Jutarō Komura

Jutarō Komura was the most important Japanese diplomat of the era in which Japan, from a state shackled by unequal treaties, became a colonial power. A short, sickly son of an impoverished samurai and a Harvard graduate, he directed his country’s foreign policy for almost ten years. He concluded the alliance with Britain that enabled Japan to win the war with Russia, negotiated the peace at Portsmouth for which his compatriots wanted to lynch him, and carried through the annexation of Korea. It was he who decided that Japan would not share the railway in southern Manchuria with the Americans, and he who wrung from China the privileges that a quarter of a century later served the Kwantung Army as a pretext for conquering the region. He died in 1911 at the height of his success, but his successors pursued the policy he had begun right up to the catastrophe of 1945.

From Obi to Harvard

He was born on 26 October 1855 (the 16th day of the 9th month by the lunar calendar) in Obi, the seat of a small domain in Hyūga Province on the island of Kyūshū, now part of the city of Nichinan. He was the son of a low-ranking samurai who ran trading ventures on behalf of the domain. When his father’s enterprises failed, the family fell into debt, which Komura spent most of his adult life paying off. He studied at the domain school, and in 1870, aged fifteen, he was sent to Tokyo to the Daigaku Nankō, the school from which the University of Tokyo later grew.

In 1875 he was among the first group of scholarship students sent abroad to study by the Ministry of Education. He read law at Harvard University, where his acquaintances included Kentarō Kaneko, and then spent two years in the New York law office of Edwards Pierrepont, a former Attorney General of the United States. He returned to Japan at the end of 1880, speaking fluent English and knowing American law and politics better than almost anyone in the Tokyo of the day.

Official and envoy

He began at the Ministry of Justice, and in 1884 moved to the Foreign Ministry, where for several years he headed the translation bureau. His career advanced slowly: Komura did not belong to either of the great Satsuma and Chōshū cliques that shared out official posts between them. He was noticed only by the foreign minister Munemitsu Mutsu, who in 1893 sent him to Beijing as chargé d’affaires. Komura was there on the eve of the First Sino-Japanese War and was regarded as an advocate of a hard line towards China.

After the war he was sent to Korea at the most difficult moment for Japanese diplomacy. In October 1895 Japanese soldiers and hired thugs, instigated by the Japanese minister Gorō Miura, murdered Queen Min in her palace in Seoul. Komura came to investigate the affair and then replaced Miura as minister. In February 1896 King Gojong fled to the Russian legation, and Japanese influence in Seoul collapsed. All Komura could do was salvage what he could. In May 1896 he signed a memorandum with the Russian representative Karl Waeber in which the two states agreed that each could keep small forces in Korea to protect its legations and nationals. It was the first in a series of agreements in which Russia and Japan tried to divide influence in Korea between them.

In the following years Komura was vice-minister for foreign affairs, and from 1898 minister in Washington, St Petersburg and Beijing. In the Chinese capital he represented Japan in the negotiations that followed the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion, which ended with the signing of the final protocol in September 1901.

Minister of the war with Russia

In September 1901 Prime Minister Tarō Katsura entrusted him with the Foreign Ministry. Two approaches were then contending in Tokyo. Hirobumi Itō wanted an understanding with Russia: Japan would recognise Russian interests in Manchuria and Russia Japanese interests in Korea. Komura believed that Russia would not stop at Manchuria and pinned his hopes on Britain, which feared Russian expansion in Asia. In December 1901 he presented the elder statesmen with a memorandum arguing that an alliance with London would bring Japan more benefit and less risk than an agreement with St Petersburg. He won them over. On 30 January 1902 the Anglo-Japanese Alliance was signed, regarded as the first alliance in history on equal terms between a European great power and an Asian state. Komura was made a baron.

The alliance ensured that if Japan went to war with Russia, no other power would come to Russia’s aid. In 1903, when Russia failed to withdraw its troops from Manchuria, Komura conducted negotiations with the Russian envoy Roman Rosen in which Japan proposed an exchange: Korea for Japan, Manchuria for Russia. The Russians were unwilling to give up Korea without conditions. On 6 February 1904 Japan broke off diplomatic relations, and two days later the war began. During the war Komura made sure that Japan had London and Washington on its side, and that it obtained the foreign loans without which it could not have waged the war.

Portsmouth

After Tsushima, on 31 May 1905, Komura instructed the Japanese minister in Washington to ask President Theodore Roosevelt to mediate. He knew, better than Japanese public opinion, that the country had no more money or men for further fighting. He went to America himself as chief plenipotentiary. Cheering crowds saw him off as he left Tokyo. He is said to have remarked then that when he came back people would behave quite differently.

