Social Science Japan Journal Advance Access originally published online on October 2, 2006
Social Science Japan Journal 2006 9(2):171-186; doi:10.1093/ssjj/jyl027
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Social Science Japan Journal 9:171-186 (2006)
© 2006 Oxford University Press
Race, Monarchy, and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1902–1922
Antony BEST is a Senior Lecturer in the International History Department at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Britain, Japan and Pearl Harbor: Avoiding War in East Asia, 1936–41 (Routledge, 1995), British Intelligence and the Japanese Challenge in Asia, 1914–1941 (Palgrave, 2002), and co-author of International History of the Twentieth Century (Routledge, 2004). He is currently working on a monograph dealing with the role of race in Anglo-Japanese relations between 1868 and 1953. He can be reached at International History Department, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom or by e-mail at a.best{at}lse.ac.uk.
The history of the Anglo-Japanese alliance is usually treated by historians as an exercise in power politics that came about because of the broadly similar national interests of the two signatories who were both opposed to Russian expansion in North-East Asia. Such an approach overlooks the fact that this was an alignment between two countries that differed in regard to race, religion, and culture. To overcome this divide and thus seal the alliance, both sides made overt use of royal diplomacy to create mutual respect and a sense of equality between the two nations. This led to a series of high-profile royal visits and the reciprocal conferment of the highest orders of honour. However, in the background racial factors, such as the ‘Yellow Peril’ phenomenon and the rise of pan-Asianism, continued to exist. In the Great War, these problems came to the surface and fuelled mutual suspicion. As a result, at the end of that conflict, some felt that the alliance had no future, and this sense of malaise contributed to its termination at the Washington Conference.