Foundations of Japanese Naval Policy
The year 1907 marked a significant turning point in the history of the Imperial Japanese Navy. In that year Japan’s highest military authorities—the ministers of the army and navy and the high command—decided on the Imperial National Defense Policy (Teikoku kokubō hōshin), which was sanctioned by the Meiji Emperor.1 This document was accompanied by the General Plan for Strategy (Yōhei kōryō) and the Naval Strength Requirement (Kokubō shoyō heiryoku).
From this point forward Japan’s naval policy was defined by the following basic doctrines: (1) the concept of the United States as the navy’s “hypothetical enemy”; (2) the need for a 70 percent fleet ratio against the U.S. Navy as a strategic imperative; and (3) its corollary, a program for building a first-line “eight-eight fleet” consisting of eight modern (dreadnought) battleships displacing 20,000 tons and eight armored cruisers (later, battle cruisers) displacing eighteen thousand tons.2 These doctrines were, of course, interrelated.
The concept of the United States as the navy’s hypothetical enemy first appeared in the National Defense Policy of 1907. (The army’s hypothetical enemy was Russia.) The policy stipulated that “of all hypothetical enemies the most important from the viewpoint of naval operations is the United States.” At that time, however, it amounted to little more than a “budgetary enemy,” a target for building a large fleet. Recall that Satō Tetsutarō, in his treatise Teikoku kokubō shiron (1908), used the term “hypothetical enemy” as a “standard for armaments,” a bureaucratic rationale for building appropriations. This definition of a hypothetical enemy mirrored Mahan’s dictum that the standard of naval preparedness should take into account “not the most probable of dangers, but the most formidable.” Similarly, Japanese naval strategists defined their “hypothetical enemy” as “any one power, whether friendly or hostile, that can confront Japan with the greatest force of arms.”3 However, the National Defense Policy did state that although friendly relations with the United States must be maintained, there was a possibility of “a violent clash some day because of geographic, economic, and racial reasons.” The last reason given—the immigration crisis in California and the war scare it generated—seemed ominous. The seeds of Japanese-American antagonism had been planted. By the time the Imperial National Defense Policy came up for revisal in 1918, the prospect of a “violent clash” with the United States had come to revolve around the conflict over China policy.
The idea of a 70 percent naval ratio as Japan’s minimum defense requirement against the United States had been jointly worked out around 1907 by Akiyama Saneyuki and Satō Tetsutarō, when both were instructors at the Naval Staff College. This ratio rested on the basic premise that “an approaching enemy armada would need a margin of at least 50 percent superiority over the defending fleet.” If the Japanese navy had 70 percent strength against the United States, it would correspond to 143 percent for the American navy—not quite enough for launching a successful attack on Japan. If the Japanese navy had only 60 percent, the American navy’s strength would amount to 166 percent, which was deemed sufficient for attacking Japan. To put it another way, with a 70 percent ratio, Japan’s chance in a war with the United States would be fifty-fifty according to Akiyama and “slightly in Japan’s favor” according to Satō. However, the 70 percent figure was not based on any strict mathematical calculation.4 On the American side, distance, as Mahan said, was a factor equivalent to a number of ships.5 The Philippines were three thousand miles from Hawaii. American naval planners used the rule of thumb that a battle fleet would lose 10 percent of its fighting efficiency as it cruised each one thousand miles from its Hawaiian base because of wear and tear, bottom fouling, the enemy’s attacks en route, and declining morale of officers and men. This accounted for the operational strength of 70 percent upon arrival in the western Pacific, and it would give the American navy a “sporting chance.”6
To the Japanese navy, the seemingly minor margin between 60 and 70 percent made the difference between victory and defeat. The notion of the 70 percent ratio—“insufficient to attack (in transpacific operations), sufficient for defense (in Japan’s home waters)”—was reinforced by war games, tabletop maneuvers, and fleet exercises, and it crystallized into a firmly held consensus—even obsession—within the Japanese navy until the eve of the Pearl Harbor attack.
The Naval Strength Requirement that accompanied the National Defense Policy stipulated that Japan’s naval armaments should be “sufficient to take the offensive against American forces in Far East waters [the Asiatic Fleet].” The Battle of the Sea of Japan had established the primacy of the battleship. By 1907 the Japanese-American naval race was on. Whereas in 1901 Japan possessed twelve battleships and armored cruisers and the United States possessed a mere seven ships, by March 1907 Japan had become the inferior party with twenty-five ships compared to thirty-five ships for the United States.
With an eye to attaining 70 percent of U.S. strength, the Japanese navy drafted the “eight-eight” fleet plan, an ambitious building program consisting of eight battleships and eight armored cruisers (later, battle cruisers), all no more than eight years old, together with auxiliary ships.7 Japanese planners believed that this level of force would deter the United States from risking war with Japan. The eight years spanning 1914–21 may be called “the age of the eight-eight fleet.” This building plan became the focal point of Diet debates in which Navy Vice Minister Katō Tomosaburō brilliantly defended the government’s naval expenditures. Through the navy’s public relations efforts, the eight-eight plan became widely known to the Japanese people.
The General Plan for Strategy that accompanied the National Defense Policy of 1907 was still in its embryonic stage. It merely stipulated in abstract Mahanian terms that “the principal object is to take the offensive to annihilate enemy naval forces.” But it gave no further provisions, except to say, “subsequent operations should be planned according to the requirements of the moment.”8 Because no record exists of the navy’s operational plans, they must be reconstructed from such fragmentary sources as the naval maneuvers of November 1908 and the map exercises conducted at the Naval Staff College in 1911.
Because the navy did not have the material strength to carry the war to America’s shores, it would have to fight an essentially defensive war near Japan’s home waters. For the first time, in 1908, the navy conducted a large-scale exercise with the United States as its hypothetical enemy. Naval leaders assumed that the American fleet would capture the Japanese base in Amami-Oshima and head north; the Japanese navy would counter it south of Shikoku in a decisive fleet engagement. The first concrete study of a Philippine operation is found in the map maneuver conducted at the Naval Staff College in 1911. Japan would capture Luzon island in the Philippines and destroy the American base there before intercepting the U.S. fleet.9 This exercise established the principles of “big battleships and big guns (taikan khonōshugi)” interceptive operations, and the decisive fleet encounter—the three principles that became fundamental strategic doctrines until the eve of the Pearl Harbor attack.
