The Japanese racial equality proposal

On 13 February 1919, in Paris, at a meeting of the commission drafting the charter of the future League of Nations, the Japanese plenipotentiary Baron Nobuaki Makino tabled an amendment to the draft Covenant. Under it the member states of the League were to undertake to accord “as soon as possible” equal and just treatment in every respect to the nationals of other member states, “making no distinction, either in law or in fact, on account of their race or nationality”. Japan was the only non-Western great power among the victors of the Great War, and it wanted the new world order to acknowledge this explicitly. The amendment fell that same day, and when two months later the Japanese returned to it in a softened form, a majority of the commission supported it, but its chairman, the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, ruled that it had not been adopted. The loudest opponent of the Japanese proposal was the Australian prime minister, Billy Hughes, a champion of the “White Australia” policy. In Japan the rejection of the principle of racial equality was long remembered as proof that the West did not regard the Japanese as its equals.

Japan in Paris

Japan entered the war on the side of the Entente in August 1914, invoking its alliance with Britain of 1902. That autumn it seized the German base of Qingdao in the Chinese province of Shandong and Germany’s Pacific islands north of the equator: the Marianas, the Carolines and the Marshall Islands. In 1915 it imposed the Twenty-One Demands on China, and in 1917 it obtained secret promises from Britain, France, Russia and Italy that after the war it would keep Germany’s rights in Shandong and the islands. Its navy escorted convoys in the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. It did not, however, shed much blood on land, and its expansion at China’s expense aroused growing mistrust in Washington and London.

In January 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, Japan took its seat among the five great powers. It had two places on the Council of Ten, alongside the United States, Britain, France and Italy. The delegation was formally headed by Prince Kinmochi Saionji, a former prime minister and one of the last of the genrō (elder statesmen), who reached Paris only at the beginning of March. In practice the delegation was led by Makino, a former foreign minister and the son of Toshimichi Ōkubo, one of the founders of Meiji Japan. He was assisted by the ambassador in London, Sutemi Chinda, the ambassador in Paris, Keishirō Matsui, and the ambassador in Rome, Hikokichi Ijūin. Among the younger members of the delegation were Fumimaro Konoe, later prime minister; the press spokesman Yōsuke Matsuoka, who in 1933 would lead Japan out of the League of Nations; and Makino’s son-in-law, the diplomat Shigeru Yoshida.

In Paris the Japanese pursued above all their own interests: Shandong and the Pacific islands. On European matters they hardly spoke, which earned them the name of “silent partners”. The government in Tokyo approached the idea of a League of Nations with reserve. Prime Minister Takashi Hara, who had taken office in September 1918, wanted cooperation with America and Britain, but in the government’s Advisory Council on Foreign Affairs and in the press there were fears that an organisation dominated by “white” nations would be used to hold Japan back. In guidelines adopted on 13 November 1918 the foreign minister, Kōsai Uchida, wrote that since racial prejudice between nations had not disappeared, the League might prove “seriously disadvantageous” to the empire. If it were created, however, Japan could not remain outside it, but should take care to remove “the disadvantages arising from racial prejudice”. In December 1918 Konoe published a much-discussed article, “Reject an Anglo-American-centred peace”, in which he argued that Anglo-Saxon slogans of justice served to perpetuate the dominance of the rich powers.

Where the amendment came from

Behind the Japanese demand lay a quarter of a century of humiliation. In the United States a campaign against Japanese immigrants had been growing since the beginning of the 20th century. In 1906 the San Francisco authorities tried to move Japanese children into schools for Asians; in 1907–1908 the so-called Gentlemen’s Agreement forced Tokyo to stop the emigration of labourers; and in 1913 California barred aliens “ineligible for citizenship” – in practice Asians – from acquiring land. Canada restricted Japanese immigration, and since 1901 Australia had pursued the “White Australia” policy: an official could stop any unwanted arrival by giving him a dictation test in any European language of the official’s choosing. In the West there had been talk for years of the “Yellow Peril”. For the Japanese, who had won a war against Russia and had for some years no longer had to endure unequal treaties, such treatment was an insult to a nation that regarded itself as a great power.

The delegation first sought American support. At the beginning of February Makino and Chinda put two versions of the clause to Wilson’s adviser, Colonel Edward House. House received them sympathetically, and it seemed that Wilson would agree. Resistance came from the British side. The British Empire delegation included representatives of the dominions, and for Australia, New Zealand and Canada any mention of racial equality raised the question of their immigration laws. Meanwhile the issue had become a cause célèbre in Japan. On 5 February some three hundred representatives of parties and associations met at the Seiyōken restaurant in Tokyo for a rally of the newly formed League for the Abolition of Racial Discrimination, backed by people from the circle of the nationalist Mitsuru Tōyama. The government could no longer back out of the matter without losing face.

