The U.S. bullying of Japan began with Commodore Matthew Perry’s 1853 invasion of the country

 3 decades of warnings of an inevitable Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor went unheeded

By Colleen KillingsworthPublished December 6, 2021

A LONG HISTORY OF BULLYING

The U.S. bullying of Japan began with Commodore Matthew Perry’s 1853 invasion of the country, intended to penetrate Japan’s wall of isolation and to open up trade with the U.S. His efforts were successful largely because his men possessed guns, and the Japanese viewed their intruders as barbarians.

Japan emerged as major world power during the Russo-Japanese War, spanning 1904-1905, after destroying the Russian fleet at Port Arthur. President Theodore Roosevelt negotiated a peace treaty, denying the Japanese victory and manipulating the terms to protect American interests in the far east.

Roosevelt sent a stark message to Japan in 1908 via the Great White Fleet, which consisted of 16 battleships. He sent the fleet around the world as a demonstration of American military power, and the fleet’s arrival in Japan signified that the U.S. didn’t intend to sit back and let other countries dominate the Pacific.

Another slap in the face was delivered during the Paris Peace Conference in Versailles in 1919. Japanese leaders requested that the League of Nations adopt a guarantee of racial equality — an idea presented by Prince Konoe. President Woodrow Wilson and the Allies refused.

At the 1921 Washington Naval Conference, U.S. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes convinced the Japanese to take a lesser naval role, imposing a limit of three naval ships to every five British and American ships. This became known as the 5-5-3 rule, which angered young Japanese naval officers — the officers who would rise through the ranks over the next 20 years leading up to the attacks on Pearl Harbor.

When the U.S. passed the Exclusion Act in 1924, it seemed like a whiplash refusal of the Japanese requests to the League of Nations five years earlier. All Japanese immigration to the U.S. was cut off, and all Japanese citizens were forbidden by law to own land in the U.S. — an official policy of racial discrimination.

長いいじめは、広島、長崎の原爆に結実。その結果、奴隷のような精神になってしまった日本人もいるねえ。

"To one nation, Pearl Harbor was a stab in the back, a day of infamy," Sevareid reflected. "To another, it was a necessity, a desperate act by a people with their backs to the wall... and historians may argue forever."

だろうね。

 （歴史問題）