US : Iran :: Japan : US

The attack on Iran made me think of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and that made me think of how Japan may well have considered the US for the hundred or so years before 1941.

Consider the American 19^th century from the perspective of the Japanese Empire, then—leaving aside Perry’s forcible opening of Japan to “trade” in 1853.

 

From just before the Civil War, the US had expanded tremendously from its east coast origins. It swept away nation after nation as it moved to the west. In the 1840s, having had its citizens infiltrate the territory, it annexed Texas. In treaty with the UK, it acquired what are now the states of Oregon and Washington. As a demand after the Mexican American War, it acquired California, Nevada, and Utah. Right after the Civil War, the US purchased Alaska. OK—all of that is territorially part of North America.

 

And then came the Spanish-American War, when the US quite deliberately attacked the weakest of the European Empires in order to show that it was more powerful than that empire and in order to establish its expansionist agenda beyond North America. In the Caribbean, it acquired Puerto Rico and, for all intents and purposes, Cuba. In the Pacific, where no doubt the Japanese had a much much more focused interest, it acquired the Hawai’ian islands in the same way that it had acquired Texas, by infiltration. And then there were the war prizes—Guam, Wake Atoll, and the Philippines. Guam, Wake, and the Philippines are all about two thousand miles from Japan.

 

Between Guam, the Philippines, and Japan there are the Micronesian islands, an archipelago of small islands that is small in land area but covers a vast area of the western Pacific. And then there’s Okinawa, only 400 miles from the main Japanese islands.

 

Japan annexed Okinawa in 1879. After WW I the League of Nations mandated most of the Marianas islands to Japan. Buffers, perhaps.

 

And there it stood between the end of WW I and the start of WW II. US territories on one side, Japanese territories on the other side, divided not by fruited plains or purple mountain majesties, but by the Pacific Ocean.

 

Again, between the founding of the US and the beginning of the 20^th century, the US had swept away nation after nation in asserting its manifest destiny. It had warred with Mexico to cement its annexation of Texas, and in the aftermath of that war had acquired great swaths of western lands. It had purchased more lands, both from Mexico and from Russia, and acquired more by treaty.

 

Was Japan to think that the US would stop its westward expansion with Guam, the Philippines, and Wake Atoll?