In Masayuki Takayama’s 35 Chapters to Awaken the Japanese Mind (Themis), the roots of U.S. hostility toward Japan are traced not to Manchuria but to the 1893 Hawaii incident.
Japan’s protest shook white supremacy, shaping Theodore Roosevelt’s resolve to “contain Japan,” a reality later articulated by Mahathir Mohamad.

2016-03-30
The following is a continuation of “Chapter 2: The Strange Alliance between Kenzaburō Ōe and the Asahi Shimbun” from Masayuki Takayama’s 35 Chapters to Awaken the Japanese Mind (Themis, 1,000 yen).
What, then, first prompted Theodore to begin viewing Japan as an enemy?
Needless to say, it was not the Manchurian Incident forty years later, as Mr. Matsumoto claims.
This, too, is recorded in history books.
In 1893, when an American group seized the Kingdom of Hawaii by force, the Japanese cruiser Naniwa entered Honolulu and lodged a silent protest.
Under the 1885 Berlin Treaty, it had been agreed that whatever injustices white nations committed in the Third World were their own affair.
Japan’s dispatch of a warship to protest, however, inevitably drew global attention.
No matter how much whites believed they could act at will, this was unacceptable.
As a result, the United States was forced to delay the annexation of Hawaii by five years.
In that era, whites were regarded as gods.
In Argentina, for example, the few remaining indigenous people were massacred in the name of modernization, and General Roca, who commanded the operation, went on to become president.
In Australia, hunting down Aboriginal people was a weekend pastime for whites, and in the United States, President Lincoln ordered the extermination of Native Americans alongside issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.
The United States had been humiliated by Japanese people who shared the same skin color as those indigenous peoples.
Theodore’s outburst about “planting countless Stars and Stripes in Hawaii” stemmed from this very resentment.
Yet after the Hawaii incident, Japan went on to defeat China and even best a white power, Russia.
If left unchecked, white authority itself would collapse.
Thus Theodore’s determination to “contain Japan” swelled into a sentiment shared by Americans at large.
Viewed in this light, history is more consistent if one sees the United States as eager to wage war against and crush Japan.
It was Malaysia’s former prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, who pointed out that the United States crushed Japan not because Japan was an aggressor, but to preserve the prestige of white dominance over the Third World.
To be continued.