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

56 • BROOKS, CHARLES WOLCOTT
Order was soon restored, and the Chinese government agreed to the
payment of an indemnity for foreign lives lost and properties destroyed.
It also agreed to punish those responsible for the attacks on
foreigners and to permit the foreign powers to police the railroad line
connecting Peking with the coast near Tientsin.
So far as the United States government was concerned, a far more
intractable problem rested with the possibility that the uprising might
provide such nations as Japan, Russia, Britain, and France with a pretext
for partitioning China into so-called spheres of influence. Although
this process had been going on for some time already—Washington
had put itself on record as opposing the partition of China in
the first of its Open Door notes in 1899—the presence of foreign
troops on Chinese soil greatly increased the likelihood of swollen imperial
ambitions. In order to ward off this possibility, Secretary of
State John Hay issued the second of his Open Door notes, which
specifically and unequivocally expressed U.S. respect for China’s
“territorial and administrative integrity.” Diplomatic notes, however,
held little water in the face of Russian determination to remain in
Manchuria. There can be little doubt that, in the minds of Washington’s
policymakers, Russia’s opportunistic expansionism compared
unfavorably with Japan’s seeming compliance with the Open Door
policy. This proved invaluable to Japan once the Russo–Japanese
War broke out, for United States President Theodore Roosevelt
proved a ready and reliable friend for Japan.
BROOKS, CHARLES WOLCOTT (1833–1885). American owner of
a trading company in San Francisco having business interests in California,
the Kingdom of Hawaii, China, and Japan. In addition to operating
his trading business during Gold Rush era San Francisco, in
1858, Brooks was appointed by the Tokugawa shogunate as its commercial
agent and consul general for Japan in the United States, a position
he continued to serve until 1873 under the new Meiji government.
Brooks arranged commercial transactions for Japan, looked
after castaway Japanese sailors brought to San Francisco, and made
arrangements for both the Shogun’s Embassy of 1860 and the
Iwakura Mission of 1871–1873. In 1876, Brooks published an informative
work on Japanese castaway sailors, titled Japanese
Wrecks Stranded and Picked Up Adrift in the North Pacific Ocean.