There is a notion of continuity in the negotiation zone from its inception up to its current state in this study. While the reasons for its maintenance and the actors involved varied, the feeling that Japan was an exception among ‘coloured’ races and had to be treated differently remained constant. During the First Sino-Japanese War, granting a special racial status to Japan was made easier by the fact that its enemy was China. Widespread contempt for the alleged backwardness and weaknesses of the Chinese helped to build the image of Japan as a Western proxy in the East. The context of the Russo-Japanese War was far more complex. Fear was added to the equation, and both the Japanese and the Russian side actively tried to influence the effectiveness of the middle ground.

One point, however, needs to be emphasised: the middle ground described up to this point was only relevant for international relations. It had nothing exceptional, if anything at all, to say about interpersonal relations and it is important not to be misguided in believing that the preferential treatment of the Japanese nation automatically extended to Japanese individuals. Statesmen often have different perspectives and agendas than their citizen. In the West, politicians were at first concerned with what meaning Japan would have for future relations in the Far East. On the societal level, the concern was more with what influence the Japanese, as individuals, would have on the daily lives of people. People chose to view the Japanese in the frameworks of economic competition, social norms, morality and racial purity. In some cases, the frameworks used by state and civil society actors could overlap. However, the latter tended to disregard the potential threat of Japan as a nation in favour of the one posed by Japan as a race. State actors, on the other hand, kept in mind that the existence of Japanese individuals implied the presence of a Japanese state in the background. This discrepancy in priorities was nowhere more obvious than in the interactions between Japan and the United States.

Becoming visible: Japanese immigration to the United States

American sympathetic feelings towards Japan started to fade away once the Russo-Japanese War ended, leaving the Japanese confused about their status in the world. Much of this can be attributed to a change in the visibility of Japan and its people.

In the previous chapter, we saw how Fukuzawa Yukichi translated the concept of race and adapted it to suit the needs of modern Japan. This was a crucial step, as it acquainted the Japanese people with race and gave the Japanese elite an additional conceptual tool to understand the West. The nation was now aware that international relations were also conducted through the lens of race, and that Japan was at the bottom of a racial hierarchy alongside other ‘coloured’ people. However, this understanding makes us reach the crossroads mentioned in the introduction of this book. Fukuzawa's work is essential for further discussions about the conceptualisation of race at the domestic level. Yet, it is not enough to grasp the process behind the construction of the Japanese racial identity on the world stage. The reason is that, simply put, race was a game for which the rules were decided in the West. The adaptations Fukuzawa made to the concept did not influence the international racial standing of the Japanese inside. It is safe to assume that at the beginning of the Meiji period, policy makers in the West were not interested to know that some Japanese intellectual rejected biological determinism. In fact, keeping an international mindset, it is of secondary importance whether the Japanese even truly believed in the validity of race. The Western nations did, and that meant that if Japan wanted to have a place in international relations, it had to take the Western definition of it into account. The Japanese, however, were not forced to remain passive. If one continues the metaphor of a game, they may not have been able to decide the rules, but they were certainly able to influence the way in which these were interpreted.

As already mentioned, during the Meiji period, international relations had long become interracial relations as well. As the Australian Prime Minister Alfred Deakin (1856–1919) put it, the British Empire was ‘divided broadly in two parts, one occupied wholly or mainly by a white ruling race, the other principally occupied by coloured races who are ruled’. This pattern became so common that by 1914, less than one fifth of the world was free of European or American encroachment. This clear-cut distinction between a ruling White race and ruled ‘coloured’ races worked well enough on paper and did find confirmation in most corners of the globe.

Of all the ‘Western things’ Japan imported over the decades following the arrival of the Black Ships, race has to be the most complicated. The very nature of the concept itself, its function as a pillar for the structure of White supremacy, as well as its intrinsically exclusive nature should have been enough to persuade the Japanese to ignore it. Moreover, we have seen in the previous chapter that Japan already had patterns of exclusion which were in their function similar to race. Thinking in the framework of domestic intellectual thought, then, the introduction of the concept does not make much sense, and even appears to be rather counterproductive. Following up on what was argued in the previous chapter, the early history of race in Japan cannot be separated from coeval developments in the West, as the country became part of an international struggle in which race played a pivotal role. Retracing parts of that history is the aim of the present chapter.

