The Eagle's Talon

CXXXVI

At the height of the Age of Discovery, rivalries between the two superpowers of the day --- the Empire of Spain and the Empire of Portugal --- were first settled by an appeal to Pope Alexander VI. In the 1493 Bull Inter Caetera the Pope drew a straight line down the face of the earth at approximately 38° West.* All territory east of the line was to be Portugal’s. all west, Spain’s.

The division of the world between Spain and Portugal in the 16^th Century according to the agreements collectively referred to as the Treaty of Tordesillas

In 1494, the line was adjusted by the actual Treaty of Tordesillas to approximately 46° West, recognizing significantly more of Portugal’s claims to its already extant colony of Brazil than had the Pope. After confirmation that the world was indeed round, the 1529 Treaty of Zaragossa created an antimeridian at 142° East. The claims of all other nations were ignored, and just as most of Portuguese Brazil lay in the Spanish zone, all of the Spanish Philippines lay in the Portuguese zone.**

Portuguese colonies in that nation’s zone endured until the end of 1999, when Macao --- now called Macau --- was ceded to Chinese control. 

Spain’s colonies were ripped from it a century earlier by the United States.

It was not long after Japan was opened to the West in 1854 that the Japanese realized that their island nation --- rich in history and culture, crowded, and poor in natural resources --- could never be self-sufficient in the Industrial Age. Japan had to trade, especially for raw materials, if it wanted to be counted among the great Powers. Its first, and initially busiest trading partner was the U.S., from whom it hired designers and engineers of all sorts.***

In 1875, Japan laid claim to the Ryukyu Islands, an archipelago stretching southwestward from the major Japanese island of Kyushu. The Ryukyans, though ethnically Japanese, had been largely ignored throughout Japanese history. They traded with the Chinese island peoples of Taiwan, established an independent kingdom with its capital on Okinawa, and spoke a distinctive Sino-Japanese dialect of their own. They had no desire to be part of any "Greater Japan" and when occupied the Ryukyans submitted to the Emperor’s overlordship perforce.   

The flag of the Kingdom of Ryukyu

Far across the Pacific basin and in the heart of the North American continent, the United States was continuing its relentless push westward toward the Pacific rim. Shoving the Native Americans aside, or killing them, what Americans called their “Manifest Destiny” was only temporarily and partially delayed by the fraternal bloodletting of the Civil War. By 1869, Americans had spanned their mighty continent with rails. Searching for new horizons, the Americans began to ponder the Pacific. An epic conflict was a-borning. There is no indication that either Japan or the United States planned to confront the other in the 19^th Century. In fact, the two nations were quite friendly. The perception of each to the other as a geopolitical threat evolved over the better part of a century. 

The Ryukyus were far away from America’s shores, but Japan’s interest in Pacific islands was not limited to the far side of the Pacific. In 1881, the Emperor Meiji invited the King of Hawaii to Tokyo as his first official State Visitor, ever. During the visit, the Emperor queried the King about the efficacy of a joint trade and mutual defense pact between their two island nations.

King Kalakaua demurred. He knew it would be an unbalanced partnership and he had no desire for his little kingdom to be dominated --- by anyone. 

The Hawaiian monarchy fell from power when an American cabal, led by pineapple magnate Sanford B. Dole, seized control of the islands in 1897, established a republic, and asked for American protection. In 1898, Hawaii became a U.S. Territory.

The flag of the Kingdom (and later State) of Hawai’i. Designed by the unifier of the Hawaiian Islands, King Kamehameha, the Union Jack represents the influence of Captain James Cook, who first arrived in the “Sandwich Islands” in 1778, and the red, white and blue stripes represent the influence of U.S. whalers, who used the Lahaina Roads off the island of Maui as an important reprovisioning stop

Whether the Emperor’s offer to the King was part of a larger plan is not known, but Japanese policymakers were certainly casting their eyes about the Pacific. The newly-modernized nation quickly demanded  --- and got --- Concessions from the Chinese. In 1897, Japan took the island of Taiwan from China. The Empire was clearly expanding, at least southwestward, and the next logical stepping-stone for Japanese expansion was the Philippines.  