On the basis of these records we can piece together Japan’s operational plan as follows. At the outset of hostilities, the Japanese navy would conduct offensive operations against the Philippines, neutralizing American naval forces there and occupying Manila. It would then lie in wait for the American battle fleet advancing westward across the Pacific to reclaim the Philippines. When the American fleet approached Japan’s home waters, the navy would intercept and then annihilate it in a decisive battle west of the Bonins, just as it had destroyed Russia’s Baltic Fleet in the Tsushima Strait. Japan would have the geographic advantage because of its proximity to the main theater of operations, and there would be a quick showdown. The winner of the decisive battle would obtain command of the sea and dictate peace. This strategy set a pattern for interceptive operations that governed Japan’s Pacific strategy for more than three decades.
In 1906, after Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War, Japan emerged as the U.S. Navy’s hypothetical enemy in War Plan Orange, a war plan drawn up in the midst of the Japanese-American war scare that was triggered by the immigration crisis in San Francisco. The American war scenario roughly paralleled that of Japan: it included recapture of the Philippines, destruction of the Japanese battle fleet in its home waters, and the complete commercial isolation of Japan. In 1911 Raymond P. Rodgers, President of the Naval War College, restating the Orange situation, predicted that the Japanese fleet would attempt to drive the United States from the western Pacific by overrunning the Philippines, Guam, and perhaps Hawaii. To counter Japan, the U.S. fleet would steam from the Pacific Coast and then advance along the “central route,” recapturing Hawaii and Guam, and strike into the Philippine Sea. There the American fleet would engage and defeat the Japanese fleet. If Japan still refused to surrender, the American navy would isolate and strangle Japanese commerce.10 By 1914, it seems, the American navy had worked out its operational plan in greater detail than the Japanese navy had.
By this time the Japanese navy had been provoked by the bold diplomatic initiatives the United States had taken to neutralize Manchurian railways and “smoke out” Japan from Manchuria. In 1910 Navy Minister Saitō Makoto stated in his proposal for a naval increase that Japan must be “alert to the policy of the United States that has recently shifted from the Monroe Doctrine to imperialism and intervened in the Manchurian question.” He wrote that the United States was speeding up its construction of the Panama Canal, maintaining the Hawaiian base, building up the Philippines, and expanding its fleet. When these objectives were attained, he wrote, “The Empire’s policy would frequently encounter formidable difficulties.” In 1913 the Naval Staff College, provoked by the American intervention in Manchuria and the recurrent immigration crisis in California, demanded a “sea power that can defy the United States.” It pushed for early completion of the eight-eight fleet program, but that program was overstraining Japan’s financial capability.11 In 1914 the opening of the Panama Canal revolutionized the strategic prospect of a Japanese-American war, greatly facilitating the transfer of American battleships from the Atlantic to the Pacific. They no longer had to travel ten thousand miles across the globe to join the fleet on the Pacific Coast; the distance to the Philippines was reduced by half. As Mahan once remarked, distance was a factor equivalent to a number of ships, and the drastic reduction of strategic distance enhanced the threat the Japanese navy perceived.12
MOUNTING TENSION IN THE PACIFIC
The outbreak of the European war in August 1914 proved Mahan’s predictions correct: the great war destroyed the multilateral balance of power in East Asia and left Japan and the United States directly confronting each other across the Pacific. Upon Japan’s declaration of war on Germany, the Japanese navy hastened to occupy the German islands in Micronesia (the Marshalls, Carolines, and Marianas) that flanked America’s line of communications running from Hawaii through Guam to the Philippines. For the Japanese navy this meant a sudden expansion of its defense perimeter and a step toward realizing southward expansion, as Satō Tetsutarō had envisioned. Katō Kanji, Captain of the Ibuki and Chief of Staff in the Second Fleet, which was then operating in the South Seas, urged the naval authorities in Tokyo that the “time has come for Japan to conduct active southern operations with a view to expansion in the south.”13 The Japanese occupation of the German islands would mean acquisition of advanced posts in the mid-Pacific—a prospect that had alarmed Mahan. Shortly after Japan presented its ultimatum to Germany, Mahan had urged Franklin D. Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, to warn Britain (Japan’s ally) that Japan’s seizure of the islands would cause outrage among Americans. American naval men reacted strongly: “Too much stress cannot be laid on the dangers of the foothold the Japanese are gaining in the South Pacific Islands, and the possibility of their extension of operations all over the Pacific.” The navy’s General Board warned that Japanese possession of these islands would be a “perpetual menace to Guam and to any fleet operations undertaken for the relief of the Philippines.”14 The American navy’s fears never materialized, however. As it turned out, the mandated islands worked to America’s advantage. At the Paris Peace Conference, Japan, upon being awarded these islands as mandates of the League of Nations, pledged not to fortify them. Unfortified, these islands became “hostages” of the U.S. Navy, which could use them as way stations in its transpacific campaign.15
Japan’s second move to take advantage of the European war was to impose the Twenty-One Demands upon China in January 1915, which jeopardized China’s sovereignty. The imperialistic actions of Japan in China (and later in Siberia) provoked sharp reaction in American naval circles. In June 1915 Lieutenant Commander Harry E. Yarnell wrote in his report to the Naval War College that Japan had “impressed her suzerainty upon a helpless nation of 300,000,000 souls.” If successful, he warned with a touch of Mahanian racism, Japanese control would lead to “the strangulation of foreign trade [and] the final elimination of the white race from the Far East.” There was an increasing awareness that a clash with Japan was likely. In February 1916 the War Plans Division stated, “Japan is generally credited with a desire to extend her dominion to the Philippines, Guam and Honolulu and possibly to ... other U.S. possessions in the Pacific.” In the following month the Office of Naval Intelligence observed, “Assuming that she [Japan] has determined to attack us, it is more than a probability that she has been preparing to do so for the last two years, and that she will strike suddenly when ready.”16
To counter the perceived Japanese threat, the U.S. Navy’s General Board, in January 1917, urged the need “for American naval domination of the western Pacific.” The mission of the U.S. fleet was to strike immediately to secure control of the western Pacific and to cut Japan’s overseas communications by dispatching a superior fleet to the Far East.17 In January 1917, in response to Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, the General Board presented a plan titled “Strategic Problem, Pacific.” It represented the fullest survey yet completed. To secure naval domination of the western Pacific, the board calculated that the U.S. Navy required a fleet twice the size of the Japanese fleet. As naval historian William R. Braisted observed, “The Board proposed in 1917 to provide the United States with unprecedented military power in the Far East, but it would also practically deprive Japan of [the] capacity of independent self-defense.”18
