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The term “chilly reserve” comes from a letter by D. W. Stevens, long-time American resident in Japan and sometime advisor to Ito Hirobumi while he served as resident general in Seoul. In a letter to his good friend, Admiral Willard R. Bronson, USN, dated December 1907, he states that “as for the immigration matter there will be no war on that account” but that “the warm regard for America which has hitherto been one of the salient features of Japan’s international relations will be transformed into a wall of chilly reserve which I fear will last for years to come.”
Stevens was right, as further documents regarding immigration matters—the Gentlemen’s Agreement and the upsurge of Japanese-American rivalry over the building of railways in Manchuria, in which the development of U.S. dollar diplomacy in Manchuria by Averill Harriman and Willard Straight played a role—clearly show.
Documentation of this development of chilly reserve is very thorough, and it resulted in an American devotion to what could be called excessive open doorism in U.S.-China policy, which led to a cold war in the Far East between the United States and Japan during most of the decade between 1907 and 1917. One further example will conclude this limited discussion of some of the revealing documentary sources in chapters 1–4, which cover the period from 1898 to approximately 1910. The following excerpt comes from a private letter from Britain’s foreign secretary of the time, Edward Grey, to British Ambassador MacDonald in Tokyo, dated June 17, 1908: