Historical Dictionary of United States-Japan ... - Bakumatsu Films

202 • PEACE IN VIETNAM! CITIZENS’ COALITION
gave rise to several thorny issues in the Far East, most of which centered
on the former German rights and concessions in the Chinese
province of Shantung.
Japan was included along with the United States, Great Britain,
France, and Italy as one of the five great powers of the conference.
The Japanese delegation, led by Prince Saionji Kimmochi, saw its
most important task as retaining all German rights and concessions in
Shantung (in 1914, Japan seized the German leasehold). The Chinese
delegation sought the province’s restoration to China. It found a sympathetic
supporter in President Woodrow Wilson, who led the American
delegation to the conference. Japan, however, was bargaining
from a position of strength. During the war, it had reached secret
agreements with Britain, France, and Russia, which supported its territorial
claims. The Chinese, too, had committed themselves to supporting
Japan’s territorial claims. In the event that these claims were
not met, the Japanese delegates threatened to walk out of the conference
and to boycott the League of Nations, whose establishment Wilson
believed to be the most important task of the conference.
Wilson backed down and consented to a clause in the Versailles
peace treaty, which transferred the former German holdings to Japan.
For its part, the Japanese delegation offered reassurances that political
control of Shantung would be returned to China in due course (irreconcilable,
China refused to sign the treaty). The treaty also handed
Japan the Pacific islands formerly held by Germany, the Marianas,
Carolines, and Marshalls, under a League of Nations mandate.
Nonetheless, Japan walked away from the conference with a bad
taste in its mouth: its fellow great powers had refused to insert a
racial equality clause in the League of Nations charter. Across the Pacific,
Wilson met with implacable congressional opposition to his
peacemaking efforts. The United States never joined the League of
Nations and signed a separate peace with Germany in 1921. See also
DULLES, JOHN FOSTER.
PEACE IN VIETNAM! CITIZENS’ COALITION. The Peace in Vietnam!
Citizens’ Coalition was a civic movement in Japan that started in
1965 to protest U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. The founding
leaders of the movement were Professor Michitoshi Takabatake of Surugadai
University, Professor Shunsuke Tsurumi of Doshisha Univer-