Japan Watchers and the crisis in East Asia, 1931–1941

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the changing informal views of Japan held in Britain in the decade after 1931. It investigates the relationship between understanding and policy, and how the needs of policy, most significantly the subordination of Asia to Europe, impinged on understanding. In looking in microcosm at where Japan Watchers, made up of newspapermen, missionaries and businessmen, interacted with formal diplomats and government officials, this paper focuses on the lectures and journals of learned societies in London, especially the Royal Central Asian Society, which served as one conduit through which knowledge of Japan passed to an audience with a regional interest. A wider audience was reached through newspapers. In trying to influence the reading public, the importance of ideas having to resonate with the concerns of the reader is stressed. It is emphasized that influence on perception is often dependent on a particular time. The views of Old China Hands came to supplant those of Japan Watchers in influencing the British image of Japan by the late 1930s.

Keywords:

• Japan Watchers
• Mukden Incident
• Sino-Japanese War
• the East Asian Crisis
• British image of Japan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The term Japan Watcher is used here to refer to those offering informal comments based on their experience of Japan. Old China Hands is used to refer to those offering informal views who saw Japan from their positions in China.

2 In 1934, Brigadier-General Sir Percy Sykes (1867–1945), the soldier, scholar and diplomat, who served as Honorary Secretary of the RCAS through the 1930s, gave the number of members as 1450 (Sykes 1934, 7). Two prominent Old China Hands were Officers or members of Council in the late 1930s, E.M. Gull, the Secretary of China Association in London, and G.E. Hubbard, who became a Far Eastern Research Officer at the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Others with China experience included Admiral Sir William Archibald Howard (1873–1952), who had been CinC China Station 1931–1933, and Sir John Thomas Pratt (1876–1970), a former Consul in Shanghai and later an adviser in East Asian affairs to the Foreign Office. Among those with Japan experience were Sir Horace Rumbold (1869–1941), who had served in Japan between 1909 and 1913 and later Ambassador to Berlin 1928–1933, and Sir Robert Clive.

3 A more sympathetic review that supported Kennedy’s hope for cooperation in the economic field was written by H.St.C.S. in JRCAS, XXIII, Part IV, 682–683.

4 Timperley pointed out that a correspondent of the Associated Press of America represented a constituency of some 1,300 newspapers, and other news distributing organizations had even a greater number of clients. He argued ‘here is a force which can work with tremendous potency for either good or evil in the field of international relations.’

5 John Gittings has argued much of the confusion about Chinese civilian casualty figures stemmed from Japanese intelligence agents misreading one of Timperley’s telegrams (16 January 1938) concerning the massacre, and sending to Japanese Embassies the Chinese civilian casualties of some 300,000 that Timperley estimated for the entire campaign in the Yangtze delta as the number killed in Nanjing alone (Gittings 2002).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hamish Ion

Hamish Ion is Professor Emeritus of History at Royal Military College of Canada.