Race War!: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire

10. Race World

10 Race World RACE MADE MORE CONVOLUTED and intricate the ability of allies on all sides of the war to come together. Even when seemingly absent, as in relations between Washington and London, the infamous “colour bar” provided fertile soil for the growth of ethnic and other differences. Such differences also made it more difficult to confront Japan’s particu­ lar challenge to white supremacy. The ever present race factor made some Chinese hostile to the Empire even as Tokyo rampaged through Asia; it allowed some Mexicans to look skeptically toward their colos­ sal northern neighbor. It complicated relations—thankfully—between Tokyo and Berlin. It helped to propel the war, then prolonged it. A “vigorous anti­British” attitude characterized the great Chinese pa­ triot, Sun Yat­Sen, as late as the 1920s, not to mention many of his com­ patriots. To those of “pure European descent,” and “to the denizens of the Treaty Ports he came to seem a virtual Bolshevik.” In particular “[his] new relations with Russia drew Western fire.” At his “last major address” in Kobe in late 1924, he spoke of a subject dear to the hearts of his Japanese hosts, “Pan­Asianism.” Like Nehru and Du Bois before him, he too pointed to Japan’s defeat over Russia as a turning point in the devolution of white supremacy. “We regarded that Russian defeat by Japan as the defeat of the West by the East,” he proclaimed. This was a continuation of Sun’s nationalism, as “the first cause in which Sun Yat­ Sen and his Japanese friends collaborated was that of Philippine inde­ pendence,” a collaboration which had begun as early as 1898. Sun’s po­ sition on the controversial race question was as blunt as that of his Japanese friends. As Marius B. Jansen put it, “the idea of an Asiatic union under Japanese leadership to combat Western imperialism was not merely the contrivance of Japanese imagination. . . . For Sun and his friends, China and Japan had so much in common that there was no rea­ son why they should not work together.” As Sun once put it during one 251 252 RACE WORLD of his many visits to Japan, “If there were Europeans here tonight . . . they would not be able to tell the Chinese from the Japanese.”1 In fact, “in the first decade of the twentieth century, tens of thou­ sands of Chinese youth sought a modern education in Japan,” at a time when they were few and far between in the United States and the United Kingdom.2 In 1905, “buoyed by Japanese success against Russia and angered by American mistreatment of Chinese immigrants, Chi­ nese students, some [just] returned from study in Japan, organized an anti­American boycott, arguably the first sustained nationalist move­ ment in Chinese history.”3 At that conjuncture, in the aftermath of Japan’s victory over Russia, Tokyo “occupied in the regard of the Asi­ atic revolutionaries the place later held by Moscow.”4 As a young trav­ eler, Sun often masqueraded as Japanese to avoid harassment, for, as he put it, “when the Japanese began to be treated with more respect, I had no trouble in passing. . . . I owe a great deal to this circumstance, as oth­ erwise I would not have escaped many dangerous situations.”5 When the Japanese authorities were tried as war criminals after 1945, they sought refuge in their relationships with the colored, partic­ ularly Sun. According to Yasaburo Shimonaka, Japan founded the “Greater East Association” which was “based upon the following arti­ cles: blood is thicker than water; China and Japan are brother coun­ tries.” All this was motivated, he argued, by Sun Yat­sen. “Sun Yat­Sen was the origin of this principle and Matsui was the echo.”6 Kumaichi Yamamoto, former Japanese Ambassador to Thailand, argued that the concept of the Greater East Asia Co­Prosperity Sphere, Pan­Asianism, and all the rest all came from Sun.7 But these ideas were rejected. One Soviet writer also pointed to “close ties between the Black Dragon and . . . Sun Yat­sen. For many years he collaborated with the Black Dragon Society. . . . Sun Yat­sen as well as the Black Dragon [So­ ciety] aimed at driving all Europeans and Americans out of Asia. In all biographies of Sun Yat­sen written for Europeans and Americans, this aim was usually disguised. To him, however, it was a guiding princi­ ple.” Indeed, argues this analyst, by the time of his death Sun was not...