At Portsmouth Komura was the opposite of the Russian delegate, Sergei Witte. He rarely spoke to journalists and stuck to his instructions and a cool tone. He obtained everything his government regarded as essential: recognition of Japan’s paramount position in Korea, the Russian lease of Port Arthur and Dalny, and the railway in southern Manchuria. He did not obtain an indemnity or the whole of Sakhalin. On 28 August the government and the elder statesmen, with the approval of Emperor Mutsuhito (Emperor Meiji), instructed him to make peace even without those gains. The next day he gave up the indemnity in exchange for the southern half of Sakhalin, and on 5 September he signed the treaty. In America he fell ill with typhoid, and he was also troubled by the tuberculosis from which he had suffered for years.

In Japan, where people had been counting on billions of yen in reparations, riots broke out. When Komura returned in October, flags were taken down in Yokohama at the sight of him, and at the station in Tokyo Prime Minister Katsura and the Navy Minister stood at his side, ready to shield him with their own bodies in case of an assassination attempt.

Manchuria for Japan alone

Even before Komura’s return, Prime Minister Katsura had reached a preliminary agreement with the American railway magnate Edward Harriman on joint management of the railway in southern Manchuria. Harriman dreamed of a railway around the world, and Katsura was counting on American capital. Komura, who knew America better than anyone in the government, judged that this would mean handing the Americans the fruits of a victory bought with blood. On his return he had the agreement annulled. It was a decision with far-reaching consequences: Manchuria was to be Japan’s domain, not an area of cooperation with America.

In November and December 1905 Komura personally negotiated in Beijing with China, which was represented by, among others, Yuan Shikai. On 22 December a treaty was signed in which China recognised the transfer to Japan of Russia’s rights in southern Manchuria and added new ones: the right to build railways, to exploit the forests along the Yalu and to have Manchurian towns opened to trade. In the secret minutes of the negotiations China was said to have undertaken not to build lines parallel to the Japanese railway that might take traffic away from it. The interpretation of this provision was the subject of constant disputes in the 1920s, and Japanese military men cited it as proof that China was breaking its agreements.

Earlier, in November 1905, Japan had imposed a protectorate treaty on Korea. Komura, who had obtained Russia’s consent to this at Portsmouth, and that of Britain and the United States before that, was one of its authors. In January 1906 he left office together with Katsura’s government.

Second term and the annexation of Korea

From 1906 to 1908 he was ambassador in London, and in 1907 he was made a count. In August 1908, when Katsura became prime minister for the second time, Komura returned to the Foreign Ministry. His programme had three aims: the annexation of Korea, the consolidation of Japan’s position in Manchuria and full tariff autonomy for Japan.

In November 1908 the ambassador in Washington, Kogorō Takahira, concluded an agreement with Secretary of State Elihu Root in which both states promised to respect each other’s possessions in the Pacific and the principle of the Open Door in China. A year later, when the American Secretary of State Philander Knox proposed internationalising all the railways in Manchuria, Komura came to terms with Japan’s former enemy: in July 1910 Japan and Russia concluded an agreement in which they jointly rejected the Knox plan and confirmed their spheres of influence.

In July 1909 the government adopted Komura’s proposal to annex Korea at the appropriate moment. The assassination of Hirobumi Itō in Harbin in October 1909 hastened matters. In 1910 General Masatake Terauchi, the new Resident-General, carried it out in Seoul: on 22 August the Korean prime minister, Yi Wan-yong, signed the annexation treaty, while Komura in Tokyo prepared its diplomatic setting, securing the tacit consent of the powers.

Komura’s last great achievement was the revision of the unequal treaties. Extraterritoriality for foreigners had already been abolished in 1899, but Japan still could not set its own customs duties. In February 1911 he signed a new commercial treaty with the United States, and in the following months with Britain and other states, restoring Japan’s full freedom in tariff matters. In 1911 he was made a marquis. At the end of August he left office together with Katsura’s government.

Death and memory

He died of tuberculosis on 26 November 1911 in the seaside town of Hayama, aged 56 (some Western sources give 25 November). He was buried in Aoyama Cemetery in Tokyo. To the end of his life he was poor for a man of his position, because he was paying off his father’s debts. His contemporaries mocked his slight figure, and the writer Ryōtarō Shiba, who made him one of the heroes of his novel about the war with Russia, immortalised his nickname, “the rat minister”.

Significance

Komura was the creator of Japan’s imperial diplomacy. He based Japan’s security on the alliance with Britain, which lasted until 1923, and on continental acquisitions that he considered essential to the country’s survival. In his time Japan annexed Korea, established itself in southern Manchuria and freed itself from the last restrictions imposed by the West. His decisions to break the agreement with Harriman and to come to terms with Russia against American plans for Manchuria began the rivalry with America over China that in 1941 turned into war. The South Manchuria Railway, which he won at Portsmouth and defended against the Americans, became in 1931 the scene of the Mukden Incident.

In Japan he was long regarded as a model diplomat who, in difficult circumstances, managed to win everything possible for his country. To Koreans he is one of those responsible for the loss of their independence. Historians point out that Komura himself learned in 1905 how dangerous an inflamed public opinion could be, yet the policy he left behind rested on the conviction that gains on the continent must be neither given up nor shared with anyone. In the 1930s that conviction led Japan from Manchuria to war with China and with the rest of the world.