Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…otiate will be given to everybody else. So it meant whatever one could negotiate accrued to them all. It meant that China lost sovereignty and Japan lost their sovereignty when these treaties went in. So the Japanese, unlike China which fights war after war with these Westerners trying to defeat them militarily, and it's unsuccessful. The Japanese say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're going to assess what the nature of the problem is.” They sent fact-finding mission after fact-finding mission to Europe primarily, but also the United States. This is just the most famous one, the Iwakura Mission, which was off to the West in the United States as well in 1871. They're studying not only Western military institutions, but a whole array of political, economic, legal, social, educational - the works - to understand the basis for Western power and the problem that is hitting them. They arrive in Europe at a really interesting time. It's when Otto von Bismarck is just finishing up the third war of the unification of the Germanic states. The Japanese think, “Ooh, this might be quite a model for us.” Why? Because Prussia transformed itself over a succession of three wars from the weakest of the five great European powers to second only to Great Britain. It did so in part by unifying the Germanic states into modern Germany. The Japanese are thinking, “Wow, this might be relevant to us because we're divided up into all these feudal domains that we have just tried to glue together. What are the lessons to be learned here?” As they're thinking about this and watching what Bismarck is up to, they come upon thinking about institutions and technology. I'm going to use the words in the following sense. Modernization means adopting the most state-of-the-art technology, whatever it is, not just military technology but all manner of technology. Westernization the way I'm going to use it means adopting Westernized institutions. I don't mean just military institutions. I mean everything from whether you westernize your educational institutions or political whatever it is. The question is, can you have one without the other? Can you modernize and have all the fancy gadgets and things without having the Westernized institutions that the societies that created these things had? If you think about it, this dichotomy is still with us. There are a lot of fighters in the Middle East and North Africa who are more than happy to use state-of-the-art technology, but the last thing they want is Westernized institutions. The Japanese—when they posed this question back in the day asking whether you can have one without the other—they decided the answer was no. They didn't particularly like Western culture, but they believed that in order to not only use and import state-of-the-art technology, but become an independent producer of it, you've got to do some degree of Westernization. So they get home. They set themselves a policy objective which is to protect Japanese national security and sovereignty in an age of accelerating imperialism. They come up with a two-phase grand strategy to do this. e. They set themselves a policy objective which is to protect Japanese national security and sovereignty in an age of accelerating imperialism. They come up with a two-phase grand strategy to do this. It's going to start with a domestic phase of Westernization, Westernizing your institutions. When they're done with that, they're going to have a foreign policy phase which is going to be about starting an empire. Why do that? Because they look at all the powers of their day and think “What's a great power look like in those days? Well, it has an empire.” So they go, “Well, we're going to have an empire, all right.” This is the domestic phase. These are known as the Meiji reforms in honor of the emperor who reigned in this period. It's between 1869-1890. It's a whole generation. If you look at them, only two of them pertain to the military. There's the draft and then creating the general staff. Then if you look at the two that start it all, they start it at the top of the social pyramid with the feudal domains. Those are the power brokers of Japan. They're getting rid of all those and then they go right to the bottom of the social pyramid, which is children. They decide that they need to have compulsory elementary education because they don't believe you can have a modern country, a strong country, without a literate population. But if you look at the rest of these things, you're getting a Bank of Japan, you're going to be having something running your currency and other things. You've got a cabinet, a higher education, you're going to have a professional civil service constitution, a parliament, you're going to have a court system that looks like a Western court system with laws that look an awful lot like Western laws. As a result of doing all of this, the Westerners had no excuse left for having a treaty port system because this mirrors what's going on in the West. So Britain, which is the precedent setter in these things, the superpower of its day, it renegotiates its treaties with Japan on the basis of juridical equality. The other powers follow suit and do it. This happened in Japan a half century before China got rid of its unequal treaties. it renegotiates its treaties with Japan on the basis of juridical equality. The other powers follow suit and do it. This happened in Japan a half century before China got rid of its unequal treaties. The domestic phase is over the moment Japan signs that treaty with Britain. The foreign policy phase has to do with China. Japan believes it needs an empire and its neighborhood is a mess. China is imploding for various reasons, which I will get to, and Korea's even worse. China, because it's having massive civil wars throughout China, can no longer fulfill its suzerain role to stabilize Korea. And the Korean royal house is busy mailing package bombs to each other. I kid you not, they're blowing each other up. What Japan is terribly concerned about is that Russia might try to fill this power vacuum. Why would Japan think that? Well, it’s the Trans-Siberian Railway. Russia decides in 1891 that it's going to build a Trans-Siberian Railway to exactly what? There is no Russian population out there. Japan understands exactly what it is. It's a bid for an empire in Asia. Because once Russia completes this thing, it's going to overturn the Asian balance of power because Russia is going to be able to deploy troops where nobody else can. Therefore, treaty revision happens on the 16th of July, 1894. That's when it's signed on the dotted line with Britain. Nine days later, Japan fires the opening shots of the First Sino-Japanese War. The Japanese fight three wars of Russian containment. I'm going to talk about the two that went well for them today. The third one's a whole other topic. The first one's the First Sino-Japanese War, when little Japan defeats the greatest land power of Asia, China. Incredible. The second one, which I'll get to a decade later, is the Russo-Japanese War when the Japanese defeat, sorry spoiler alert, Russia, the greatest land empire of Europe. Amazing that they can do this. The third one does not go nearly as well. That would be the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1931 to 1945. That morphs into World War II. That ruins the Japanese, but it's a different topic. The First Sino Japanese War, to let you know what happened in it. It's comprised of two pairs of key battles. There are other battles as well, but this is a good way to understand it. The first battle is at Pyongyang. The Japanese defeat the Chinese army, which takes off and retreats all the way over the border river, which is the Yalu, back into Chinese territory. So Japan has actually achieved its war objective, which was to remove Korea from the Chinese sphere of influence. Battle number one, they've already done it. The second battle occurs within the week, the same week in mid September 1894. It's the Battle of the Yalu, where the Japanese navy trounces the Chinese navy, which, believe it or not, in this day both countries had state-of-the-art navies. Japan trounces it and gets command of the sea after that. That's terribly important for Japan. For Japan to reach the theater here, it's got to cross the sea. If there's a hostile navy out and about, it can sink troop transport, supplies and other things. It's very important to get rid of the hostile navy.…

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