From the 1880s until 1945, Japan pursued a determined imperial policy of maintaining its military and political supremacy over China, or at least over most of it. What America, Asia, and Africa were to Western European imperial colonizers, China and later Southeast Asia were (or at least were supposed to be) to Japan.

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However, in pursuing its imperial endeavors in China and Southeast Asia, and following the example of Western colonizers and imperialists, including the United States, Japan was hampered by the imperial jealousy of the Western great powers, who believed that they alone had the right to a monopoly on the exploitation of China and the countries south of it in Pacific Asia. However, by laying claim to China and the Pacific Basin, Japan clearly risked increasing the opposition, and even hostility, of the Western powers. It was clear to Japan that these powers would not voluntarily leave it alone to do what these powers had already done long before it in the same geographical area. Japan discovered, first of all, at the end of the 19th century that the Western powers would not leave itcarte blanchefor its imperial undertakings in China, and above all in Manchuria, not because they had any sympathy for China, but primarily because they were against Japan’s military, political, and economic rise, which Japan could not, following the example of the Western colonial powers, carry out without creating its own colonial empire.

To achieve its imperial goal in this part of the world (for the rest of the world, Japan was not interested), Japan had to resort to the oldest means of diplomacy. Surrounded by a group of cruel Western colonial powers that had already divided up the territory of Pacific Asia among themselves, Tokyo decided to split its united front by courting a major Western power as its ally and friend. In the domestic public, this policy was presented as nationally beneficial in exchange for the patronage (protection) of that Western power. In other words, at the very beginning of the 20th century, Japan believed that if it managed to gain the friendship and protection of one of the leading world powers of the time, for which it was prepared to pay the appropriate price in one form or another, it would be able to contain all other powers against it and thus avoid being forced, as in 1895 (after the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, in which it defeated China), to temporarily give up its main demands regarding China.

The crucial question now arose: What great Western power could this be, despite their general view of Japan as a newcomer to the politics of the Pacific Asia? In other words, the basic diplomatic and geopolitical problem for Japan around the year of 1900 was how Tokyo would be able to provide a great power, in principle a Western one, with evidence that it would accept certain risks if it agreed to bilateral friendship and cooperation with Japan. However, opinions in Tokyo were divided on this issue.

In fact, it was generally accepted in Japan that Japan’s ultimate national enemy, which fought against all Japanese imperial claims in the Pacific, was its immediate overseas neighbor – Russia. However, a number of Japanese experts on the geopolitics of Pacific Asia advocated easing tensions in Japan’s diplomatic relations with Tsarist Russia. This party, when it came to power in Tokyo, began negotiations with Russia on the peaceful coexistence of Russia with Japan. Nonetheless, another geopolitical school in Tokyo was in favor of an alliance between Japan and Imperial Germany. This fit in with that party’s program of modernizing Japan on the basis of the German experience: constitution, army, etc. In the following years, the shaping of Japanese foreign policy depended on the level of Japanese contact with Imperial Germany, which was in favor of establishing much closer ties with Japan at all levels.

Nevertheless, in Japan, another school of thought finally prevailed in terms of the country’s foreign policy orientation, which was in favor of Japan relying on its navy in its foreign policy. The arguments were that Japan was an island country and that it was a maritime power in the Pacific Ocean. The proponents of this school felt that Japan should follow its predetermined geopolitical destiny and that it therefore had to accept a maritime solution to its foreign policy problems. Thus, Japan finally decided to tie its geopolitical destiny to Great Britain. Thus, two thalassocracies (the ancient Greek expression for the master of the sea), one as a world and the other as a regional maritime power, were joining forces to achieve their geopolitical goals in the Pacific Ocean region.

There were three main geopolitical reasons for Japan’s turn towards Great Britain as a strategic partner at the very beginning of the 20th century:

Thus, in 1902, the Anglo-Japanese alliance was concluded, primarily and only, against Tsarist Russia, and which provided Japan with the world partner that Japan had longed for at that time.

Source: Global Research