Season 14, Episode 6: A Whole New World
The armistice of November 11, 1918 was just the beginning of the end for the First World War. A peace treaty was still needed to secure the future and re-establish order in Europe and throughout the world. While the various nations of the world disagreed on many aspects of the great and terrible war, there was one thing which the Entente Allies generally did agree upon: this war was entirely Germany’s fault.
Now, I know what you’re probably thinking: this war began in Serbia when the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand led to a declaration of war against Serbia by Austria. Why wasn’t Austria blamed for the war? As you may recall, Austria worried that invading Serbia would cause a reaction from Russia and they sought a guarantee from Germany that if Russia attacked them, Germany would help with defense. It is entirely possible that if Germany had declined to assist Austria in this endeavor, the entire war could have been avoided. Germany’s fault, however, goes much deeper than simply guaranteeing Austria’s national defense.
The German invasion of Belgium and Luxembourg, both nations whose neutrality was guaranteed by multiple nations, including Germany itself, was considered the primary cause for the escalation of this affair from minor regional skirmish into global attritional conflict. Germany’s defense at the time, that it was only invading Belgium to prevent France from invading it first, may have served as an acceptable justification if they had won the war. Because they lost, it rang hollow to the ears of the Entente Alliance.
Before we discuss the particulars of the peace agreement which would define the decades following the first World War in Europe, we should discuss Japan’s further role in the war after the siege and capture of Qingdao. The Japanese government, led by Prime Minister Okuma Shigenobu, largely focused on their attempt to expand their control over China via the 21 Demands. The Imperial Navy, however, opted to take an aggressive posture against German holdings throughout the greater pacific.
While the port of Qingdao was Germany’s crown jewel of their far east holdings, they also held claims on many islands of the archipelago known as Micronesia. The Imperial Navy acted almost wholly on the whims of its high command who interpreted Japan’s entry into the first World War very broadly, and seized many of these tiny islands throughout the Pacific, which created no small amount of friction with the United States. Japan’s European allies were also less than thrilled at this initiative, as most of these claims were unenforced in the first place and there were no Germans living on these islands at all. It kind of seemed like Japan was taking advantage of the geopolitical situation, which I think is a fair assessment.
When the Twenty-One Demands became public and their allies pressured them into altering their proposal, the Japanese government under Okuma Shigenobu was embarrassed by being forced to accept smaller concessions, no matter how generous. Shigenobu also faced difficulty when he encouraged the lower house of the Imperial Diet to pass a spending bill which would greatly increase the line items for the navy and army, who argued that they needed more money to defend the islands that they had just seized. The majority of the lower house belonged, at the time, to Seiyukai, a political party that was openly hostile to the prime minister. To resolve the deadlock, Shigenobu called a snap election and his party won enough of a majority to pass the spending bill that he championed. However, yet another Taisho Period scandal was about to make ruin and mockery of Japan’s political class.
While Okuma Shigenobu’s Rikken Doshikai party had won a slim majority of the lower house, they needed votes from other parties in order to pass the spending bill. Oura Kanetaka, then serving as the cabinet’s Home Minister, had essentially bribed unaligned or undecided members of the lower house using funds from the Rikken Doshikai treasury, buying the votes that were needed to secure the bill’s passage. When this incident, now referred to as the Oura Scandal, became public, Oura Kanetaka resigned as Home Minister in disgrace. In October of 1915, most of the rest of Okuma Shigenobu’s cabinet also resigned as it became clear that they had lost the faith of the Diet. The genro, however, persuaded Okuma Shigenobu to continue for a while as prime minister, given the need to finalize pressing treaties with France, Russia, and China. In early October of 1916, however, Shigenobu resigned and retired from politics altogether after enduring a particularly heated argument with the genro.
The man selected to serve as prime minister after Okuma Shigenobu was Terauchi Masatake, a 64-year-old veteran who had gotten his start as a fighter in the Kiheitai militias that helped overthrow the Tokugawa Shogunate. Throughout the Meiji Period, Masatake enjoyed a fairly storied career in the Imperial Japanese Army in spite of losing his right hand during the Seinan War, which is frequently called the Satsuma Rebellion. He coordinated troop movements during the First Sino-Japanese War, and during the Russo-Japanese War he served as Minister of the Army. He had served as Minister of the Army in the cabinet of both Katsura Taro and Saionji Kinmochi, though to be clear he was not the Army Minister responsible for precipitating the Taisho Political Crisis.
In addition to his military experience, Masatake also had a decent amount of civilian leadership under his belt. He had served as the last Japanese Resident-General of Korea and, when the office transitioned in 1910, he served as the first Japanese Governor-General of the Peninsula. His governance on the peninsula was admired by the Japanese populace, which as you might be able to guess, meant that it was not very beneficial to the Koreans who actually lived there. On the one hand, he had thousands of modern schools built across the peninsula which greatly increased literacy and general education. However, the purpose of these schools was not education alone, but assimilation. The curriculum revolved around learning the Japanese language and the history classes centered on Japanese history.