The Japanese navy was keenly aware of the dynamic, and apparently offensive, war plan being worked out by the U.S. Navy. An increasing number of Japanese officers regarded the United States as more than a mere “budgetary enemy.” A significant memorandum prepared in March 1916 by Rear Admiral Takeshita Isamu, head of the Operations Division, stated, “The nation with whom a clash of arms is most likely in the near future is the United States.” He noted, “The United States is rapidly expanding its naval armaments and it is building its military installations in the Pacific, thereby trying forcibly to impose its national policy on Japan.” Takeshita concluded with a neo-Mahanian brand of economic determinism: “With its vast resources and newly acquired colossal financial power, the United States is invading the Oriental market. It is blocking our national expansion and depriving us of our interests [in Asia]. In addition, it is rapidly expanding its naval strength and completing its military facilities in the Pacific, thus forcing its national policy on us.”19
Takeshita’s memorandum was important, because he participated in the 1918 revision of the Imperial National Defense Policy. Similarly, a secret report submitted by the Naval General Staff to former Navy Minister Saitō stated, “The Japanese-American crisis stems from the American effort to unjustly obstruct Japan’s development. . . . If the United States truly wants to avoid war, it must refrain from threatening Japan by building bases nearby. Otherwise war is inevitable.”20 Such perceptions must have affected naval leaders who were revising the National Defense Policy. It was sanctioned in June 1918, but its text has not yet been discovered. In light of the Takeshita memorandum, however, the revised defense policy likely defined the United States as the hypothetical enemy with which a clash was likely “in the near future.” This is corroborated by a working paper prepared by the Naval Staff College in 1918 that stated, “The rivaling nation with which the clash is most probable on account of the China question, in other words the hypothetical enemy, has become the United States.” This document continued:
Although the government in its explanations to the Diet has never openly indicated which nation is our hypothetical enemy, if under the existing circumstances the question is raised, it will not be unreasonable to state that the United States is the foremost hypothetical enemy. . . . The United States has excluded Asiatic immigrants and clamored for the Open Door in China. More recently there are many among its intellectual classes who violently oppose Japanese occupation of South Sea [German] islands and openly call Japan their hypothetical enemy. Also the United States is rapidly expanding its navy, carefully preparing for [a Pacific] campaign. These facts obviously bespeak its policy of intimidation in the Orient.21
However, Navy Minister Katō Tomosaburō would not accept such a redefinition of a “hypothetical enemy.” In a cabinet meeting on 26 July 1917, he stated that it was “from the viewpoint of naval armaments that America is regarded as hypothetical enemy number one.”22 Katō’s statement reflected the traditional concept of the United States as a target for naval buildup. As far as he was concerned, the revised National Defense Policy of 1918 expressed Japan’s desperate effort to maintain a semblance of naval balance with the United States. President Wilson had announced in August 1916 a building program that included ten superdreadnoughts and six battle cruisers to be completed in three years. This plan for a “Navy Second to None” was by far the largest rapid building program up until that time. Although the plan primarily was directed toward dangers in the Atlantic, Japanese navy men saw it as directed against them.
As the naval journalist Itō Masanori has written, the two naval powers that were least damaged by (or, most profited from) World War I—Japan and the United States—entered into a Mahanian naval race “as if preordained by Fate.”23 The appearance of the post-Jutland superdreadnought intensified the race. In 1921 Hector C. Bywater, a famed British naval journalist and American, attracted international attention by publishing Sea-Power in the Pacific, in which he astutely dealt with the “naval resources” of the United States and Japan and the strategic problems that such a war would present.
Facing the dangerous situation in November 1918, shortly after the armistice, Katō observed at the Advisory Council on Foreign Relations (Japan’s highest advisory body on foreign policy) that if the huge American building plan was completed, “It will result in such an extreme disparity as to reduce the Pacific Ocean to an American lake.”24 To counter such a fear, the Naval Strength Requirement that accompanied the revised National Defense Policy of 1918 provided for an “eight-eight-eight fleet” plan that would add eight capital ships or battle cruisers (all no more than eight years old) to the existing eight-eight program. The new plan consisted of three battle fleets of eight warships each. To complete this program, Japan would have to launch three battleships or battle cruisers every year. The naval historian Nomura Minoru commented that “the weight of these battleships would have, so to say, sunk the Japanese archipelago.”25 From the beginning there was little hope of obtaining budget appropriation for the eight-eight-eight fleet program. The shares of naval appropriations in the total national budget for 1919, 1920, and 1921 were 23.4 percent, 26.5 percent, and 31.6 percent, respectively. (See Table 1.)
Mutual antagonism between the two navies had been rapidly increasing. As early as 1917 the Japanese navy had obtained a generally accurate picture of War Plan Orange. The Japanese asserted that U.S. war plans were stolen, but without resorting to clandestine operations, the Japanese navy could have deduced American plans from geography, war objectives, and relative strength. It was a matter of mirror imaging. Whatever the source of the information, Japan knew that the United States would advance its fleet to the mid-Pacific (Hawaii, the Carolines, and the Marshalls), recapture Guam and the Philippines, and, after victory in a climactic Mahanian engagement in the western Pacific, cut off Japan’s seaborne traffic, blockade its home islands, and starve it into submission. In October 1920 Tokyo clandestinely acquired an operational study on a transpacific campaign jointly drafted by three brilliant planners, Harry E. Yarnell, Holloway H. Frost, and William S. Pye.26 Japanese admirals noted that the American strategy corresponded with their plan to intercept the U.S. fleet in the western Pacific. Meanwhile the American navy surmised, correctly, that the Japanese strategy was to wait until the U.S. fleet, because of the difficulties of a transpacific passage, had sufficiently lost its strength (about 30 percent) before conducting a decisive fleet engagement near Japan’s home waters.27 The mirror image was noted by both navies.