Introducing modernity: the translation of race in the early Meiji period

On 6 April 1868, the Charter Oath was read aloud before the Emperor in the Kyoto Imperial Palace. Comprising five articles, the Oath was designed to set the future course of Japan and to usher the country into a new era of Western-inspired modernity. The last article famously required that ‘Knowledge shall be thought throughout the world so as to strengthen the foundation of imperial rule’. This rapidly became a priority, for the opening of treaty ports and the unequal treaties imposed on Japan made the acquisition of information about the Western nations not only unavoidable but also of paramount importance: only by having a substantial knowledge of these nations could Japan hope to escape the fate of its neighbour China after the Opium Wars (1839−42 and 1856–60). Knowledge came either from the Western people themselves in the form of foreign consultants and teachers (o-yatoi gaikokujin), or was acquired by Japanese going abroad as emissaries or exchange students. It also came to Japan through the translation of Western works. Translation, therefore, became a means to understand the West, its institutions, history, geography and arts. Most of the geography works translated in the early Meiji period contained a section about race, a fact that made the importance of the concept palpable to the translators.

In the year 1850, a thirteen-year-old boy named Hamada Hikozō left Edo Bay on a junk bound for the south of Japan. One night, his ship was caught in a storm and severely wrecked. After days of drifting on the sea, he and fellow survivors were saved by an American vessel which brought them to San Francisco. In 1852, the castaways were told that the American government was sending them to Hong Kong to join the expedition of a certain Commodore Perry who was supposed to take them home to Japan. Upon arriving in Hong Kong, however, Hamada decided to return to the United States. During his time there, he was baptised, met the American president, and went on becoming a citizen of the United States. Forty years after his shipwreck, Hamada, now known under his American name Joseph Heco, sat down and wrote his autobiography The Narrative of a Japanese: What He Has Seen and the People He Has Met in the Course of the Last Forty Years.

Heco's description of his odyssey to the West offers us a rare glimpse into the life of a Japanese from the Tokugawa period (1603–1868) who was able to leave his country. There are several fascinating anecdotes in his work, but one seems particularly striking: on a torrid July evening in a cabin on board the Susquehanna (one of Perry's Black Ships), he and his friends decided to go on deck to escape the heat. They saw no harm in their actions, but when the officer on watch duty saw them, ‘he shouted out something in a loud voice. Then he kicked us with his shoes and pointed down for us to go below. Thus we were driven down to our quarters on the berth-deck like a herd of swine’.

This was no isolated incident: Heco complained that the crew of the Susquehanna frequently tormented him and his fellow Japanese. Upon enquiring into the reason for this treatment to an interpreter, the latter explained that the crew had long been stationed in China and had ‘become accustomed to deal with Chinamen’. ‘The Chinese are a greedy and cringing race’, Heco explained,

In July 1894, tensions between the Qing dynasty and Japan over the status of Korea erupted into war. One week after the Japanese forces took the city of Port Arthur in late November 1894, a journalist for the French newspaper Le Petit Journal gave his comment on the siege of the city. He had not much sympathy left for the Chinese defeat:

The occupation of the main parts of China, he continued, will make civilisation in Asia do a leap forward of three centuries and it was quite the spectacle to see ‘the beneficial invasion of the backwards and barbaric Orient by the progressive and modern Orient’.3 Before the war, China, ‘that amorphous monster, terrible as much as abject, the shame of humanity’, was thought to be invincible. But the Japanese had shown ‘that there was nothing in China. No authority, no intelligence, no military capacity’. The French opinion, according to the journalist, could be resumed as follows:

This article from Le Petit Journal is visibly tainted by resentment towards China: one decade prior to its publication, the French and Chinese armies had been clashing in French Indochina. Nevertheless, bitterness aside, the palpable sympathy towards Japan was not restricted to the French journalist, as Western public opinion often sided with the Japanese during the war.

There were several reasons for this tendency. The United States, for example, believed that a Japanese victory would lead to the advancement of progress and civilisation in Asia. It also believed that Korea would remain independent. The Americans also seemed to feel sympathetic towards what they saw as an underdog taking on a much bigger enemy.