Hammering down nails: Politics, diplomacy, and the quest for national unity in Japan and America, 1912--1919

This dissertation argues that, more than reflecting a battle between "Old" versus "New" diplomacy, Japanese response to American racism, cultural incompatibility, or a particular generalized mindset, the acrimonious rhetoric that crisscrossed the Pacific in the 1910s was indelibly anchored to the very real competitions for political power and to determine the dominant national identity within each nation. Whether in times of war or peace, various domestic groups, in other words, exploited a common language to further their political positions and self-serving versions of what the nation represented. Rather than strict dichotomies between national selves and foreign others, these competitions to define what it meant to be "American" or "Japanese" included imagined alignments and marked distinctions between friends and foes both at home and overseas. In addition, in terms of diplomacy, policy makers on either side of the Pacific most often saw the world as reflective of their battles for domestic power. Woodrow Wilson, for instance, initially held up "the Japanese," due to their ability to act for the common good, as models of the national unity that Americans should try to achieve, and later criticized them in language previously reserved for his Republican rivals once their actions in China proved inimical to American interests. Even after the First World War simultaneously smashed the "old" international system and elevated the relative standings of the United States and Japan in global affairs, Americans in or in pursuit of office continued to proclaim their allegiance to the principles which had been forged in the Revolution and fortified by the Civil War, while Japanese elites maintained their strict adherence to the true legacy of Meiji nation-building. More than simply strategic responses to external events, moreover, such major issues in bilateral relations as immigration or the Twenty-one Demands were principally motivated by and embedded in the domestic political dynamics of each nation.