13 February

The League of Nations Commission met under Wilson’s chairmanship in House’s suite at the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris. It comprised two representatives from each of the five great powers: for Britain Lord Robert Cecil and General Jan Smuts; for France Léon Bourgeois and the lawyer Ferdinand Larnaude; for Italy the prime minister, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, and Vittorio Scialoja; for Japan Makino and Chinda. The smaller states were represented by, among others, the Belgian Paul Hymans, the Chinese Wellington Koo and the Greek prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, and from February also by Poland’s delegate, Roman Dmowski. The commission was just completing the first draft of the Covenant, which Wilson wanted to present to the whole conference the next day before returning to America for several weeks.

The draft contained an Article 21 on religious freedom, introduced by Wilson. Makino proposed adding after it a sentence on the equality of nations and the equal treatment of their nationals regardless of race. His argument was practical. The League was to be a system of collective security, and its members might be called upon to defend a state under attack, including by force of arms. It was hard to ask a nation to shed its blood for a state that discriminated against its citizens. He recalled that soldiers of different races had fought side by side in the war and that a “common bond of sympathy and gratitude” had been born between them. He also stressed that the amendment would not change anyone’s rights overnight and that the manner of its implementation would be left to governments.

Cecil was the first to reply. He considered the matter so delicate that it was better not to raise it at all. Venizelos then proposed that the clause on religious freedom, which was also contentious, be removed from the Covenant as well. According to the Japanese report, the Belgian representative objected to the substance of the amendment, the delegates of Brazil, Romania and Czechoslovakia showed sympathy for the Japanese, and the Chinese delegate said he was awaiting his government’s instructions. The commission struck out the whole of Article 21, and the Japanese amendment with it. Makino declared that his government would return to the matter. The next day, 14 February, Wilson read the draft Covenant to the plenary session of the conference. It contained not a word about either religion or race.

The Australian veto

When the Japanese proposal became known, the west coast of the United States reacted with alarm. Wilson, who was at home from mid-February to mid-March, realised that in the Senate, where the Republicans were already attacking the League of Nations, any clause that could be read as interference in American immigration law would doom ratification. The Japanese therefore toned down their proposal. They dropped the language of equal treatment in every respect and proposed merely writing into the preamble of the Covenant “the endorsement of the principle of equality of nations and just treatment of their nationals”.

The toughest opponent proved to be Hughes. A small, partially deaf, hot-tempered former trade unionist from the Sydney waterfront, he regarded “White Australia” as the foundation of his country. At one meeting he declared that “ninety-five out of every hundred Australians” rejected the very idea of equality. He told the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, that if the clause went through he would leave the conference, and threatened to rouse public opinion in the dominions and the United States against it. In March Smuts and the Canadian prime minister, Robert Borden, tried to mediate between him and the Japanese and arranged a meeting between Hughes, Makino and Chinda. It went badly. The Japanese diplomats later described Hughes as loud and boorish, while he complained that they had showered him with bows. Hughes was prepared to accept a formula on the equality of nations only if it stated explicitly that it did not apply to immigration or to states’ right to decide whom they admitted. For the Japanese such a clause would have been empty, so they rejected it. The New Zealand prime minister, William Massey, thought likewise, though he was quieter about it than Hughes.

Lloyd George found himself in an awkward position. Japan had been Britain’s ally since 1902, and the principle of the equality of subjects did not in itself conflict with the idea of empire. But Lloyd George had no intention of breaking the unity of the imperial delegation for a cause that did not directly concern the British. France was well disposed towards the Japanese. Makino told journalists that the Japanese were not “too proud to fight” but were too proud to accept the place of a nation deemed inferior, and wanted nothing but “simple justice”. This was an allusion to Wilson’s famous remark of 1915 that Americans were “too proud to fight”.

11 April: a majority that lost

On the evening of 11 April 1919 the commission met for the last time to adopt the revised text of the Covenant. Makino proposed adding to the preamble the words on “the endorsement of the principle of equality of nations and just treatment of their nationals”. Cecil replied on behalf of the British Empire that he could not support the amendment and that the League itself should deal with the matter once it had been established. Orlando and Bourgeois spoke in favour of the amendment. The Frenchman said that it was impossible to reject a proposal that expressed “an indisputable principle of justice”. Wilson asked Makino not to press for a vote, but he insisted.

According to most accounts, 11 of the 17 commission members present voted for the amendment: both Japanese, both French and both Italian delegates, together with the delegates of China, Greece, Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Sources differ over the eleventh vote. Western studies attribute it to Brazil, while the Japanese delegation’s cable to Tokyo gives Portugal and lists Brazil among those who did not support the amendment, along with the Americans, the British, Romania and Poland. According to that cable, Dmowski justified his position with a formal objection that a principle not found in the articles of the Covenant should not be written into its preamble. No one formally voted against. The delegates of the United States and the British Empire simply did not support the motion.

Wilson then declared that the amendment had not been adopted. In view of “serious objections” on so important a matter, the decision required unanimity. Larnaude at once pointed out that a majority had voted in favour. Makino recalled that the commission had settled other questions by majority vote. Wilson replied that on matters of such weight it had always sought the agreement of all, or at least the absence of objection. Makino gave way, but asked that his statement and the result of the vote be entered in the minutes. Wilson agreed. Historians point out that the president knew the British, under pressure from Hughes, would not accept the clause, and that the American Senate would reject a Covenant that contained it.