He also engaged in a great land reform, which was much needed but whose results left much to be desired by the native populace. The existing system of ownership was a series of irregular provincial titles which included absentee landlords, sharecroppers, and a lot of common farmers who claimed ownership over their parcels which had been historically recognized but carried no written documentation. Terauchi Masatake arranged large-scale castradal surveys and organized the existing written documents to establish ownership in a more properly modern setting. However, he also opted to deny the claims of partial owners and those who had only verbal claim to their parcels. This disenfranchised huge numbers of small farmers across the peninsula, whose land was seized by the Japanese government and sold to Japanese developers. Most estimates indicate that the land which had been possessed by these disinherited smallholders amounted to about two-thirds of all the privately owned land in Korea.
In 1916, his time as Japanese Governor-General of Korea came to an end when he got a sweet promotion as the new Prime Minister. To fill his cabinet, he chose career bureaucrats rather than elected officials because he did not trust electoral politicians. During his time as the Prime Minister, he also served as the Foreign Minister and Finance Minister. He intended to make aggressive use of both offices.
As the first World War continued, there were several pressing issues which he sought to resolve. The United States of America, which had not yet entered the war, was very upset by the Empire of Japan’s seizure of German colonial possessions near their sphere of the Pacific. By this point, Yuan Shikai had died and what is now called “The Warlord Period” began in China. For Japan, this meant that rather than only dealing with the president of a single, unified republic of China, they now had to contend with several competing polities with warlords leading them. Getting control of China was still very much on the Japanese Empire’s radar, but defending the holdings they had already managed to acquire took precedence.
Before his death, president Yuan Shikai had acknowledged Japan’s possession of Qingdao and its surrounding area in Shandong Province. For some time, many nations withheld their approval of what looked like a naked land grab both on the Chinese mainland and in the pacific. However, everything changed when Germany implemented unrestricted submarine warfare.
Increased submarine activity around Europe meant that the Entente powers were losing more ocean vessels, which meant they needed naval assistance to both strike back at the submarines and secure their supply lines. While the German seaborne aggression was a big factor in convincing the United States to support the Entente in the war, it also created an opportunity for Japan to acquire a little old-fashioned diplomatic leverage. The Japanese government agreed to utilize its navy to support the Entente war effort on the condition that Britain recognize Japan’s rightful possession of the many Pacific islands which had formerly been claimed by Germany. Britain agreed.
When the US joined the Entente Powers in 1917, the situation was a little awkward because they were fighting on the same side as Japan. While the US government was unhappy with Japan’s Pacific encroachment, they were more concerned with Japan’s seeming desire to gradually annex China as they had done to Korea. Late in the year, however, they temporarily resolved their disagreements through diplomatic channels and created the Lansing-Ishii Agreement, in which both nations agreed to respect China’s territorial integrity and to uphold equal opportunities for commerce and industry therein.
To Japan’s international credit, the naval support they provided to the Entente powers was critical and robust. Crossing into the Mediterranean Sea via the Suez Canal, Japanese warships escorted troop carriers and provided support against German and Austrian naval attacks. After the war, the Japanese navy brought seven German submarines back to Japan as war prizes.
Which brings us to… the Russian Revolution. In 1917, the Russian Imperial Army withdrew from the first World War to spend more time fighting the Tsar’s enemies at home. After years spent trying to prevent democratic reforms and tightening his grip on power, Tsar Nicholas II was finally forced to abdicate after an uprising that began on International Women’s Day - March 8, 1917. The Tsar and his family were placed under house arrest and a Provisional Government was formed which overturned many of the Tsar’s more oppressive policies, including the banning of radical political parties. Agents of the German Empire, seeing an opportunity, arranged for Vladimir Lenin, and several of his associates who had been living in exile in Germany, to be sent back to Russia in hopes that they would cause trouble and prevent Russia from rejoining the war effort. The previously-banned party that Lenin had led was called the Bolsheviks, meaning “majority.”
The Provisional Government of Russia had promised the people that they were now out of the war and that they absolutely would not re-enter the war for any reason. In June, however, they broke that promise by deploying Russian soldiers in a new offensive against Austria-Hungary which failed miserably. Discontent with the Provisional Government continued building among the people, who now saw opposing the war as a priority for any would-be holders of power. The Bolshevik Party had been virulently opposed to the war since the beginning and their numbers swelled with new members throughout the summer and fall of 1917. In October, revolution in Russia broke out once again. Okay, technically this new revolution occurred in November according to the Gregorian Calendar which we all use today, but it was October according to the Julian Calendar which Russia was still using at the time, which is why this event is referred to as “The October Revolution.”
Lenin was actually in hiding when the October Revolution erupted but he soon joined his comrades in their new quest to overthrow the unpopular Provisional Government. Ultimately they were successful and they formed a new government ostensibly based around the Soviets, which were worker’s councils that had been active throughout the revolution.