To counter America’s forward strategy, the Japanese navy reformulated its General Plan for Strategy in 1918. The plan consisted of two parts: (1) the navy would stage a bold offensive at the outset to destroy America’s much inferior Asiatic Fleet, to capture Luzon, and to obtain command of the western Pacific; and (2) as the U.S. main fleet approached Far Eastern waters, the Japanese navy would deliver a decisive blow in a climactic main encounter. It was assumed, rather too optimistically, that the winner of the decisive battle would obtain command of the sea and end the war.28
In the U.S. Navy, the scenario worked out by the Plans Division (newly created in 1919) projected a three-phase operation: (1) during the first phase, the United States would concentrate its main battleship forces in the eastern Pacific; (2) during the second phase, the U.S. fleet would occupy points in the Japanese mandates in the mid-Pacific and recapture the Philippines and Guam; and (3) during the third phase, the U.S. fleet would defeat the Japanese fleet in a decisive battleship encounter and pressure Japan through blockading and occupying the Japanese territories. A key paper, “Strategic Problem, Pacific,” adopted by the Joint Board in December 1919 assumed that Japan would acknowledge defeat only after the United States had effectively blockaded its homeland and captured the outlying islands. Such operations presupposed American domination of the western Pacific. This in turn required battleship superiority of at least three-to-two over Japan.29
LESSONS OF WORLD WAR I
What kind of armaments would Japan require in this new age of total war? Conflict over this question was at the heart of the dissension concerning strategy, armaments, and policy toward naval conferences throughout the 1920s and beyond.
The “clash between the two Katōs” at the Washington Conference—Navy Minister Katō Tomosaburō and Vice Admiral Katō Kanji (no relation)—will be described in the next chapter with all its drama and human poignancy.30 Here I will simply contrast their views on naval defense. Cognizant of the new realities of total war, Navy Minister Katō Tomosaburō held a modern view of naval defense that saw national security in relation to economic, technical, political, and diplomatic factors. In a new age heralded by World War I, “National defense is no longer the monopoly of the military,” he declared. No amount of armaments would be adequate unless backed by total national strength, which essentially consisted of industrial and commercial power. Squarely facing Japan’s limitations in this respect, he believed that the nation would have to be content with “peacetime armaments commensurate with its national strength, if it were to avoid financial ruin.”31
In sharp contrast, Vice Admiral Katō Kanji, who had served almost exclusively on the Naval General Staff and in the fleets, drew a diametrically opposed lesson from the recent war. Ignoring the requirements of total war, his thinking was embedded in military-strategic considerations of a limited war. “The cardinal lesson” of the world war, he held, was the vital importance of effecting a decisive fleet engagement early in the war before the United States could mobilize its formidable industrial potential. Failure to execute a quick and short war would turn the conflict into a war of attrition, to Japan’s mounting disadvantage. He wrote, “One of the most important lessons we have learned from the Great War was the need of ‘quick encounter, quick showdown.’” And the decisive fleet engagement was predicated on “the principle of big battleships and big guns.”32
Katō Kanji held that the United States, with its “huge wealth, resources, and gigantic industrial power,” could quickly turn its military potential into a formidable fighting force once war broke out. It thus could meet its security needs, he argued, with peacetime preparation equal to or even less than that of a “have-not” nation like Japan. Conversely, Japan’s security required a large peacetime armament, he concluded.
However, some naval officers recognized the importance of preparing for a total war. They realized that “determination and preparation to endure a protracted war will be required.” One of them was Commander Niimi Masaichi, who had been sent to England to study the lessons of World War I. He submitted reports on such subjects as “Economic Warfare and the Navy” and “Preparations for a Protracted War.” These officers also realized that battles like Tsushima and Jutland were unlikely.33 However, such perceptions never took root in the Japanese navy. The majority, wedded to the doctrine of “quick encounter, quick showdown,” focused their attention on a decisive battleship engagement at an early stage, instead of preparing for a total war that entailed a protracted conflict.
Thus the Japanese navy faced the dilemma of expecting the next war to be a protracted one while reckoning that its only chance of success lay in a quick showdown. This meant that Japan would have to prepare for the type of warfare that it could least afford to fight.