Possibly Japan might next have tried to buy the huge scattered archipelago from the chronically cash-strapped and moribund Spanish Empire, but history intervened in the person of Theodore Roosevelt.

Theodore Roosevelt in a typical pose at his home, Sagamore Hill, in Oyster Bay, New York

Until 1897, Roosevelt had been a well-known and colorful figure, but one deemed unlikely to walk the world stage --- by anyone who didn’t know him. He had been Police Commissioner of New York City, but President William McKinley appointed him as Assistant Secretary of the Navy that year, based almost entirely on his having written The Naval War of 1812 some years earlier. As Assistant Secretary of the Navy he trumpeted the Monroe Doctrine and preparedness. His superior, John D. Long, was an old man who liked to take long naps in the afternoon. He found the boyish thirty-seven year old Roosevelt an annoyance.

Most Americans avoided the word “imperialism,” but not the fact

Roosevelt hated foreign imperialism in the New World (his ideas on American imperialism were quite different), and wanted to eject Spain from its remaining colonies in Cuba and Puerto Rico. He was an ardent supporter of the Cuban revolutionaries who were fighting Spain for independence.

Given the difficult situation in Cuba, Roosevelt hounded Long into sending a U.S. battleship, the Maine, to Havana, as a kind of visual reminder of American power. When the Maine exploded at anchor on the night of February 15, 1898, the popular press exploded too, promoting every kind of conspiracy theory against Spain; Roosevelt was in the front row of the chorus, shouting “Sabotage!”  (More recently, it has been proven that an electrical short aboard the ship ignited its powder magazine causing the explosion.)

 

 

Although the outcry was to “Remember the Maine!” as it lay wrecked in Havana Harbor, many Americans doubted that the Spanish would be so foolhardy as to launch a surprise attack on an American battleship. It didn’t matter. Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst confided to a friend, “You give me the picture, I’ll give you the war.” It was a victory for yellow journalism

A few days after the sinking of the Maine, Secretary Long decided to take a long weekend; freed from supervision for half a day, Roosevelt became a whirling dervish, issuing orders: Keep full of coal. All leaves cancelled. Get steam up. Keep all weapons loaded.  By the time Long came back to work on Monday, the Navy was on worldwide alert. He did not, significantly, countermand Roosevelt’s orders. A few weeks later, bowing to popular pressure, President William McKinley declared war on Spain.

Roosevelt and his Rough Riders in Cuba

The war was short and messy. The main theatre was Cuba, where Roosevelt (having resigned as Secretary of the Navy) and his volunteer regiment, the Rough Riders, became national heroes at the Battle of San Juan Hill. Cuba won her independence. The U.S. occupied Puerto Rico. 

On the other side of the world, after an exchange of shots in Manila Bay, the Spanish struck their colors, ceding all of the Philippines, which they had ruled for 333 years, to the United States in a matter of hours. Elsewhere in the Pacific, Marines stormed ashore on Guam (where there was little fighting), and American naval vessels began claiming any specks of land that seemed unwanted or at least unoccupied. 

Immediately after the Spanish-American War, broken Spain divested itself of the remainder of its Pacific colonies, selling the Marianas, the Carolines, and the Marshalls to Germany, who lost its colonies to Japan after the First World War.       

The Battle of Manila Bay. Commodore Thomas E. Dewey, commanding the U.S.S. Olympia, battered the Spanish fleet into submission within minutes

America’s sudden territorial aggression so close to home alarmed the Japanese, who, until then, considered the United States a staunch ally. The war altered that perception, and led to a cooling of Japanese and American relations. 

