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

Conroy proceeds to explain how, with 50,000 Japanese residents already in Hawaii, contrasted with less than 10,000 Americans, the Japanese minister in Washington, Hoshi Toru, immediately recommended to Tokyo “our occupation of that island by dispatching without delay some powerful ships.” “Fortunately for all,” Conroy relates, “Foreign Minister Okuma vetoed his minister’s suggestion and placed ‘our opposition within the limits of diplomacy.’?”

Chapter 2, “The Open Door and Yesterday’s China,” begins: “The traditional and comfortable American view of the Open Door policy considered it a well-intentioned and friendly doctrine, designed to preserve American and other legitimate commercial interests in that vast sprawling area known as China and to bolster the latter in her hour of need.” Conroy contrasts this standard account with revisionist historian William Appleman Williams’ charge that the open door, which would become central to American policy (1900–1958), was disingenuous: it looked “moralistic,” but covered fundamentally selfish economic expansionism. Conroy’s response to both of these rather ideological theories, one rooted in Americanism and the other in structural Marxism, is to say, “Let’s look at the evidence.” The kind of evidence that he looks at comprises what the diplomats and foreign ministers said to each other, officially and in private. The results? Virtually everyone, including the British, the French, the Germans, occasionally the Russians, and definitely the Japanese, took the open door notes seriously. Each nation saw the mixture of fair play and realism in the notes as something positive. Japan wanted “not to be left out.” If she were secretly already thinking “Japan’s China,” or “Japan’s Manchuria,” these need not be construed as exclusively Japan’s thoughts, both out of fairness to the other powers and to China herself. In twenty-first-century retrospection, it might really be “Japan’s ‘China’s China.’?” After all, it had to be somebody’s. Anyway, Conroy concludes, John Hay’s open door notes received positive greetings—and at a minimum, held off the wolves to allow time for a “revolutionary reordering of things in China while there still remained a China” (referring to the 1911 Sun Yat-sen Revolution).