Ironically, Katō Tomosaburō—the architect of the eight-eight fleet plan—was the first to recognize that this building program was bound to exist only on paper. Although the appropriation for the eight-eight fleet plan, to be completed in 1927, was finally approved in 1920, he saw that the plan was beyond Japan’s financial capability. He had his subordinates—Captain Yamanashi Katsunoshin, Section Chief of the Naval Affairs Bureau, and Commander Hori Teikichi of the same bureau—estimate the costs of maintaining the eight-eight fleet program, and they found that the fleet program alone would require one-third of the government’s budget—and Japan was already suffering a serious postwar recession.34 At the budget subcommittee meeting of the Diet in February 1919, Katō admitted, “Even if we should try to compete with the United States, it is a foregone conclusion that we are simply not up to it. . . . Whether the United States, with its unlimited wealth and resources, would continue its naval expansion is up to that country. My policy is to build up an adequate defensive force within the limits of Japan’s national power.”35
In late 1920, Katō gathered leaders of the navy ministry—the navy vice minister, the chief of the Naval Affairs Bureau, and the chief of the Naval Construction Department—for secret consultation at his official residence. The gist of his talk was as follows:
Since I became navy minister six years ago, the trends of public opinion and in the Diet have changed a great deal. In the olden days Diet members and other dignitaries were delighted to be invited to the Yokosuka naval yard and drink a toast at launching ceremonies. They congratulated me, saying Japan is becoming a great naval power. But during the past year or two they keep on asking about the costs of construction or maintenance, launching ceremonies, and maintenance of new ships. Our national wealth has simply not increased in proportion to naval expenditure, and we cannot proceed at the present pace. I am at my wit’s end.36
About the same time, a desperate appeal came from Nishihara Hajime, Vice Minister of Finance. He told Katō and the sixty assembled naval officials, “Our financial position is fast becoming hopeless; whether it will be ruined or not is entirely up to you navy people. . . . We’ll have to give up in despair. Please put your heads together about this.”37
The thankless task of scuttling the eight-eight fleet plan fell on Katō Tomosaburō. Drastic mutual reduction, he realized, was the only way to stop the arms race and save Japan’s financial situation. On 18 January 1921 Navy Vice Minister Ide Kenji, under Katō’s direction, told the New York Tribune that Japan would voluntarily reduce the eight-eight plan if a proper balance was maintained with the Anglo-American powers. Then on 14 March Katō himself told an Associated Press correspondent that Japan would not insist on completing the eight-eight fleet program if the powers could find a “suitable formula” for a “dependable” international agreement to limit their navies.38 He made it quite clear that Japan was not attempting to compete with the U.S. Navy. This was the first signal to the world that Japan was prepared to discuss naval arms limitation. For Katō, who was hoping to halt the dangerous arms race, the American invitation to the Washington Conference that arrived on 11 July 1921 must have seemed a godsend. He later confided to Shidehara Kijūrō (who became his co-delegate to Washington), “There was no chance of building an eight-eight fleet, so I want to scrap it when given a chance.”39
THE WAR SCARE OF 1920–21
The immediate background of the Washington Conference was an acute war scare that had developed in both Japan and the United States in 1920–21. The American navy became haunted by the vision of war with Japan. It was largely rooted in the “security dilemma” between the two navies: the Japanese would view a navy strong enough to protect the Philippines and the Open Door as a threat to their security. Conversely, Americans would view a navy powerful enough to defend Japan and its policies as a threat to the Philippines and other national interests in the Far East.40
The Japanese navy was more alarmed than ever by America’s accelerated efforts to build a “Navy Second to None.” The Japanese also nervously noted the creation, in 1919, of an imposing battle fleet in the Pacific. The United States placed half its fleet, with more than half its naval firepower, in the Pacific; and the enlarged Pacific Fleet was at least equal to the Japanese fleet. This clearly indicated that, as Mahan had, the Pacific had become of greater strategic importance than was the Atlantic. Fearing that the United States was about to establish its naval dominance in the Pacific, Japan responded by increasing its naval budget nearly fivefold between 1917 and 1921. Leaders of both countries denied that their building programs were directed against each other, to little avail. Captain Malcolm D. Kennedy, a British officer stationed in Japan since 1917, noted, “In Japan war with the United States was discussed as though it were inevitable and even to be welcomed.”41
On the American side, Secretary of the Navy Daniels told the House Naval Affairs Committee in 1920 about “the necessity of being prepared if [Japan] should attack.”42 In February 1920 Director of Naval Intelligence Albert P. Niblack wrote the General Board, “During the past year Japan has been making strenuous preparations for war. These preparations are frankly directed against the United States.” The Office of Naval Intelligence had “conclusive information” that Japan was “exerting every endeavor to prepare for war at the earliest possible date.”43
On 14 July 1921, a few days after the United States had invited Japan to the Washington Conference, Theodore Roosevelt Jr., Assistant Secretary of the Navy, wrote his wife, “The best authority whom I have met says that Japan is preparing for war in time of peace more systematically and more thoroughly than any other nation in modern history. . . . I think it probable that Japan’s war appropriations are simply incident to her desire to maintain absolute sway in Asia. . . . With the Philippines and our Asiatic relationships, I can easily imagine how, even with Asiatic dominance as her sole policy, unavoidable friction might ensue.”44 Apparently, in an instance of selective perception, the American navy had failed to need Navy Minister Katō’s statement in March 1921 that Japan was willing to cut back its eight-eight fleet program.
Meanwhile, the American navy had conjured up an elaborate picture of the yellow peril that was inherited from Mahan’s age. In 1921 the General Board and the War Plans Division prepared a number of reports about Japan, from which it is possible to extract American admirals’ Weltanschauung. They saw in Japan a strategic, economic, political, ideological, and racial threat to the United States. The General Board feared that Japan sought not only territorial expansion and commercial domination of China but also political control of East Asia and the Pacific. The specter of a gigantic racial conflict seemed to alarm American admirals most. They feared that control and exploitation of China’s resources and manpower would enable Japan to attain a “unification of the yellow race” that would “sweep over the world.” The “rising tide of color,” advancing eastward over the Pacific, would threaten not only white supremacy but the security of the United States itself.45 This lurid yellow peril image essentially reiterated Mahan’s nightmare of the clash of the Eastern and Western civilizations.
As during earlier war scares, the crisis of 1920–21 was accompanied by a resurgence of the immigration question. Japan resented the passage in 1920 of a new alien land law in California that made it totally impossible for Japanese to own land. The immigration issue, while not a casus belli for Japan, exacerbated Japanese resentment. Warlike propaganda ran rampant on both sides. The Japanese government was especially concerned about an inflammatory book by Lieutenant General Satō Kōjirō, If Japan and America Fight. The American public was treated to equally sensational fare that included such titles as The Menace of Japan, The Rising Tide of Color, The New Japanese Peril, and Must We Fight Japan?46 Overall, in 1920–21 Japan and the United States seemed to be moving toward a head-on collision.
