Published on July 15, 2019.
Through Masayuki Takayama’s essay published in Shukan Shincho’s Henken Jizai column, this article examines U.S. policy toward Japan after the Russo-Japanese War and the anti-Japanese maneuvers of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Harding, Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt. It interprets Manchukuo, the dissolution of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, Japan’s withdrawal from the League of Nations, and the road to Pearl Harbor through the mirror of America.

July 15, 2019.
The territory was inside the Great Wall, but Hoover fabricated the lie that “Manchuria and Tibet are also Chinese territory,” delegitimized Manchukuo, and drove Japan out of the League of Nations as well.
The following is a continuation of Masayuki Takayama’s essay published in this week’s issue of Shukan Shincho in the column Henken Jizai.
However, in the Russo-Japanese War ten years later, surprise turned into threat.
The Japanese had not merely become the first to defeat a white nation.
Since ancient Greece, naval battles had used the ram tactic, in which ships struck the flank of enemy ships with their bows.
But Japanese warships sank a Russian fleet of forty ships, including armored battleships, without even touching the enemy.
Japan even changed the form of naval warfare.
“I regard Japan as a threat,” Theodore Roosevelt wrote to his friend Mahan.
For American rulers, defeating Japan for the honor of white nations became a destiny.
So Theodore promptly intervened as mediator in the Russo-Japanese peace settlement and arranged things so that Japan would not receive even an inch of territory or a penny of indemnity.
Furthermore, he pushed troublesome Korea onto Japan.
With these two maneuvers, he succeeded in greatly exhausting the Japanese economy.
Woodrow Wilson succeeded in using the Committee on Public Information, or CPI, to drive Japan and China apart, and Harding made Japan abandon the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and isolated Japan.
China’s territory, since the days of Qin, had been inside the Great Wall, but Hoover fabricated the lie that “Manchuria and Tibet are also Chinese territory,” delegitimized Manchukuo, and drove Japan out of the League of Nations as well.
Franklin Roosevelt, as the finishing touch to the half-century effort to crush Japan, set a trap at Pearl Harbor and somehow eliminated the threat to white people.
But Japan revived, and once again inspires the world’s admiration in both its economy and manners.
When New Hampshire state representative Nick Levasseur said that “two nuclear bombs were not enough,” it was the reverse side of that inferiority complex.
Why did that war occur?
It should be clearly visible through the mirror called the United States.