Japan and the League of Nations: Empire and World Order, 1914–1938 (review)

The Japanese love of things international is fairly well known. Especially from the 1980s onward, internationalization, or kokusaika, has been celebrated like a national mantra. Some observers have charged that most Japanese do not grasp what “international” really means, often equating simply learning English to internationalization. But even such skeptics about Japan’s kokusaika cannot deny that those who espouse the so-called “internationalism” do not lack good intentions, for internationalism, by and large, is regarded as a “good thing.” It conjures up the image of peace rather than war, with people in intergovernmental institutions, nongovernmental organizations, and nonprofit organizations selflessly devoting their lives to creating a better world. To many, the United Nations stands as the epitome of such internationalism. Hence, most Japanese have no problem with their government making huge financial contributions to the United Nations, while Ozawa Ichirō, the former leader of the Democratic Party of Japan, can safely trumpet “UN-centrism” as the crux of his party’s foreign policy platform.

According to Thomas Burkman’s book Japan and the League of Nations, the Japanese did not always take to internationalism, however. During World War I, very few Japanese leaders were aware of the sort of substantive changes the nascent liberal internationalism would bring to the world of power politics. Theirs was the world governed by power, where anarchy ruled and territories had to be conquered. There was always international law, of course, but that meant little when more pressing needs for state prestige or survival were at hand. In short, a state—or indeed, a “power,” great or otherwise—had to look after itself: harsh, but, in a way, straightforward. Nonetheless, the ravages of war in Europe stimulated a yearning to end all wars. The Wilsonian conception of the League of Nations assumed, in a Lockean way, that the state would be led by what was good. And as in domestic politics, one could apply the rule of law to create some sort of order among states. This brand of thinking, no doubt a product of nineteenth-century liberalism, was at the very heart of the League of Nations. Right of conquest and unequal treaties were no longer deemed a legitimate tool of international politics. In their place, the more just international order based on the concepts of sovereignty, collective security, multilateral consultation, and international law would emerge.

In an engaging narrative, Burkman tells of Japan’s initial indifference to and later suspicion of these tides of liberal internationalism that begot the precursor organization to the United Nations. Thinking that the idea of the League was a fantastical scheme led by a zealous U.S. president, most Japanese policymakers did not make much of it at first. Another source of suspicion, never completely alleviated even at the heyday of Japan’s involvement with the League, lay in the Eurocentric nature of the League and its related institutions. Anyway, Geneva was too far away for most Japanese to conceive of it as a true control center of their country’s destiny. Some understandably questioned the Great Powers’ motives in setting up the League at that precise moment. By freezing the international political map in their favor and making sure that the aspiring revisionist powers, such as Japan, Germany, and Italy would not easily upset the precarious balance (or imbalance) of power, the Great Powers, some Japanese leaders warned, were establishing the League of Nations to safeguard their own interests.

Its halfhearted endorsement of liberal internationalism before the post– World War I peace settlements notwithstanding, we learn from Burkman’s book that what was indeed remarkable about Japan’s story was the way the country eventually came to embrace internationalism once it did opt for the policy of going along with the League. And this is the part of the story often overlooked in many narratives of Japan’s interwar history. Taisei junnō, or a policy...