In the years since the taking of the Ryukyus, Japan’s leaders had formulated an informal expansionist policy that was meant to bring most of the foreign-dominated Pacific Rim colonies to independence (under Japanese suzerainty). Lands included in this imaginative plan included the Kingdom of Hawaii, the various colonized islands of Oceania, the Spanish Philippines, Spanish Guam, Taiwan (as of 1897’s Sino-Japanese War called Formosa), Russia’s Kurile Islands, and Sakhalin Island,**** Korea, China, Mongolia, French Indochina, British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. Some even contemplated adding British India to the list.*****

Politics in the South China Sea, circa 1900: The Ryukyu Islands and Taiwan (Formosa) (top) were territories of Japan. Brunei was British, but the balance of the big island of Borneo (bottom) was Dutch. Vietnam (left) was part of French Indochina; and the Philippines and Guam, once Spanish, were now decidedly American. Later, both places would become flashpoints for war

Japanese thinkers, in short, contemplated their own version of the Treaty of Tordesillas with a line of demarcation at the 180^th Meridian (Hawaii would be their Brazil). The U.S. could gladly have the rest. Now, that happy fantasy had been turned upside down.

Based upon the 180^th Meridian, the International Date Line snakes around several inhabited islands

Instead of having a sure friend, Japan had a new, and potentially untrustworthy, neighbor that might attack anytime with no provocation: The United States.  It would be another President Roosevelt, however, who would eventually go to war with Japan.

*Given that there was no standard system of measurement or system for calculations of longitude circa 1500 (though latitude could be measured in relation to Polaris) the exact position of the treaty lines has to be approximated.

** Which explains why South American Brazilians speak Portuguese rather than Spanish and why Asian Filipinos have surnames like Vargas and Rodriguez. 

*** In the movie The Last Samurai, the Briton Simon Graham (Timothy Spall) explains to Captain Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise) that the Japanese Emperor is importing “warriors from America.” This remark is inaccurate. Americans were hired for their technical knowledge of railroads and infrastructure. French military experts were hired to teach Napoleonic strategy and tactics (which predominated in the 19^th Century) to the new Japanese Army.

****The Treaty of Portsmouth, brokered by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905, and for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize, forced defeated Russia to cede the Kurile Islands, half of Sakhalin Island, and Russia’s Chinese Concessions, to the Japanese. T.R. was under no illusions about Japanese-American relations when he wrote in 1909:

President Roosevelt with the Russian and Japanese delegates at Portsmouth, 1905

I do not believe that Germany has any designs that would bring her in conflict with the Monroe Doctrine . . . But with Japan the case is different. She is a most formidable military power. Her people have peculiar fighting capacity. They are very proud, very warlike, very sensitive, and are influenced by two contradictory feelings; namely, a great self-confidence, both ferocious and conceited, due to their victory over the mighty empire of Russia; and a great touchiness because they would like to be considered as on a full equality with, as one of the brotherhood of, Occidental nations, and have been bitterly humiliated to find that even their allies, the English, and their friends, the Americans, won't admit them to association and citizenship, as they admit the least advanced or most decadent European peoples. Moreover, Japan's population is increasing rapidly and demands an outlet; her wiser statesmen will, if possible, prevent her getting entangled in a war with us, because whatever its result it would hamper and possibly ruin Japan . . . But with so proud and sensitive a people neither lack of money nor possible future complications will prevent a war if once they get sufficiently hurt and angry; and there is always danger of a mob outbreak there just as there is danger of a mob outbreak here.

***** In its origins, the plan was non-militaristic and would have created a Japan-oriented Pacific Partnership with the aforementioned peoples. But Japan’s leaders quickly adopted the attitude that the colonized were colonized because they were inept and ripe for exploitation: "We are indubitably relatives . . . but [they] breed large populations of idlers . . . These people have reached a point of almost complete emasculation." In other words, they were barnyard relatives at best, people the Japanese had little use and less need for.  The sour maturation of this opinion during the early reign of the Showa (“Bright Peace”) Emperor Hirohito into the idea of “The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” led to the worst and most brutal excesses of Japanese militarists against other East Asians (especially the Chinese) and ultimately to World War II and the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.  

A Japanese ten sen stamp of 1942 depicting the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere as a realm of tropical delight. Japanese brutality toward the inhabitants made the paradise a pipe dream