West Across the Pacific: American Involvement in East Asia from 1 ...

That the Japanese should seek to develop a commitment out of this appears, again obliquely, in an instruction sent to the acting minister in Washington, Matsui, on the occasion of the appointment of a new minister to Washington on November 25, 1897. “Minister to the United States sailed for his post on November 20 taking instructions concerning the note from Secretary of State (August 14) and proposals for amicable adjustment of annexation question on basis of future protection of Japanese subjects and interests in Hawaii”¹⁶ (emphasis added). Thinking ahead, we can say that again and again the Japanese government harkened back to the idea that the treatment of Japanese residents on American soil deserved attention as a matter of diplomatic negotiation, and one for which, if injustices occurred and Japan accepted them, diplomatic consolation should occur elsewhere—in Manchuria for instance. Griswold, the traditional frame of reference for this, correctly concludes that “complicating all of these problems, darkening the atmosphere in which they were studied the issue of Japanese immigration hung like a cloud over the Pacific,”¹⁷ but he does not explain precisely how. And his separating immigration and Japanese resident matters into a separate chapter?¹⁸ precludes our understanding their influence on specific issues as they came up.

Lastly, a certain irony arises in the fact Ito insisted on acquiescence in the American “experiment with empire” in the Pacific annexations, while Okuma and Minister Hoshi inclined toward anger and protest. Ito, the Bismarckian, practiced Realpolitik, whereas Okuma and Hoshi led the Progressive and Liberal parties of Japan, respectively. (Though outmaneuvered and defeated by oligarchs of whom Ito was the chief, in their later careers the two resigned to service in the oligarchic framework. They had been sterling advocates of English-style parliamentary government in the new Meiji Japan.) The implications of this kind of phenomenon may be difficult to say, but certain alternative propositions are interesting enough to be kept in mind. These are based not only on the case in point but also on the author’s deeper probing into the background of the Japanese annexation of Korea, wherein the realist, Ito, tried to avoid the Russo-Japanese War and various excesses in Japan’s penetration of Korea, while the liberals, who had once advocated freedom and constitutional forms in and for Korea, became apologists for seizing the peninsula.¹⁹