THE ROAD TO WASHINGTON
Behind the Japanese-American naval race were the shared Mahanian doctrines of the supremacy of the battleship and the clash of rival battle lines in a decisive fleet encounter. This mutually shared doctrine had originally incited and later intensified the competition between the two navies over the capital ship ratio,47 as noted by Vice Admiral Katō Kanji, the dogged opponent of naval limitation. He later wrote, “The Japanese navy’s studies on strategy tallied exactly with their American counterparts.” It was natural, he noted, that “strategic planning in any nation, even that bearing on the secret aspects of national defense, should lead to identical conclusions if based on the same premises and reliable data.” The two navies based their conclusions on Mahanian sea power doctrine, reinforced by map maneuvers, large- and small-scale exercises, and study of naval history. Noting a mirror image, Katō Kanji explained, “This is precisely the reason why the United States has been trying to impose a 60 percent ratio on us and why we have consistently demanded a 70 percent ratio.”48
The Japanese navy’s study of naval limitation began as early as June 1919, when Navy Minister Katō Tomosaburō appointed a special committee, under his direct control, to study the matter. (Originally navy leaders anticipated that the problem of naval limitation would come up in the League of Nations.) The formula this committee presented became the guideline for the navy’s position at the Washington Conference. Chaired by Rear Admiral Abo Kiyokazu, head of the Operations Division, this committee consisted of captain-rank officers from both the Navy Ministry and the Naval General Staff, including Yamanashi Katsunoshin, Nomura Kichisaburō, Kobayashi Seizō, and Suetsugu Nobumasa—all of whom were to participate in the three naval conferences of the 1920s. The committee’s report, presented to Katō on 21 July 1921, shortly after Japan had received the invitation to the Washington Conference, stated, first, that “Japan does not persist in building the eight-eight fleet as long as it can keep balance with the Anglo-American powers.” This was a retreat from an earlier committee report of June 1920, which had stated that an eight-eight fleet was the minimum requirement. Second, and more important, it confirmed the earlier report’s assertion that Japan “absolutely required” a ratio of 70 percent or more against the U.S. Navy. “There can be absolutely no room whatsoever for compromise on this ratio,” the report categorically stated. This was, of course, a restatement of the long-standing naval conviction about minimum security needs.49
The demand for a 70 percent ratio was based on a prerequisite: prohibition of further U.S. fortification of the Philippines and Guam. (American bases there were not yet adequately equipped to repair and maintain ships, much less to accommodate a large fleet.) Any buildup of bases on these islands, the research committee stated, would eliminate Japan’s geographic and strategic advantage that had hindered U.S. plans to wage a transpacific offensive. On the other hand, if a base in Guam were reinforced, a great American fleet could anchor and be repaired there. “Should this [fortification] problem fail to be satisfactorily resolved,” the report warned, “naval arms limitation would not only be meaningless but may conceivably prove suicidal to Japan.” However if the United States refrained from building up these bases, its badly damaged battleships would have to return to Hawaii, and the danger of such a long passage would be prohibitive. Navy Minister Katō agreed with the report. Apparently he regarded the fortification problem as more crucial to Japan than hair-splitting bargains over fleet ratios. If the United States built impregnable fortresses in the Philippines or Guam and obtained footholds in the western Pacific, Japan’s fleet ratio would become meaningless. On the ratio question, therefore, he would take a flexible stand at the Washington Conference.50
The naval limitation committee presented its report as a resolution embodying the navy’s consensus. Although Katō Tomosaburō, who was appointed chief delegate to the Washington Conference, did not officially endorse the resolution regarding the 70 percent ratio, he could not entirely ignore the firmly held naval consensus. Katō Tomosaburō told Vice Admiral Katō Kanji, President of the Naval Staff College, who accompanied him to Washington as a chief naval expert, that the committee’s reports and resolutions should guide the negotiations at Washington.51 However, Katō Tomosaburō did not consider himself bound by these reports.
As the head delegate, Navy Minister Katō resolved to have a completely free hand at the coming conference, and he had Prime Minister Hara Kei’s full support. He had already been navy minister for six years and his position was second only to the prime minister. He was ideally suited to head the Japanese delegation in Washington.
The government’s instruction to Katō was carefully drafted to give Katō maximum discretion. Significantly, it did not mention the ratio question. Instead, it contained a flexible provision requiring naval strength “sufficient at least to maintain a rough parity with the effective operational strength that the United States can command in Far Eastern waters.” The instruction directed the delegates to preserve the status quo in Pacific fortifications. Above all, the instruction stated, “The [Japanese] Empire must attach special importance to maintenance of friendly relations with the United States”—a condition to which Katō Tomosaburō paid close attention.52
Shidehara later recalled that from the beginning, Katō seemed to have decided that Japan could negotiate on the basis of a 60 percent ratio, although he did not tell this to anyone. Katō said, “A well fortified Guam would be as impregnable as Heligoland in Germany. If the status quo is agreed on Pacific fortifications, Japan can fight the United States with a 60 percent ratio.”53
The stage was now set for negotiations in Washington. Japanese-American relations had already reached such a critical state that both sides fretted about whether the Washington gathering would be able to dissipate war clouds. The assembled leaders felt that the only way to reach a naval agreement was to treat it within a broader political context. Putting my conclusion first, the Washington experiment showed that successful naval limitation must include an across-the-board adjustment of political questions of the Pacific and the Far East. Before discussing the naval negotiations in the next chapter, I will digress and briefly trace the process of Japanese-American détente as it related to the naval issue.
DÉTENTE IN THE MAKING
Political scientist Hedley Bull wrote, “Armaments are causes as well as effects, and shape political motives and intentions as well as express them.” To put it differently, naval arms limitation depends on the wider context of political agreements and accommodations among the participating nations.54 None recognized this better than Charles Evans Hughes, American Secretary of State and Chairman of the Washington Conference. The Washington naval treaty did not stand by itself; it was part of “the Washington system,” a cooperative framework that defined naval, political, and economic relations among Japan, the United States, and Great Britain in East Asia and the Pacific.55 Unlike subsequent naval conferences, the Washington Conference succeeded because its delegates recognized this relation between naval and political issues.
