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Japan
Organized Panel Session
In the early 20th century, officials, businessmen, and other figures in Japan’s maritime industries viewed trans-Pacific shipping lines as essential to economic development and national defense. First established in the 1890s, these lines were vital links to Japan’s largest trading partner, the US, and ideal for the employment of ships capable of deployment as cruisers in times of war. During WWI (1914–18), as British and German ships were withdrawn from world shipping, Japanese shipping companies assumed a dominant position in the Pacific. After the war, however, they faced fierce competition as British ships returned to world sea-lanes and as a massive American fleet emerged from wartime construction programs. Preserving—and potentially expanding—Japan’s place in trans-Pacific shipping thus became issues of mounting urgency for Japanese shipowners and policymakers.
In this paper, I examine how figures in Japan’s maritime circles discussed the necessity and practicalities of promoting trans-Pacific shipping lines in the interwar decades. As Japan’s shipping companies were confronted by British and American rivals in the Pacific, shipping executives proposed a variety of structural changes to the industry and programs of state support. In the process, they appealed to a vision of Japanese power in which the fate of the nation rested on its shipping capacity—and in which the key to the nation’s shipping lay in the Pacific. By tracing the spatial dimensions of such discussions, I show how Japanese activities in the trans-Pacific sea-lanes were linked to larger projects of maritime power in the Pacific and beyond.
Elijah Greenstein
Princeton University