On 28 April the conference adopted the Covenant of the League of Nations in plenary session. Makino made a speech announcing that Japan would raise the question of racial equality at every opportunity. He did not table the motion again.

Shandong

Two days later, on 30 April, Wilson, Lloyd George and the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, decided that Germany’s former rights in Shandong would pass to Japan. The Japanese had made it clear that without them they would not sign the treaty or join the League. Wilson, who after the walk-out of the protesting Italians feared another split, gave way on receiving a verbal assurance that Japan would return sovereignty over the peninsula to China and keep only economic rights. Many contemporary and later writers believed that Shandong was compensation for the rejection of the racial clause. The Japanese delegation denied this: the fate of the clause had been settled on 11 April, and the Big Three considered Shandong later. What is certain is that Japan gave way on an issue its public regarded as a matter of honour and won the one that mattered to its army and its economy. At the same time the conference awarded Japan Germany’s former Pacific islands as Class C mandated territories, and Australia, at Hughes’s insistence, the former German New Guinea. A Class C mandate allowed a territory to be governed as part of the mandatory’s own state, so Australia could keep Japanese settlers out of New Guinea.

For China the decision on Shandong was a disaster. On 4 May student protests broke out in Beijing that gave rise to the May Fourth Movement, and the Chinese delegation refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles. Japan returned Shandong to China only in 1922, after the Washington Conference.

Reactions

In Japan the press and political associations received the news with indignation. There were calls not to join the League at all. In the Advisory Council on Foreign Affairs Makino was accused of weakness; he was defended by Prime Minister Hara, who had never believed the clause would succeed and valued cooperation with America and Britain above a gesture. Konoe came away from Paris with a lasting dislike of the Anglo-Saxon world order. In Australia Hughes was triumphant. On his return he told parliament that he had brought the principle of “White Australia” back from the conference “as safe as it was on the day when it was first adopted”.

The Japanese initiative also had another side. In those same weeks, from 1 March 1919, Japanese police and troops were bloodily suppressing peaceful independence demonstrations in Korea, annexed in 1910, and no one in Tokyo asked the Chinese of Shandong for their views. Some Japanese commentators, such as Tanzan Ishibashi and Sakuzō Yoshino, reminded their compatriots that they themselves despised the Chinese and Koreans and that Japan would not admit Chinese immigrants. Historians stress that Tokyo was concerned above all with the status of the Japanese, not with the principle of the equality of all people, and that the clause was also a domestic compromise, meant to win a distrustful public over to the League of Nations. Even so, it was the first attempt to write a ban on racial discrimination into an international treaty, and its fate was followed with hope by people of colour around the world, including the Black press in the United States.

The long shadow of the rejected clause

The rejection of the clause did not immediately end Japan’s cooperation with the West. Japan joined the League of Nations as a permanent member of its Council, and in the 1920s its diplomats, such as Kijūrō Shidehara, pursued a policy of accommodation with Washington and London. But trust had been damaged. In 1921 Britain, under American and Canadian pressure, decided not to renew its alliance with Japan, which was replaced at the Washington Conference by a looser Four-Power Treaty. Paradoxically, one of those who argued for keeping the alliance was Hughes, who preferred to have Japan as an ally rather than an enemy. In 1924 the United States Congress passed an immigration act that closed the door to Japanese immigrants entirely. The Japanese called it the Japanese Exclusion Act, and some of the Japanese press and organisations called the day it came into force, 1 July 1924, a day of national humiliation. For many educated Japanese the refusal of 1919 and the act of 1924 merged into one: the West admitted Japan to the circle of great powers as long as it suited it, but would never accept it as an equal.

From this sense of grievance grew the pan-Asian propaganda of the 1930s. The army and the nationalists presented expansion in Manchuria and China as the liberation of Asia from the rule of the white man, and the slogan of justice for the coloured peoples served to justify conquest. Japan, which left the League of Nations in 1933, drew closer to Germany, the fruit of which was the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936 and the Tripartite Pact of 1940, even though Nazi racism ranked the Japanese below the “Aryans”. In November 1943 the joint declaration of the Greater East Asia Conference in Tokyo, signed by Japan and its puppet governments, proclaimed “the abolition of racial discrimination” throughout the world. In the occupied lands of that same “Co-Prosperity Sphere”, the Japanese treated the Chinese, the Koreans and the peoples of South-East Asia as inferior nations.

After the war Emperor Hirohito himself returned to the events of 1919. In the spring of 1946, in recollections dictated to courtiers and known as the “Emperor’s Monologue”, he named as one of the remote causes of the Pacific War the powers’ failure to accept the Japanese proposal on racial equality, and the persistent sense of a difference between yellow and white, exemplified by the rejection of Japanese immigrants in California. Historians treat this explanation with caution, since it shifts responsibility for the war onto the West, but they agree that 1919 was one of the moments at which Japan began to turn away from cooperation with the democracies. The principle that Wilson would not write into the League Covenant found its place in 1945 in the United Nations Charter, which lists among the organisation’s purposes respect for human rights “without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion”. The “White Australia” policy survived for more than another quarter of a century and was finally abolished only in 1973.