howells, W. D. AWhat Shall We Do With Our Sympathies?,@ Harper=s Weekly vol. 48 no. 2462 (Feb. 27, 1904), 321.
[22]AAmerican Sentiment,@ 816 (emphasis added).
[23]Ibid.
[24]Itself an intrinsically racial term, originating as the name of an indigenous tribe in India, Kuli, and coming to refer to any Asian unskilled laborer.
[25]Davis, 51.
[26]Ibid., 66 & 89 (photo captions).
[27]Howells, ASympathies,