Thus the American invitation to the Washington Conference called for discussions “to seek ground of agreements as to principles and their application to find a solution of Pacific and Far Eastern problems.” President Warren G. Harding, Secretary Hughes, and his fellow delegates stressed the linkage between the naval treaty and Far Eastern political settlements. As long as Japan and the United States feared going to war over the China problem, naval arms limitation was out of the question.56
When Tokyo received America’s invitation to the Washington Conference, many Japanese were alarmed by such a linkage; they suspected that the naval limitation proposal merely camouflaged an attack on Japan’s position in China.57 However, the influential segment of the Japanese government recognized that a basic reorientation of its China policy was imperative to prevent further diplomatic isolation and deterioration. A Foreign Ministry memorandum crisply stated, “Necessity to shift our policy. Otherwise, the fear of total isolation and a Japanese-American war.”58 Shidehara, ambassador to Washington and the foremost advocate of peaceful economic policy, pleaded with Tokyo for a “constructive” policy to stabilize East Asia. He assured Tokyo that because the conference sought naval limitation and general détente in the Pacific and East Asia, Japan had nothing to fear.59
As Shidehara had surmised, the Harding administration, with its ties to business interests, had a great stake in improving relations with Japan. Hughes told Shidehara in preconference conversations, “The United States desires to eliminate all the sources of conflict and misunderstanding in the Far East in a frank and friendly spirit.” Shidehara saw that the American government was primarily interested in the success of naval limitation and that it would be satisfied with a reasonable compromise regarding East Asian problems.60
However, one anticipated stumbling block was Japan’s resistance to a categorical restatement of the Open Door in China. Hughes had been warned by State Department officials that Japan would insist on confirming its special interests in Manchuria. In a perceptive memorandum to the American delegation, Edwin L. Neville of the State Department’s Far Eastern Division pinpointed America’s weak position: “Our Open Door policy cannot be sustained without force,” but the United States had never been willing to supply force. “Besides, we have at different times even recognized the special interests of Japan.”61 Chandler P. Anderson, a member of the American delegation, handed Hughes a copy of a letter President Theodore Roosevelt had written to warn his successor, William H. Taft, in 1910: “As regards Manchuria, if the Japanese choose to follow a course of conduct to which we are adverse, we cannot stop it unless we are prepared to go to war.”62
Hughes carefully noted that the American people overwhelmingly demanded naval limitation, while few took serious interest in East Asian issues. It followed that he could not afford to antagonize Japan regarding East Asian questions, for fear of jeopardizing the naval negotiations. On the other hand, he feared that the U.S. Senate might never ratify a naval treaty if East Asian political problems were left unsolved.
Advisers’ recommendations all pointed to the wisdom of handling Japan with kid gloves. Hughes opposed Japan’s “aggressive” policy of “political domination” but he was willing to recognize “natural and legitimate economic opportunities for Japan.”63 Regarding Japan’s “legitimacy,” however, the American delegates held differing opinions. Herbert C. Hoover, Secretary of Commerce and a member of the advisory committee for the American delegation, admired the Japanese and sympathized with their plight. He emphasized that given its vital dependence on China’s resources and market and faced with the chaotic condition there, “Japan certainly had legitimate reasons” for its continental policy.64 Elihu Root, one of the American delegates and an elder statesman of the Republican Party, was the most outspoken in defense of Japan. He held Japan in high regard as a peacekeeping and stabilizing power in East Asia, and he believed that Americans must recognize the cold logic of Japan’s position there. Believing that the moderate liberals controlled the Tokyo government, Root advocated a manifestly friendly policy calculated to strengthen this group.65
The most comprehensive examination of the conference strategy was presented by J. Reuben Clark, Special Council to the State Department and Hughes’s assistant. His memorandum included the following points.
1. America’s “only prime and great concern” is the “security” of the United States in the Pacific region. The problem of naval limitation is of vital importance, but Far Eastern questions are only secondary.
2. This conference must do the utmost to take away from Japan its distrust and fear of the United States.
3. The doctrine of “special relationship” must be agreed upon. Japan is right in its claim that it has a special relationship in China.66
In giving priority to America’s security in the Pacific, emphasizing the primacy of naval limitation, and calling for recognition of Japan’s special interests, Clark was clearly in line with Rooseveltian realism. Most of the points he raised in this memorandum were incorporated in Hughes’s diplomacy at the conference.
Hughes gave his views in his instruction to the American delegation: “He had gone along on the theory always that this country would never go to war over any aggression on the part of Japan in China, and that consequently the most that could be done would be to stay Japan’s hand.”67 Like Root, Hughes pursued a friendly policy intended to bolster liberal moderates who supported naval limitation. The stage was set for Japanese-American détente at the Washington Conference.
COMPROMISE SETTLEMENT AND THE WASHINGTON SYSTEM
The Washington Conference started its sessions on 12 November 1921. Hughes took a bold initiative on the opening day, proposing a drastic naval reduction. He calculated that his proposal would instantly receive such overwhelming support, not only from the American people but also from world public opinion (including Japan’s), that Japan would have no choice but to accept it. Japan would not dare take an obstructionist position that would torpedo the conference, because it would be denounced by the whole world. Hughes was proved right. Japan’s chief delegate, Admiral Katō Tomosaburō, was greatly moved by the enthusiastic reception that greeted the Hughes was proposal and concluded that Japan “must pay dearly for opposing it.”68 (See Chapter 4.)
In his conference strategy Hughes had linked the naval question with Far Eastern issues. If naval limitation were jeopardized by Japan’s intransigence regarding Far Eastern problems, Japan would be condemned by the whole world, so it would have to cooperate regarding Far Eastern questions. Hughes’s strategy worked beautifully. The most important tasks for the Japanese delegates were to wipe out the stigma of a “militaristic” and “aggressive” nation and extricate Japan from diplomatic isolation. Each time a deadlock over a Far Eastern issue (especially the Shantung question) threatened the success of the naval treaty, the Japanese delegates tried to save the conference, entreating Tokyo to make one compromise after another. The Japanese delegates, like their American counterparts, understood that naval arms limitation depended on a wider context of political accommodation.
Hughes’s larger design was to start the process of Pacific détente. First, the United States took the initiative by demonstrating its friendly and peaceful posture. As Root secretly apprised a Japanese delegate, the United States had proposed drastic naval limitations at the outset of the conference in order to assure Japan that it held no hostile intentions.69 Throughout, Hughes was careful to avoid any overt threat, relying on diplomatic persuasion and the force of public opinion. In this respect, Hughes’s success was nearly complete.
