Japan’s Status-Driven Restraint Despite Racial Humiliation, 1921-1936, The Journal of American-East Asian Relations, vol. 32, issue. 3 (2025): 239-267

According to recent theories on the intersection of status and race, a combination of a rising power’s pursuit of status and its encounter with the racial hierarchy at the international level does not bode well. This is the case because one can assume that such moments drive a rising power to be more aggressive. Given Japan’s racial humiliation associated with the rejection of its racial equality proposal at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 and the Japanese Exclusion Act of 1924 in the United States, why did Japan concede to an inferior ratio in naval size and remain committed to the Washington naval system from 1921 to 1930? Why by the early 1930s did Japan profoundly overturn its status policy and not earlier? Drawing on critical appraisals of the theories that address a rising power’s status and its racial anxiety, this article argues that Japan’s orthodox foreign policy idea prioritized its higher civilizational status relative to the Western great powers and the rest of East Asia, which generated an elite consensus among civilian and military leaders on accepting the trade-off between reduced military capabilities and increased status from 1921 to 1930 despite racial humiliation. Japan’s status-driven restraint persisted until this elite consensus collapsed and the political-economic consequences of the Showa Depression defeated social expectations. Link to PDF.

Why in the Upper Nile but Not in West Africa? Britain’s Atypical Preventive War Motivation, the Contagion Effect, and the Fashoda Crisis Revisited, 1882–1898 (under review)

While the existing literature on the Fashoda crisis largely focuses on why the Fashoda crisis was peacefully solved, few research examines the Fashoda crisis in light of the leading sea power’s atypical preventive war motivation in the periphery during a naval arms race. Consequently, none of the previous research can explain why Britain signed the Anglo-French convention of June 1898 over Niger in West Africa but was on the verge of fighting a war against France over the Upper Nile in October 1898. In this paper, drawing on my novel mid-range theory, An Interactive Theory of Power Projection, I argue that the geographical direction of a naval challenger’s power projection as well as the leading sea power’s expectation about its contagion effect on the first line of naval defense in the peripheral theater are key variables that account for the variation in the leading sea power’s resolve to use force in the peripheral theater during a naval arms race and unpack why Britain invoked a preventive war against France over the Upper Nile but not in West Africa. In doing so, I also offer a compelling answer as to why Britain had an atypical preventive war motivation in the first place despite France’s consistent inability to close the naval power gap.