Chapter 4 · Japan · David Partridge · Bridport, March 2026
Everybody knows that the Treaty of Versailles started a war with Germany. Fewer people know it started a war with Japan.
In 1919, thirty-two countries sent their representatives to Paris to divide up the world. Japan was among them — one of the victorious Allied powers, a nation that had modernised itself in a single generation and fought on the winning side. Japan came to Paris expecting to be treated as an equal.
Japan proposed two things. The first was a racial equality clause in the covenant of the League of Nations — a statement that member nations would treat each other's citizens without discrimination on the basis of race. It was put to a vote. Eleven countries voted in favour. Six voted against. It had a clear majority.
Woodrow Wilson, chairing the session, ruled that such a sensitive matter required unanimous support. No other motion at the conference was held to that standard. The racial equality clause was killed — not because it was defeated, but because the Americans and the Australians could not accept the principle that non-white people were their equals. America wanted to go on treating its black citizens as it pleased. Australia wanted to maintain its White Australia policy. And Wilson, the great champion of self-determination, determined that some selves mattered more than others.
Japan's second proposal was simpler. Germany had held territories in China's Shandong province — a concession extracted by force in 1898. Japan had captured these territories during the war. Japan expected to keep them. The conference agreed. Article 156 of the Treaty of Versailles handed Germany's Chinese territories to Japan.
So the West's message to Japan in 1919 was this: you are not our equal, but you may help yourself to China.
Japan heard both parts clearly.
What followed was not sudden. It was a generation of composting. The military factions in Japan — already powerful — used the racial equality rejection as proof of what they had always argued: that the Western powers would never accept Japan, that diplomacy was a white man's game played by white man's rules, and that Japan's future lay not in joining the Western club but in building its own empire.
The liberal Taishō period of the 1920s — Japan's experiment with parliamentary democracy, party politics, and international cooperation — withered in this soil. Why cooperate with nations that had publicly declared you inferior? The moderates lost ground. The militarists gained it. Not overnight. Gradually. The way mushrooms grow.
And the territory in China? Having been given Shandong by the very powers that refused to call them equals, Japan drew the obvious conclusion. If the West's international order was built on racial hierarchy rather than principle, then the rules were not rules — they were preferences. And preferences could be ignored.
Japan expanded into Manchuria in 1931. The League of Nations — the same organisation that had rejected racial equality — condemned the invasion. Japan left the League. The West expressed concern. Concern is what the West expresses when it has created a problem it does not wish to own.
By the late 1930s, Japan was deep into China. The war there was brutal — Nanjing, the bombing of civilians, the occupation of coastal cities. The Western powers watched. They sold Japan oil and scrap metal. American oil fuelled Japanese ships. American steel became Japanese bombs. Business continued because business was more important than principle, which had already been established at Versailles.
Percy didn't pull the trigger. Percy loaded the gun, handed it over, and expressed concern when it went off.
The compost was laid in 1919. A generation of fruiting bodies grew from it — militarists who had been told, in the most public forum in the world, that their race was not equal. They drew their own conclusions. The West provided the manure and then acted surprised by what it grew.
By 1940, Japan controlled much of eastern China and was looking south — towards the oil and rubber of Southeast Asia, towards the European colonies whose owners were busy fighting each other in Europe. The ingredients were all in place. The fuse was cut. All that remained was for someone to light it.