In contrast to his dramatic appeal for naval limitation, on Far Eastern problems Hughes secretly negotiated with Japanese delegates to reach quiet compromise settlements. He entrusted the pro-Japanese Root to keep close liaison with a Japanese delegate. Root said he was going to help Japan “to extricate itself from the present difficulties,” such as the Shantung question. As for Manchuria, he anticipated that the Japanese “would undoubtedly insist upon maintaining their hold on [Manchuria],” admitting that “a good deal was to be said” in favor of Japan’s position.70
When he drafted the Root Resolution that became the basis of the Nine-Power Treaty relating to China, Root quietly inserted the so-called security clause: a pledge committing the signatories to refrain “from countenancing action inimical to the security of [signatory] powers.” It was an implicit concession to Japan’s traditional contention that its special interests in Manchuria were vital to its “national defense and economic existence.” Furthermore, Root secretly reassured the Japanese delegates, “There will be no change in Japan’s present position in Manchuria.”71
America’s navy men were quick to note the relation between the Nine-Power Treaty and the naval treaty. Because the General Board regarded the fifteen unfinished American battleships, earmarked for scrapping, as the “very potent argument” with which to force Japan into a Far Eastern settlement, it recommended that the naval treaty “be not signed until a satisfactory solution regarding Far Eastern Questions has been embodied in a treaty and signed.” The navy men felt that, because the naval treaty drastically reduced American influence in the Pacific, the United States must obtain political compensations that would protect its interests in the Far East.72
Regarding the Shantung question, the Tokyo government firmly opposed any American intervention, claiming it was a “problem of sole concern to Japan and China.” But Shidehara urged Tokyo to recognize that “it was extremely important to solve the Shantung question,” which had become a crucial political issue for the United States because of the controversy over the ratification of the Versailles treaty.73 Hughes was careful to avoid confrontation with Japan over Shantung lest naval negotiations be jeopardized. Unless the Shantung question was solved, however, he feared the Senate would refuse to ratify the naval treaty.
Shidehara, fully aware of the political significance of Shantung to the Republican administration, warned Tokyo that if the Shantung negotiations ruptured, the Senate would not ratify the naval treaty, and Japan would be blamed for the subsequent failure of the conference. Like Hughes, Shidehara linked the Shantung question to the naval issue and tried to solve both questions in a broad context of Japanese-American détente. His repeated entreaties finally moved the Tokyo government.74
Admiral Katō Tomosaburō confidentially reported to the naval authorities in Tokyo that the American delegates, especially Elihu Root, were “extremely friendly to Japan,” while they were responding to China’s concrete proposals “merely with harmless resolutions.” This unexpectedly friendly attitude of the United States encouraged Katō to redouble his efforts to come to agreement on the naval issue.75
Termination of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance was another important prerequisite for a naval limitation treaty. As long as this alliance remained, the United States would have to expand its navy to protect against a joint Anglo-Japanese naval confrontation. Hughes held that naval limitation depended on termination of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. But this alliance was not even on the conference agenda, and it would have been tricky for a third party to demand its annulment. Having accepted the drafts of Shidehara and the British chief delegate, Arthur Balfour, as the basis of negotiations, and careful not to offend Japan, Hughes skillfully transformed these drafts into the Four-Power Treaty, “a general and harmless international agreement” among the United States, Japan, Britain, and France. Hughes limited the scope of its application to the Pacific islands, guaranteeing the status quo of the Pacific and the security of the Philippines.76 For the United States the Four-Power Treaty was a diplomatic triumph: it gracefully terminated the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, demilitarized the western Pacific, and facilitated a nonfortification agreement regarding the Pacific islands that was stipulated in the naval treaty. Along with the naval treaty, the Four-Power Treaty was a part of a Pacific security system. Japan and Britain accepted the treaty because they gave priority to naval limitation and improved relations with the United States. Japan lost the alliance, but it was assured its position as a member of the Washington system.77
Henceforth peaceful cooperation became the mainstream of Japanese foreign policy. This historic turnabout hinged on a remarkable improvement in Japanese-American relations. The Japanese delegates were relieved at the unexpectedly “sympathetic attitude” of the Americans and appreciated their efforts “not to hurt our feelings or honor.” Shidehara declared, “There is no doubt that Hughes has respected Japan’s position so far as possible.”78 Regarding the naval negotiations (which will be covered in the next chapter), Katō Tomosaburō cabled the government, “Here in Washington we delegates scarcely imagined such things as Anglo-American oppression.” Eager to emphasize this point, he declared at the dinner that Prime Minister Takahashi gave to welcome back the delegates, “There are some prejudiced people who claim that Japan had been oppressed by the Anglo-American powers, but I can categorically declare that those of us who negotiated the treaties at Washington assure you that this was not the case.”79
Hughes emphasized the importance of mutual trust and friendly rapport that went beyond individual treaties, which he called the “spirit of the Washington Conference.”80 Admiral Katō Tomosaburō, known for reticence, spoke with equal eloquence: “The conference succeeded because the participating nations agreed on the pressing need to establish world peace and alleviate the burden [of armaments]. And these two aims can be accomplished only by freeing ourselves from the old system of exclusive competition among the powers and by creating a new world of international cooperation.”81 The American naval attaché in Tokyo reported how completely the Washington Conference had dispelled the “war psychology”: “I have told members of the Cabinet and other Government bodies repeatedly that prior to the Washington Conference, whether rightly or wrongly, there existed a war psychology and consequential war talk. The Washington Conference has dispelled these war clouds. . . . It is truly as important as any treaty and agreement reached there. It is our mutual duty to see that this mental attitude is maintained and bettered on both sides of the Pacific.”82
The naval treaty succeeded largely because it was integrated into the Washington treaty system, which rested on an across-the-board adjustment of political questions. However, as we shall see in the next chapter, from the time of the treaty’s inception, a strong undercurrent of opposition to the Washington system ran through the navy. The malcontents, particularly those on the Naval General Staff, led by Katō Kanji, reacted violently against the naval treaty, regarding it as a flagrant Anglo-American imposition of an inferior naval ratio on Japan. Preoccupied with strategic imperatives, they did not comprehend the broad political considerations that had brought about Pacific détente. The enemies of the naval treaty were determined to scrap the Five-Power Treaty just as soon as soon as they seized power. This split between the pro-treaty and anti-treaty forces plagued the Japanese navy during the 1920s.