Abstract
The news of the signing of the alliance with Britain, announced by the Japanese government on 12 February 1902 was received in Japan with great excitement and stimulated a ‘festive outburst’, which soon swept across the country. One of the opinion-leading magazines, Tōyō Keizai Zasshi, pointed out in an editorial that as the nation was being ‘carried away in euphoria ... the prices of the national flags of Great Britain and Japan as well as those of champagne have doubled’, and recorded that ‘the people, both in government and civilian life, are busy congratulating one another constantly’.1 Another magazine, Jiji Shimpo, expressed its delight on the signing of the alliance as follows:
It was only forty or so years since Japan had opened its doors to the world community, and barely five or six years earlier that it had demonstrated its power to the world in the Sino-Japanese War; it was now able to attain, quite suddenly, full status as a world entity among the most powerful nations. It looks as though it is but a captivating dream. Is it really so?2
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Notes
Richard Storry, ‘The Image of Japan in England’, 27 February 1970, cited in Bulletin of the International House of Japan, May 1970.
F.S.G. Piggott, Broken Thread, (Aldershot, 1950), p. 271.
Ian Nish, Alliance in Decline: A Study in Anglo-Japanese Relations, 1908–1923, (London, 1972), p. 384.
Misuzu Shobo (ed.), Gendai Shi Shiryo, (Documents on Modern History of Japan), (Tokyo, 1963), series 4, p. 44.
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Mizuno Hironori, ‘Analysis of the New Policy of National Defence’, Chuokoron, April 1926.
Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (JMFA) (ed.), Nihon Gaikō Nenpyō narabini Shuyō-Bunsho (Chronology of Japanese Foreign Policy and Important Documents), (Tokyo, 1955), vol. II, pp. 361–2.
Satō Naotake, Kaiko Hachijūnen (Eighty Years of My Life), (Tokyo, 1963), p. 375.
Satō Tetsutarō, Teikoku Kokubō Shi-Ron (On the Defence of Imperial Japan), (Tokyo, 1908), Preface.
Takegoshi Yosaburō, Nangoku-Ki, (The Story of Southern Area), (Tokyo, 1910), cited in Ikeda Kiyoshi, Kaigun to Nippon, (The Navy and Japan), (Chukōshinsho, 1979), p. 88.
Sumio Hatano and Sadao Asada, ‘The Japanese Decision to Move South (1939–1941)’, cited in R. Boyce and E. M. Robertson (eds), Paths to War (London, 1989), p. 385.
Craigie to Foreign Office, 7 May 1938, Craigie to Halifax, 14 December 1938, FO 371/21521; ADM1/9909, cited in A. Marder, Old Friends, New Enemies, (Oxford, 1981), p. 25.
Ishikawa Shingo, Shinjuwan eno Keii, (The Road to Pearl Harbor), (Jiji Tsūshinsha, 1960), p. 114.
John W.M. Chapman (ed. and translator), The Price of Admiralty: The War Diary of the German Naval Attaché in Japan, 1939–43, (Sussex, 1985), vol. II, p. 338.
Sanbōhonbu (ed.), Sugiyama Memo, (The Memoirs of Sugiyama), (Hara Shobo, 1967), vol. I, p. 157.
Inoki Masamichi (ed.), Nihon Seiji Gaikō Shiryō Sen, (Selected documents on Japan’s domestic and foreign policy), (Yūshindō, 1967), p. 276.
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© 1992 T.G. Fraser and Peter Lowe
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Kiyoshi, I. (1992). The Road to Singapore: Japan’s View of Britain, 1922–41. In: Fraser, T.G., Lowe, P. (eds) Conflict and Amity in East Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12160-1_3
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