What occurred in Russia in 1917 was, to many imperial nations around the globe, absolutely unthinkable. For decades, the spectre of a communist uprising had been haunting Europe and now, in their own backyard, it had occurred. The new nation, which would name itself the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922, was facing an immediate backlash to the success of their revolution in the form of several arch-conservative army generals who were intent on crushing the burgeoning government and either re-installing the Tsar or perhaps making a new dictatorship in their own image. These opposition generals were called the Whites, a reference to their supposed monarchist aims. Longtime Bolshevik organizer Leon Trotsky created the Red Army to defend their new socialist state.
In spite of the ongoing World War, the Entente Powers attempted to intervene in the Russian revolution with the stated goal of securing supplies and ammunition from German raids. This was not as flimsy a pretense as it might sound to modern ears. To get Russia permanently removed from the first World War, Vladimir Lenin had signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March of 1918 which ended the war as far as Russia was concerned. As the Entente Powers, weary from the world war, prepared for a military intervention in Russia, the war ended and the objective shifted to supporting the White armies in their quest to crush the reds.
Ultimately the intervention was unsuccessful, spoiler alert. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was here to stay, at least until its eventual collapse in 1991. Japan’s part in the intervention, however, deserves special mention. Initially, the Japanese Imperial government planned to send seventy thousand troops to Siberia to support the White Generals and their fellow interventionists. This was an eyebrow-raising figure that inspired suspicion from some of their already-suspicious allies, particularly the United States, and these allies also greatly misliked the Japanese campaign proposal of using their massive army to occupy eastern Russia all the way to Lake Baikal, which is just north of central Mongolia, a massive swath of land. Under pressure from their allies Japan scaled this intervention back, though they ended up occupying eastern Russia until 1922, three years longer than most of their Allied interventionist powers.
You might be wondering how the Japanese Empire, whose struggle with balancing revenue and expenditures had made them a perpetual debtor, could afford such an action. The answer lies in the wartime economics of the closing years of the First World War. The Germans had desired a swift, decisive victory but the First Battle of the Marne had denied this. What resulted was a four-year war of attrition in which they knew they would be eventually out-supplied. The unrestricted submarine warfare which they initiated in 1917 was motivated primarily out of a desperate desire to balance the scales - to cause their enemies to suffer the kind of shortages which they were presently suffering in hopes that the Entente Powers would blink. Instead, it made the Entente Powers look elsewhere for their supply.
Toward the end of the first World War, Japan became a high-volume supplier of war materiel in a way that altered their existing economy. In short, they went from being an indebted nation to being a creditor throughout the turbulent final year of the war - 1918. While that was a particularly good year, economically things had been on the upswing for Japan starting around 1913. By 1918, exports had quadrupled and a glut of foreign capital flooded domestic markets, creating new opportunities and new hazards.
Export booms can create domestic shortages, especially in stability-related items like food. Japanese rice was actively sought by exporters as the global food shortages caused by the first World War created massive demand for foodstuffs worldwide. This increase in the profitability of the exports spurred an increase in domestic prices as well, as domestic consumers now competed with foreign importers. The result was rapid inflation and a drastic reaction from domestic consumers in the form of a good, old-fashioned rice riot.
While in general rice riots were not new to Japanese history, the rice riots of 1918 were like nothing the nation had ever experienced before. Previous riots were largely contained to the big cities of Japan, typically Osaka or Tokyo. This one began in Uozu, a sleepy fishing village in Toyama Prefecture, which is located in Chubu. The riots themselves were preceded with the usual peaceful petitions which the people perceived as falling on deaf ears. Then the riots began in Uozu and rapidly spread across the country.
In addition to the general riots, unions staged strikes, looting was rampant, and improvised incendiary devices were thrown into police stations and government buildings. Rioters violently clashed with armed police and eventually over twenty-five thousand people were arrested nationwide. Of those initial arrestees, over eight thousand were convicted. Some were even given the death penalty.
In response to what came to be called the Taisho Rice Riots, Prime Minister Terauchi Masatake and his entire cabinet resigned in late 1918. He was succeeded as Prime Minister by Hara Takashi, a name which astute listeners might recognize. The head of the Seiyukai party, Hara Takashi had replaced Saionji Kinmochi as the president of Seiyukai when Kinmochi resigned in 1914 after the fallout from the Taisho Political Crisis. Seiyukai lost their majority in the elections of 1915 but regained it in 1917. Four years later, Hara Takashi’s moment had arrived.
Hara Takashi is notable as prime minister for a multitude of reasons, arguably chief among them that he was the first to hold this office who was of commoner status. However, a lot had occurred between 1914 and 1918. Hara Takashi had previously championed some rather radical reforms but in light of events around the world, particularly in Russia, he felt the need to rein in his own radicalism for the sake of pragmatic reality. Next time, we will discuss the premiership of Hara Takashi as he seeks to bring the nation back from the brink of economic calamity while preserving Japan’s newfound place as creditor to the world’s great powers.