Americans, and British colonists in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand led Japanese to interpret Western diplomatic opposition in racial terms. “From first to last the League did not flinch from its anti-Japanese stance,” reported le no hikari. “This is the predictable outcome of the current control of the League by the white race.”126 Although the sense of racial isolation was nothing new, its inflation into a seemingly insurmountable obstacle was. During the Paris Peace Conference that followed World War I, Japanese diplomats had pushed hard for the inclusion of a racial equality clause in the covenant of the League of Nations. Their defeat evoked much anger in the Japanese press, but bitter feelings were tempered by victory on the two key conference demands: recognition of Japanese acquisition of former German rights in China's Shandong province and the Pacific Islands.127 In the past, the racial gulf between Japan and the Western powers was regarded as an aggravation to be countered by skilled diplomacy. In 1931, it became the explanation for the failure of Japanese diplomacy.
The specter of a solid phalanx of white powers united against Japan led to gloomy scenarios of economic blackmail and worse. An article analyzing the diplomacy of anti-Japanism explained that the League resolutions of the fall of 1931 “treated Japan just like a burglar…and isolated poor Japan from the world.” Although sanctions had never been seriously discussed at the League, the mass media imagined a worst-case scenario and reported that council resolutions censuring Japan's actions threatened the country with an “international economic blockade if she did not withdraw her troops.”128 In such day-by-day micro-reporting of the events at the League, a new picture emerged of Japan's relationship with Western powers. Since its founding, Japanese had felt proud of their membership on the League Council: Japan was a player in the great power club. In the context of the early thirties, this image changed. Now the League became an institution controlled by white powers who bullied and isolated Japan.
The reformulation of Japan's relationship with the Western powers in a framework of confrontation and hostility was reinforced by a flood of images of an impending conflict between the United States and Japan. A boom in war-scare literature with titles like “If Japan Should Fight” were filled with portentous references to “war clouds in the far east” and warned that it was only a matter of time before the “unavoidable clash between America and Japan.”129 In 1932 alone, seventeen books and thirty-six articles in leading journals appeared on the subject of a coming war with the United States. War scares had been a reoccurring feature of the Japanese-American relationship since before the turn of the century, and the twenties had witnessed two of them. Both the 1919–1921 and the 1924–1925 scares were set off by a combination of naval rivalries and tension over American legislation against Japanese immigration. Though the announcement in May 1932 that the U.S. Atlantic Scouting Fleet would be stationed in the Pacific helped trigger a new war scare,130 the real source of Japanese-American antagonism in 1932 and 1933 was Japan's invasion of China. In the past, predictors of war had imagined such a conflict might arise from the struggle for naval supremacy in the Pacific or racial antagonisms. Now a battle for control over China was included in the hypothetical landscape of war.
While war-scare literature exaggerated the Western threat, at the same time popular magazines seemed to spare no effort to deflate public fears of reprisals. In this way the thinly veiled anxiety behind the anti-Western bluster manifested itself in a contradictory tendency first to inflate the extent of the threat and then to minimize its significance. Participants in an illustrated roundtable discussion on Japan's withdrawal from the League in the April 1933 issue of Kingu dismissed the war bogey. “I cannot imagine sanctions leading to war,” an army officer was quoted as saying. Another participant pointed out that since the United States was dependent on Japanese imports it would never apply sanctions. A cartoon illustration of a worried Uncle Sam trying to work out the costs of sanctions on an abacus was accompanied by the explanation, “to lose Japan's silk imports would mean a tremendous shock to the American textile industry.” Another drawing, noting that a loss of the Japanese cotton market would “cause a drastic fall in cotton prices and hurt farmers which make up half the American population,” symbolically rendered American suffering in the image of a mother, breasts bursting, watching in agony as her infant suckled contentedly at his own bottle. The caption read: “The country that imposes economic sanctions is the one who suffers.”131 These cartoon images conveyed the message that Japan's trading relationship with the United States implied interdependency. If Japan, like the infant, was vulnerable, then so was the more powerful American economy.
Such discussions incorporated new ideas of autarky and economic warfare into imperial rhetoric. In the past, fears of diplomatic isolation had rested on the specter of military coercion. Now they included economic pressures as well. Turning rhetorical somersaults to quell fears of outside pressures, the same Kingu journalist argued that even if the United States applied sanctions, with a few substitutions and “national will,” overcoming trade dependence on food, oil, cotton, and so forth “would not be difficult.” This point was driven home with the cartoon of a farmer seated at a traditional Japanese meal of fish, soup, and rice, and turning his back on an elegant Western-style repast. “Self-sufficiency is plenty” announced the smiling farmer.132
A special feature asking “What will happen to Japan after it withdraws from the League?” answered comfortingly that “Japan will not suffer in the least. The one that will suffer is the League itself.…Japan's withdrawal will cause the League to lose power and influence.” Moreover, Japan's isolation would not last, for “before long one of the great powers will adopt a policy of allying with Japan. The white powers in the League united against Japan, but they have divergent interests. Even the U.S. and England, which now seem to be fast friends, are in fact at great odds with one another. It is extremely disadvantageous for great powers with interests in the Far East to look on Japan as a permanent enemy. Therefore they will use every opportunity to draw closer to Japan in the future.”133 In fact, concluded one observer, the only effect of withdrawal would be to liberate Japan. In a cartoon illustrating this point, a Japanese samurai used his sword of “righteousness” {seigi) to sever the chain tying him to an iron ball representing the League of Nations.134 Such language telegraphed a message of defiant isolationism, conveying to the Japanese public the virtues of Japan's withdrawal from the Western club of imperialists.
In mass-media coverage of the diplomacy of the Manchurian Incident, the alternating inflation and deflation of the Western threat was mirrored by a depiction of Japan's foreign policy posture as powerless and reactive, then defiant and strong. Illustrating the reactive face, one cartoon showed Japan and China on the League of Nations boat. As China labored to steer the boat toward the shoals of “withdrawal,” Japan frantically tried to keep the boat away from the shoals.135 At the same time, the recurrent image of a solitary Japanese soldier standing guard, his bayonet held aloft, expressed a mood of grim bravado. Accompanying one such illustration, the Kingu poem “Attack Us Head On” captured the sense of defiant isolationism with which popular writers greeted the news that the League had voted against Japan in February 1933:
We stood against forty-two
And were defeated.
What is defeat, we are just!
That is right, that is right,
We are just.
Enemy, if you come, attack us head on.
Attack us head on!136
In illustrations and songs like these, the mass media conveyed a powerful set of messages to their audience concerning the current foreign crisis. Sanctioning Japan's new diplomatic isolation, the mass media depicted the nation driven by forces beyond its control: Japan was compelled to take a stand—and would stand alone. At a stage in which diplomatic repercussions of the invasion of China remained at the level of moral censure, the mass media told a story of Japan single-handedly taking on a mighty host of Western armies. The choice of military metaphors
